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I don't think there are any decent Mac emulators around. There are, however, decent PC emulators on the Mac.

If that's not an option, then you can't really do anything about Mac/IE, as the Mac and Windows Internet Explorers use completely different rendering engines.

Safari is based around the KHTML engine, and so you can be fairly safe with that browser as long as you test in Konqueror.

Things like Browsercam aren't very helpful, as you can't interact with them, and a lot of bugs only show up when interaction takes place. But if you have no other option, like Mac/IE without owning a Mac, then it's better than nothing.

Even if you aren't bothered about other platforms, virtual machines like VMWare are useful. You can set up a range of them with different screen resolutions, font size settings, Javascript on and off, and so on, so you don't have to keep fiddling with your settings.

If you take the "fiddle with your settings" approach to testing, set up a second account on your workstation for just this purpose. That way, any plugins, settings, etc, that you use for normal day-to-day surfing won't interfere with your testing. Make sure you keep a checklist where you can tick off each combination of settings that you have tested against - you will miss combinations otherwise. You will probably find it useful to install multiple versions of Internet Explorer on the same machine.

Obviously, run your code through HTML and CSS validators, and possibly linters as well. It's a good idea to incorporate validation into your publishing routine - nothing invalid ever reaches the server. If you can't do that, it's a good idea to set up a validator to automatically spider your websites on a regular basis and report any errors to you via email. Alternatively, check out Ben Hammersely's validation RSS feed.

In answer to the long held question, can a TiBook with one Wifi card act as a repeater and relay access to everyone else in the room without them having to pay, the answer it turns out is yes. How do we do this? Well, first turn off the built-in Apache installation on the OSX machine that is online. Edit httpd.conf to load mod_proxy (there are about 20 or so lines to uncomment). Turn Apache back on. Go to network prefs, and find out your assigned IP address. Write it on a piece of paper, and pass it around the room, telling them to set it as their web proxy.

Where piece of paper == iChat via rendezvous.

As Matt's server screams in the dark London night, you could spell my name right...HammerslEy

Anyhow, the pic on Matt's site shows the rune to my wireless node. It's in Kensington, just round the corner from Imperial College. A T1. Help yourself.

I'm blogging live from the stage

I'd love to believe this, but no.

Still, the guy must be brilliant - not only has he got a five year old Commodore to get onto the Apple site, with a five year old browser, over non-existent phone lines but he's planning on spending five years wages on an ipod too?

It's bollocks.

I've been to the area and know the sort of conditions. First up, if anyone is using email in Afghanistan it is not over the standard POTS. If much of that is still remaining, it is in no way any condition to get a data connection over. Internet connections in Afghanistan are satellite (Bin Laden's is, so are the Aid Agencies and the journalists). So unless our hero has a either a sat phone, or a 3ft dish in his back garden, I doubt he sent an email from anywhere in the area.

"Junis's e-mail -- routed to Kabul, then Islamabad, then London" is not the way it would go - if I remember correctly, the main Pakistani bandwidth goes via Singapore. Unless Katz means this email was sent to someone in Kabul who forwarded it to someone etc etc etc.
In which case I'd hazard a guess to say the first passing was on paper, not electronically.

Next, "Junis, a computer geek obsessed with Linux, had first e-mailed me years ago while I was writing for Hotwired. He was genial and obsessed with American culture. He loved martial arts movies, anything to do with Star Wars, and rap. He was perhaps the Taliban's prime kind of target. (Now he's furiously trying to download movies he's missed and is mesmerized by open source and Slashdot.)"

Well, Hotwired's URL was first registered on 21-Apr-1994, but Katz's first writings were on Netizen. That started in 1996. The Taliban took Kabul in 1996, so Junis must have been quick. Obsessed with Linux then, sure - but now mesmerized by open source?

Which brings us to I thought they were going to get Microsoft," he wrote. "I guess not."

How did he know of the court case? Meanwhile, where did he learn perfectly idiomatic English? "Get" Microsoft? I "guess not"?

Temptation Island? Survivor? Riight - an area that until a week ago was isolated from the rest of the world is now aware and anticipatory of a tv show that is not even being aired on a nearby satellite network?

I'd love to believe this, I really would. But it's smelly as all hell, not to mention the highly dubious "they did it all for the toys" politics.

Still, if JK posts the email, with the headers, I'll be happy to believe, and drink a toast to Junis and his friends.

Ok, so it's a minor plug, but as my sig says, I run Gbloogle from an old machine under my desk. It's a weblog search engine that updates its index every three hours.

Now, apart from the plug (and this being slashdot, and me paying for the bandwidth, gawd knows why I did that), I point this out because even Google only updates every four weeks or so.

For some subjects (and the memes and odd sites you find via blogs are good examples) the specialist search engines are going to become very useful. Things like Distributed Searching, JXTA and so on are the way forward when the web is double the size it is today, and then double again.

And if you don't permit web sites to execute code on your computer, or are using Netscape 4 on linux and his javascript doesn't work...
http://www.benhammersley.com/peshawar/man%20with%2 0hash.jpg

>How can 90% of the world's heroin come from
>Afghanistan when the Taliban officially >declared growing opium poppies sinful a year
>ago, and their cultivation was stopped dead in
>its tracks?


You're not going to like this. The Taliban declared opium growing sinful for two reasons. Firstly, the price of opium was going down, and they needed to fix the market. Secondly, the ban was a condition of $43million of aid given by the US, in a war-on-drugs initiative. Sadly, there is the little-mentioned fact that the War-on-Drugs, in some small way, helped fund what resulted in a War-on-Terrorism. oh, and if you want to see a picture of an Afghan drugdealer with a kilo of hash he was about to try to sell me, have a look at picture number 8 here