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Isomatic UK Weblog

Peter Burton's daily log, covering Peter's personal interests, e.g. jazz, travel and general grumpiness plus (occasionally) the business of Isomatic and its associate companies.

Sunday, February 29, 2004

New page; Ferrite transformers 

Yesterday I introduced another new page to our web site:
Ferrite transformers and inductors
I also corrected HTML errors (mainly in imported code) in the following pages:
ADSL splitters and filters
SDSL splitters and filters
SHDSL splitters
VDSL splitters and filters
DSL racks (shelves) cables and connectors

Thursday, February 26, 2004

More new web pages 

Yesterday I revised one web page and introduced two new web pages to our site:
C cores
C core transformers
toroidal transformers

These are part of a new policy of narrowing the content of each page to match just one to three search phrases.

Tuesday, February 24, 2004

New web page for Toroidal Cores (Toroids) 

Yesterday I produced a new web page for toroids, or toroidal cores to give the full name. We use them in our own transformers but in the past we have not put much effort into selling them to other manufacturers and users. The URL is http://www.isomatic.co.uk/toroidalcores.htm

Saturday, February 21, 2004

International cargo transport 

What a problem this is ! What company does it efficiently and economically ? I ask each one that touts for business will you:

1) Collect any weight from anywhere and deliver to anywhere ?
2) Provide a single point of contact so that use of multiple carriers/agencies is hidden from me ?
3) Deliver as quickly as possible with no delays due to admin. or payment ?
4) Calculate import VAT correctly and consistently ?
5) Fax documents to me for EVERY delivery in advance ?
6) Deliver goods undamaged ?
7) Charge economic prices with no hidden extras ?

They all say yes to all these questions but each company we use falls down on at least one within the first three deliveries. Is it really that difficult ?

Friday, February 20, 2004

Web design; CSS Box Model 

A common problem when using Internet Explorer for Macintosh is seeing 'boxes' of text overlapping or shifted way to the right. Vicky Tickner is an ace web designer who has solved the problem on her site. See http://www.vickytickner.34sp.com.

Vicky has produced her layout entirely in CSS. This allows her to
change the colour scheme and layout of her entire site by changing one CSS stylesheet. There is a demonstration of this on the website with the ability to choose between three colour schemes. Most browsers support the styling segment of CSS (font, colour, size, etc), even Netscape 4! The difficulty with this approach is that the various browsers implement the CSS box model in different ways. This website details one of the key differences http://www.positioniseverything.net/floatmodel.html.
IE5 on the Macintosh doesn't understand the right statement correctly for the main content. Mozilla, Firebird, Opera etc. understand CSS correctly. The full description of the fix can be found at http://www.dzr-web.com/misc/ie-right-positioning.
A good book on CSS is published by Glasshaus. http://www.glasshaus.com/bookInfo.asp?bookId=59.
It should be noted that a web site will never look exactly the same in
any two web browsers however you code it, either using tables or CSS (or both).
Personally, I try to avoid both as far as possible to enable those with the most primitive software to acess our pages easily.


Thursday, February 19, 2004

DSL filters and splitters 

Received a call from yet another customer that does not understand the difference between a DSL splitter and a DSL filter. This presumably arises because unscrupulous competitors sell only filters so want to dupe the purchasers into thinking the two terms are synonymous. See DSL splitter or DSL filters for a detailed explanation of the similarities and differences.


Wednesday, February 18, 2004

Message to Mayor of London 

Following yesterday's post regarding transport and work location, I E-mailed an extract from it to Ken Livingstone, Mayor of London. I added that extending the congestion charge zone westwards would discourage visitors to London's entertainments where they spend a lot of money. It is hard enough now to time one's journey to just cross the zone boundary as it ceases to operate at 18:30. How much harder it will be when there are still several miles to travel from boundary to destination.

Tuesday, February 17, 2004

Transport and the Environment 

I submitted my views to the IEE consultants' chat line.

The greens and environmentalists want us to give up our cars and nothing else will do. I have news for them; we won't and we are the largest electoral group in the country so governments beware. Those are the facts.

Tinkering with public transport will never solve the problems of crowded roads at rush hours and school times but no passengers for transport to earn money during the rest of the day. The rush hours solution is simple enough; no office worker needs to travel to work every day. They can work at home or in local 'telecottages' where workers from different employers gather together to share equipment, facilities, high speed communications and social exchange. We need a government that is bold enough to 'pump prime' the feeble-brained big employers to accept this, using some strong carrot and stick.

I arranged for an attractive, intelligent, well-spoken woman from DEC to present this case to a Transport 2000 meeting. A row of scruffy men, who seemed to form some sort of environmental weirdo clique, tried to argue that this approach would never work. Eventually one of the speakers on their side of the argument admitted that his London-based company had its typing pool in Northern Ireland and this worked perfectly well. QED.

I wish I had such a solution to the school run :-(
Any ideas on persuading mothers (to do anything) ?


Friday, February 13, 2004

Kick-off 

This is the first of (hopefully) daily posts to this Weblog page.
Links to our main product pages are as follows:

Home Page

Resistance Welding Transformers

Small Transformers

3 phase converters

ADSL/SDSL Filters, Splitters

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