Hello. I am Paul Kinlan.

I've given kinlan.co.uk a fresh coat of paint with a new Blogger Template. It's cleaner, faster, and easier on the eyes. I'm planning some more small tweaks in the near future, stay tuned!

I've just completed a Mastering UML training course at IBM Education Services in London. It was a good course and I learned a lot, particularly because the instructor, Chas Weaver, incorporated his own experiences. The only downside was the lack of Internet access.

In this post, I share my support for Internet Explorer 7's decision to enable ClearType by default. Bill Hill's blog post on the topic highlights research demonstrating ClearType's positive impact on reading, IE's primary use case. Personally, I've found ClearType enhances readability and focus, though IE7 Beta 2 has presented rendering issues on platforms like Blogger.

I've updated my C# regex for extracting CSS class names to correctly handle URLs in CSS properties like url(someimage.png). The previous version incorrectly matched file extensions. The improved regex uses a negative lookbehind assertion (?<!url\s*\(.*) to prevent matching class names within url() declarations. It now accurately extracts class names, even with variations in spacing within the url() function.

I've been considering updating the website's design as mentioned before, but haven't found one that is both simple and aesthetically pleasing. I may update it in the future when I have more time.

I love Coding Horror and want to emulate its crisp, clean design on my own blog. My current design is bloated, slow, and hard to read. I plan to back up my template and experiment with a simpler layout next week.

I've updated my Opensearch implementation based on feedback from Michael Fagan. Changes include correcting the short name length, fixing capitalization issues, and adding an RSS search URL using Google Blog Search. Unfortunately, full A9.com integration isn't possible because the search engine isn't on my domain. While proxying results is an option, I feel that would be unfair to Google.

I contacted Google about using my AdSense account with IE7's SiteSearch through OpenSearch. Unfortunately, they don't currently allow anything but their own search boxes. I think this is a limitation and they said they'd consider it, but for now, using AdSense with IE7's OpenSearch provider is not permitted.

I've added a custom search provider to my blog using Google Search for Internet Explorer 7 Beta 2 users. It lets you easily search my site's content. The provider is set up using an OpenSearch XML file linked in each page's header. Not sure about Google's terms on this, so I'll remove it if there's an issue. Hopefully, this example helps others implement search providers.

I've partnered with Shopzilla UK! If you're looking for laptops or price comparisons in the UK, check out their link at the top right of this page.