From today, Friday 28 July, until next Wednesday, 2 August, I'll be in the countryside where there is no Internet. This site is therefore closed in that period; anything that needs my personal intervention will have to wait until next Thursday.

I'm in an ethical quandary. I've written a new browser detect script that's definitely better than the old one, but I hesitated for almost a day before publishing it. I'm afraid that amateur web developers will take the function and abuse it. Nonetheless, I decided to publish. I just hope I won't be sorry a year from now.

Here it is. It uses navigator.vendor wherever possible, because this property is much more reliable than the good old navigator.userAgent. I also ported the whole script to one neat object that can be dropped into any script.

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When I posted my book announcement on 2 June, I thought the huge project was almost done. Unfortunately I was wrong; right now I'm still working on the book. I thought I'd give you a quick update on what I'm doing right now.

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Today I celebrate my 36th birthday by going out into the sun, having drinks with friends, and generally taking it easy. Happy birthday to me!

Incidentally, today Rembrandt would have turned 400. I cannot fault the great painter's taste in birthdays.

Official website (unfortunately web standards hadn't yet been invented in Rembrandt's days).

Rembrandt portal of the Dutch public broadcasting corporations. I include this link because it leads to my current project. Click on the "Bekijk uitzending" link next to the last portrait, and you'll see a (Dutch) TV programme on Rembrandt. (You have to select a format (Windows Media or Real) and a quality (broadband or smallband) first, by the way.)

I created the player the programme (and in fact all public broadcasting programmes that are available on the Internet) runs in.

It's not quite ready for formal publication yet, because at the last possible moment I had to sacrifice the noscript version to solve a very nasty Explorer bug. In the next two weeks, however, I hope to reinstate the noscript version while not triggering the bug. When that's done I'll formally discuss this project.