Photographer, software developer, sysadmin, startup-founder, atheist Buddhist, vegan and Green. Wears a hat.
This blog reflects my personal opinions only, although most posts are so old they might not even do that anymore.
“The patriarchs of this profession were highly educated men. However, today […] even the ineducate have opportunities to desecrate this art form; therefore, destroying the historical integrity of typography. ”
A pompous (deliberately, I assume) but valid complaint - MS Comic Sans is getting much too popular. According to ancient IT folklore, the use of MS Comic Sans in business documents is a likely indicator of dangerous mental health problems.
Link: Ban Comic Sans
These horses are trained to work like guide dogs - but look at their size! Surely this can’t be real?
My plan to do a rough, hacked-together set of scripts to make something that looked like my planned Hippo project this weekend didn’t work out - I ended up trying to write the real thing instead. It doesn’t do anything useful yet, but it does do it properly.
I’ve also been getting up early every day for weeks, getting in to work early, leaving work as soon as I can, doing housework immediately, watching the Simpsons, not dressing quite as scruffily as usual, drinking lots of Yogi Tea, eating more chocolate, reading more. I don’t really know why - despite my colleagues’ theories, I’m neither attending job interviews yet or having/planning an affair.
It could be a virus I suppose. I think I like it.
Or so these people claim, because I set my web browser to block those infuriating pop-up advert windows that ruin so many websites. The Anti-Thief software bars browsers that won’t open pop-up windows.
Well, hard luck Anti-Leach. I’m continuing to refuse pop-ups. I can think of a quite easy way for the Mozilla coders to get around this, and I expect it soon. People using other browsers will see your adverts, and the clued-up users will avoid the adverts. As most of these adverts only work on the gullible and ignorant, you won’t be losing any sales.
My two top pop-up irritations are:
1) The “Warning! Your computer is broadcasting its address” adverts, which use ignorance and fear to sell firewall software. The advert is disguised as a Windows warning message. It makes misleading claims - computers do not “broadcast” their IP address across the Internet, and they lie - my computer is not “insecure”, certainly when compared with their software. Lancaster University has a good page on this scam.
2) The plague of X10 adverts which somehow use sex to sell home automation gadgets. I think they exploit a nerd fantasy in which nubile young women are crazy about men with automatic curtain closing machines and infrared door locks. As far as I know, this isn’t true. I bet their cameras sell well to peeping-toms…
This claim that ignoring an advert is theft is not new. A US media spokesman recently implied that when TV viewers wait for the adverts to start before making tea or going to the toilet, they are stealing. And fast forwarding past the adverts on a tape or using a PVR, well.
Is this trend a sign that the advertising-funded income model is collapsing, or just that media companies are longer tolerating consumer dissent? Both, I suspect. More media-consumer crimes.
Health and safety issues for zoo staff. Good old Ananova: that’s a picture of a chimpanzee, not a gorilla.
Weird Japanese thing featuring condiment superheroes, sudden and puzzling cat suicide and much squirting.
Link: Kikkoman
Website design guidelines based on actual research. Some interesting and useful information, much of it based on what users expect and understand, rather than what fashionable designers or usability gurus declare to be best.
It looks as if a few simple and usable layouts from early, successful web sites have shaped what users want - they don’t want startling new navigation methods that take ten minutes to understand, they want a site to be predictable. Experimental Flash designers take note.
Link: Optimal web design
This one isn’t going to be finished for a long time - I expect to release it next summer. Hippo is primarily for my own use, and possibly for use at work too, much later. I aim to work on the “Flexible Jabber” projects at weekends, and slowly develop Hippo in the evenings in between smaller projects like Cat. It’s going to be single user and with data input through Webmin at first, and hopefully grow into a full application. Maybe.
Hippo is a web based app. It’s a familiar tool implemented in an unusual way. I’ve toyed with using PHP (with Smarty and Adodb) for a while, but in the end I’ve decided to stick with Perl. No CGI stuff this time: pure handler-based Mod_Perl, a big SQL database, and the quite amazing Template Toolkit Perl module. Layout will be almost completely through CSS. Themes too, but the Template Toolkit makes that rather too easy. So far, a vapourware spec fit for an Amiga fanatic, but bits of it are already working.
It keeps me off the streets.
About 1,000 years ago, the Dunhuang cave in China was packed with 50,000 paintings and manuscripts, and sealed. In 1900 it was opened, and the contents taken away (stolen?) by western museums and private collectors.
Now over 40,000 documents, from museums all over the world, have been gathered together into an indexed and searchable online collection. And it’s fantastic.
Link: IDP Manuscript Search
Quite a nice tutorial on basic use of Unix via a command line interface. A few mistakes here and there, but a good introduction overall. However, never use telnet to log in to another computer over the Internet. In fact, I’d recommend avoiding any computer that has telnet login enabled, as it’s been very badly configured. Use a secure shell instead.
