Grey Nicholson

Strategic voting

2024-06-22T23:44:00+00:00

Suppose you want to “get the Tories out”. Specifically, you want the Conservative party not to be in government.

To be clear, I'm not saying that you should (or shouldn't) want this. But suppose.

How might you vote to achieve this?

Vote for someone else

At first glance, you might just vote for whichever party or candidate you actually want instead of the Conservatives.

But the voting system for UK general elections is first-past-the-post: there are 650 separate constituencies, each of which returns one MP. That MP is whoever gets more votes than any other individual candidate in that constituency, even if the other candidates put together have more votes.

A party can have more than half of the seats (MPs) without persuading more than half of the voters. Since 1931, no single party has ever won 50% of the vote. Most people voting against the Conservatives isn't enough to get them out of government.

Vote tactically

So perhaps there's another candidate in your constituency who you're willing to vote for, and they have a better chance of winning your constituency. You could vote for them, and if they win that would minimise the number of Conservative (or otherwise undesirable) MPs after the next election.

Tactical voting. Job done.

…Right?

For how long?

The thing about general elections is that there's always the next one.

Perhaps Labour will win a majority at this election, and the next one, and the one after that. Do you think Labour will win every election forevermore? What happens when they eventually don't?

If you only want the Conservatives out of government for the next 5 years, tactical voting can do that. Maybe for the next 10 or 15 years.

Suppose you want to keep the Tories out.

Whose confidence?

For a government to stay on, it has to have the confidence of the House of Commons: at least half of the MPs have to be willing to let it continue.

If you're the prime minister and all those MPs are in your own party, that's much easier: you can promise jobs or threaten deselection. But if you have to persuade members of other parties, those tactics don't apply. You have to actually govern in a way that at least half the MPs support.

Under the current voting system, half the MPs doesn't necessarily mean half of the voters. But it could.

Vote strategically

No single party has won 50% of the vote in a general election since 1931. So if the voting system changes to a proportional representation system, it's unlikely the Conservatives would be able to win a majority of seats any time soon.

But if the voting system stays the way it is, it's likely that in the near future the Conservatives would win a majority of seats.

Voting for a party that supports keeping the first-past-the-post voting system is voting for this future.

If you want to keep the Tories out, you can vote strategically for proportional representation.

A raft of politics

2022-10-26T11:35:00+00:00

We're on a raft hurtling towards a waterfall. The Conservatives, Labour, and Liberal Democrats have no interest in trying to stop the raft falling over the edge.

…Well, they're open to the idea, but it's far more important to ensure that the oars are in the right position. Yes, we can try to slow or reverse the course towards the waterfall, but we have to make sure we don't disturb the oars too much! Of course, all 3 parties want the oars in a slightly different spot, and insist that moving the oars would be disastrous.

Meanwhile in England and Wales, the Greens want to escape the waterfall, but no-one listens to them because they have nothing serious to say about the position of the oars. Most of them agree that we shouldn't throw some people over the side of the raft, but there are a few who say it's a matter of grave seriousness and morality that we must throw some people over the side; most of the others aren't interested in disagreeing or stopping them, because we're hurtling towards a waterfall.

The Conservatives will happily throw some people over the side of the raft, because they deserve it, and anyway I would never be one of those people. More room on the definitely-not-doomed raft for the good ones! The Labour party say it's absurd to suggest throwing people any less than 78% of the way off the raft, and anyway the Conservatives aren't doing a very good job of throwing them. (And don't forget where they put those oars! Ludicrous to trust them with the oars.)

The SNP reckon that splitting the raft into 2 smaller rafts will somehow avert the waterfall. The Reform party say the river is made up.

About Me, Grey Nicholson

2021-09-29T17:45:00+00:00

Hi! My name's Grey.

On the internet I sometimes call myself “Grey the earthling”, which is fittingly both whimsical and factually-accurate.

A brief summary, in lieu of a proper bio:

they/them
idiosyncratic enthusiast, eccentrically sensible
approximately Manchester, GB
vegan
typical Ophiuchus
YYYY-MM-DD, tau
Deep Space Nine
GNOME, Silverblue
Go/weiqi/baduk, Bohnanza
XS Malarkey
puns
Digitalis, BAGeL Radio, Deep Space One, the Act 1 boss music from Sonic 3
Green politics, solarpunk, secure scuttlebutt, convivial street design
trans-Neptunian objects

You can also find me at:

Consume!

2018-04-28T11:00:00+00:00

Having is good.

Getting is better.

Buying is the only good way of getting, because getting without buying involves giving.

Giving is bad because having is good, and to start giving you must stop having.

Consume!

21st century season calendar

2018-04-21T16:58:00+00:00

I like to be aware of the solstices and equinoxes, because they're the closest things we have to natural holidays, so I want to have them as events in my calendar.

I haven't been able to find a calendar to subscribe to in iCalendar format, that shows the solstices and equinoxes without a load of extra messy stuff, and doesn't expire in the next few years.

Luckily, the Astronomical Applications Department of the United States Naval Observatory generously makes a lot of astronomical data available in such a way that it can be gathered and manipulated easily, with free permission to reuse the data.

So I've downloaded the data for the entire 21st century, and converted it into iCalendar format. It's a simple plain text format, so I was able to do this manually with plenty of find-and-replace.

The result is a calendar with 6 events per year:

the two solstices in June and December
the two equinoxes in March and September
the perihelion in January
the aphelion in July

To subscribe or import the data, point your calendar program at https://gkn.me.uk/seasons/seasons.ics. Or, going to webcal://gkn.me.uk/seasons/seasons.ics may prompt your web browser to send this URL to your calendar program, depending on how co-operative all the software on your computer is.

The calendar's contents won't change: it's unlikely that new observations would make the data obsolete (perhaps an inconsequential minute or two either way) and I don't expect to have any personal use for data beyond 2100. Someone else will have to fulfil your 22nd-century calendar needs.

Self-driving cars: software crashes

2018-02-25T23:28:00+00:00

No car is self-driving.

A “self-driving” car is piloted by software, which is ultimately written by a person. You don't know who that person was; only that they were employed by a particular company.

They were probably sitting in an office somewhere in California when they wrote the code driving your car. Maybe it was 17:30 on a Friday and, despite caring sincerely about the work they were doing, they happened to be distracted by the prospect of going home. Maybe not. You don't know.

Do you trust that person with your life?

Well, the company hired them, so they can't be completely useless. You trust the company's recruitment procedures. …What are the company's recruitment procedures?

Anyway, presumably there are processes in place to review the code, and stop mistakes from making it into the final software. Presumably. You trust that there are, and that they work, and never fail.

Now imagine the company has made it illegal for you to see how the software works. Are you sure you trust this company with your life?

There should be a law saying that if a vehicle can be piloted by software, and it's capable of containing or hurting a human, then all installed software must be open source, and you must be able to prove that the source code corresponds to the software running in the car.

It has to be legally possible for the vehicle's owner (or prospective owner) to discover how their car might behave in a life-or-death situation, so they can decide whether they want to be responsible for the car's actions.

Responsibility

Logically, the manufacturer who wrote the software would be responsible, but they have no incentive to take responsibility for their cars' imperfections. Doesn't make money. Why admit your own flaws while your competitors keep schtum, look better, and rake it in? Any goodwill from better transparency will evaporate as soon as someone dies in an accident.

It's much safer to claim that the human pilot should have taken control at the critical moment. Capitalist governments won't argue with rich, profitably-taxable businesses.

Car makers will only be transparent about how their cars behave if they're obliged to by law.

Open source

Merely having access to the software's source code isn't enough. It must be legal to reuse the source code, for several reasons.

Morally, if Non-Specific Engines Ltd writes an algorithm that's better at saving lives than any other algorithm, shouldn't Acme Motors be obliged to used the safer algorithm in their cars, rather than forbidden?

Practically, you need software experts to audit the code. You want the code checked by an independent expert in the field of vehicle automation — not a business partner of the manufacturer — and that person will be a software developer.

If they use a similar concept in their own work later, Mom's Friendly Car Company could threaten to sue them, claiming they copied the code illegally. Software developers are rarely as rich as car companies; even the threat of a lawsuit would mean that in practice the code would go unchecked.

And again, morally, you can save lives here, by letting the developer reuse the good code.

Reproducible builds

Lastly, it needs to be possible to prove that the audited code is actually the code running in the car. You want an independent auditor to build the software for themself, in a development environment they trust, and get the exact same output as what's in the car. It must be possible to build the software reproducibly.

Otherwise checking the code is pointless — you still have to trust the car manufacturer, and you can't be sure the software's behaviour doesn't deviate in subtle ways in very specific situations. Maybe you don't care about any subtle differences, but maybe you do. The driver should at least be honest with you, and you can decide for yourself.

None of this will make sure a self-driving car is perfectly safe. All software has bugs. But at least you'll know the driver was acting in good faith.

Trade secrets and competitive advantage are not worth dying for.

…Or you could just trust the big friendly company… right?

The Patriot Act

2018-02-25T20:03:00+00:00

It seems really quite odd to promote patriotism.

Patriotism is the belief that you should like your country because it's yours, rather than because it's actually any good.

If you believe your country really is good, then you don't need to promote patriotism, because everyone will like your country anyway — because it's good.

So proud patriots who insist that everyone should be a patriot, and if you're not a patriot, well that's just not patriotic: I guess those people actually think their country is… rubbish?

So why do they want everyone to love their rubbish country?

Big New Tab Button

2009-05-06T18:09:00+00:00

In Firefox 3.5 there's a button on the tab bar that opens a new tab. It's a bit small. This add-on makes it bigger. That is all.

Into the Fire

2009-03-06T15:07:00+00:00

An entry at Illuminated Mind has struck a chord with me. It's titled “If It’s a Good Idea… Don’t Do It”, although “If It's Just a Good Idea…” captures the message more clearly.

One of the reasons I petered out of university was that I was doing it only because it was a good idea, and not because I was still passionate about understanding the physics. Even the dead-centre-of-my-field-of-interest module of Cosmology was failing to inspire me.

It wasn't at all arduous: I still came upon flashes of epiphany every so often—one such I recall involved the insight that the constituent particles in atoms' nuclei are also arranged in shells, like the orbiting electrons, and that shell boundaries could explain some discontinuities in each element's differing physical properties—but they were too few and too far between to hold my interest.

I also realised that I wasn't especially good at maths, and the solid intuitive understanding of maths needed to grok the physics I was learning was just slightly beyond me. Perhaps I stopped caring about maths too.

I realised that I only cared about qualitative trends, and not about the process of calculating results from formulae, or being able to properly derive a formula from memory and a set of more fundamental equations. Once I knew that formula C necessarily followed from formulae A & B, I was happy. I still like unscaled graphs as qualitative illustrations.

The main thing I cited at the time was Six Feet Under. More4 were showing repeats of the later series late each weeknight. I decided that the characters' philosophical discussions (perhaps combined with the late hour of the broadcast) were expanding my mind more than rigorous study of science.

I never particularly wanted a degree—I just wanted to learn about the universe. And I found myself gaining more insight into the universe by following the fictional escapades of a family of intelligent undertakers than by computing physical quantities.

So I was doing what was a good idea, rather than what inspired me. I'd made a similar decision before, when I chose to carry on Religious Studies to full A-level in college, instead of continuing to study Chemistry, despite doing slightly better at chemistry in practically every respect.

The difference was that in that case there'd been a fire for me to jump out of the frying pan and into. Watching Six Feet Under is not a full-time occupation.

So I bummed about a bit, not even looking for a job for the next few months as I had some spare student loan and overdraft to play with.

I eventually happened upon a desk job that suited me down to the ground: opening letters, filing, sorting and being a general administrative office bitch, for the customer relations department of a train operating company.

The work itself was easy and almost entirely stress-free, as I always had someone to turn to when in doubt. I continued to devote much of my mindshare to the day-to-day happenings in software and technology news (an interest I can trace back to the buggy implementation of CSS in Microsoft Internet Explorer 6).

I did, of course, think about my job as and when required. As is my wont, I came up with a couple of suggestions to do things better in the office, but anything beyond keeping tidy, labelled piles of stuff was stymied by being stuck with a particular set of tools.

This was OK. After all, I didn't really care that much. Yes, it'd be nice if Mrs Smith from Glasgow could receive a response to her complaint about delayed trains a day or two sooner, but.

I was rudely awakened from my employmentary coasting when my office was relocated to Newcastle, a 60-minute (free) train-ride each morning and evening, on top of the twenty-minute walk. This gave me plenty of time to read some books for a change, and I sped through The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress by Robert A. Heinlein and the original Foundation trilogy by Isaac Asimov (in full this time) over the course of a couple of weeks.

But co-workers and my genial manager were leaving because of the move, and the immediate vicinity of Newcastle Central railway station is no match for the lunchtime scenery afforded by York's River Ouse and Museum Gardens, especially in summer. Though I couldn't see myself leaving, I couldn't see myself staying there either. And so I jumped: I handed in my notice (metaphorically—I actually just told the outgoing and incoming managers when I intended to leave).

Technology news was replaced by job-searching. I recall one Tuesday in Newcastle spent, by all three members of the administrative team, primarily looking for other employment.

Astoundingly, it worked, and two weeks later I was staying in a hostel in Bristol about to be trained to be a charity street fundraiser.

Thirty-six hours after, I found myself standing at the side of the main street in Leeds, nervously sipping at a cup of tea, trying to dilute the adrenaline.

That day went unexpectedly well, propelled largely by my frequent self-reminders that I was talking to random people on the street and trying to convince them to donate to a charity, for a living.

Three months elapsed.

My old teammate had often told me that the day's outcome could be influenced by my expectation of what would happen. I expected to come back to work and do solidly well. I expected that I knew what I was doing. My old team-leader had said he firmly believed that if you wanted something enough, you'd find a way to attain it. I believed that I wanted to be a good fundraiser. The team's coach insisted I had it in me. I deferred to his superior understanding.

It was starting to become apparent that I wasn't meeting targets. Not just the actual targets, but the minimum ones too. I wasn't earning my place on the team.

This came into focus one Wednesday evening in York when, after applying every technique I could muster—level thinking, playing the long statistical game, appropriate body language, concision, knowledge, friendliness…—I found myself walking home without having signed a single person up.

I realised I didn't actually know what I was doing. I was doing a good impression, much of the time, of someone who knew how to go about street fundraising, but in reality I was winging it. And not well enough. An awful day should yield no fewer than two sign-ups; the remainder of the team had signed people up.

I arrived largely undeterred the following morning in Newcastle, after a journey that was equally oddly familiar and strangely different. It was drizzling—not supposed to affect a fundraiser's performance, but not especially conducive to it. As it was November, there was an almighty racket accompanying a department shop's Christmas display, rendering a decent swathe of the street useless for talking to people. I was deterred.

Despite this, I signed two new donors before lunch, a decent tally for the morning session. Briefly, I convinced myself that I'd remembered how to fundraise. I spent most of the afternoon mulling over the decision to quit, safe in the knowledge that soon enough a decision would most likely be made on my behalf anyway. I even signed another person up (though I'm told he's a serial charity-joiner).

The following morning's news headlines centred around the deepening recession: specifically around new figures for job losses, and the recession's stifling of charitable donations. I have a wry sense of humour.

Jonathan's blog post reminded me strongly of when I left both university and fundraising. Both times, the initial spark of enthusiasm for what on paper is a pretty awesome idea had dwindled, leaving me merely going through the motions.

University lectures were not a chore, so the twenty-or-so hours of every week of term that they occupied weren't sorely missed. Even spending a day in labs each week was OK. Attaining a proper quantitative understanding of physics, though, required plenty of off-timetable study—time I was loath to put in since in truth I cared little for the specifics. It showed: each week's problem questions seemed more and more daunting, which only increased the resolve needed to actually study.

Fundraising had me leaving home each day at around 07:30 and getting back at about 22:30—albeit typically due to healthy after-work socialising. (And I should point out that everything that went with the job was wonderful: my teammates, and our adventures together—even running for a train back from Harrogate with one minute to spare felt like an adventure—were each uniquely brilliant).

I now know that I'm not capable of devoting my time to something that I'm not enthralled by. It doesn't have to be actually important—I just have to care enough to want to take control.

I suppose part of it is the knowledge that someone else could be doing a better job instead of me. My demotivation in physics and fundraising alike roughly coincided with the dawning that I would be neither a brilliant cosmologist nor a legendary fundraiser respectively.

I have this need to correct things and improve upon what's there, and if I can't make something better I tend to leave it to someone else.

So I agree with Jonathan that something just being a good idea doesn't make it a useful application of my time.

Remove Close Buttons from Tabs

2009-03-03T21:04:00+00:00

Having a close button on each tab in Firefox makes closing tabs discoverable, but at the expense of accidental clicks.

When the tabs get too small the close buttons on inactive tabs are removed, again as a trade-off between discoverability and accidental clicking, but there's still the off-chance.

So for those of us who're comfortable with closing tabs by middle-clicking them, Remove Close Buttons from Tabs removes the close button from every tab, all the time.

Hence the name.

You can get it from Mozilla Add-ons or, if you really trust me that much, directly from me.

It's licensed under the ISC licence:

Copyright © 2009, Grey Nicholson

Permission to use, copy, modify, and/or distribute this software for any purpose with or without fee is hereby granted, provided that the above copyright notice and this permission notice appear in all copies.

The software is provided "as is" and the author disclaims all warranties with regard to this software including all implied warranties of merchantability and fitness. In no event shall the author be liable for any special, direct, indirect, or consequential damages or any damages whatsoever resulting from loss of use, data or profits, whether in an action of contract, negligence or other tortious action, arising out of or in connection with the use or performance of this software.

Mmm… shiny simplicity.

Red Head points out that you could just set browser.tabs.closeButtons to 2 instead, if you'd rather use about:config than install an add-on.

The Laissez-faire Paradox

2009-02-19T12:20:00+00:00

I believe that one shouldn't impose one's beliefs on others.

In fact, I practically require others not to impose them on me.

Think about that for a second.

Just Give Me A Back Button

2009-02-16T08:57:00+00:00

A while ago, the Mozilla developers did some research and related some anecdotes, both of which suggested that web browser users use the Back button rather a lot. So in Firefox 3, they made it bigger than the Forward button. (—except on Linux, where they imitated a native design instead, shrewdly surmising that (A:) we like our applications consistent, and that (B:) our native design is pretty sensible.)

At the same time, they combined the Back drop-down menu (showing pages you've previously visited in this tab in this session) with the Forward drop-down menu (showing pages you've visited in this tab in this session that you've then come away from by going Back).

A couple of years previously, I'd made two Firefox extensions that played around with these menus' appearance & functionality. One removed the drop-down buttons, aiming for a simpler look (and leaving the menus accessible by a right-click); the other turned each entire button into the menu trigger (also providing the simpler look, but working less efficiently without providing any extra capability). The latter was never supported, and when the menus were unified I stopped using (& thus supporting) the former.

A couple of hours ago I was thinking about how Google Chrome manages to reduce all of a web browser's UI into five toolbar buttons & two menus, and thinking about how to do a similar thing with other applications, particularly Firefox. I realised that I tend not to remember which page is one Forward, so when I want to go to any page other than one Back, I usually use the drop-down menu. So I may as well get rid of the Forward button.

I also realised I could. So I did.

Just Give Me A Back Button is named after Asa's memorably-titled blog post and consists of one line of code:

#forward-button{display:none}

—plus the necessary incantation to install it and apply it to the main Firefox window. It may look like arse on Windows & Mac, where the Forward button is visually integrated with the Back & drop-down buttons—I don't know. Don't complain. (Fixes are welcome, though.) It actually doesn't look like arse—I've now checked.

It mainly lives at Mozilla Add-ons, but if you trust me—and there's no reason why you should—you can also get it directly from me.

It's licensed under the ISC licence, which reads:

Copyright © 2009, Grey Nicholson

Permission to use, copy, modify, and/or distribute this software for any purpose with or without fee is hereby granted, provided that the above copyright notice and this permission notice appear in all copies.

The software is provided "as is" and the author disclaims all warranties with regard to this software including all implied warranties of merchantability and fitness. In no event shall the author be liable for any special, direct, indirect, or consequential damages or any damages whatsoever resulting from loss of use, data or profits, whether in an action of contract, negligence or other tortious action, arising out of or in connection with the use or performance of this software.

It's only a minor simplification. Arguably, those overwhelming menus are a much bigger problem (in every sense). But it's something.

“You're the Cables that Connect Me” (the 2009-02-13 Friday Fetch-it)

2009-02-13T22:22:00+00:00

A couple of years ago, Swedish record label Labrador released a summer sampler of gargantuan proportions. A lot of those 68 songs are unremarkable (though none is truly awful).

But I keep coming back to Chasing Dorotea's unabashedly romantic The Anchor Song.

Part of the song's charm is its simplicity: two voices singing mostly in unison, backed by an acoustic guitar, with a harmonica decorating the space around the verses.

The singers exude tranquillity and relaxation, right from “You've got a sparkle in your eyes, stronger than the brightest sun”. Even the instruments seem carefree as they ebb and flow amongst the vocals.

But the real joy is in the lyrics' endless river of metaphors and fond exaggerations.

This song is guaranteed to leave you with a lower blood pressure, a subdued heartbeat and a wistful smile. If you download one song this week, make it The Anchor Song.

(How do you follow that? Something slightly more lively but equally lovely: “Spring Came, Rain Fell” by Club 8, from the same sampler.)

↓

2009-01-19T10:28:00+00:00

This.

How to set up a Canon i250 printer in Ubuntu 8.10

2008-11-26T18:48:00+00:00

Setting up a Canon i250 printer in Ubuntu is possible, but not automatic. Here's how to do it in less than five minutes.

Actually, it seems to be impossible. I've no idea what I've done differently, but the printer fails to work now. Cheers, Canon.

First of all, the reason any of this is necessary is because Canon is rubbish. They don't support drivers (software needed for computers to talk to peripherals such as printers) for any operating systems other than Windows and Mac OS X. They don't allow me to just give you a copy of their unsupported Linux drivers. And they refuse to release specifications that would allow other programmers to make good-quality drivers for everyone.

I won't be buying another Canon printer in the foreseeable future.

Anyhow, I've packaged up a script to install the Canon i250 drivers in Ubuntu 8.10.

This script will ask for your password so that it can install the necessary software; unless you trust me enough to give me full control of your computer, you shouldn't run this script without reading it first.

If you do want to run the script, you'll have to make it executable. To do this in Ubuntu, right-click the script file (install-i250-drivers.sh), choose Properties, and on the Permissions tab, tick Allow executing file as program.

You can then double-click the script file to run the script. It'll take a couple of minutes to download, convert and install the drivers so I suggest running it in a terminal.

If you prefer not to download a script file, you can paste the following equivalent commands into a terminal (again, don't trust me):

gksudo "aptitude -y install libpng3 libtiff4 cupsys alien"
cd /tmp
wget http://download.canon.com.au/bj/i250linux/bjfilteri250-2.3-0.i386.rpm
wget http://download.canon.com.au/bj/i250linux/bjfiltercups-2.3-0.i386.rpm
gksudo "alien --scripts bjfilteri250-2.3-0.i386.rpm"
gksudo "alien --scripts bjfiltercups-2.3-0.i386.rpm"
gksudo "dpkg -i bjfiltercups_2.3-1_i386.deb bjfilteri250_2.3-1_i386.deb"
gksudo "ln -s /usr/lib/libtiff.so.4 /usr/lib/libtiff.so.3"
gksudo "ln -s /usr/lib/libpng.so.3 /usr/lib/libpng.so.2"
gksudo "/etc/init.d/cups restart"

The script & code don't actually set the printer up. You will still have to do that in the normal way through System → Administration → Printing. When offered the option, tell the computer to use the PPD file at /usr/share/cups/model/canoni250.ppd.

It may or may not be necessary for the printer to be switched on while Ubuntu starts up, so if the test page fails to print, try restarting the computer with the printer on.

I created this script by mercilessly copying from Daniel Howard's blog post on installing the i250 drivers in Ubuntu 7.10—spot the difference. (Seriously, there is a crucial change.)

Welfare State Fail

2008-11-18T14:53:00+00:00

Wishing to avoid an unsightly mess in time for the 2012 Olympics (please don't sue me), Ministers have unveiled plans to end homelessness in London. By the way: great to see Hartlepool's MP Iain Wright continuing his election-winning policy of being local, isn't it?

One such plan entails a 24-hour helpline to report concerns about homeless people. Euh! Look, Terence—a homeless person! Quick! Call the helpline! …or hit her with our copy of the Daily Mail, or something…!

Also planned is assisting single people with deposits on rented property. And, as I understand it, the government requires cohabitation before it recognises a relationship, so logically they will view all homeless people as single.

Last time I was unemployed, I claimed Jobseekers' Allowance and Housing Benefit. These totalled to around £85 per week, which was sufficient to pay for my rent, food, water and power bills, and even a few luxuries.

Are homeless people not eligible for these benefits?

If they are, deposit assistance should solve the immediate problem. Unless, of course, by “assistance” they mean:

Here! Have half!

But I can't afford the other hundred pounds—I have barely enough income from selling The Big Issue to eat.

Well, we tried! <cheesy shrug-to-camera, canned laughter>

Maybe make it illegal to discriminate against a job candidate on the basis of addresslessness too.

If homeless people aren't eligible for Jobseekers' and Housing Benefit—why the hell not? It seems to me that homelessness and joblessness are essentially the same issue, and that it should be well within the Job Centre's remit to address homelessness too.

But then, of course, I'm an ill-informed imbecile. Fixing the immediate problem of “being able to get a house” won't help everyone.

Sssspppppllllllllaaaarrrgghhh!!!!

2008-11-03T02:18:00+00:00

Ssssssssssssssssssppppppppppppppplllllllllllllllllllaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaarrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrgggggggggggggggggghhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!!!!!!!!!!

New Elements in HTML 5

2008-04-01T11:56:00+00:00

HTML 5 has been in development for a good few years now. In addition to clarifying a lot of grey areas in previous versions of the spec, and changing a few definitions to reflect real-world use, it also introduces a few new elements. Here's a quick look at some of the more interesting ones.

The `í` element

HTML 5 redefines the i element, which was purely presentational and denoted anything that looked vaguely slanty, as representing a span of text in an alternate voice or mood, or otherwise offset from the normal prose, such as a taxonomic designation, a technical term, an idiomatic phrase from another language, a thought, a ship name, or some other prose whose typical typographic presentation is italicized.

Note typical: the contents of an i element don't actually have to be displayed in italics.

In light of this, the spec also introduces the í element (note the acute accent), which represents a really, really italic bit of text; it adds that user agents should render text within an í element with a dynamic ‘whoosh!’ effect.

The `spam` element

HTML 4 introduced the span element, which represents a generic run of text. It's used all over the place in HTML, as a semantically correct way to mark up absolutely anything just for fun.

HTML 5 corrects a typo in the HTML 4 spec and renames this element to spam.

A corollary to Arthur C. Clarke's third law

2008-03-21T02:31:00+00:00

Any sufficiently advanced science is indistinguishable from divinity.

Line of Sight

2008-03-19T21:44:00+00:00

Suddenly I was bathed in light. I peered behind me to see; my whole body twisted in unison. Immediately it met my gaze, staring me right in the face.

For weeks the sun had been threatening to align, but in the end always seemed to show up just a little bit too far to the right, obscured by trees and buildings. Now, though, here it was, bang smack in my line of sight. Equinox—right on cue, as well.

Bed is a good place to sunbathe—the ultraviolet light can't penetrate glass. (I was never any good as an astronomer—I look directly at the sun all the time.)

Waves of hot air gushed out of the heater and danced steadily upwards, visible only as ripples of shade and light on the wall, blanketing the cracked plaster. Lush instrumental rock emanated from the other end of the room, coming from a wonderfully obscure radio station, as I lay on the bed. I noticed a hair I didn't realise I had, glowing white, backlit.

This was why they built Stonehenge.

The alignment only lasted an hour today. Even then, I had to creep closer and closer to the window, following it as it forged ahead, blissfully oblivious, heading away to the zenith in the south. As if staring at it forlornly would make it change its mind and come back.

It would, though.

Winter was over.

Unprecedented Occurrences

2008-03-05T19:13:00+00:00

Yesterday, I bought some clothes—reasonably priced(!)—from Marks & Spencer (one pair of jeans @ £9.50; two T-shirts @ £3.50 & £3.00 respectively); I also listened to a Nine Inch Nails record—and liked it.

“You Wrote Your Number on My Hand & It Came Off in the Rain” (the 2008-02-29 Friday Fetch-it)

2008-02-29T23:53:00+00:00

For ages, all I knew of the Mystery Jets was “You Can't Fool Me, Dennis”; and that one of the band members was one of the other ones's dad. But Young Love, their new single (even though I usually steer clear of recommending those), is the epitome of English pop.

The bassline it kicks off with is simple, but with a definite twang to it. From here, the song launches straight into a chorus, through which weaves a guitar line that complements the wry vocals, seemingly skipping along beside them.

The verses are underpinned instrumentally by strong, marching drums; and a bassline that rises and falls, dancing around the vocals. Shimmering guitar crescendos also make an appearance every so often. Half-way through, some backing vocals chip in, contributing staccato, fey “aah”s on the offbeats; they become legato (but remain fey) in the second chorus and start alternating between “ooh” and “ahh”.

At this point, the song's punctuated by a bridge: off-kilter clangs herald successive choruses of “woawoawoaw, woawoawoa-ooo!” and crescendos of those marching drumbeats; until the verse re-emerges—and brings current indie-folk up-and-comer Laura Marling with it.

Laura Marling's voice is the poshest this side of Sophie Ellis-Bextor. It's ably escorted by the rising-and-falling, dancing guitar line; marching drums; and finger-clicks, provided in the video by the disembodied hands of three off-screen Mystery Jets.

After a final chorus featuring Laura singing an alto counter-melody, the song arrives at another bridge, and this is where it concludes—no chorus repeat (aptly enough, I feel like I'm repeating myself here) and no fade-out: an extended bridge and then stop. This is the mark of a durable pop song: it leaves you only 90% satisfied rather than outstaying its welcome. Moreover, the guest vocalist actually feels like a guest for a change, instead of an ill-advised attempt at a full duet.

The song's lyrics comprise rhyming couplets that, with plenty of hyperbole, depict their protagonist hopelessly in love with a fleeting acquaintance. Despite being pretty straightforward in structure, they simultaneously manage to be poetically vivid and immensely catchy: “Is that you on the bus? is that you on the train? / You wrote your number on my hand and it came off in the rain” is definitely couplet of the week.

But it never seems twee, like a lot of Scando-Scottish indie-popsters (seriously, who can tell Camera Obscura and the Concretes apart?)—the rattling drums and precise guitars prevent the sound from becoming syrupy. Earnest and foppish, yes: but not twee.

So it is quintessentially English pop music—not only due to Laura Marling's accent, but because of the attitude it exhibits: a combination of resigned exasperation but recklessly unremitting determination nonetheless. You'd not hear that from Belle & Seb.

It's the sort of song Hugh Grant would sing if only he wasn't so frightfully shy. If you download one song this week, make it Young Love.

(How do you follow that? The “aah”s echo the Rakes' “We Danced Together” (an English band); the guitar and overall rhythm, (English) Field Music's “A House Is Not A Home”; and the bridge—annoyingly—“This Fffire”, by Scandinavian-produced Scots Franz Ferdinand.)

Seventeen (“Localised Black Hole”)

2008-02-25T05:10:00+00:00

The BBC Loves Them Some Microsoft

2008-02-22T01:52:00+00:00

Either that or they're crap journalists. Or their technology editor's wholly unknowledgeable (which really amounts to the same).

In the offending report, one paragraph (comprising just one sentence—have you noticed how often the BBC does that?) says that:

It [Microsoft] also promised not to sue open source developers for making that software available for non-commercial use.

Now, open source developers are those who make open source software, which is any software that's released under an open source licence. Point 6 of the Open Source Definition explicitly states that commercial users cannot be excluded. So for a program to be released as open source, it must be available for commercial as well as non-commercial use.

Open source developers therefore have no interest in releasing code just for non-commercial use. Doing so is usually called shared source—“you can look, but you can't run it for commercial purposes”. Microsoft have offered code under shared source licences before—that, in itself, isn't news.

Far from helping open source developers, this may actually make it easier for Microsoft to sue them: they can more-plausibly claim that an open source developer has looked at some of Microsoft's source code, and copied it in code they've released as open source (and therefore for commercial use), which would be a violation of Microsoft's code's licence.

Certainly, with this as (at least) a possibility, any open source developer would be foolhardy to actually look at the Microsoft code if they intend to write anything comparable in the future.

Places’ Full Titles

2008-02-10T17:33:00+00:00

Places’ Full Titles is a tiny extension for Firefox that eliminates unnecessary truncation of bookmarks' and history items' titles.

Make “Smart Bookmar...” a thing of the past! ...or something.™

To leave space for sub-menus, menus that unfold vertically still have a size limit, but it's somewhat wider than usual. This applies to the top-level Bookmarks and History menus, to any folder on the bookmarks toolbar, and to the bookmarks toolbar's overflow menu.

It's an updated, slightly-improved and renamed version of Bookmarks' Full Titles for previous versions of Firefox. (If you've already got Bookmarks' Full Titles, it'll be upgraded automatically.)

You can get it from Mozilla Add-ons.

The BBC Misunderstands DRM

2008-01-30T16:08:00+00:00

With the furore over the BBC's unfair use of DRM in its iPlayer, one would expect them to know what DRM was. Apparently, they don't.

(At least, their technology editor doesn't.) BBC News has an article about “a new method of DRM” being used by indigenous Australians to make it easier to respect their societal customs. The thing is, the system as the article describes it is not DRM.

DRM is where a file (a document, some software, or a piece of audio or video) is designed to be unreadable without a key (a cipher—like a password). Crucially, the key must remain unknown to (or unusable by) the file's intended audience.

The DRM acts as a gatekeeper, and only allows access to the file (lowers the drawbridge) if the audience can demonstrate that they are entitled to access the file. The audience may only access the file if the key-holder allows it.

Making a copy of a DRM-encumbered file and giving it to someone else typically results in their not being able to use it, because the DRM recognises them as someone else. (If it doesn't recognise them at all, they still won't be able to use the file.)

That's the intention, anyway. It's not actually possible to implement DRM so that it works—it can only ever make viewing the content a bit more awkward, for determined copyright-infringers and ordinary consumers alike.

The key point here is that the DRM—and thus the key-holder—controls the audience's ability to access the file.

In the situation described by the BBC article, the audience chooses to avoid certain content, based on a set of cultural rules. The “DRM” system allows the audience to filter the content, by taking cultural information about the audience and applying those rules.

There is no key (that the article mentions, anyway); no-one is prevented from accessing any content—it's just made easier to avoid content that's inappropriate for that particular person.

This system sounds rather more like a simple set of filters that work on metadata associated with each bit of content. That's a lot more like a porn-&-swearing blocker than DRM. It's very similar to Flickr's search engine.

Indeed, it's very similar to any search engine, except the criteria are “appropriate for this age, that gender and this community” instead of the more typical “must contain the words foo, bar and baz”.

So this is, as the article describes, an example of applying search logic and technology (that itself originates from European-influenced cultures) to solve a cultural problem that many from European-influenced cultures would find surprising.

It has nothing, however, to do with DRM (which is an example of unfeasibly clinging to a business model that's been made obsolete and unworkable by technological improvements), as the article erroneously suggests.

“I Did Your Wife a Favour” (the 2008-01-11 Friday Fetch-it)

2008-01-11T22:32:00+00:00

Melancholy is a subtle mood. There are lots of songs I find uplifting and essentially happy, that other people think are morose, sad and a general downer. So, depending on which half of the glass you prefer to focus on, Winter Killing could go either way.

It begins abruptly—not “Decent Days And Nights” abruptly, but abruptly nonetheless: there's no intro (strictly, there are 1½ beats before Stina Nordenstam starts singing—hardly an intro) and the song arrives fully-formed.

The intimate electric guitar line (which acts as a bassline despite being much further up in the register) and percussive rhythm that form the song's backbone are present right from the start, as are Stina's vocals. Her vocals are distinctive: close-mic'ed, quiet and understated, with a breathiness and an accent that tend to knit the words together in a slur; her vocals are almost drawled.

When the chorus arrives for the first time, the accompaniment does little to acknowledge that this is actually the chorus; the few extra sparkles are subtle. It doesn't have to do much—the lyrics drop back and let the instruments take over, while still asserting themselves by their repetition.

The lyrics seem to speak warmly of togetherness: “you're safer with me here”. Then, after three of those affirmations and half a minute in that frame of mind, the punchline comes with a wry smile: “and you there”.

As understated as the chorus is, it's still a grooveable sing-, hum- and foot-tap-along, largely thanks to that percussive rhythm, which could easily be transplanted into an upbeat dance-pop tune. (In fact it's very reminiscent of the rhythm underpinning “5 Years” by Björk.)

The second verse retains most of the embellishments from the chorus, and has a bigger feel to it than the first verse. Conversely, though, it's only half as long before launching into another chorus. This second chorus is the song's fully-rounded “complete” sound that you'll be singing back to yourself next time you hear the first chorus—forgetting how restrained most of Winter Killing is.

As with much of the rest of the album, The World Is Saved (and “Parliament Square” is a particularly good example of this), it's the accompaniment's instrumental flourishes that really make the song—here a jazz-influenced, echo-y piano counter-melody most evident in the second chorus.

A modified, dampened third verse takes the place of a middle 8. When the chorus returns it too is subdued and adds a note of fragility: “I'm safer with me here”. The music does kick back in, but only fleetingly, and after the bulk of the words have passed.

Perhaps it's just the title, but Winter Killing does bring winter to my mind. Each piano note is a tiny white light peeking through the leaves of a tree; that percussive rhythm is the sound of snow cracking underfoot; the jangling bells are flurries of snow falling beneath a streetlight or, well, jangling bells. If there were a video for Winter Killing, Stina would be wearing a woolly hat and gloves, with her breath crystallising as she sings.

Throughout, it feels frosty and minimal—not in a white-cube zen–type way; more in that it sounds completely un-produced, or perhaps un-overproduced. There's no wall of sound, no pithy vocal effects and no overdubs. And there's certainly no big, celebratory, radio-friendly, stadium-rocking chorus repeat. In fact, there aren't even any backing vocals: perhaps that's what gives Winter Killing (and the rest of The World Is Saved) such an air of intimacy. There's nothing lacking, but equally nothing excessive. It's not laden with grandeur, pretension or ego.

It's as if she's taken the skeleton of a song and added individual notes, each glistening, until it's just beautiful enough. If you download one song this week, make it Winter Killing.

(How do you follow that? I'm still not really sure. It's the mood of “Hotel” by Broken Social Scene married to the rhythm of “5 Years” by Björk (plus a smattering of frost), so those two go well. “Leaving the City” by Róisín Murphy has lyrics that actually follow and make sense, and the style of Stina's vocals is even (sort-of) echoed in the breathiness of Róisín's. “Rewrite” by Sia also follows it nicely, as does “Waiting” by Cibelle.)

Sixteen, part 3

2008-01-10T16:39:00+00:00

Sixteen, part 2

2008-01-10T15:38:00+00:00

Sixteen, part 1

2008-01-10T13:57:00+00:00

Dumb Lock

2008-01-10T11:45:00+00:00

How much power would we save if every single Num Lock light in the world suddenly ceased to function?

The New Illiteracy of the Internet

2008-01-02T00:54:00+00:00

Kottke writes about a 56-year-old prediction of a positive effect from television on literacy, and notes that predictions for “television” closely resemble the modern web.

A lot of modern communication technology is textual which, a few decades ago, when television and home video were at their height, would have seemed odd. But it turns out that text is more efficient than audio and video. I think this is because basic literacy levels have improved: people are generally expected to be able to read and write text, which has made text-based technology convenient, and has also improved the rate of basic literacy.

This means that lots of people can use text to communicate; it most certainly doesn't mean that those people are using good-quality written language. Ppl r in ur intArnet, revelin in intenshunly wierd gramr. It's reminiscent of an intentional misspelling fad in nineteenth-century America, from which the word/phrase “OK” is suggested to have arisen.

Where, when I was a lad, kids would only use text when writing for their teachers, who would then correct and frown upon misspellings and poor grammar, now children talk amongst themselves using text—internet instant messaging, mobile phone–style text messages and emo blogs being the primary culprits. (Be nice to LiveJournal—it's felling lonley rite now.)

So people get used to using unconventional or incorrect (depending on your viewpoint) spelling and grammar, with the understanding that the receiving party will nonetheless be able to understand the message. (This is compounded by a general reluctance to correct or be corrected.)

Where this compresses communication, for example by abbrev.—making it quicker and generally more efficient—this is not a bad thing. There are a set of essentially universally–recognised abbrev's, e.g. “e.g.”, “&”, & “etc.” etc.; numeral figures and mathematical symbols can also be considered examples. A problem only arises when meaning is misinterpreted.

Some help for English-learners and by way of an example: more often than one might expect, “then” actually means “than”. “More often then one might expect” doesn't actually make any sense and “then” sounds similar to “than”, so most experienced English-speakers can understand the message. “There”, “their” & “they're”, and “to”, “too” & “two” are two other classic examples of words being conflated.

My point is that whereas before the advent of recent technology a smaller number of people had a greater quality of literacy, now a greater number of people has a lesser quality of literacy. It's as if the ubiquity and the quality of literacy sum to a constant.

Being “natural”

2007-11-28T20:17:00+00:00

Stem cell research is accosted (to put it mildly) for being unnatural; relationships between certain groups of people are derided as unnatural; arbitrary miscellaneous things are condemned for not being natural; hair colouring products are advertised as looking natural and being made from natural ingredients. But what the bloody hell is “natural” supposed to mean anyway?

You could argue that anything that isn't caused by a human is “natural”. While this is clear, it's not very useful: it's just assigning blame to a particular species rather than telling you anything fundamental about the questionably-natural thing.

There's a well-known and prestigious science journal called Nature, whose title goes straight to the crux of what science is about: describing nature. So you could argue that anything that can be described by science is thereby natural. This seems fairly reasonable at first glance.

However: two hundred years ago, Brownian motion wasn't understood at all; one hundred years ago, radioactivity wasn't understood at all either. Further back, lightning and comets were sources of wonder—no-one knew what they were or how they came to pass. No-one has ever (seriously) suggested that these were anything but natural phenomena.

And science is constantly progressing—ever more phenomena are being understood each year. But this doesn't mean that those phenomena were previously supernatural or unnatural and have now, by virtue of our understanding of them, suddenly become natural.

There's that tricky “our” again: who are “we”? All humans? Humans plus some hypothetical human-like aliens? If these aliens' science understood a phenomenon that humans didn't, would it be natural? If so, such a phenomenon would be natural, but without humans (or even a second species of hypothetical human-like alien) knowing that it was; naturalness would then become a seemingly random property of which one could never be sure—not very useful. If aliens don't count, we're back to defining naturalness on the basis of an arbitrary species (those pesky humans again).

Beavers' Dams

Are they natural? They're certainly not human-made, but I doubt many would assert that they were a natural phenomenon. That designation is reserved for things more like the weather: complex (or even simple, actually) systems of inanimate matter producing an interesting or noteworthy result (this is how we'll describe a “phenomenon”) by processes governed by The Laws Of Nature™. That's science again.

But psychology is a science too. (Yes, it is.) Human behaviour is arguably governed, and if so it's by rules that psychology describes.

(By the way, The Laws Of Nature™ are also just a description, rather than a prescription—things don't happen the way they do because The Laws™ say so; rather, The Laws™ say what they do because that matches how things actually happen. That's a surprisingly common misconception among non-scientists.)

So we have “natural sciences”: typically physics, chemistry and biology. Things like astronomy, palæontology, geology and ecology come under that banner as well, though ecology does stray towards being heavily human- and animal-influenced. And then there are “human sciences”: about half of geography, economics, sociology and arguably history, for example.

But psychology doesn't fit clearly (as far as I'm concerned, anyway). It's definitely about humans and animals, but it's also intricately linked to biology.

Zoology is usually considered a natural science as well, because it's not about humans, though it is about animals. But is it about nature?

I think the usual assumption of “natural” being “anything that we (humans) haven't touched” comes back to human arrogance and self-centredness. (For millennia we humans thought our planet was at the centre of the universe because, why, we're here.)

Thinking

I'd suggest that a process is certainly “natural” if it involves nothing that can think. (Of course, there's then the problem of how to determine what's alive and conscious and can think.)

Clearly, though, the existence of beings that can think is natural. And it seems somewhat masochistic to say that because one is capable of thinking about whether what you're doing is “natural” (which is assumedly virtuous) that it therefore isn't natural.

So, I don't know. I have a clear idea of what sort of things are and aren't natural, but I have no idea what definition of “natural” the apparently-obvious distinction arises from.

Columbo

Just one more thing: being unnatural is certainly not necessarily a bad thing: buildings are unnatural but very useful. For the environmentally sensitive, solar power cells are unnatural but useful. Also: clean water from a tap; electricity; eyeglasses; most medicine.

An American entry

2007-11-28T19:53:00+00:00

I came across The Ethical Blogger at …Blogger, and was reminded (via a quote from the New Yorker) that writers from the United States seem to enjoy using “American” as an apparently-meaningless adjective before almost any noun at random—which is jarring for English-speakers who aren't from the United States, particularly when the topic at hand isn't specifically American.

Responses

Interesting. There was a comment in The Observer today where the columnist (Kathryn Flett, who usually annoys me anyway) said, "It's fair to say that, in its own small, sweet and uniquely American way, Heroes has delivered, if not a ... (blah blah blah)"

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,2224419,00.html

I'm American and have lived in the UK for over three years now and have NO idea what she means.

Anyway ...

Nice job on nominating Sarah for Post of the Week. I'm pleased to say she won.

Cheers,

Bob

bob merckl 2007-12-09 18:36

Mmm. I don't know about Heroes being uniquely American, but I think its style—big, grandiose, Earth-shattering, global-consequence–having—is a primarily American style of storytelling. You rarely find stories of such ambitious scale in British TV series, for example; perhaps that's because we're (1:) a tiny country and (2:) aware that other countries exist. (I kid.)

We have had some similarly ambitious series over here, things like Doctor Who and Torchwood, but their style's been heavily and consciously influenced by American series like Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Kind of like the American version of The Office: it's an American programme but consciously draws on a British type of humour (specifically the original series).

British speakers seem to use “Western” in much the same way, though less frequently. Anything about modern, city-dwelling life, and particularly modern technology, can be characterised as “Western”. I guess it's a way of making sweeping generalisations whilst excluding poor people living in South America, Africa and Asia.

(Editor's note & hyperlink-juice on the Post of the Week thing: I nominated a post on Sarah's blog for Post of the Week (which I discovered when I was nominated myself) and it co-won.)

Thanks for taking the time to write, Bob.

Grey Nicholson 2007-12-16 18:30

“It's Forgetting that would Beat it All” (the 2007-11-23 Friday Fetch-it)

2007-11-23T16:04:00+00:00

“So Much Trouble” (by Matt Pond PA) has surprisingly little in the way of chorus…-age, for what's otherwise a very straightforwardly upbeat, cheery pop song. I just noticed that recently.

Maybe it's because it's so generally singalong-able throughout that you don't notice the choruslessness. And there's extensive bridge…-iness, which sounds rather like a chorus in most songs would (“I don't think I want to think about it”—that bit); but it definitely approximates the tune of a verse, with a little bit more tension and less resolution in the voice.

(Hey, let's assume the guy singing is actually called Matt Pond, whether or not this is really the case. You can never properly tell with ostensibly-eponymous bands.)

… So it's not a chorus. The chorus starts “You're in so much trouble; you can't hide in your covers”—it even has the title in it. (Yeah, I know, but lyrics almost always sound silly taken out of the music.) And that bit only occurs once, right at the start (well, after the first verse).

Then there are four—count 'em: four—bridge-like bits: they alternate between the bit I called the bridge earlier (and shall continue to so call); and another bit (with the words “We don't want to make mistakes”) to which I could dryly refer as “the second bridge”, but shall instead dub “the tunnel”. Not only does this make for a pleasing automotive-architecture–based pun, it's also kind of apt: bridges and tunnels are often one and the same thing, appear together and complement each other.

I digress. In the middle of the two bridge-and-tunnel pairs there's an instrumental break, where the song slows to a dawdle. It's as if Matt Pond and his merry posse of accompaniment-ists (collectively known as “PA”) have been sauntering along in an autumnal park and gradually and pensively come to a halt while they decide which way to go next. (Maybe Matt Pond just has a personal assistant to help him with all the music?)

Anyhow, they end up deciding to carry on in the same direction, but have somehow returned to where they were a full minute ago. (Maybe they were going in circles?) This time, however, they have a few extra deep, reassuring guitar tones as companions, and the journey's a lot more familiar—despite not being a verse or a chorus.

It soon transpires that the verse was just the other side of a hedge all along (metaphor becoming tenuous, I know), and it's back sooner than expected, with a couple of extra drum flourishes for effect. There's even a glimmer of hope for the chorus, as this new verse borrows some of its lyrics.

Another contemplative pause later (will this song ever gain any momentum?), the bridge returns in full swing; by now it's grown up into a chorus in its own right. Nonetheless, it soon gives way to the chorus-proper, the first half of which—only—repeats satisfyingly.

Loath to satiate, though, the song ends on a minor note. It's as if they want you to play it again.

If you download one song this week, make it So Much Trouble—it's like a wistful stroll through an autumnal park (with a personal assistant).

(How do you follow that? Try “Don't Falter” by Mint Royale & Lauren Laverne.)

Random Stat

2007-11-15T19:28:00+00:00

More than 18 million fish lose their lives each week at the hands of humans.

A Quick Vignette, Using the Gimp

2007-11-11T12:18:00+00:00

It's easy to fade out the edges of a picture using the Gimp. Here's how: (using Gimp version 2.4)

Decide how broad you want the fade to be
From the menu, Layer → Transparency → Add Alpha Channel; if this option is disabled (greyed out), then the current layer already has transparency enabled and you can skip this step
From the menu, Select → All, or on the keyboard, Ctrl+A
Select → Shrink
Shrink the selection by half the breadth you chose earlier, ensuring that Shrink from image border is ticked
Select → Feather
Feather the selection by the full breadth you chose earlier
Select → Invert or Ctrl+I
Edit → Clear or Delete

If you want to fade to a solid colour rather than transparency, skip the final step and instead use the Bucket Fill Tool with the Affected Area set to Fill whole selection.

The Poppy Appeal

2007-11-11T11:00:00+00:00

Have you ever seen Huw Edwards wearing a pink ribbon?

Over the last couple of weeks, in the lead up to Remembrance Sunday today, plastic poppies have been ubiquitous thanks to The Royal British Legion's Poppy Appeal. The Poppy Appeal is important for members of the armed forces and their colleagues, and their relatives. But it's odd to me that it's uniquely endorsed—above all other charities—by schools, the media and, essentially, everybody else.

So ubiquitous is the poppy expected to be that last year a broadcaster actually received complaints because a newsreader chose not to wear one while presenting the news.

(...and in fact that news article pretty much supplants this in its entirety. Never mind.)

October was Breast Cancer Awareness Month; December 1st is World Aids Day. I haven't spotted a single pink ribbon during any TV programme I've watched over the last month-and-a-half; I don't expect to see any red ribbons on December 1st. It's quite likely that magazine programmes such as This Morning will have mentioned Breast Cancer Awareness Month and will mention World Aids Day, but I doubt even their presenters will wear a ribbon as a matter of course. Newsreaders, sport presenters, TV chefs and politicians almost certainly won't.

When I was in primary school (roughly ages eight to eleven), each November children would be enlisted to sell poppies—for charity, mind you—to the other children. Not once was I offered a breast cancer awareness ribbon, or an Aids awareness ribbon (that I can remember, anyway).

This is almost certainly at the detriment of other, equally- or arguably more-worthy, charities: donating a sum of money to one charity almost inevitably reduces the likelihood that the same person will donate to another charity later—it's simple budgeting.

I can understand the government having an extraordinary interest in the Poppy Appeal: it's largely they who're responsible for engaging the armed forces in conflicts (by “responsible” I don't mean “to blame”; I mean it's they who take the decision), but the media in general and especially schools—where children who don't quite understand what's going on are (or were when I was there) essentially compelled to donate to a particular charity—have no such vested interest.

If broadcasters want to maintain their illusion of impartiality, they need to either endorse all charities and awareness events, or none. At this point I shall lazily allude to a reductio ad absurdum involving Talk Like a Pirate Day, rather than properly constructing one.

Of course individuals should be encouraged to donate to charities and to wear symbols like the poppy, but it's not right that the national media should focus so exclusively on just one charity. Perhaps public figures should instead wear a badge reading “Donate to a charity!”.

Hydroelectric

2007-11-10T12:51:00+00:00

Given that hydrogen fuel cells can be used to run cars, why not use them to run power stations?

Though I'm not overly familiar with the physics of it, hydrogen fuel cells operate by exploiting the energy released when hydrogen (H₂) and oxygen (O₂) recombine (in a 2:1 ratio) to form water (H₂O).

I'm assuming that this process is energetically beneficial; that is, you produce more energy in a fuel cell than it takes to produce the fuel.

I'm also assuming that the only thing stopping widespread deployment of hydrogen fuel cells in cars (which I think is the venue most often discussed for fuel cells' use) is the logistical problem of refueling such cars in everyday use: containment suits are needed when pumping the very-cold liquid hydrogen—or is it oxygen? or both? Anyway, a very-cold liquid—into the cars. And, while petrol stations are conveniently ubiquitous (for the most part, anyway), none of them stock hydrogen (and/or oxygen—whatever we decided was the stuff being pumped); this is largely because there are no hydrogen fuel-cell–powered cars in everyday use. It's the proverbial chicken-and-egg situation (let's pretend, for rhetorical purposes, that that one wasn't resolved (it was the egg (no, I'm serious))).

These problems don't, however, stop hydrogen fuel cells (or the same technology, perhaps not in an actual cell) being deployed in centralised systems—like power stations. The chicken-and-egg problem is resolved because popular demand isn't needed to make it commercially viable to supply the technology, the infrastructure or the fuel itself.

It's definitely possible (at least I'd be very, very, very surprised and bemused if it weren't) to run a power station using hydrogen fuel cell technology: most (perhaps all) modern power stations operate by heating water. Coal-fired and nuclear fission-powered power stations both use the energy released from their respective reactions to heat water, which becomes steam; as the steam rises it turns a turbine; this turns a magnet in a solenoid (a tube-shaped coil of wire), which induces an electric current in the solenoid.

Hydrogen fuel cell–powered cars have wheels that turn. Attach a magnet to one, put it inside a solenoid et voilà.

The benefits of using hydrogen power, rather than fossil fuels or nuclear fission, to produce electricity would be plenty: removing the “kettle” stage from a power station would be a novelty; it would probably increase efficiency lots-fold, and it certainly (defined like “definitely” above) wouldn't decrease efficiency.

The environmental benefits are pretty substantial too: hydrogen and oxygen exist in abundance in water, and the only by-product from the fuel cell reaction is hot water. As long as this hot water isn't pumped into rivers at such a rate that a river's temperature rises significantly, which would piss a lot of aquatic animals off rather a lot, to say the least, the environmental concerns are nil—you can safely pump water into the atmosphere (almost) with abandon.

There must be an obvious stumbling block that I've overlooked; otherwise, why aren't all the cool More-Economically-Developed Countries doing it? (And I doubt it's collusion with the fossil fuel industry—there are lots of rich countries without a vested interest there.)

Three Blogger bugs

2007-11-10T10:41:00+00:00

(Stick around for the third one, which explains why these are here.)

If the label for a post hasn't been used before but matches the start of a label that has been used before, typing the new label into the Labels for this post: text box, followed by a comma, inserts the existing label. For example, if you already have a post labelled foobar and you try to label a new post foo and baz by typing foo, baz into the text box, when typing the , Blogger will automatically complete foo to foobar. The work-around for this is to accept the incorrect label then use the arrow keys to delete the extra letters.
If a post begins with a block-level element (such as a list) rather than an inline-level element (such as em or a) or text, Blogger adds an empty paragraph to the start of the post.

Blogger assumes you'll be writing unsemantic plain text, with paragraphs represented by double line breaks (which Blogger converts faithfully and unsemantically into <br /><br />), so it adds an opening <p> tag at the start of each post, in case someone tries to style paragraphs with CSS; when it comes across the list it closes the open paragraph, leading to an empty paragraph. This is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to Blogger assuming, encouraging and even (occasionally) enforcing unsemantic, awful mark-up.
When I tried to report these as bugs using Blogger's bug-reporting page, I was presented with no text entry area of any sort. Silly Blogger.
(It was probably foolish to use “three” in the title, but then I'm not sure whether this is a bug or a “feature”:) I roll my own custom templates to match Mooquackwooftweetmeow as closely as possible (visually, anyway); if the full contents of all your blog entries disappear mysteriously, it may be because you've removed the (quite possibly empty anyway) footer section. Don't ask me how that makes sense.

A Human's Guide to Relating to Other Beings

2007-11-10T10:16:00+00:00

A flow chart:

Can I have sex with it?
- Yes: figure out best way to please it (consider the other being's desires)
- No: go to step 2
Can it hurt me?
- Yes: figure out best way to subdue it or escape from it (consider the other being's abilities)
- No: go to step 3
Can I eat it?
- Yes: figure out best way to eat it (consider own tastes)
- No: ignore it

Under no circumstances should the other being be considered outside the context of what you can do with it.

Exploding Articles

2007-11-07T19:11:00+00:00

I spend a lot of time nowadays writing—or thinking about writing—stuff that I eventually publish on the web. There are two modes of entry-writing that I tend to operate in:

A lot of the time, I come up with a kernel of an idea and then gradually add thoughts, ideas and turns of phrase, and try to link them all together like a jigsaw, until they become a sensibly-structured, nicely-flowing article.

Other times, I just start writing, and the whole thing materialises linearly. These entries tend to be a lot quicker to write, but sometimes end up missing important points, or phrasing things awkwardly.

While the well-thought-out entries are generally actually better, the quick-and-dirty ones are more fun to write—there seems to be less pressure involved in writing them. I think the longer something gestates, the larger it seems. When writing articles, particularly the well-thought-out variety, this is compounded by the number of extra ideas, details and tangents I come up with during the gestation.

It takes me a particularly long time to write recommendations for the Friday Fetch-it because if they're rubbish, it's not just the article itself that I'm failing to do justice to—it's the song as well. And I like those songs.

It's the same with other things—I think it's a lot harder to do anything that's been waiting to be finished for a long time. Because you've been thinking about it and (supposedly) working towards it for ages, it takes on mammoth proportions in your mind.

And I think that's because of the phrase “worth the wait”. When you're made to wait for something, you expect it to be good. An example from the wonderful world of pop music: there's generally a two- to three-year gap between albums by an artist, in which they release little or no new music. A few decades ago, artists would generally release an album every year, maybe even two in a year. Back then, the music industry was less fiercely competitive (I assert without evidence) and a less-than-stellar album could have been more easily taken in a record label's stride; for example, News & Tributes by the Futureheads was far from disgraceful, but lost the 'Heads their record deal, because it didn't sell as well as their self-titled début.

Now, I'm not suggesting that a high output quantity somehow nullifies low quality... but it drastically mitigates it. It's easier to overlook one mediocre whatever when it's in amongst a big pile of generally-very-good whatevers. There's also that idea of not putting all your eggs in one basket—if your work (eggs) is spread across lots of smaller ideas (baskets) then if one idea ends up being rubbish (getting dropped), there were still plenty of other good ideas (eggs in other baskets).

It's not as if each person has a finite amount of inspiration—it's more of a “use it or lose it” deal.

Some examples of things I’ve done that have taken ages

...or things I've started, at least.

The latest El Twad HQ update is set in August because that's when I started writing it (and the Fringe happens in August, so it kind of has to be).
Brothers or Sisters took me six-and-a-half weeks to complete; and this was supposed to be for a “stream-of-consciousness-type” blog. When I finally did publish this, it actually won an award. So that was nice.
That review of Manager by Nat JM that she asked me to do a few months ago: I decided I was rubbish at reviewing individual songs, or that any comments I'd make would be superficial if I didn't consider them in the context of the rest of her work. So, I took it upon myself to review her entire back catalogue, which is only about a dozen songs but, unfortunately for me, is increasing at a rate of two a month. I know roughly what I'm going to say; I just need to produce the prose. (Hey, since her style of music is pretty unpolished I could easily justify similarly unpolished prose. And I reckon I shall.) Never before will so much of value have been said about Nat JM...I hope. It exists! ...sort of.
The biggie: The Perfect World—a compendium of improvements to the world that Gardner and I've been working on for about three-and-a-half years now. That's a decent fraction of a decade. We came up with the idea towards the end of sixth form; we have since left university. When this is finished (and it's about 80% of the way there (only another year to wait, then)), this will rock. They'll invent a new category of Bafta just for us.

(The preceding entry was presented in Hybrid-o-Prose™: the first few paragraphs were (relatively) well-thought-out and have gestated for five or six weeks; much of the remainder was written, largely linearly, in the space of about an hour.)

“Necessity Conquers Fear” (the 2007-10-26 Friday Fetch-it)

2007-10-26T00:16:00+00:00

I was going to do my usual shtick of describing what the vocals and instruments do, and when they come in, and how they come out of nowhere and sound wonderful, and all of that—after making a general point about a particular musical technique and using that to introduce the song.

But it wouldn't really have done the song justice—musically, at least, it's not revolutionary (though there are some beats nestled in amongst the instrumentation that wouldn't sound out of place on Homogenic), but that's not the point. Yes, it's a piano that happens to convey a lot of the warmth; again, not the point. And that synth line coming out of each chorus (or serving as its second half) is just lovely—not really the point. The point:

“Don't Lose Yourself” by Laura Veirs is simply beautiful.

Though it's impossible not to enjoy on a visceral level (lest your soul be judged stony and dead), the song's also blessed with intelligence. There are a full four verses (though the second half of the last segués into the final chorus): each and every line would have made a good title for the album, or for this entry, or for some other blog post, or for a personal blog, or for an episode of a TV programme; if “Tiger Ointment and the Cosmic Collision” isn't an actual band in ten years' time, I may have to start one.

The lyrics aren't particularly complex, however—every fourth line usually completes a simple rhyme, and that's about it. They're just inventive and thoughtful and good. So intriguing are the verses' lyrics, and so good is the accompanying groove, the words in the chorus don't need to extend beyond Don't lose yourself; don't let yourself be lost. Anyone can sing along with that.

Through most of “Don't Lose Yourself”, Laura's voice is actually a bit deadpan—she sings simply and without affectation. Her singing's only punctuated by the backing briefly dropping before launching into the second chorus.

But at the end, right where you'd expect a fifth verse, the chorus's instrumental groove instead continues, and Laura comes in with a lyric-less vocal—the type that may well have been ad-libbed—as the song fades away. It's clearly a heartfelt expression of emotion (and not a showing-off exercise), quiet and understated enough to be missed by those not paying attention (or with the volume too low).

Just that little, quiet sound perfectly conveys the elation I feel listening to this song. If you download one song this week, make it Don't Lose Yourself. Then smile.

(How do you follow that? Try “Can't Be Sure” (from Reading, Writing and Arithmetic) by the Sundays.)

Shingai Shoniwa’s socks

2007-10-09T18:24:00+00:00

I just noticed how similar the colour scheme at the Friday Fetch-it is to that of BrooklynVegan—this wasn't intentional. I actually picked the colour from Shingai Shoniwa's socks:

I already wanted a roughly-green colour, and this allowed me to title that particular shade “Shingai Shoniwa’s Socks” Green—which is nicely absurd.

Brothers or Sisters

2007-10-07T00:34:00+00:00

In the first series of Brothers & Sisters, which is just about to finish showing in the UK, Kevin—the gay one—meets a guy at the gym. So far, so cliché. Let's start a cliché tick-list:

There's always exactly one gay main character
Gay men meet in gyms

(I'm generally including lesbians in “gay”, for brevity.)

But Kevin's not sure whether the guy, Chad, is gay or straight.

Chad is a really gay name

Later, in conversation with his sisters, Kevin summarises the points in the “gay column” and those in the “straight column” of Chad's (presumably hypothetical) chart of telltale sexuality indicators.

Characters in drama series and sitcoms exacerbate awkward or uncertain situations by avoiding communicating directly with a particular person (or several people), especially when frank communication with that person (or those people) would undoubtedly resolve all of their anxiety and/or uncertainty. (This is known as Frasier's Law.)

Examples of “gay column” behaviour include complementing Kevin's body...

Any mention by a man of the appearance of another man's body is always sexual, even in a gym, where improving one's body is often the primary goal and so the appearance of a person's body, particularly in relation to their fitness, is somewhat relevant to the present activity

...having a pug (dog) named Lola...

Gay men... have pugs called Lola... I guess

...and having a lot of gay friends.

One's sexuality can be determined by aggregating the sexualities of one's friends

Examples of “straight column” behaviour include using words such as “dude” (incidentally, saying “dude” in any accent other than a North American one always makes you sound silly) and “bro'”...

Straight men use slightly-outdated trendy slang, which makes them appear masculine

...having a girlfriend...

~~Men who have girlfriends are not likely to be gay~~ OK, so this one's a fair assessment and not a cliché

...and, inexplicably, acting in a daytime soap opera. (I wasn't aware that acting in soap operas was an especially heterosexual profession; maybe it's an American thing.)

Sarah (Kevin's sister) suggests that Chad may be bi. Kevin retorts that No-one's bi. Have you ever met a bisexual 70-year-old? Hence the expression ‘bi now, gay later’. Eventually everyone decides.

This is the gay one saying this—the non-bigoted one. It's not that the writers are asserting this idea ironically—Kevin is not being portrayed as naïve or bigoted here. He isn't challenged any further by the other characters—after all, they're straight* and he's gay; he knows about sexuality, because only his sexuality is an issue.

Gay people know more about sexuality in general than straight people do
Anyone whose sexuality isn't mentioned is assumed to be straight

* (If any of the other characters were bi, they'd be the authoritative source on bisexuality. If any of the other characters were gay (or possibly if they were bi or asexual), the writers would have already made a massive point of their sexualities, too.) ↑

So why does Kevin think he hasn't met any bisexual 70-year-olds? For a start, quite a lot of people don't regularly wear any sort of label identifying their sexuality. So the only ways Kevin could know that he'd met a bisexual 70-year-old would be:

Asking them about their sexuality
Using guesswork, applying his shrewd detective skills, and convincing himself of his conclusion beyond any doubt

Judging by the sophistication of Kevin's criteria for determining gayness and straightness, he'd have a hard time correctly guessing that any arbitrary 70-year-old was bi. And judging by his resorting to unsophisticated guesswork, rather than just asking, “Bro'! You gay or what, dawg?” of his potential boyfriend, I doubt he asks many 70-year-olds about their sexuality.

But Kevin has probably happened upon a few same-sex couples involving 70-year-olds, and a few opposite-sex couples involving 70-year-olds. Of the former, he's thought “oh, a couple of gays”, and of the latter, “oh, a couple of straights”.

(I'm pretending here that everyone is, to whatever degree, either definably male or definably female, which isn't true. And I'm aware that this entry addressing the assumption of a sexuality dichotomy whilst still assuming that a gender binary exists is both suboptimal and generally a bit crap. But this entry is long enough and has already taken far too long to write.)

All (or at least the vast majority of) “having a relationship with one person” behaviour can be filed away neatly under either “gay” or “straight”. Compared to the fraction of people in couples, the fraction of people in relationships with more than one person is relatively small (and of those, the fraction who are 70-year-olds is positively minuscule). Examples of obviously-bi behaviour amount to:

Having a series of relationships with people of different sexes
Having a polyamorous relationship with people of different sexes
Expressing interest in people of different sexes
Displaying the bi pride flag
Saying “I'm bi”

Few people are obviously bisexual, especially at first glance. So Kevin has been categorising everyone neatly away as “gay” and “straight”. Or rather, he's probably started with everyone in the “straight” pile (a category, not a physical pile), then plucked out anyone who contradicts this, and hurled them over into the “gay” pile. If you're going to assume that everyone is not bi, of course you're not going to notice any bi people.

Later, when Kevin finally does ask Chad about his sexuality, Chad says, “I may not be gay, but that doesn't mean I don't think you're hot.” (Fans of double negatives rejoice.) This, along with the ensuing sexytime, practically confirms that Chad is bi.

Yet after this, and in the following few episodes when Kevin carries out a relationship with Chad (apparently without Chad's girlfriend's knowledge), Chad's bi-ness isn't mentioned at all. Their relationship is merely described as “closeted” and occasionally “gay”. Start singing A Little Respect, everyone—it's bi erasure!

It's been said that every time you say you don't believe in bisexuals, one dies. I seriously doubt this will prove to be literally true. A couple more to finish the cliché tick-list:

Fairies are a bit queer
Bloggers like to explain general principles using individual examples of those principles (...and self-reference)

“It's in the Eyes of the Beholder” (the 2007-09-28 Friday Fetch-it)

2007-09-29T00:18:00+00:00

Over the course of the last fifteen years, the Cardigans have covered genres ranging from bubblegum pop (“Carnival”, “Lovefool”) via subdued, smouldering indie (“My Favourite Game”, “Erase/Rewind”) to country (“For What It's Worth”). Most of the 2005 album Super Extra Gravity falls into the latter category; but a couple of tracks stand out.

The gloriously-named “I Need Some Fine Wine And You, You Need To Be Nicer”—the album's lead single—is a medium-paced all-out rock tune, a near-perfect example of what I keep referring to as “driving rock”; as such, it shares little in common with anything else on the album-proper.

But then there're the bonus tracks—songs that half-count as part of the album and half-don't, depending on who you ask or which country your copy comes from. Elusive little buggers.

Super Extra Gravity actually includes a track entitled “Bonus Tracks” (if you buy it in the UK, at least)—a twenty-second ditty consisting substantially of footsteps approaching what turns out to be a harpsichord (or, y'know, something that sounds like what I think a harpsichord sounds like), upon which a short tune is played, culminating in a chorus of voices emphatically intoning the title. I'm not recommending this—I haven't gone that outlandish yet—but the next bit:

“Give Me Your Eyes” begins unassumingly with a rising wind noise (which briefly implies a continuation of the weirdness of “Bonus Tracks”) followed by a cautious acoustic guitar verse that ends on a ponderous rising note (I think it's called a seventh). And then all hell breaks loose: a brash, cyclical electric-guitar rhythm dominates what's nominally a restatement of the introductory guitar verse, and leads into sixteen loud, relentless drumbeats.

So this is unbridled rock—by now there's no doubt about it. Throughout the first verse the bassline builds up an amount of tension, slowly alternating between two nearby notes; into the chorus there's a cathartic screech of feedback, diffusing the tension and allowing the chorus itself to proceed unencumbered.

The end of the chorus is punctuated by another set of sixteen drumbeats, before continuing full-speed into the second verse; the song's filled out by now and there's less of the first verse's tension. The calmly aggressive tone of Nina Persson's voice, along with the instrumentation's insistence, lends a dash of the sinister at the end of that verse—when she sings “it's in the eyes of the beholder, now give 'em to me” it occurs to you that she might actually mean “give me your eyes” literally—!

Halfway through the second chorus, the song neatly veers off towards a fairly straightforward middle eight, followed by another set of drumbeats leading into the breakdown. This bit's pretty standard too—a quietly-accompanied verse that introduces a speedy synopsis of the entire song. It borrows the chorus's lyrics for its second half and leads to a half-length reprise of the chorus. The chorus ascends into a solo, culminating in that brash guitar cycle (Nina sings along too); and those damn drumbeats bash the song out of existence.

On paper, it's actually quite a conventional song, and it's hard to compellingly describe a song that distinguishes itself in its execution, rather than by a spark of compositional cleverness—this is why recordings by bands have superseded sheet music. If you download one song this week, make it Give Me Your Eyes.

(I'm guessing this was written and recorded too late to make the album-proper, and that's why it's a bonus track; if that's the case and this is an indication of the style of the next album, said album will rock.)

(How do you follow that? Let's say “Chemistry” by Semisonic (since I already mentioned “Memorize The City” a while ago)).

BBC msPlayer

2007-09-07T21:52:00+00:00

The BBC recently launched a video-on-demand service called “iPlayer”. To ensure that copyright violators have to invest more time in copying each video, and to make it awkward for everyone else to view content that they're allowed to view*, the BBC decided to encapsulate their content in DRM—officially “digital rights management”, equally accurately “digital restrictions management”.

They chose Microsoft to provide the DRM, ostensibly a good choice, since Microsoft have proven themselves adept at bundling obtrusive unwanted software along with software the customer actually wants—it was for this reason that they were convicted of operating a monopoly in the EU.

Unfortunately, Microsoft's DRM system only works on Microsoft's operating system, Windows; and even then, only on the five-year-old version, XP, which has since been superceded by Vista. Oddly, having better DRM capabilities is one of Vista's selling points. And it's odd that the British Broadcasting Corporation would choose to anoint Windows XP as its favourite operating system, since there isn't even a version of it that uses British English. (There is a Welsh version, because too many Welsh speakers started using Free Software.)

The BBC Trust maintains that it's a good idea to ask a convicted software monopoly to produce software whose purpose is to restrict users' capabilities, and that only runs when using the monopoly's operating system software.

A petition was sent to the UK government to protest against this decision. They've responded; an excerpt:

The BBC Trust made it a condition […] that the iPlayer is available to users of a range of operating systems, and has given a commitment that it will ensure that the BBC meets this demand as soon as possible. They will measure the BBC's progress on this every six months and publish the findings.

—iplayer - epetition response

Every six months. They're going to review their progress every six months. The government, the BBC Trust and the BBC don't seem to understand the pace at which technology, particularly internet-based technology, moves. The length of time it's taken the BBC to produce the iPlayer since announcing it is evidence of this. Hopefully such a long delay will harm Microsoft Windows Vista as much as it will harm Free Software.

The BBC shouldn't just make the iPlayer available for a range of operating systems—they should make it open source, so that anyone with the right skills (or who can persuade someone with the right skills to help them) can make an iPlayer for their operating system. Anyone would be able to improve the iPlayer, and we wouldn't be reliant on the BBC to provide fixes for errors. Open-sourcing the iPlayer would instantly satisfy the BBC's commitment.

Whoever wrote the Job Centre’s website should be fired

2007-09-07T17:20:00+00:00

The Job Centre (officially branded “Jobcentre Plus”) is the UK government's unemployment service; one of the functions of their website is to provide details of available jobs and how to apply for them. Let's get straight on with describing what's wrong with it, shall we?

The table displaying the list of job vacancies has its width specified in pixels, so its size is fixed irrespective of how much text it contains. This also means that it doesn't scale when the user increases the size of text in their browser.
Furthermore, any content that overflows is instructed to be hidden—they're actively hiding information rather than just allowing it to spill out of the box that should really be containing it. Even decreasing the text size until it's unreadably small doesn't guarantee that it'll all fit.
Instead of marking up the table's header row as a table header, it's marked up as a data row, which is incorrect.
Searching for a job is a six-step process; these six steps are displayed throughout, but the completed steps aren't links to go back and change those details.
The results are paginated, twenty results per page. If there are any more than one hundred results, the total number of results is only given as “more than 100”; even though the “Next” and “Previous” parts of the page-switching widget continue to work, the page numbers part stops at 5.

The first and second errors meant I had to resort to using Firebug just to read the content. It was while doing this that I noticed the third error. Here, though, is the biggie, and what mainly prompted me to write:

Once I've gone through the six-step searching process, Firebug'd the results table to be wide enough to read all the text, clicked through the indeterminate number of results pages and found a vacancy I'm interested in, I decide to bookmark its details page, to refer to later.

Individual job vacancies' details pages cannot be bookmarked.

Of course, you can print them, but only if you have a printer—I don't; and if the details are updated or corrected, you have an out-of-date copy. Never worry—you read the page's address from the printout and type it into your browser. And then you get an error, because the vacancies' details pages don't have their own permanent address—you have to use the search “facility” every time.

Each vacancy does have its own reference number, which can simply be typed straight into the appropriate field on the search form, so why wasn't this used as the identifying token in a permanent address for each vacancy?

When I say whoever wrote this website should be fired, I'm not using hyperbole. If they think that these kinds of errors—errors that an untrained amateur can spot, without even looking for errors, in half an hour's use of the site—are acceptable on a government public-service website, then they don't have the first idea of how to do their job properly.

Sadly, it seems that this is par for the course when it comes to government- and council-run websites. If the government can't run a website properly, or recruit someone who can, why should we trust them with running anything more tangible?

Playing well with others

2007-09-04T09:32:00+00:00

(There's been a distinct lack of consciousness streaming, around here recently. This is me doing something to fix that.)

There's a cartoon at indexed expressing that the “do unto others” mantra isn't (or shouldn't be) only adhered to by religious people.

I think Jessica's taking humanism to be roughly equivalent to that mantra, which I don't think is quite correct. As I understand it (and I'm not a humanist, so I may well be wrong) humanism is the idea that it's humans' duty to care for their environment, such as by taking care of the other species.

My opinion is that the other species can probably take care of themselves on their own, thank you very much. In my opinion, this form of humanism treats other species as the United States' foreign policy treats other countries.

This isn't my main reason for writing, though: it's that the “others” referred to in the mantra aren't only humans. This is why I'm a vegetarian—I don't want to be killed and eaten.

The Big Brother Final is tonight, but what’s the weather like?

2007-08-31T18:54:00+00:00

Well, it's been mumbles weeks since they entered the house, during which time we've seen twenty-dunno different housemates come and go (unless, like me, you haven't been watching it) but tonight the winner of Big Brother 2007 will be crowned. (In the UK, that is. I'm well aware that other countries exist and have their own versions of Big Brother.)

Now, while Anna Pickard of sometimes-writes-things-in-the-Guardian and little.red.boat fame will be live-blogging the final itself, I thought I'd go for something a bit more inventive.

Besides, the computer's upstairs in my room and the TV's downstairs. It'd be a lot of frantic running and typing, and my housemates would probably think I'd gone mental. But, my bedroom window is just on the other side of the room, right behind me... and I have a swivel chair.

So tonight, Matthew, I'm going to be live-blogging the view from my bedroom window.

Yeah.

Now, since there are no comments around here, the whole blogosphere-type two-way communication thing shall be done via email. Heckle me at any time on someoneisactuallypayingattention@gkn.me.uk.

I'll be back in a little bit to begin. (Y'know, this is probably going to end up being a really stupid idea.)

19:12 (UTC—20:12 in Britain)

First of all, let's just use British time henceforth.

Anna's live blog has started, as has one at Digital Spy... but I still haven't had dinner yet—it takes a lot longer to write those Fetch-its than you'd expect (particularly given their quality).

So, I'm gonna go downstairs and make some toast or something. While I'm down there, I'll sneak a look at the TV to see what's going on in Big Brother-land. Meanwhile, you can read that Friday Fetch-it thing I spent so long on earlier, if you like.

Quick window update: it's starting to get dark now—what with the sunset and all. Ooh! And a car just drove into the car park that occupies much of the view from the window. It's a blue Vauxhall Corsa; not a new one—one of the ones from a few years ago. A couple of people have got out, but a strategically-placed tree is preventing me from finding out what they look like.

20:22

Dermot O'Leary's talking to Davina McCall about when and how the remaining contestants will be evicted. He was also talking to contestants from previous series of Big Brother; they seemed to be having a right lark, those wacky minor celebrities.

Toast is toasting, kettle is ...kettling.

The one remaining housemate that isn't away is out, so mentalness accusations shall be avoided at least until he reads this. Also, the views from my kitchen and living room are near-identical to that from the bedroom, so very little action shall be missed. ...or present.

20:28

Adverts on Channel 4. Nadine Baggott, “celebrity beauty editor from something” was extolling the virtues of some cosmetic product; and then there was an advert for nappies. Clearly, Big Brother viewers are conscious of both their appearance and their children's lavatorial needs.

The toast is done and the tea's brewing—a lovely cup of Equal Exchange Fair-Trade Darjeeling.

At the far end of the car park, someone's removing something from a car boot. I don't know what.

20:33

Anna Pickard reckons Nadine Baggot's surname is spelt with just the one T. Who am I to argue? Digital Spy still haven't said a word. Lazy bastards.

The tea's still brewing, probably overbrewing, so I shall go and remove the teabag now. Fingers crossed.

20:37

A silver car of some description has come into the car park and driven to the far end. I don't think it's the same one from whose boot stuff was being removed earlier.

20:38

Another car, a dark-coloured Ford Focus, has driven out of the car park. It may only be dark because of the fact that it's now night.

20:39

The tea wasn't overbrewed, luckily. While retrieving it, some of the Big Brother contestants were making self-important “goodbye” speeches. One of whom, whose accent implied that he's from North East England (hooray!), seemed to deftly avoid Big Brother cliché by saying “I don't love yous, but y'know, I've enjoyed my time with you.” Don't know what that one's called, but I'm now backing him to win.

20:42

I say I'm backing him to win—I don't really care who wins.

A big white van is lurking near the car park's entrance. I reckon they're about to do a crime.

20:43

Actually, it's stopped lurking and left.

20:45

My toast-buttering was interrupted by the sound of someone shutting a car door. They then carried a bag of shopping towards the flats.

I should explain: the car park is for a fairly-big apartment complex. The flats are in a backwards-L-shaped building, with the car park in the space in the middle. I'm at the open short end of the car park, and a row of houses' gardens backs on to the open long side. The car park's entrance is in the middle of the long side to my left.

20:48

The TV downstairs seems to be making drumroll-like noises. I'm finishing buttering my toast instead of investigating.

20:50

The toast has gone somewhat cold by now. I don't mind, though—I quite like it when the butter doesn't melt. On this first slice I also have peanut butter (crunchy). Yes, butter and peanut butter.

20:51

Person in jeans and a dark top is walking the length of the car park, towards me. I hope he hasn't figured out that I'm effectively stalking his flat block.

20:53

OK, he's disappeared. I'd assume he went into a car, but I haven't seen one leave.

20:54

Oh! There he is—he was in a silver Vauxhall Astra, hiding behind one of the white vans on the right of the car park. He's driven out now.

20:55

Engine noises... a silver VW Golf has arrived and gone to the far end. Meanwhile, someone's milling about on the left side of the car park.

20:56

A dark car, possibly a Ford Escort, has just left from the far side of the car park. Thoughtfully, the driver used their indicator to indicate that they would be turning into the exit and not continuing into the other wing of the car park.

First slice of toast has been eaten. I'm thinking cream cheese for the next one.

20:59

Another figure in blue jeans and a parka has got out of a car and walked to the far end. The car's parked opposite the entrance which may explain why I didn't see it come in.

21:00

A blue Citroën Saxo entered, pointed the car left towards the far end, paused tentatively, then reversed and drove into the near end. While I was typing that sentence, the car made its way to the far end of the car park.

21:02

The Saxo's now parked—they did want to head left after all—but no-one's got out yet.

21:03

Cream cheese toast was tasty—Aldi make good cream cheese. This is their medium fat cream cheese—they also make low fat, but not high fat.

Man in blue jeans and white top seen walking towards far end of car park. Presumably came out of the Saxo, since he was walking a bit ponderously.

Simultaneously, a red Nissan Micra (again, one of the old models) entered and parked right in front of me. Man who exited wore a grey sweat-top and walked far more confidently than Saxo man.

21:05

The dark Focus is back. It may actually be one of the new models of Fiesta or Fusion—they all look the same. Occupant wasn't seen exiting the car; demeanour could not be judged from walking style. However, they were revving the engine fairly heartily.

21:07

Two men have got out of a car that's hiding behind one of the white vans nearby on the right. (The nearer van is actually silver.) One of them is possibly the man who left earlier in a silver Astra. They swaggered.

21:09

The amount of activity in the car park over the last hour has surprised me. What hasn't, however, is the lack of activity in my inbox.

More drumrolls from downstairs. I guess that's the second housemate being evicted.

21:11

A silver Ford Focus is reversing towards me. It's trying to park in one of the spaces on the left.

21:12

Still trying to park. Gender of driver shall not be commented upon.

...It's parked. A man and a woman exited; a red van blocked my view of which door each came out of. Driving-related gender stereotypes are once again unsubstantiated.

21:14

I'm having a second slice of Aldi cream cheese on toast. A fourth slice remains; it'll probably be peanut butter since I'm starting to run out of cream cheese.

21:15

I saw a car driving to the far end of the car park. Then a car, possibly the same one, drove to this end and parked out of sight. Meanwhile another car entered and drove to the far end.

21:17

Two people have gone into the nearest flat block; I think they may have come out of the first car. The second car has yet to finish parking.

21:18

So far, Digital Spy has written three updates, the first of which was two lines long; the other two were one-liners. Anna has written a total of fourteen updates comprising about 28 decent paragraphs. Yay her.

21:21

Big Brother contestants entitled “Jonty”, “Carole” and “Ziggy” have lost so far. This leaves three more contestants, of which one is a pair of twins who evidently only count as one person. The repercussions of this on anti-murdering laws as they apply to identical twins are unclear.

21:23

The second slice of cream cheese toast was as tasty as the first.

21:25

I have received an email from a Mrs. Trellis of North Wales. She says:

At the start of this entry you promised a discussion of the weather at your location. So far, your meteorological insights have been far from adequate. I'd even go so far as to say they were nonexistent!

Yours patiently, Mrs. Trellis.

Well, Mrs. Trellis, when I started this entry I forgot that it would be completely dark after about half an hour, making it quite difficult to track the antics of the clouds outside. I do recall that when I started, there was a moderate-sized grey-ish cloud visible above the flats. Now, the cloud cover is somewhat more comprehensive.

21:28

The loud-engined, dark Focus, which I now think is probably a Fiat Punto, has left the car park again. Its biscuit-tin-fart-like engine was clearly audible speeding away towards the main road, along the side road that the car park and my street come off.

21:31

Digital Spy now have five updates, all of which are one-liners except the first, which is one line and three words. In their defence, those extra three words are clutching his monkey, which somewhat mitigates their updates' lack of volume.

21:34

The fourth slice of toast is, as expected, peanut butter. About half of my very large mug of Darjeeling has been drunk; the remainder is now somewhat luke-warm. Might have to brew up a new cup of tea.

21:36

The car park is mostly quiet, except for another dark-topped, blue-jeaned person I saw come out of the flats and walk towards a car a few seconds ago.

The near-full moon is sporadically very clearly visible behind what's evidently quite thick clouds.

21:37

The dark-topped, blue-jeaned person has returned to the flats carrying two yellow boxes, approximately large enough to hold a garden gnome each. I doubt that they do hold garden gnomes, however, as I don't think the flats have their own gardens.

21:39

The clouds, which were moving left-to-right quite quickly before (that's north-to-south for Mrs. Trellis) have slowed down to about a quarter their earlier speed. They're now sauntering gently in the moonlight.

21:41

Through a break in the clouds, it's become apparent that although the moon is nearly full, it is distinctly gibbous.

21:43

The tea has definitely reached “lukewarm”, though the Darjeeling flavour makes this less unpalatable than with most ordinary teas. A fresh cup is still, however, on the cards.

21:45

There's been no apparent activity out the window for a good few minutes now, and there's bouncy music emanating from the TV. I'm going to investigate and make more tea.

21:48

The kettle's on again. It transpires that The IT Crowd has been on Channel 4 since half past; the bouncy music remains unidentified but it may well be that programme's incidental score. As I left the TV to write this, that bit of the episode that you've already seen plenty-four times because it was in the advert that they've shown far too often over the last week was on. You know, at a funeral: I'm sorry for your loss...move on.

The tea and toast have been finished; there's a Snack Noodle in the cupboard (like a Pot Noodle, only cheaper and from Aldi) that shall provide further, non-toasty-though-nonetheless-carbohydrate-rich sustenance.

21:54

The tea is brewing and the Snack Noodle...“cooking”. I succeeded in emptying the latter's little soy sauce sachet into the pot rather than the mug—that could've spoilt an otherwise-very-nice mug of Assam. Assam's quality whilst lukewarm remains to be seen, but I doubt it'll be as not-unpalatable as Darjeeling.

On The IT Crowd, a man in a white suit marched into the funeral and—as far as I could tell—punched the man that was reading a poem I saw on Four Weddings And A Funeral. The canned laughter on that programme is far too loud, which always leads me to assume that the programme itself must be terribly unfunny, no matter how funny it actually is.

21:59

The IT Crowd has finished; Big Brother is back on next. “Liam” has also lost, according to Anna. “Brian” and the duo variously dubbed “Samanda”, “Samandamanda” and “Sam and Amanda” are still candidates to win the £*cough*,000.

Digital Spy has written some more words, and broken the three-line barrier in one of their updates.

22:03

The car park has been tranquil for a while now. The clouds around the moon have ostensibly come to a halt. (They're not actually around the moon—they're around the position in the sky that would cause them to be in a direct line between me and the moon... but that's a bit excessively wordy.)

22:05

A couple of people have spent the last minute or two slowly wandering from the far side of the car park to the near side. I think they may have got into a car.

22:06

Another drumroll. The winners of Big Brother may be being announced. Note the plural as a subtle nod to the suggestion that the outcome is a foregone conclusion.

22:07

No, the couple are wandering back to the far end of the car park.

22:10

The Snack Noodle is fairly tasty. It's “Chicken & Mushroom” flavour, but doesn't actually contain any part of a chicken—it's Suitable for vegetarians and the front even bears the slogan Ain't No Chicken.

22:12

There are bits of mushrooms in it, though—fairly big ones actually.

I just saw a lonely figure walking stealthily towards this end of the car park. He may have been a ghoul.

22:15

Judging by Anna's description of “Liam” as Geordie, I'm guessing that he's the one who refrained from expressing exaggerated and clichéd feelings of love earlier. Apparently, he also wants an ocelot, but I think that's just because he thinks the word is intrinsically funny. He's come third, or fourth if you consider identical twins to be individual people.

22:19

Not strictly out-the-window news, but hey: I've just noticed a moth, about a centimetre from head to back-of-wings, sitting on my wall. This is probably because it's dark, my light is on, and I have the window open. Mahmoud, my window-spider (kind of like a doorman, but a spider and for a window) has been building reasonable webs across the entrance for the last few days, but I think I've opened the window a little bit too far for him this time.

22:21

More drumrolls, but I'd rather talk about Mahmoud.

Further investigation shows that he has built a web of roughly the same size as usual, but since the window is open wider, the gap from the immovable pane to the hinged pane is larger, and so the same area of web doesn't come down as far from the overhang of the roof. (The hinge is on the right side of the right pane.) So the web is less effective at deterring flying insects from entering. (Is a moth technically an insect?)

22:25

Evidently it was “Brian” who won, despite the other contestant having two personalities with which to gain votes.

22:27

The moon's moved quite noticeably in the sky (due, of course, to Earth's rotation rather than its own actual movement)—I now have to bend down so that my head is roughly at seat-level to be able to see it. There's no trace of a cloud near it.

22:32

I said earlier that the flats were in the shape of a reversed “L” and the car park was in the open space within that shape. Actually, the car park itself is another reversed “L”, rotated 180° and interlocking with the flats; so there's a gap between the end of the flats and my street.

Through this gap, if I stick my head out my window and look left, I can see a section of the side street that the car park and my street come off. A car has just driven along it towards the main road, which is odd, because at the other end of the side street is a river.

(There is a loop at the end of the side street, mind—and plenty of space to park cars. So it's not really that odd.)

22:38

Digital Spy's updates now only just fit on one screen.

22:39

I can hear a familiar advert emanating from downstairs. I think it's the one where the Peugeot 207's in-built satellite navigation directs a driver to go via a twisting road over lots of hills, when he really just needs to get to Glasgow as fast as possible because his wife is in labour.

OK, that last bit's made up, but it would be pretty inconvenient to have a 207 when you're in a hurry.

22:41

And now the familiar tones of Sunny Afternoon can be heard, as per the Magner's Irish Cider advert.

22:43

I'm glad the car park wasn't this serene a couple of hours ago. I'd've probably given up yonks ago.

22:47

I just re-read some of the earlier updates above... it seems like so long ago now [nostalgic sigh]. I should clarify that in the final paragraph of the 20:22 update, by “housemate” I meant the people that I live with—not Big Brother people... 'cos that just wouldn't make sense.

22:50

Compare:

The doors opened, the crowd screamed, the fireworks went bang, the ticker tape twinkled under the lights, and after a brief salute and wave and moment of victorious arm-waving, Brian suddenly crouched down, as if his legs had buckled under him, over-whelmed by it all. Then, standing up, and hooting like the Essex wideboy he is, he went to meet Davina and his adoring public.

—Anna Pickard

Brian emerges. There are those fireworks again.

—Digital Spy

22:54

The last of the Snack Noodle has been consumed. It was definitely worth the thirty-odd pence.

22:58

The lukewarm Assam isn't quite as pleasant as the lukewarm Darjeeling was, but it's still pretty passable.

A thin veil of cloud now surrounds the moon. I've spotted the first star off to the left—damn light pollution.

23:00

Action! A red Corsa, of the same age as the blue one from eight o'clock, but without the metallic paint or colour-coded bumpers, reversed quite sharply from the far end of the car park and sped out the exit. It wasn't going quite as fast as the loud-engined Focus-Punto earlier, though.

23:04

Quite pleased with the circularity of beginning and finishing with an old Corsa entering and leaving the car park respectively—even though not actually the same Corsa—and not wanting to go out with a whimper, and given that Anna gave up five minutes ago, this is where I shall conclude.

I think we've all learned something here tonight: you that I have a window-spider called Mahmoud; and I that I don't actually have any regular readers, vindicating my not-bothering-to-include-a-comment-form stance.

Goodnight.

“Pour Salt into that Wound of Yours” (the 2007-08-31 Friday Fetch-it)

2007-08-31T17:53:00+00:00

I don't really know how to go about recommending Gentlemen Prefer Blondes by CC & the Spades (which partially explains the large gap since the last entry and why the following isn't my usual neatly-structured, eloquent prose)—I don't know why I like the song so much. I know that I do like it. And I think that's because it's damn good, but I can't be sure.

Incidentally, I don't usually recommend songs that I discovered on another music blog, my logic being that if I found it, you could too. But this was a full year ago, and the band still have well under five hundred listens on Last.fm. (They've now accrued 59 hits on Google, but 17 of them are me).

There are two versions (that I'm aware of): the original, rough demo version—which is what I'm mainly writing about—and a vastly tidied-up version, which uses a slightly different lyric and adds some extra guitar bits. (That one's presently on CC & the Spades' MySpace page.)

The song basically comprises vocals, guitar, bass and drums. It's fairly straightforward by my standards—there are no weird time signatures and no clever rhythms; it doesn't suddenly shift sideways; it's not less than a minute long and it's not seventeen minutes long; there are no wacky instruments and no macho guitar acrobatics. (I wouldn't recommend bringing it home to meet your grandma, though—it uses the “fuck” word.)

Where the tidier version finishes with a long-held strum, the demo version stops on a drumbeat, as abruptly as it started—its departure smacks you in the face as much as its arrival did. There's no particular melody or even rhythm to the vocals in the chorus—it's almost as if CC's improvising the vocals here.

In fact the whole song is very rough, unpolished and raw: a lot of the time the microphone can't quite contain CC's voice; the bass guitar (which plays up in almost the same register as the lead) is noticeably off-rhythm during the choruses and I think it hits the wrong note at the start of the instrumental towards the end.

It's this sort of coarse sincerity that defined punk. If you download one song this week, make it Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.

(That link is to the rough, demo version as an MP3; it was on their MySpace profile for a while, but the tidier version replaced it.)

(How do you follow that? Usually with the same song again... or 8 Hours (also by CC & the Spades; see eashfa to download that too). More usefully, perhaps: Swimmers by Broken Social Scene follows the demo version particularly nicely.)

How to write kick-ass blog posts like it ain’t no thang

2007-08-30T23:47:00+00:00

Copy Trizoko.

(Incidentally, stop by tomorrow/this evening (that's Friday) at about 19:00 UTC (20:00 in Britain)—I'm doing something a bit special.)

Answers on a Postcard

2007-08-26T21:55:00+00:00

Mooquackwooftweetmeow's never had a comment form; originally, it was just a collection of a few static pages of stuff that I'd written (and now it's just a lot more static pages of stuff I've written) rather than a “proper blog”. I wrote the entire site myself; a comment database was (and still is) way beyond my ability. (I still write everything by myself, in a way, since I wrote the Mooquackwhatnotbot and it generates the entire site.)

Anyhow: point is, no comments. Here's some proof: Justin Ruckman (of Centripetal Notion fame) emailed me a little while back saying he'd've liked to comment on one of my entries, but there's no comment form. So it's definitely true. (Justin ended up offering to host Mooquackwooftweetmeow (thanks for that, by the way). More emails like this, please.)

It'd be very difficult for me to set up comments here—I doubt any hosted “solution” would actually do what I wanted it to; I'd probably end up trying to write my own system. The upshot of all this would be that I'd get to spend x hours a month deleting spam.

Tom Coates has recently written some words about comments, in which he describes how back in the day, before comments were ubiquitous (and when the internet was in black-and-white), people would write full articles or posts on their own sites in response to other posts. I like that idea (old nostalgic, I am).

So, you can email me about anything Mooquackwooftweetmeow-related: mooquackwooftweetmeow@gkn.me.uk. You can also microblog at me: I'm @greytheearthling@queer.party on the Fediverse. Drive-by comments are welcome. If you write a longer, impeccably-thought-out chunk of prose somewhere else, you can point me towards it and I'll add a link here.

How To Make Scroll Bars A Little Bit Easier To Use

2007-08-05T23:17:00+00:00

When you have a mouse whose scroll wheel doesn't work, you tend to use the scroll bars a lot more. I usually click the little arrows at each end repeatedly as I read the page. This means that I'm not looking where I'm clicking, and so my mouse tends to wander slowly, which results in me clicking stuff I didn't mean to.

A simple way to fix this—and it applies to many elements of a computer's graphical interface—would be to move the mouse pointer to the middle of the button when you click it.

This should be done when the mouse button is lifted, and only to controls that afford repeated clicking. So menus and drop-down list boxes would be excluded, because just clicking them does nothing and they can be dragged to select an item (in Gnome, anyway). Buttons that dismiss dialogue boxes, and the Minimise, Maximise and Close buttons in windows' title bars would be excluded as well, because the buttons move or disappear after you've clicked them once. Tabs; buttons that bring up a new window that you're expected to interact with straight away; and radio buttons (“choose one of several”-type options) wouldn't be included, because you don't need to select them twice in a row.

But tick boxes would, as you might want to toggle them. Most toolbar buttons; program launchers (on Gnome's panels); those little up and down arrows next to inputs that want a number; toggles for expanding to show more information; and scroll bar buttons would be included, too.

The wheelchair symbol

2007-08-04T13:34:00+00:00

The wheelchair symbol—a stick-person sitting in a stick-wheelchair (well, on a stick-wheel at least)—is a common, internationally-recognised symbol.

Ramps

I suppose it originally meant something like “mainly for people using wheelchairs”. For example, in cases where a building's main entrance involves steps, but there's a secondary entrance that uses a ramp instead, this symbol is often used with an arrow to point towards that ramp. But it's a bit of a dodgy symbol for this purpose.

Perhaps the main intention behind the ramp is to allow access for people who use wheelchairs; but others are quite likely to use it as well—people with pushchairs, for example; or on bikes (if it's an outdoor ramp). Maybe you're a small dog (or with one) and don't fancy climbing up steps half your height. Maybe you can walk, but can't easily lift your feet to the height of a step. Maybe you're a skater.

I suspect that many ramps that use the wheelchair symbol were only installed in the first place in order to comply with anti-discrimination legislation, which (in addition to having a poetically rhythmic name) has come into force in the United Kingdom recently. In this frame of mind, someone thought, “OK, chaps. We're putting this ramp in for the disabled people, so we're gonna put up a big sign saying ‘This is for disabled people.’ That makes sense.”.

And it sort-of does, but they're thinking about it far too hard. They should use a symbol of a ramp instead—something like the UK road sign for an incline, but without any gradient. This would show what's there, factually and simply, without making assumptions about who's going to be using it. Analogously, a simple pictorial of some stairs is often used to represent a staircase, and quite sensibly.

Sound

That example of the wheelchair symbol's use is relatively innocuous—the ramp is intended mainly for wheelchair users. But there are other cases of its use where it's wholly inappropriate, mainly on the web.

A lot of websites use simple tests to distinguish real (presumably) human users from automated spamming machines. These tests usually involve reading a picture of a string of letters and numbers, that's been made intentionally difficult for a computer to read. This also makes them virtually impossible for people with poor sight to read. In order to provide access for these people, most websites that use such tests provide an alternative one that involves recognising sound instead.

(Both of these are useless for deafblind people. There have been attempts at devising more sensible tests that don't assume that real people can either see or hear, such as Eric Meyer's WP-Gatekeeper.)

These audio tests are often indicated by the wheelchair symbol. —which makes no sense whatsoever.

The rationale behind this is presumably that the wheelchair symbol has become a general symbol for disability. That's a shame, as it lumps everyone with anything that's considered a disability into one category. And using a wheelchair needn't be a disability in every situation, and certainly isn't on the web (which is incongruous, because that's where its image is being used as a symbol for disability).

There is a symbol for blindness, which would be more appropriate for this purpose than the wheelchair symbol; it's a person walking with a cane to the ground in front of them. Unfortunately, it assumes that all people walking with canes in front of them are blind, which is reasonably fair; and that all blind people can walk, which is not.

A better symbol for blindness would be an eye with a slash through it; the UK's Royal National Institute of Blind People uses such a symbol as their site's icon. Analogously, the symbol for deafness is an ear with a slash through it. (This is a very sensible symbol.) The symbol for deafblindness could then, logically, be an eye and an ear, with a slash through each (so, the deafness and blindness symbols combined).

But even the blindness symbol would only be as appropriate for indicating an audio-based test as the wheelchair symbol is for indicating ramps. It's a sound-based test; it should be represented by a symbol for sound; a speaker with “sound waves” emanating from it would be perfect.

Parking

There are some uses of the wheelchair symbol that are a bit more awkward. The wheelchair symbol is often used to mark disabled people's parking spaces*—those reserved for drivers and passengers who are “registered disabled”, with extra room and in the most convenient positions. “Registered disabled” means that the person in question uses a wheelchair, uses crutches, has poor or no sight, or has another condition that makes a better parking space a practical necessity. (I'm not sure whether having poor or no hearing gets you a disabled-badge**, but I don't see why it would mean you'd need a space nearer to the building.)

* (I say “disabled people's parking spaces” rather than “disabled parking spaces” because the latter seems to imply that the parking spaces themselves are disabled.)

**: (Similarly, “disabled badge” seems to imply that the badge itself is disabled.)

The wheelchair symbol isn't really appropriate here. Like with the ramp, these parking spaces aren't only for people who use wheelchairs; they're also specifically for people who fall into other groups. Unlike the ramp, this is an artificial distinction: the spaces are explicitly for certain groups of people and—more importantly—specifically not for everyone else. The ramp was just “probably less convenient” for people who can use steps.

In this case, I can't think of a better symbol to use. I think it would be counter-productive to invent a new symbol to generally represent “disability”, because using any symbol like this arbitrarily lumps a lot of disparate groups of people together. However, it might remove the implication that, in any case where a certain biological or medical condition would cause problems, wheelchair users are always “disabled”—or literally, incapable.

How To Make Thunderbird Well Sexy

2007-08-03T07:12:00+00:00

For Thunderbird to properly succeed in providing real choice and freedom, it needs to become the successor to Firefox, in the way that Flock is currently trying to be. (You can think of Firefox as “The Internet 1.0”; Flock as “The Internet 1.1” and Thunderbird as “The Internet 2.0” if you like.)

There are lots of people who use Firefox for day-to-day web browsing—great for HTML, CSS and JavaScript interoperability and ostensibly a win. But a large portion of that browsing consists of using “social networking websites” such as Myspace, Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, even Blogger; or “instant messaging services” such as MSN, Yahoo! and AOL's instant messengers.

Each of these is closed and isolated from each other, particularly its direct competitors. Any interconnection is done at the whim of one of these companies, one service provider at a time. I can phone a BT line in Glasgow from a Virgin Media line in York; I can send an email from RandomMail to Mom's Friendly Email Service, even if neither has heard of the other. But if I write a blog post at Acmeblog, my friends using Myface won't see it.

For there to be true freedom, there needs to be an open, standards-based, social network through which people can freely conduct communication. (This is what the Internet is supposed to be in the first place.) And I don't mean “social network” in the limited sense of “a website where you log in and can talk to your friends lol”.

I mean a set of standard protocols by which anyone can communicate with anyone in any conceivable way. I'm thinking of open, federated standards such as email, Atom (including the publishing bit), Jabber, OpenID and OpenSearch (and avoiding saying “semantic web” even though that's pretty close to what I'm on about).

Flock takes a standard web browser and surrounds that with structured social network stuff. Thunderbird should invert that. It should start from a set of high-level concepts such as contacts, presence, subscriptions and messages. Then it should bring in bits of web browseriness as appropriate to display the content.

(By the way, I shouldn't have written this on Asa's website; I should have written it in Thunderbird, to: the web; cc: Asa.)

Imagine Thunderbird and Lightning, Pidgin, Skype (but Free), Miro, AllPeers and the Chandler project, all combined into the only communication program you'll ever need. Thunderbird should be that.

About the blog's title

2007-07-16T23:26:00+00:00

There was a TV advert recently—I think it was for an optician, though it might've been for a camera—in which a person walks through a forest, with Polaroid-type photos dropping behind them every few paces. The point was that we see so many images even over the course of just one day, but remember just a tiny fraction of this. You can generalise that to the other senses as well.

For example, a human can see at a rate of about ten frames per second, so over twelve hours one sees more than four hundred thousand images. And we remember none of them. I mean: we filter these images and extract facts from them, but then we forget the actual image. Even if we consciously try to remember the image, memories are imperfect and some subtleties are always changed or lost. (Animals make rubbish eyewitnesses.)

After a split-second review of each of these innumerate sensations, to extract the juiciest titbits, the brain simply discards all of them. There's decay intrinsic in every perception an animal makes.

In the world of software geekery, a “dataloss” bug (problem or error) is one that causes some of the user's information to be lost. It occurred to me that this advert was expressing a continual state of dataloss. It's one of the fundamental aspects of what's often called “the human condition” (although I should make it clear that I think this applies beyond just humans).

A lot of science fiction stories involving robots—for example—contrast those robots with their human (and roughly-human) counterparts, by having the robots be “perfect”. Flawless memory; absolute objectivity (the absence of emotions influencing decisions); and limitless accuracy and precision in almost every respect are hallmarks of the science fiction robot. (This isn't particularly contrived, as these are attributes that the fictional robots share with real-life computers.)

Often this “perfection” extends to an inability to feel emotions, usually love. While the robots are lauded for their impeccable grasp of the factual, they can simultaneously be pitied for their lack of a “deeper” experience of life, beyond the “merely” factual. (My suggestion that there is something “deeper” than the “merely factual” already assumes that there's more to life than pure facts.)

Is it wrong to say it's love when it tries the way it does?

—The Flaming Lips, “One More Robot / Sympathy 3000-21”

It's concluded that in fact the robots' “perfection”, while ostensibly useful, is also a shortcoming. Imperfection is highlighted and celebrated as being intrinsic to humans' nature—constant dataloss is a fundamental part of life.

There's definitely, definitely, definitely no logic to human behaviour.

—Björk, “Human Behaviour”

I used “Dataloss” in the title rather than “decay” because dataloss is usually seen as being actively induced and thus preventable. Decay is more of a continuous, natural, inevitable process; I wanted to challenge dataloss's preventability. Besides, the latter has connotations of rotting flesh that I didn't want to encourage.

The “Walking” half of the title is the best way I could find to succinctly express the idea that people are dataloss (although, of course, I don't mean that they literally are). I'm also using it to illustrate the idea that what seems to be the most straightforward way to say something often comes loaded with assumptions. Here it's assumed that discussion is naturally restricted to concerning humans and no-one else, and that all humans can (or do) walk.

There should be a conclusion here... ...So! “Walking Dataloss” manages to cover the blog's main thrusts, “decay, perception and dodgy assumptions”, pretty succinctly.

“We Won't Save You” (the 2007-07-13 Friday Fetch-it)

2007-07-13T20:18:00+00:00

When I started the Fetch-it, some fifteen months ago (or seven, if you only count months in which I've actually recommended anything), I decided not to recommend any music by Björk, mainly because I couldn't bring myself to pick one of her songs above all others. It should be very clear at this point that I am less than three Björk.

In 2005, Björk compiled an album of Army of Me remixes and covers in aid of UNICEF. (Pay attention to that link—it has free downloads.) Alongside a country and western version; a couple of hard-rock reimaginings; a bossa nova version; a one-minute a cappella; and a Super Mario-flavoured accelerando, Beats Beyond (of whom I've never heard either) contributed “Army of Me [Bersarinplatz Mix]”.

So this isn't a song by Björk. It's a remix of a song by Björk, which uses bits of her voice, and things, but it definitely doesn't count as a Björk song simply because—as we'll see—it's nothing like the original.

...Although it does begin with the same crescendo as the original song—exactly: you may even be fooled into believing that this is Army of Me, though only for about three seconds. Where the original's beat kicks in with an explosion at the end of the crescendo, here the explosion fades away and is replaced by an electronic throb.

This throb is joined by a dirty, buzzy bassline—like a twitching, edgier version of the original's bassline—and a few choice Björk vocals. And then “The Riff” takes over, and any lingering suggestion that you're hearing Army of Me evaporates. This riff is a drum-'n'-bass dance bassline, only at a more moderate tempo and swung, using triple time. And with a thudding beat. Like Train by Goldfrapp crossed with Shoot The Runner by Kasabian.

The bassline, throb and vocals gradually reappear and are soon joined by a high, rippling electronic countermelody to The Riff. By now, two minutes in, the song's driving along nicely—toes are tapping.

But then with a drone-like, suspended animation Björk vocal (“once more”) along for the ride, in the space of about five seconds, the song swerves to avoid a crossing pedestrian and skids off the side of the road—crashing straight into a black hole, in which all the constituent parts of the song tie themselves up in a knot and collapse in on themselves, like an old-fashioned TV being switched off. More literally, it sounds like a more-warped, grungier version of the end of Phones' Disco Edit of Banquet by Bloc Party. Or a five-second armageddon.

Instantly, the driving beat of The Riff resumes. After passing through a quick loop-the-loop and crashing into another supernova, the song breaks down to just the throb and the rippling countermelody.

But soon The Riff reappears once more, alongside a new counter-countermelody. —On top of the first, rippling countermelody. And the melody of The Riff. And Björk's vocals. Four layers of melody now accompany the driving rhythm, so we're quite happy to dwell here for a minute or so, until the song concludes with a repeat of the opening explosion, again fading, this time to nothing.

Apart from Björk's voice, which sings a very simple line, every melody here is completely original and the rhythm is nothing like Army of Me. It's like calling an ostrich a remix of a velociraptor.

It technically is, but in reality it's a completely different animal. If you download one song this week, make it Bersarinplatz. ...or anything by Björk.

(I <3 Björk)

(How do you follow that? Probably with either Train or Shoot The Runner. Or possibly Den her sang handler om at få det bedste ud af det by Under byen (who're really rather good, you know).)

Hiatus

2007-07-11T01:25:00+00:00

I don't think Mooquackwooftweetmeow has ever really hit its stride. There may have been a few moments back when the Mooquackwooftweetmeow 4 weblog was new, and perhaps the odd moment of glory fairly recently; but it's never been a constant fountain of genius.

Now, I'm not saying that Mooquackwooftweetmeow will never gather momentum and flourish into the most spectacularly astounding website ever, just that it won't be doing so any time soon. Especially since Mooquackwooftweetmeow currently lives in my university webspace and I recently left university, which means there's a pretty good chance it and The Twaddle will fall off the edge of the internet at some point in the near future.

I am doing other stuff—it just all lives elsewhere on the web—so in the meantime, the front page has morphed into a summary of that stuff. The Mooquackwhatnotbot is a clunky old thing, and my connection to the university's servers is a bit dodgy at the best of times; so having The Man host my content is considerably more convenient than doing everything myself.

While Mooquackwooftweetmeow exists online, it'll always be at http://purl.org/mooquackwooftweetmeow/, and most probably at http://gkn.me.uk. (Hi, Google cache!)

Introduction

2007-07-09T13:45:00+00:00

So… This blog's going to be centred around the idea of decay and how it affects our perception. And then how that leads to assumptions, and illogical categorisations (putting things into boxes where they don't belong).

I'm already guilty after one sentence—to whom does “our” apply? Just me? Me and a few friends? Me and you? (Hi! by the way.) Every person alive today? Every human including the dead and yet-to-be-born? Every mammal? Every animal? Or absolutely every living being including plants and such?

Yeah. Tough one.

Of necessity, I'm going to have to reduce generalisations to only those that apply to me. Generally, though, I'm going to try to challenge assumptions by stretching applicability to the widest sense possible.

I'm not going to criticise directed writing or speech in English for assuming the audience is human—at the time of writing, only humans can understand English beyond a few words—but I will use things being assumed when they shouldn't be as starting points for wider thoughts.

I've written about this sort of stuff before—simplistic things like my “rant about foreigners” in which I complained about an American website using units of measure that were familiar to them, but that a wider, non-American audience found awkward or even incomprehensible. I've also written about what's in the solar system, trying to use language that most objectively describes the reality of what's there, as well as removing the historical misemphasis particularly of Pluto, but also of the “major planets”. (I only just realised that that entry was relevant to this.)

A lot of my photo art has a theme of decay and imperfection. In Four (I use ¡Forward, Russia! nomenclature for the pictures I publish) I tried to make a picture of a murky sky over Hartlepool (Great Britain, Earth etc.) look bright and sunny; the result has a clear air of artificiality (quite possibly due to my lack of GIMP mojo).

For Ten, I drew around the photo by hand, sloppily, creating an outline that was clearly produced in this way. Both of these were an attempt to highlight how the reality of what I photographed gets filtered en route from the camera to the viewer, by artificially filtering the pictures even more; and in the case of Ten, by intentionally introducing imperfections.

As another example of me playing with imperfections, I began my Thirteen series by focusing on the most obvious imperfection the camera recorded (part 1)—the overexposure of the Sun. I then focused on the same area but with the imperfection removed and the sky recoloured to blue, the colour you'd expect of a sky; the resulting picture (part 3) is—in my opinion—less interesting than part 1. And finally, I couldn't bring myself to “waste” such a good photo (again, my opinion, of course) by not publishing the full thing as it was “supposed” to look (part 4)—an example of the valiant fight against decay.

One more thing: there's an article on The Twaddle, a now-mostly-defunct website I run, about the English language (indeed any language) being an intrinsically imperfect representation of what the speaker is trying to express; it argues that this imperfection, the nuances that are applied to any perception that passes through a brain, ought to be appreciated. 00101 01110 00111 01100 01001 10011 01000 01001 10011 00011 01111 01111 01100 wasn't written by me (the author now prefers to remain anonymous for unstalkability reasons) but it probably comes closest to the type of thing I intend to write about on this blog.

(By the way, earlier, “our” applied to anything that can perceive, which I think means any animal.)

Fifteen

2007-07-09T03:44:00+00:00

Fourteen (“just an illusion caused by the world spinning round”)

2007-07-02T18:03:00+00:00

Thirteen, part 4

2007-07-02T17:49:00+00:00

Thirteen, part 3

2007-07-02T17:48:00+00:00

Thirteen, part 2

2007-07-02T17:47:00+00:00

Thirteen, part 1

2007-07-02T17:46:00+00:00

Twelve, part 5

2007-07-02T16:45:00+00:00

Twelve, part 4

2007-07-02T16:38:00+00:00

Twelve, part 3

2007-07-02T16:30:00+00:00

Twelve, part 2

2007-07-02T16:20:00+00:00

(An offcut from Twelve, part 1)

Twelve, part 1

2007-07-02T16:19:00+00:00

Eleven (“Reality Distortion Field”)

2007-07-02T14:26:00+00:00

(This is as the camera captured it.)

Ten

2007-07-02T14:21:00+00:00

Starring Martyn Robertshaw and Gary Owen Tumilty

“Under a Sinking Sun” (the 2007-06-22 Friday Fetch-it)

2007-06-22T11:19:00+00:00

One review of The Deep Blue claimed that Charlotte Hatherley does “a spot-on impersonation of the Sundays' Harriet Wheeler” in the first half of Roll Over (Let It Go). This isn't quite true; but she does do a spot-on impersonation of herself singing very nicely. (The way she sings “lover” and “harbour” makes me want to hump her.) Charlotte's usually better at angular (Lazy Use of a Popular Musical Adjective #1) guitar-pop-punk-rock than at lush dream-pop. Even in Roll Over her “sha-la-la”s and “ooh”s don't bed into the instrumentation fully enough to match up to the Sundays or the Cocteau Twins: however soft the vocals' surfaces are, they still have sharp edges.

Hidden tracks—meanwhile—are generally a bit rubbish: they're the recorded equivalent of leaving the stage for a minute or two, before returning to perform—surprise!—an encore. Supposedly “hidden” tracks are even easier to see coming: enter track length display. Nonetheless, there's the obligatory minute or two of silence after the last song-proper, to fool you into thinking the album's over... as well as to royally screw up shuffled playlists and mix discs. Only if you leave the thing alone, either by the serendipity of sheer laziness, or by taking keen notice of the fact that it's still playing, may you bask in the bounty of the hidden track. ...which is usually about half a minute long and fades out just as it starts to resemble a decent song. Not so on The Deep Blue.

The last track, Siberia, ends with an improv-y crescendo of guitar and piano that gives way to a final guitar loop; six iterations later, the loop drops abruptly to silence. It's a strong conclusion to an album that never loses momentum throughout, despite many changes of pace and mood.

Two minutes of silence ensue.

Two minutes—that's a long time.

It's probably taken you about that long to read this far.

The silence draws you in. It makes you listen more carefully, in case there's something quiet going on that you're otherwise missing.

Silence is far more potent than leaving a large break in text—you can just read faster, skip over a blank page in the space of a second or two.

It makes you wonder: when will the silence be broken? And by what? And when it is broken, it makes the sound that breaks it that much more profound.

Two minutes of silence.

After two minutes, Siberia and the rest of the album are a fond memory rather than a present experience, and what follows stands separately from the album.

All momentum has now ceased.

Out of the silence springs a quiet guitar, at times reverberating like a sonar pulse; accompanied by a slow, almost occasional, soft drumbeat. By this point it sounds like it could be your heartbeat. After a little while a deep, resonating, warm acoustic guitar joins; and then Charlotte's singing.

Those sharp edges in her voice are entirely engulfed by the rich, expansive acoustic guitar and the other sonance swirling around her. There's the occasional glugging sound, probably produced on a xylophone, but sounding more like air escaping from an underwater cove, or a seahorse scarpering as a pebble falls towards it.

Three minutes in, although it feels like about half that, the rich swirls of sound die down, returning to the more minimal arrangement of the intro. It's at this point—if not before—that lesser hidden tracks would just have faded out, and you half-expect this intro arrangement to be the song's conclusion.

Instead, the same intro riff acquires the accompaniment of the deep acoustic guitar and a violin, which plays a legato, swaying, floating line. The violin stays around while the main, warm riff resumes and Charlotte sings another chorus.

Again, she's accompanied by the same swirling sonance, with the addition of the reverberating whooshes of a couple of passing space-dolphins. (Lost In Time could be described as the musical analogue to Ecco the Dolphin 2: The Tides of Time on the Mega-Drive.)

The guitar riff from the intro concludes the song with the full resonant lushness of the song's body, and the acoustic guitar resonates into silence.

This is dream-pop. If you download one song this week, make it Lost In Time.

(How do you follow that? With ~~Death Cock by Broken Social Scene~~ Hjertebarn by Under byen. Or, preferably, another two minutes of silence.)

Previously on the Friday Fetch-it...

2007-06-22T11:01:00+00:00

Once upon a time, there lived a music recommendation blog called the Friday Fetch-it. It lived in the magical land of Last.fm, where it spent its days frolicking with its friends surrounded by pink social-musicky goodness.

But then, after a few months of pink! pink! other stuff! things that aren't the blog!, the Friday Fetch-it found itself increasingly confined by all the other pink stuff flying about around it, and it decided to move out of its parents' house and get a job.

No job later, the Friday Fetch-it finds itself uprooted from its familiar, old, pink (did I mention that Last.fm is pink?) pot and planted in a new, bigger, less-pink pot... like a plant being replanted... by a gardener who represents a poor metaphor.

Anyhow: so as not to forget its old life in Pinksville, the Friday Fetch-it made a list on itself (because it's a blog, remember (this anthropomorphised-blog business gets confusing sometimes)) of all the old posts. And in time-honoured story-referencing-itself and effect-preceding-cause fashion, this is that very list:

(This bit's the montage of quick shots of the characters emoting and/or in action-packed situations, overlaid with snippets of dialogue, that goes some way to explaining what happened last week when you forgot to set the video:)

the 2006-04-14 Friday Fetch-it, in which the Friday Fetch-it was introduced and I recommended Slits Grapevine
the 2006-04-21 Friday Fetch-it, in which I recommended Area
the 2006-04-29 Saturday Fetch-it, in which I recommended By The Water
the 2006-05-05 Friday Fetch-it, in which I recommended The Big Sky
the 2006-05-12 Friday Fetch-it, in which I recommended Shoreline
the 2006-05-19 Friday Fetch-it, in which I recommended Can't Hurry Love
the 2006-05-26 Friday Fetch-it, in which I recommended Pioneers Remixed
the 2006-06-06 Tuesday Fetch-it, in which I recommended Love In The Making
the 2006-06-09 Friday Fetch-it, in which I recommended Iwe
the 2006-06-23 Friday Fetch-its, in which I recommended Set The Fire & La Rit
the 2006-07-07 Friday Fetch-its, in which I recommended Confide In Me & Colours
the 2006-07-14 Friday Fetch-it, in which I recommended Poison
the 2006-10-15 Sunday Fetch-it, in which I recommended Give Me Strength
the 2006-10-20 Friday Fetch-it, in which I recommended Rush Hour
the 2006-10-29 Sunday Fetch-it, in which I recommended Memorize
the 2006-11-04 Saturday Fetch-it, in which I recommended Shack Up
the 2006-11-11 Saturday Fetch-it, in which I recommended Animator
the 2006-11-17 Friday Fetch-it, in which I recommended Whirlwind
the 2006-11-25 Saturday Fetch-it, in which I recommended ¡12!

(Cue the title sequence.)

(Smash-cut to many years later, by which time the entire blog is collected in one place, and this whole thing makes no sense.)

Take the Drowned in Sound pledge

2007-05-22T13:15:00+00:00

Refuse to comment on anything rated 8 out of 10.

Nine

2007-05-17T17:59:00+00:00

On “on Volta”

2007-05-09T04:37:00+00:00

I've written some words about Volta, Björk's new album, on my Last.fm journal. A good number of them are quite orthogonal to what might be considered sensible. Yes, I'm aware that my interpretation of the album's narrative is entirely unique.

For posterity, here are those words — since deleted from Last.fm — courtesy of archive.org.

on Volta

8 May 2007, 1:37am

I bought Volta today, what with it being released today and everything. And here was me, like a fool, expecting an album of songs like Earth Intruders. I should know better.

By the way, this isn't a coherent review—just some thoughts. (The Friday Fetch-it will be back soon.)

Volta's sleeve is pretty elaborate (the limited edition, anyway)—the CD and DVD live in the middle of a five-layer Russian-doll–style nest, and the front artwork lives on a sticker that holds together the two halves of the gatefold.

Declare Independence is a blatant contender for a future single. The nearest comparisons to other Björk songs are Army of Me, Pluto and (especially) the Alec Empire mixes of Jóga; but it also sounds kind of like Let Me See Your Eyes, Dance This Mess Around and the start of Banquet (Phones' Disco Edit). (If you download one track off this album...)

I See Who You Are and Hope sound like Colleen—that'll be the plucked strings then. To call The Dull Flame Of Desire “epic” would be lazy but fitting; it has good drumming.

A couple of the tracks sample brass from Drawing Restraint 9 and dramatic or lamentative brass is present throughout much of the album. Volta sounds like it takes place partly aboard a very slowly sinking steam ship, partly in a zen garden and partly inside a drum. And occasionally in Björk's head,

more on Volta

added 8 May, 11:28pm

Actually I think Declare Independence is much closer to Enjoy than to Army of Me. It's kind of like the bastard child of Pluto and Enjoy only with more noise, 10%-Dalek vocals and four times as loud.

The songs on Volta each share a lot of elements with various earlier Björk songs, both sonically and thematically; I won't try to show off by listing every connection I can think of 'cos you'd probably spot them anyway.

(Warning: the following paragraphs were invented inside my head and make absolutely no sense whatsoever; any similarity to any album by Björk is entirely coincidental)

Our story begins—inside a drum in the middle of Africa—with Earth Intruders. Timbaland's there and everything's generally a bit mental: Space Invaders™, subtly renamed to avoid legal difficulties, are trying to take over the... drum. Fortuitously, and quite inexplicably, a steam ship arrives and makes a lot of noise for one minute and thirty-one seconds.

The ship is the venue for most of the album. In Wanderlust, Björk sets sail aboard the S.S. Drawing Restraint 9, leaving Timbaland behind. She meets Antony Matthew Barney Hegarty, the ship's captain, and Björk and Antony perform The Dull Flame Of Desire from deep within the bowels of the ship's hull (because Antony didn't know all of the words to Unison).

Innocence is a flashback to Björk's time with Timbaland... in the drum... when Björk discovered another side to herself (place your bets now on what this is going to end up being) and slowly comes to terms with it.

I See Who You Are, in which Björk admires Antony's body (gender notwithstanding) and decides it's pretty tasty-looking (bear with me on this), takes place in a zen garden inside Björk's head (which is still inside the ship, on top of the rest of her).

Vertebræ By Vertebræ is set back on S.S. DR9—it turns out Björk is a werewolf (or possibly a werewhale).

During Pneumonia, the now-werewolfily-schizophrenic Björk watches herself ravage everyone on the ship (including Antony), despite her own protestations.

Hope cuts back to the zen garden in Björk's head, in which she ponders the ethical ramifications of her werewolfy alter ego's rampage.

Declare Independence takes place inside the ship's engine as it crashes into the ocean floor (Björk ate the pilot, remember?). In her last moments, Björk considers the plight of Timbaland and all those other people who live in the... drum... at the hands of the Space Invaders™.

My Juvenile is set once again in the zen garden in Björk's head / the afterlife, where Antony (as ‹the conscience›) forgives her. 'Cos, y'know, he's a nice guy like that.

It's kind of like the film Titanic, only with a werewolf instead of an iceberg, Antony and Björk instead of Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet, and no string quartet. And Kate rips Leo to bits with her teeth.

Six

2007-05-06T06:11:00+00:00

I've completely redesigned the site again and I'm calling this version Mooquackwooftweetmeow 6. I decided that the top of each entry's page was overwhelmed with a lot of stuff that needn't be there. Someone landing on an entry for the first time doesn't really care what the blog's title is—they just want to read the entry. Similarly, while the often-lengthy tagline—in prime position at the top of the page—used to be a bold statement of quirkiness, I began to find that it just looked silly—annoying, even.

What else was wrong with the old design?

One of the æsthetic ideas behind Arcturus (and thus Vega) was that the sections' backgrounds got gradually darker further down the page—essentially a poor man's subtle gradient down the sidebar. So the sections of the page were all positioned next to each other—connected together. With Canopus I changed to a one-column layout for the main body, to focus on the actual entries. This mostly broke the subtle gradient effect and left the front page with a significantly different layout to the entries' pages.

So the site's layout was a bit of a mess, really. The Mooquackwhatnotbot, my trusty website-building script, has always been a bit of a mess and it wanted tidying up as well. I finally found out how use XSL parameters in xalan (the program that the Mooquackwhatnotbot uses to produce all the site's pages)—I can now tell it to transform mqwtm.xml using bigbadxsltemplate.xsl, with the keyword cheese, which has simplified a lot. It means I can now use one template for every page on the site, and just pass in parameters telling xalan which page to produce.

What's changed?

I've rebuilt the entire site from scratch; the Mooquackwhatnotbot isn't entirely rewritten, but it is heavily modified. There are some things that I haven't added back in—nothing is still here just because it used to be. For example, there are a lot fewer dates flying about—I decided they were unnecessary and just added clutter. However, each entry still has a timestamp for when it was written and, if applicable, for when it was last altered (substantively—I don't count correcting spelling mistakes, for example). I haven't reincluded the content pulled from other sites (“Teleprose”) yet, but it will be back soon. The shameless promotion's gone, too; that might come back if I can find a decent way to do it. More likely, though, is that I'll just write entries pimping good stuff instead.

There are now archive pages for each year, month and day in which an entry was written. I'd always meant to do them, which was part of the reasoning behind the short-lived date-based entry URIs, but I hadn't worked out how to make the Whatnotbot do such tricks. The Recent Entries page was an attempt at doing something like that and so it, too, has vanished into the æther.

How did you come up with the new design?

For the new design—Spica—I disconnected everything. All the page's sections float in space, with a title floating nearby; a strong border separates and connects the title and its subject. With Spica I wanted to make much bolder use of colour than Canopus. The initial idea called for boldly-coloured borders; the real thing's also ended up with a deep background, contrasting with the light background behind the text.

A lot of TV programmes (particularly recent American dramas) have their title sequences at the end of the first part; I thought this might be a good idea to apply to the site. So I got rid of the site's title from the top of the page, and put the entry's title front-and-centre instead. This was the starting point for Spica. I've kept the links to other parts of the page at the top—they are actually useful: maybe you're trying to go a few entries forwards, so you just want the link to the next entry, and don't actually want to read this entry. The skip-links save lots of scrolling, and are pretty essential for keeping the site easy to use for everyone (especially keyboard-users).

At the bottom of every entry is essentially a replica of the front page—I'm embracing my bottom; been doing it since Canopus, and over at The Twaddle. Or rather: the front page is just an entry page minus the entry—a generic reception page. This was easy to do now that every page shares a single template. I did consider putting all the bottom-stuff on the archive pages as well, but it didn't seem right: no-one's expected to read to the bottom of an archive page, a list of other things to read.

What does the text look like?

One thing that wasn't broken in Canopus was the selection of fonts. Vega had used Georgia for titles and links, and a generic sans-serif font for the main text; Canopus changed that to Gentium for titles and links, and Franklin Gothic Book for the main text. Spica uses Gentium, URW Palladio L or Palatino Linotype (the first one that's available) for titles, and Franklin Gothic Book or DejaVu Sans Condensed for everything else.

The positioning of text in Canopus was a bit haphazard, though. Spica is largely composed to a vertical rhythm, although not entirely. The primary line-height is 2em but the page is laid out on a 1em grid, so there's kind of a syncopated, usually-2em–sometimes-1em rhythm. The 2em line-height leaves a generous gap between lines; there's a full line gap between paragraphs; and the line-length is limited to 49em—all of which should make the text thoroughly easy to read.

In-text headings are also set into 2em lines, which maintains the rhythm, but they have an extra blank line above them. This allows the headings to be big and clear without feeling cramped, and visually separates the heading from the preceding paragraph. The headings are all big enough that they don't need to be bold to stand out—serif fonts tend to look not-so-sexy when boldened.

Links are no longer set apart by being in the serif font: Gentium looks small compared to the sans-serif fonts at the same size (because its x-height is relatively small), so mixing the two together tended to look awkward. So links are now just shown in colour. It's a dark colour (actually the same one as the page's background) but it's sufficiently distinct from the grey body text without standing out too much. Unvisited links in the main text; links to unvisited entries; and links you're pointing at also receive an underline, or a border for images.

How about the Starburst and those other pictures?

The starburst background from Vega and Canopus has survived, but it's no longer semi-transparent; that was a throwback to Shades of Grey's almost-topographical presentation of the underlying HTML code. I decided early on that I didn't want a patterned background for the main text (as well as “no gradients, shadows or trendy stuff”), so the starburst only appears in the page's background. The content is all contained in solidly-coloured boxes that float in front of it. The starburst gives the design a sense of layering and a real depth—it looks like there's a lot of space behind the front layer (and the front layer is floating in that space).

The starburst also appears behind the main title on the front page and on archive pages. The border underneath provides a strong visual base for the intricate shape to sit on, and directly connects the site's identity with the design's most striking motif. (If I could have written bollocks like that when I was 15 I'd've done much better in my Design Tech GCSE.) Some entry pages feature their own decorative shape behind the site's title, to give the page some identity of its own. Most of these decorations are made from photos that can be found amongst my photo art; the rest should be self-explanatory.

Six? Wasn't the last version 3.1? Where did 4 and 5 go?

I did call the last version “3.1”, but it was actually the fifth Mooquackwooftweetmeow. “Version 0” was a naff page of randomness at the now-recently-defunct Express Page, which I made when I was 14. It was actually called “MooQuackWoofTweetMeow”. It had background music, marquees, a guestbook and animated GIFs.

“Version 1”, the second version, was a pretty unmemorable page or two living at GeoCities. The content was less absurdly random than its predecessor, but no more worthful. There were no background music or marquees here, but I can't say with certainty that no GIFs were seen to animate. And there was a guestbook.

By now I'd completely forgotten about version 0, so I called the third version “version 2”, which is how the dodgy numbering came about. This version was the first one with any sort of thought behind it. The concept was that it was a 2-D site—the entire thing was on one page with each section occupying its own column. Being made with GeoCities's “WYSIWYG” page-building applet, it was a horribly-inaccessible stew of worst practices, made largely out of JPEG images. The content was mostly an exercise in exaggerated arrogance and verbosity, although I do still find the heading for the Some Things column funny. This one still exists online; I'd steer clear of the guestbook, though.

The fourth version—“version 3.0”—was a hand-coded, best-practices site with a weblog, that lived at FreeWebs. Most of its content survived into the fifth version—“version 3.1”—hence the .1 version number. Both versions are described a bit in the welcome entry I wrote for Mooquackwooftweetmeow 5. There's absolutely no chance of me throwing away everything on Mooquackwooftweetmeow, so either it's stuck at “version 3.x” forever, or I do away with the dodgy version numbers.

And so this is Mooquackwooftweetmeow 6.

Eight (“A Taste of Power”)

2007-04-04T06:04:00+00:00

Seven (“Electrical Room”)

2007-04-03T07:44:00+00:00

Six

2007-04-03T07:43:00+00:00

Five (“Moon, Light”)

2007-04-03T07:42:00+00:00

Four

2007-04-03T07:41:00+00:00

Three

2007-04-03T07:40:00+00:00

Two

2007-04-03T07:39:00+00:00

One

2007-04-03T07:38:00+00:00

I'll be brand new, brand new tomorrow; a little bit tired, but brand new

2006-12-31T14:32:00+00:00

If I wanted to spend the new year being reclusive, I'd start playing Homogenic at 23:21:01, so that Pluto ends at midnight.

Keep It Simple, Stupid

2006-12-19T05:34:00+00:00

The “Stupid” shouldn't be there; “Keep It Suitably Simple” is much better, and even provides the requisite two “S”s for the acronym.

“Burning a Path for Us to Share” (the 2006-11-25 Saturday Fetch-it)

2006-11-25T19:22:00+00:00

Seven months before they recorded Twelve for Give Me a Wall (I just bought that this Thursday 'cos I rock), “spazz-rock heroes” ¡Forward, Russia! recorded another, unreleased, version at a place called Ghost Town in Leeds. They said so.

The most distinct difference (if there's anything distinct about a ¡Forward, Russia! track) is the vocal on “your conscience is low” at the end of each chorus. (Well, it's only a chorus to the extent that there even are any in a ¡Forward, Russia! track.) In the Sahara Sound version (the one on the single and album), Tom Woodhead sings it, using a grand total of two notes for the word “low”. By contrast, in the Ghost Town version it's a single, drawn-out, unmelodious, much-less-reassuring gasp/yelp. The album version sounds more like “your conscience is low... but y'know what? I've come to terms with that, and it's OK with me”; but this way is more uncomfortable, suggests urgency and some sort of crisis and leaves the song hanging more at the end. It makes me want to react rather than just sit there satisfied that everything's gonna be fine.

From the start the Ghost Town version is more chaotic and less tidy; it seems less premeditated. The introductory guitar lick is distorted – perhaps even a little bit jangly – and it doesn't stick with surgical precision to a single note at a time.

I've repeatedly compared ¡Forward, Russia! to Maxïmo Park (well, I've compared lots of things to both of them at the same time, but that's pretty much the same thing) and the comparison is particularly apt for the Ghost Town version. Like The Russia's, Maxïmo Park's songs tend to have a lot of distinct sections, and the song flits between them in different orders throughout. Often in the transition between sections, the music comes to a halt for a second, there's a single drum tap or beat in the middle, and then the bass resumes and the song sets off again, usually beginning a little more subdued than before and then building up again.

Twelve does this after the choruses (of which there are only about two, depending on how you count), and the halt is more distinct in the Ghost Town version. There are fewer layers of noise going on and so less to stop, plus the word “low” doesn't carry on for quite as long so the guitar is bashed into you a few more times before stopping. It sounds particularly Maxïmo Parky the second time (before “Ninety nine...”), when there's only bass and no lead guitar upon resumption. Also like The Park, Twelve crams craploads of music into the time interval it takes Sigur Rós to complete a single note.

And just when you think the song's finished – short of two minutes in – it goes back to “But he couldn't find another way” and skips through another quick verse before finally relenting.

The album version's pretty good as well. If you download one song this week, make it ¡12!. Stay tuned.

Planet X-4: Pluto is a Planet; so is Eris; so is Sedna; and so are Charon, the Moon, Ceres, Titan and Quaoar

2006-11-21T00:55:00+00:00

This summer, a horde of astronomers decided what the word “planet” means. Their definition is a sensible one; essentially for an object to be an officially-sanctioned, bona-fide, regulation Planet™, it must:

orbit the Sun directly
be mostly round
not share its orbit with lots of other similarly-sized objects
pay a £20,000 registration fee to Sir Patrick Moore

...I made that last one up.

Furthermore, the same gaggle of telescope-botherers decided that a “Dwarf Planet” is anything that:

orbits the Sun directly
is mostly round
does share its orbit with lots of other similarly-sized objects
has a long grey beard

So the only difference between a “Planet” and a “Dwarf Planet” is the requirement of having “cleared the neighbourhood”. This means that a Planet is overwhelmingly massive and has an overwhelming gravitational influence on nearby objects. And therefore all the objects with which it shares a similar orbit will have either: been flung away; assumed an orbit that is governed by the planet (such as going into orbit around it); or just crashed straight into it and thereby ceased to exist. A Planet clearly dominates the vicinity of its orbital path.

By the way, the last Dwarf Planet criterion up there was another comedy fabrication. You guessed that, right?

This means that the difference between a Planet and a Dwarf Planet is not just its size. If you stick a fairly small chunk of rock in an orbit on its own, with only a few measly specks of dust for company, it'll easily bully them into submission. But put the same chunk of rock in the ring with something much bigger than it, and it'll become the larger object's biatch without hesitation.

So the Dwarfiness or otherwise of a Planet-like object depends on whether or not it's surrounded by similarly heavy objects, rather than any intrinsic property of the thing itself, for example its size. And so “dwarf” is a bit misleading.

Note also that a Dwarf Planet is not a Planet. The name makes it sound like a sub-category of “Planet”, but it's not. Similarly, a minor planet (an asteroid or similar) is not a Planet under the IAU/UAI's definition of what constitutes a Planet.

And that's very confusing.

Even before the “re”definition, people had been calling asteroids “minor planets”. That name comes loaded with the implication that the other things known as “planets” were, more specifically, “major planets”. Whenever anyone used the word “planet” without qualification to mean only major planets it was because: they didn't know that minor planets existed; there was sufficient context to make the adjective unnecessary (such as comparing planets to stars or “asteroids”); or they were just being lazy. (Y'know, like on the several occasions when I've said that Pluto isn't a planet.)

So I reckon the use of the word “planet” in place of “major planet” has always just been shorthand – the unqualified term has always been used loosely. This is why I think that while the definition the IAU came up with was good, it should have been defining the term “major planet” (or perhaps “classical planet”) rather than just “planet”.

Let's consider the situation a bit more sensibly.

Everything Is The Same

Mars is a giant rock. Yes, it's got some water and various other chemical substances lurking in and around it, but that just makes it a wet rock. An asteroid is just a smaller chunk of rock with a fair amount of ice chucked in for good measure. A comet is just a particularly icy chunk of rock that exhibits a tail as this ice evaporates. Earth is just another wet rock, with some animals and plants on it. If you chuck your drink on a mossy rock and then stand on it, that is then also a wet rock with an animal and some plants on it. A pebble is a smaller rock, possibly with a few animals or plants nearby.

The only differences between any of these are their size, their shape and the details of their composition. (Note that in planetology, “ice” needn't be water – it means any simple chemical compound, usually but not necessarily a solid. For example, Uranus and Neptune contain water ice, ammonia ice and methane ice in various proportions.) So what's a sensible way to categorise them?

The universe is generally homogeneous – everything is made of the same stuff. Some clever people pointed telescopes at the most distant galaxies they could find and spectroscopically analysed the hell out of them, and it turned out that they were made up of much the same stuff as our galaxy. That's how we know. There's no enlightenment to be had by categorising things based on their composition, because everything's pretty much the same anyway.

Size is also a dodgy naming criterion because sizes are usually continuously distributed. You'd have to pick a number and say that anything slightly bigger than that number is a widget, and anything slightly smaller is a fudget. Then if it turns out you measured its size wrongly, your widget becomes a fudget.

Picking an object up and dumping it somewhere else doesn't change what the object actually is. That's pretty obvious. (Well, unless you stick some bread in a toaster, but then it's the heat that's causing it to change, not the movement; anyhow, the protons, neutrons and electrons are all still the same, just rearranged.) So a body orbiting a planet wouldn't become something else if it suddenly started orbiting the Sun.

It's not even sensible to use an object's shape as a naming criterion. It's impossible to quantify by how much an irregularly shaped blob differs from some pre-defined shape. Even if it was possible, you'd still have to pick a boundary and we'd be back to the widget/fudget scenario.

So let's just call anything in space that's important enough to be identified individually a “planet”.

...Unless there's nuclear fusion going on inside it and it's therefore a star.

I don't care whether it's successfully bullied everything out of its way, or if it's been the victim of the bullying; nor whether it goes 'round the Sun in a near-circular orbit in the plane of the ecliptic, or if its orbit's the shape of Bert's head and it's flying 'round the Sun at a funky angle; I don't care if it's the shape of Bert's head; I don't even care if it's going 'round another planet instead of the Sun. It still the same thing – it's still a planet.

This is actually what most people mean when they say “planet”, and that's why minor planets and Dwarf Planets have the word “planet” in their title, and why the constituent particles of Saturn's rings aren't called planets.

That's not to say that all planets are equally important, though, and it's wrong to suggest that a planet like Earth or even Saturn is equivalent to Jupiter in magnitude. Jupiter's barycentre with the Sun lies above the Sun's visible-light surface; this is one of the proposed criteria for distinguishing binary planets from primary-and-satellite pairs of planets – it's that big.

Some Things Are Different

I said earlier that moving something doesn't change what it is, but that's not strictly true. If a planet shares its orbit with thousands of other planets, it's a member of a larger population. If it's the only thing in its orbit, it is essentially the population. This is the difference between being an object in that orbit and being the object in that orbit. The latter is a major planet – an IAU-sanctioned Planet™; I suppose you could also call them “individual planets”. (It's also the difference between being part of a loaf and being a sandwich. Plus or minus some filling, of course.)

Another of the IAU's criteria for Planets and Dwarf Planets is that they are generally round. Roundness is a useful criterion to describe planets, as it provides an overview of their size and structure and, crucially, the gravitational influence they exert over themselves and over nearby planets.

It's not an absolute, on/off, binary property though; there's no certain mass where you can add one more microgram of dust and the object suddenly stops being “not round” and instantly starts being “round”. It's a gradual thing, and it's subject to a lot of conditions, such as the body's composition and its temperature (which in turn is related to its distance from the Sun).

In fact, there are three general shapes corresponding to a planet's self-gravity: not round at all, round, and totally-über-super-well-round. I shall explain.

For a planet to qualify as an IAU Planet™ or Dwarf Planet™, it must be in hydrostatic equilibrium. This means that rather than being simply a cluster of rocks held together by their mutual gravitational attraction, a (Dwarf) Planet is massive enough that its own gravity distorts its shape into a sphere. The planet's rotation will also distort its shape into an ellipsoid, but that's inconsequential – it's the effect of the planet's gravity that's important.

Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune are often referred to as Gas Giants; Uranus and Neptune are sometimes also referred to as Ice Giants. These names aren't particularly helpful – the composition of each planet can be classified and sub-classified as much as you like. So let's call them all “giant planets” for now. Like all (Dwarf) Planets, they are in hydrostatic equilibrium and like most things, they're made up of a variety of different substances.

But unlike other planets, a giant planet exerts so much gravitational force that there is no definite boundary between the layers of different substances inside the planet; the transitions between layers are smooth. There is no surface and no atmosphere, just a mostly-symmetrical sphere of stuff that gradually attenuates to nothing as you go further out. This is the aforementioned so-round-it-hurts state, and it's the same sort of thing as goes on inside a star. (This doesn't make giant planets stars, mind – there's no nuclear fusion happening inside giant planets.)

To avoid naming them by size, you might call these self-gravitationally-internally-smooth things “fluid planets”, as the entire the planet is in a fluid state. (“Gas planet” is a little misleading, because the pressure deep inside the planet can compress gases into liquids and solids.)

So, planets can be classified broadly into three categories: “spheroidal planets” in hydrostatic equilibrium, “fluid planets” with no definite layers or surface, and “irregular planets”, which includes anything else notable enough to be identified.

Grey's Summary of Stuff in the Solar System Based On What's Actually There Rather Than On Dogma

Firstly, there's a star, the Sun. Nuclear fusion happens inside it, releasing lots and lots of shiny energy.
There are also lots of planets. There are ten major planetary systems, divided into three broad categories:
- There are four planetary systems with a fluid planet at their centre:
  - The Jupiter system, comprising the fluid planet Jupiter; four spheroidal planets (Ganymede, Callisto, Io and Europa); at least 59 irregular planets; and several coherent rings of débris
  - The Saturn system, comprising the fluid planet Saturn; seven spheroidal planets (Titan, Rhea, Iapetus, Dione, Tethys, Enceladus and Mimas); at least 49 irregular planets; and several coherent rings of débris
  - The Neptune system, comprising the fluid planet Neptune; the spheroidal planet Triton; at least 12 irregular planets; and several coherent rings of débris
  - The Uranus system, comprising the fluid planet Uranus; five spheroidal planets (Titania, Oberon, Ariel, Umbriel and Miranda); at least 22 irregular planets; and several coherent rings of débris
- There are four planetary systems with a spheroidal planet other than a fluid planet at their centre:
  - The Earth system, comprising two spheroidal planets, Earth and Moon
  - The Venus system, consisting solely of the spheroidal planet Venus
  - The Mars system, comprising the spheroidal planet Mars and two irregular planets, Phobos and Deimos
  - The Mercury system, consisting solely of the spheroidal planet Mercury
- There are two annular planetary systems – rings populated evenly with planets:
  - The asteroid belt, comprising at least two spheroidal planets (Ceres and Vesta); and hundreds of thousands of irregular planets
  - The Kuiper belt, comprising at least 800 (but probably hundreds of thousands of) irregular planets; and many spheroidal planets, including the binary spheroidal planets Pluto and Charon and their irregular satellite planets, Nix and Hydra; the spheroidal planet Haumea and its irregular satellite planets, Hi'iaka and Namaka; and the spheroidal planets Makemake, Quaoar, Orcus, Varuna and Ixion
- There are also lots of other minor planets strewn about all over the place, many of which orbit beyond Neptune, but not all. Some of them are arranged into distinct structures:
  - The scattered disc, a roughly disc-shaped collection of planets beyond Neptune, scattered there by an interaction with a major planet, that includes the spheroidal planet Eris and its irregular satellite planet Dysnomia
  - The Oort cloud, a spherical cloud of icy minor planets about a thousand times further out than the Kuiper belt, of which the spheroidal planet Sedna may be a member; planets from the Oort Cloud that fall towards the Sun and exhibit a tail of evaporating ices are called “comets”.
  - Trojans, groups of small planets following the same orbit as another much larger planet, but 60° ahead of or behind it
Arranged in order of distance from the Sun, the planetary systems are: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, the asteroid belt, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune and the Kuiper belt. The scattered disc extends from the Kuiper belt out to at least twenty times its outer radius; the Oort cloud begins at about fifty times the Kuiper belt's outer radius.
Finally, there are lots of miscellaneous small blobs of rock and ice, and plenty of dust and débris floating about all over the place.
(Actually, there are also lots of photons, neutrinos and other elementary particles hanging around that have been emitted from the Sun or other stars, but they're mostly irrelevant.)
(And there's dark matter – we can only account for one-tenth of the mass that the universe must have; the missing 90% is called dark matter. Maybe if we used the other 90% of our brains, we'd find it.)

So, to Summarise,

Everything is a planet. Even wee, small, diddy, tiny things are planets if you care enough about them to identify them.

“Knocking the Aeroplanes Down with Stones” (the 2006-11-17 Friday Fetch-it)

2006-11-18T01:56:00+00:00

Do the Whirlwind is a combination of twinkling chimes; garbled chatter; an improbably catchy bassline; an outro; a wood block counter-rhythm; some bongos; multiple Australian singers; the word "quivers"; a cymbal; twee-æsthetic melodies; some increasingly sluggish trombones; a 16-bit video depicting the band as a motley accumulation of cool kids dance/march/strutting along through a succession of weird and wonderful, side-scrolling locales; some increasingly sluggish saxophones; miscellaneous grooveability; probably a sitar; a chorus of harmonising vocals; tapes rewinding; mostly-nonsensical lyrics; some dings; some pops; some whistles; the word "abandon"; plenty of handclaps; and a single extra beat when the phrase "the beat" crops up.

...which it therefore does twice, obviously. If you download one song this week, make it Whirlwind. Stay tuned.

“Promises of Passion and Adventure” (the 2006-11-11 Saturday Fetch-it)

2006-11-11T18:46:00+00:00

Animator passes the whistle test. After hearing it once or twice, about a month later I remembered the chorus and the instrumental hook just from the title. Yay me.

Guillemotsishly, Pull Tiger Tail perform under almost-plausible pseudonyms – Marcus Ardere, the mild-mannered janitor, becomes Marcus Firefly; the already-moderately-implausibly-named David McKenzie-McConville is transformed into David "Davo" Huevo upon eating a banana; and by night Jack Navarone is the evil Jack O'Moriarty.

Animator begins with the guitar hook, which uses a grand total of three notes and (once again) is bouncily Fingers in the Factoriesish. A bassline that sounds vaguely like Y Control joins in, then lots of percussion.

In the verse the instruments drop to accompaniment and focus shifts to the lead vocal; the verse's structure and accompaniment are reminiscent of a Maxïmo Park or ¡Forward, Russia! song.

The lead vocals hold the chorus – the title repeated lots – together. They're part-¡Forward, Russia! (but less frantically mental), part-Tom Robinson (but nestle in amongst the instrumentation better) and at times part-Morrissey (but less disdain/depression/apathy–inducing). The backing vocals add a succession of rising "aaah"s to the chorus, which lend the song an epic-like-Dante's-Divine-Comedy-not-like-Doves feel; they're almost dæmonic.

The guitar hook pops up half-way through the chorus, and reappears between the first chorus and the second verse. After the second chorus the lead-up to the bridge is a lot quieter, led by a legato vocal line (of "oooh"s) with the bass playing a take on the hook.

In the bridge and final chorus the accompaniment goes at full pelt, and escalates with added hi-hats and increasingly frantic bass half-way through the bridge. The lead singer (presumably the Firefly bloke, since his name's first) comes closest to unrestraint during the last chorus (prompting accusations of Morrissiness).

A ten-second guitar solo carries the song to its climax, before returning to the hook to close the song.

Now try whistling it. If you download one song this week, make it Animator. Stay tuned.

“I Bet You Find Life Hard to Live with” (the 2006-11-04 Saturday Fetch-it)

2006-11-04T14:23:00+00:00

Shack Up is dead funky. It begins with bass, percussion, some sultry breaths and clip-clop sounds going off left, right and centre, forming a funk bassline. That's how it sounds, but on closer inspection all of the various unidentifiable noises are intentional – they're repeated two bars later. Gradually a guitar joins in, and then the funk escalates, and then it escalates again.

This is the first twenty seconds.

They're twenty of the grooviest seconds I can recall hearing, and I've heard Pick Up the Pieces. As Camille starts singing, the funkstruments seem to briefly recoil a little as if accommodating her. As the verse progresses they're joined by what sound like (and what I'm gonna choose to refer to as) panpipes, playing a simple tune over the top.

During the instrumental break, which essentially serves as a chorus, the guitar and panpipes play off each other in call-and-response style, with the panpipes carrying the lead melody. They sit out the first couple of lines in the second verse and the funkstrumentation again minimises to accommodate Camille. Of course, when it all resumes it's groovier than ever.

At the end of the second instrumental break, a few disco-style twinkles “conclude” the song and prompt the obligatory applause. Yep, false ending. The funk beat resumes, backed with general breathiness from Camille, and almost seems to peter out before a reprise of the first verse kicks in, funked up to the max.

Throughout, the notes the panpipes hit are often jazzily distorted or discordant, in fact the whole thing has a certain jazziness about it, complementing Camille's voice. Her vocals are half-whispered, half-moaned, increasingly so throughout the song. During the second verse, her “shack up”s (which, in Banbarra's original and A Certain Ratio's more famous cover, were a response to the lead vocal's call) descend to a whisper, but by the song's conclusion are emphatic.

Add to this miscellaneous breaths and the occasional whispered “shack up” and the whole thing exudes sultry.

It's not bossa nova. If you download one song this week, Shack Up, baby. Stay tuned.

(It later transpired that the singer was someone other than Camille.)

Dear LazyWeb, How Do I Make iTunes “Play Next In Party Shuffle” from Windows' Command Line?

2006-10-30T03:30:00+00:00

Hello LazyWeb. I know I always go to Wikipedia first, and then to Google, but you're my real favourite. Really. So could you help me out please?

See, I've got this noise-making program called iTunes, and you can use it to play musics with. Now, usually, when I play a music with it, I use Party Shuffle, along with a very complex set of smart playlists that I refer to collectively as “Autopilot”.

I invented Autopilot to play me the music that I most probably want to hear, but unfortunately it's not clever enough to figure out when I have a specific hankering for, say, Memorize, or Iwe, or even Shoreline.

“Psychic” is not an available criterion in iTunes. So I add songs to the Party Shuffle “manually” every so often. And it'd be nice if I could do that by right-clicking a file and selecting a “Play Next In Party Shuffle” option. To be able to do that, I need to know what command line parameters to pass to iTunes.exe... and I was hoping, LazyWeb, that you might know something about it.

Wikipedia's far too encyclopedic to include something as grubbily practical as command line parameters, and Google could only tell me how to add songs to my library or load my iPod. I knew Google wasn't really my friend – it didn't even know that I don't have an iPod. Silly Google.

Anyway, LazyWeb, what command line parameters do I need to pass to iTunes to make it “Play Next In Party Shuffle”? Answers on a postcard to lazywebplaynextinpartyshuffle@gkn.me.uk

“You Threw Pennies In and Wished” (the 2006-10-29 Sunday Fetch-it)

2006-10-30T02:01:00+00:00

Memorize the City begins with electric guitar jangle, backed with electric organ chords, which is soon joined by hi-hats and then bass as the song gets up to speed. Katie Sketch's vocals are subdued and effortless – she's clearly not setting out to prove anything. The tune is quite simple; it doesn't hurry from one note to the next. This dwelling on one note really drums the words in.

During the chorus the vocals remain subdued, and only occasionally stray from a single, insistent note. The guitar carries the main melody, with the singing and the bass each assuming a different counter-melody.

Coming out of the chorus, the second verse uses a different melody to the first and sounds more like an addendum to the chorus. By half-way through the second verse, the tune has rejoined that of the first verse. Again the lyrics are punched in at the end of the second verse, with almost mechanical determination. Sketch tersely sings "...more. More. More. More." leading into the warm guitar melody of the chorus.

The bridge reassumes the tune of the second verse, as the organ provides an extra melody and the lead guitar hammers out a rhythm very reminiscent of Fingers in the Factories. The guitar, organ and drums build to a crescendo and then subside, giving way to the lead guitar and an instrumental chorus.

Unusually, the instrumental feels more agreeable and has less tension than the sung choruses. Reduced to just the primary melody and without Katie's brooding vocals, it evokes less hostility. To cap it off, there are tambourine shakes and handclaps on every other line, but shrewdly not on all of them. I don't know why, but somehow it seems better that they're absent from the second and fourth lines.

As the lyrics come full-circle, the guitar, organ and vocals combine to lead the song up to its pounding conclusion.

Handclaps. If you download one song this week, make it Memorize. Stay tuned.

The Greatest Comeback Since Lazarus

2006-10-27T02:17:00+00:00

It's nearly November...

“In Your Eyes that Certain Shine” (the 2006-10-20 Friday Fetch-it)

2006-10-20T21:21:00+00:00

I can't figure out why I like Rush Hour quite so much. It uses the same driving 8-beat throughout; the chord progression is bog-standard; the instruments are probably all synthesised; the lyrics aren't particularly inventive or clever; Jane Wiedlin's vocals are nice, but not astounding; you can spot the guitar solo a mile off; and at the end it just repeats to fade.

In fact it's almost stereotypical of a 1980s pop song.

But it is impeccably produced. At no point does either the singing or the backing sound at all jarring or contrived. The entire song flows seamlessly from one part to the next, largely due to the way the vocals spill over from one bar into the next. So by the time the song finishes, you don't realise you've just spent the last four minutes listening to it.

And Jane's singing is nice – very nice – without sounding sugar-coated; her personality hasn't been overproduced away.

And she played Joan of Arc in Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure – what more could you want? If you download one song this week, make it Rush Hour. Stay tuned.

“Something's Drawn Me Here Again” (the 2006-10-15 Sunday Fetch-it)

2006-10-14T23:54:00+00:00

There's drama in Give Me Strength right from the outset. In the intro the droning chords, simple drumbeat and ominous electric guitar riff set up an intense atmosphere, which is maintained by the grungy guitar strums that lead into the verse.

Dischordant, eerie electronic warbles appear amongst the brooding guitars and vocals, half-way through the first verse and again at the end. Going into the bridge they give way to rumbling guitar, joined in the chorus by lurking, offbeat percussion, that sounds like steel drums heard through an unnaturally heavy fog.

All of this accompaniment is offset by Over the Rhine's usual country-esque singing. The vocals come to the fore going into the second chorus, when the instrumental melody recedes, its echo lingering, as a swirling ambience swells to engulf the resonating vocals. All of this noise is carried into and throughout the second chorus. It all disappears in an instant as the final line is sung, a cappella, and resonates into the silence.

When I first heard the song, I thought it was Dido singing; it's not, but she does share a writing credit.

So she's not entirely awful. If you download one song this week, make it Give Me Strength. Stay tuned.

“Up Her Dosage” (the 2006-07-14 Friday Fetch-it)

2006-07-15T00:38:00+00:00

Poison conjures up an image of a stark, white room in a futuristic hospital; in which, on a white cuboid table, Gigi Edgley reclines and is inspected as alien by the bespectacled, plummy-voiced retro-sci-fi staff, much to her amusement.

The first minute is dominated by this staff's mostly-impenetrable dialogue, textured with Gigi's breaths and the throbbing hums of background machinery. This use of quaint spoken voice samples is quite reminiscent of Just Give 'em Whiskey.

After a minute this gives way to the actual song; its backbone is an almost ambient, liquid combination of hi-hat, synth, bass, a funk-infused pseudo-guitar line, some eerie whistling, and miscellaneous blips, whirs, breaths and distortion, all of which wouldn't sound out of place in The X-Files.

Gigi's vocals are breathy and sensual; their layering is æthereal and eludes to a fantastical dislocation from reality, with an accompanying inquisitiveness. The instrumentation – especially the mutedness of the grunge-guitar towards the end – reinforces this.

By the time the voices re-emerge four minutes in, the whole thing is sounding very much like a drug-induced altered state of conciousness, and eventually descends into catatonic incoherence.

Yeah, her out of Farscape. If you download one track this week, make it Poison. Stay tuned.

“I View from Afar” / “Once I Have Found the Words” (the 2006-07-07 Friday Fetch-its)

2006-07-08T00:47:00+00:00

I often bang on about songs building tension; here that shall be mostly implicit. Confide in Me begins ponderously, almost coming to a halt twice in the first minute. In the first prelude, the sweeping strings and vocals lend an air of tragedy, and the minor-key piano suggests drama. The sound of distorted voices, as if coming over a radio, suggests some sort of concealment or conspiracy, especially since it's so quiet, hardly noticeable. The whole thing feels nocturnal.

After the first pause the second prelude uses none of the same instrumental pieces. Here the piano is major-key, there's an electric guitar flourish in the background, and although the muted voices remain, they no longer sound sinister – more like a conversation. (You can see where this is going, can't you?) This bit sounds like a dawn to the first prelude's night. Or perhaps each is the introduction of a character, the first the confider, the second the confidant. (It's all very GCSE English.)

The intro-proper begins after the other pause and the main string loop begins, full of anticipation. The drumbeat kicks in and flecks of detuned, slightly Asian-sounding plucked strings appear. The verses' vocals are sung almost in a whisper, growing to a sweeping, strings-like, almost operatic legato for the chorus.

As the song progresses, chanting of “confide in me”, “and then you'll see” and some other lyric I can't make out is added to the chorus parts, bringing extra urgency with it. Those flecks of plucked strings increase to a full-blown instrumental part, almost taking the lead towards the end.

Throughout the song there are spots of other sounds; in the verses, more noticeable in the second, there are little whirs and clunks of distortion that remind me of The Blue Room EP. There's even a bit of funk guitar under the Asianesque string solo after the second chorus. And at times the electric guitar hints at Hendrixianism (I just made that word up now – good, isn't it?). The whole song is very much a layered piece.

In the last minute-and-a-half, the plucked strings' repetitious, urgent pseudo–ad libbing (while slightly gratuitous); the main string loop's insistent repetition; the legato lead vocal; and the background chanting; all combine to build tension towards the end, when all the instrumentation comes to a head and drops, leaving the lead vocal to close the song.

Yes, I am recommending a Kylie Minogue song. If you download one track last week... Wait a sec – I did that joke last time.

Colours is quite typical of Editors. It begins with drums and several guitars forming a driving rhythm and a repeating riff, with a little bit of a screech at the end. Few notes are used and small sections are repeated, hammering them into the listener.

The vocals are typically minimal – few and repeated. And the lyrics are also quite typical – “You mean a lot to me, you've got a heart of gold” and “You are the colour, my dear” are the sort of nonsense Tom Smith often comes out with, to great effect.

So the first two minutes proceed pretty much like any other Editors song. Then after the brief pause at the end of the second chorus, the driving rhythm disappears. The repeating riff that replaces it verges on the socks-off-knockingly good. It's particularly long among Editors riffs, and its 3-3-3-3-2-2 rhythm lends it a striking complexity. The drumming that backs it is minimalistic but distinctive.

Not to dwell on this wonder-riff for too long, after two iterations Tom's vocals re-emerge, overlaying it with “Fill your life with something else, baby”. The two parts carry the song whilst the bass, drums and vocals all gradually intensify. Half a minute before the end, the wonder-riff makes way for a good old-fashioned cymbal-thrashing, still in 3-3-3-3-2-2 rhythm. It and the vocals take the song to its abrupt conclusion.

Even though there's such a schism between its two halves, somehow it all still holds together as one song. Don't ask me how.

If you download two tracks this week, make them Confide In Me and Colours. Stay tuned.

“There is No Peace that I've Found So Far” / “Drift In Your Eyes” (the 2006-06-23 Friday Fetch-its)

2006-06-23T20:10:00+00:00

Fans of Breathe Me will like this. I don't know who wrote Set the Fire to the Third Bar, but it sounds to me like more of a Martha song than a Snow Patrol song. The lyrics are very personal – almost every line contains “I”, “you”, “we” or some variation thereof.

Its backbone is the combined vocal of Gary Lightbody and Martha Wainwright, but calling Set The Fire a duet is somewhat misleading. Here they both sing one vocal part together, rather than the more usual call-and-response format adopted by most duets. Their voices blend together impeccably; somehow both voices seem to stand out at the same time.

Fairly conventionally, the verses smoulder – the instruments and vocals are all quite subdued, as befits the tone of the lyrics – and then at the chorus the instrumentation swells and the lid comes off. The song's structure (two verses, a chorus, another verse, then two choruses) gives an overall sense of escalation.

For a song with such a sweeping, epic feel to it, it does seem a tiny bit brief at 3:23. Having said that, it's definitely good that they haven't dragged it out to unnecessary length. There's no long, protracted coda and no excessive chorus repeat; they stop as soon as the song's finished.

And because of its succinctness, you will want to hear it again. If you download one track last week... oh, hang on.

La Ritournelle opens with just a piano, a drumkit and some subtle string backing. To these are soon added lots of sweeping strings, which if I was more knowledgeable I'd be able to identify as particular instruments; suffice it to say they all sound lovely.

The piano and strings take turns at providing the leading melody, through an incredibly natural chord progression until, before you know it, it nears the end of the fourth minute and the strings once more build to a climax. And then he starts singing.

The singing bit is backed by some funky electric bass, ever-so-slightly reminiscent of Lady (Hear Me Tonight). After only eight lines and forty-odd seconds, the strings once again take the lead, with the piano in tow. Over the next three minutes, the strings and then the piano quietly fade out, and the music comes to a gentle coda.

Amazingly, for a seven-and-a-half-minute piece of music – and especially such a simple piece of music, with no sudden twists and turns, and only eight lyrics – La Rit never seems stale. The music never seems to be standing still, nor going around in circles; it always sounds like it's going somewhere.

So this is a piece of music that repeats itself for seven and a half minutes, and yet doesn't repeat itself at all. Try figuring that one out.

If you download two tracks this week, make them Set The Fire and La Rit. Stay tuned.

“Change Before I Slip Away” (the 2006-06-09 Friday Fetch-it)

2006-06-10T00:09:00+00:00

After a couple of agenda-setting chords, Iwe opens with a driving drumbeat topped by Shingai Shoniwa's smouldering vocals. As the music's urgency builds, Shingai's vocal delivery stays audibly restrained. At the chorus, the guitar, drums and vocals all erupt into an all-out rock frenzy. As the guitar fades into the second verse, Shingai slides back into tempered mode.

Throughout the second verse she slips effortlessly between menacing temperament and unrestrained screaming, at times dwarfing the instrumentation (which gains a couple of flourishes over the first verse), at times barely discernible above it. All the while the music builds in intensity, so that by the time the second chorus comes around, no change of volume or pace is needed going into it.

When the chorus reaches its natural conclusion, the music recedes to mellow chords that by now sound positively quiet. Naturally, Shingai's vocals catch up instantly. Melodiously, over a surprising chord progression, she repeats – she chants – “Iwe”. The rhythm guitar returns and, with the vocals, builds tension to a crescendo. After exhausting one last breath, Shingai leaves a classic rock guitar solo to conclude the song.

You could not want for a stronger vocal performance, nor better-suited accompaniment.

And no, I've no idea what “Iwe” means. If you download one track this week, make it Iwe. Stay tuned.

“There is Liberation Here” (the 2006-06-06 Tuesday Fetch-it)

2006-06-06T12:30:00+00:00

Track eleven of Ruby Blue is a fifty-second instrumental called Prelude to Love In The Making. There is actually a full song, Love In The Making, whose lyrics appear in Ruby Blue's album insert; Prelude is simply the intro and outro of Love In The Making shoved together. Before Ruby Blue came out, all twelve songs had been released on three limited edition vinyl EPs collectively entitled Sequins; Love In The Making appears on Sequins 2.

The song itself is something of a slow-burner. Róisín's vocals provide the melody, layered over a lo-fi percussive rhythm; every so often her voice swells, accompanied by itself several times over. Like most of Ruby Blue, the verse-chorus structure is somewhat indistinct, but it is there.

Also present, to a certain degree, is Róisín's tendency to split one lyric over several vocal parts and to spread individual vocals out rather thinly (both particularly notable in Sow Into You).

The synth effects prominent throughout most of the album are conspicusouly quiet, but the song still has the same woozy, dischordant quality. Love In The Making sounds – to my ear anyway – vaguely south-Asian. I don't know if that's a sitar; I'm fairly certain there are some instruments that aren't well-tempered.

Because of this simplicity, it would be the stand-out track on the album, if only it were actually on the album. If you download one track this week, make it Love In The Making. Stay tuned.

“All You Need Is” (the 2006-05-26 Friday Fetch-it)

2006-05-27T00:19:00+00:00

Not many artists order a track-by-track remix of their début album. But then not many artists are Bloc Party, which is probably for the best – how would we tell them all apart?

The majority of Silent Alarm Remixed proceeds much like Silent Alarm, with some sounds added and taken away and a few extra wolves here and there. The Pioneers [M83 remix] bears no resemblance whatsoever to the original track.

It's an immersive, epic stringscape, layered with a rhythmically repeating, disjointed burst of a Kele Okereke vocal; this punctuated by intermittent fragments of the song, slightly out of sync with the rhythm. Think a passenger of the Titanic running futilely for their life along a collapsing corridor, in slow motion and in black and white.

It seems brief even at 5:47. Perhaps it's because there are so few words.

They even used it on Top Gear a couple of weeks ago in a piece about the new Honda Civic. What more could you possibly want from a song? If you download one track this week, make it Pioneers Remixed. Stay tuned.

“Hear Me Say Now” (the 2006-05-19 Friday Fetch-it)

2006-05-19T20:09:00+00:00

On The Radio was on this week's Roundtable; I found it quite pleasant but almost entirely forgettable. Far more memorable is You Can't Hurry Love, an impeccably-constructed pop song. It's composed in a sugary-sweet poptastic style, but there's no jingly-jangly piano in the execution. The instrumentation, and particularly Victoria Bergsman's woozy, ever-so-slightly discordant vocals, seem mismatched with the song's ostensible style.

Yes, there are hand-claps (with a tambourine in the middle), but for some reason I reckon they're ironic. They do nothing to sweeten the song's delivery. Can't Hurry Love fools you into thinking it's a sugar-coated pop song, but when you pay attention to it, it actually doesn't sound sugary-sweet at any point.

Or maybe I'm reading too much into it and it is just a jaunty pop song. If you download one track this week, make it Can't Hurry Love.

“But You've Gotta Know Their Lies” (the 2006-05-12 Friday Fetch-it)

2006-05-12T19:41:00+00:00

Since I actually physically own this week's song as a single on a compact disc (I bought it on Wednesday), I'm gonna write a little bit about its B-sides first.

Stars And Spit sounds like it was recorded in the middle of a busy street, while the microphone was drunk. It has the same sort of wooziness as a lot of Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots, particularly in its vocals.

Death Cock is really chilled. Stars and Spit was chilled, but this is catatonic. And it's a waltz. Waltzes are good. Part way through, the music comes to a coda and someone says “That's it”, but the song starts up again and carries on for another few minutes. Maybe they only eventually stopped because their instruments got too dusty.

I always like songs in unusual time signatures. I especially like that Broken Social Scene haven't bothered trying to be cool about it – they even named 7/4 (Shoreline) after its time signature. And parenthesised subtitles are always good.

Like its first B-side, Shoreline is a mid-tempo light-rock-stylee driving song, great for cycling through York in the summer. Each vocal line starts half-way through a bar, so it flows into the next one; the whole thing progresses smoothly. There's even a car's interior in the video – what more could you want from a driving song?

Since it's driven by the rhythm section, it sounds far worse on speakers with crap bass. The melody, however, is held solely by the vocals, led by Feist, accompanied by one of the other fifteen band-members ...a male one. You can tell from the video. The sort of richness in sound you'd expect from a song performed by sixteen people is there; it'd be inaccurate to call Shoreline's sound “layered” – it's more like spaghetti than lasagne.

Nonetheless, there are several reasonably-well-defined categories of noise present: the rhythm section (comprising the driving bass and drums); the vocals; several lead guitars and other guitarage; and lots of miscellaneous other sounds. Most of the noise lives in those last two layers, with the first two holding the song together.

Feist's vocals make the song. It'd be a great song with someone else singing her bits, but her performance adds that extra embellishment that makes it a classic.

And she doesn't even sound like The Pipettes. If you download one track this week, make it Shoreline.

(The other (male) band member is probably Kevin Drew.)

“You Never Understood Me” (the 2006-05-05 Friday Fetch-it)

2006-05-05T18:41:00+00:00

In much of the Northern Hemisphere, and certainly here in York, it's now summer. And summer requires pop songs!

“But isn't pop just pap with one less line?!”

Not necessarily. The problem is that lots of pop songs descend into chorus repeat two-thirds of the way through. This chorus repeat's many functions include showcasing the soon-tiring vocal talents of the popstar in question; padding the song out to the usual 3:30, and getting all the pop-hungry kids singing along. All of which is predictably cynical.

Oh, and they're generally quite crap as well – that doesn't help.

The Big Sky comprises 15 seconds of verse followed by a good four minutes of chorus repeat; and it's great. Unlike all those pop songs, The Big Sky actually develops during the chorus repeat (henceforth referred to as “the song”).

Instruments are added, vocal bits inserted and drums drummed more heartily. It's not marvellous in any profound, significant or even subtle way. But, it's a catchy, æsthetic, upbeat pop song.

And there's not a single key-change in sight. If you download one track this week, make it The Big Sky.

“I'll Wake Up in Fifty Years and Feel the Same” (the 2006-04-29 Saturday Fetch-it)

2006-04-29T19:04:00+00:00

You should know who Guillemots are by now, so I'm gonna try to steer clear of the obvious. For the unenlightened, Good Weather For Airstrikes's Mega-Profile includes this week's track, lots of others, and some carefully arranged letters, numbers and punctuation, a fine example of which is “you can't go wrong with a Guillemots song”.

The Aristazabal Hawkes-sung (and written) By The Water – from their Of The Night EP, released via the web this Valentine's Day – is simply lovely.

Her voice sounds a lot like Régine Chassagne of The Arcade Fire, and Feist; incidentally, all three are Canadian.

By The Water is the kind of song that mesmerises right from the start. The fade-in intro builds to an attention-grabbing and assertive opening line; the confident vocals accentuated with some slightly-jazzy piano draw you in. It remains intoxicating throughout its gradual progression towards the slow, quiet coda.

It's the sort of song you snap out of afterwards. If you download one track this week, make it By The Water.

“The Doors Have Metal Plates” (the 2006-04-21 Friday Fetch-it)

2006-04-21T18:53:00+00:00

Skip To The End was on this week's Roundtable; I thought it was an odd choice of lead single from The Futureheads' forthcoming album, News and Tributes – it's slower than the typical Futureheads track, and it doesn't help that the intro sounds like Decent Days And Nights at half-pace.

Better than Skip To The End, though, is Area, The Futureheads' stand-alone single released late in 2005.

Unlike Skip to the End, it has the pace of Decent Days And Nights, A to B and indeed much of The Futureheads' eponymous debut.

Added to this is The Futureheads' trademark vocal harmony hook, à la Hounds of Love.

It's like the best bits of every track on The Futureheads (apart from the weird time signature of The City is Here for You to Use) condensed into 2:45.

And that's another thing; like many great songs (i.e. A Certain Trigger bar Acrobat) it's far shorter than it sounds, which belies the song's intricacy – it doesn't seem probable that so much song would fit into so little time. If you download one track this week, make it Area.

TFI Firday

2006-04-15T02:53:00+00:00

Tonight I began a music recommendation blog over on Last.fm, cunningly entitled “the Friday Fetch-it”. In the process I discovered that my hands think yesterday was “Firday”.

I also came up with the perfect slogan for Last.fm - “Stay tuned”. It works on multiple levels, as do all the best slogans, providing you define being “tuned” as the state of having tunes... which you should.

Originally, I was planning to make a weekly post to The Twaddle Forums, primarily as a way to liven the place up a bit, but then decided to turn it into a full-blown blog. I briefly considered using Blogger until I realised that Last.fm's music journal is designed for exactly this.

So, every Friday evening from now on, I'll be writing stuff on my Last.fm journal.

Since then, the Friday Fetch-it has moved to Blogger and Roundtable has moved to Thursdays; I still do a Roundtable round-up on my Last.fm journal each week.

Since then, the Friday Fetch-it has moved into this site.

“We're Two of a Kind” (the 2006-04-14 Friday Fetch-it)

2006-04-14T18:54:00+00:00

I was planning to start off with my favourite song ever just to get it out of the way, until last night I happened to read (on Teletext on ITV4) that The Slits are going to reform.

The Web doesn't seem to agree; nonetheless, I'll begin instead with probably the best cover version of a song ever, I Heard It through the Grapevine.

Although Marvin Gaye's version of the song wasn't technically the original (as I heard through Wikipedia), it's the definitive recording of the song and probably the one the Slits would've been thinking of when they did theirs, so I'm happy comparing their effort to it.

The Slits managed to take an already-great song, completely change its style, its mood and a fair number of the words, and yet not completely screw it up.

The fact that the song can be uprooted from one genre and plonked comfortably into another is testament to Whitfield and Strong's songwriting; the fact that the Slits dared to do it is testament to their great confidence (the punks call it “attitude”, right?). The fact that they pulled it off is testament to their skill as musicians.

Oddly for a supposedly-punk record, the song lasts a full four minutes; odder, that's a good fifty seconds longer than Gaye's version. And crucially, without outstaying its welcome – at no point are they just repeating themselves.

I'm convinced that Ari Up didn't bother learning the real words and just sang what she thought they were. And “I heard it through the bassline” is just genius.

After the first verse and chorus of Gaye's version, I'm completely satisfied with the song – it's already delivered, and it would have been near impossible to screw it up after that, short of rambling on for ten minutes. Sure enough, the song carries on satisfactorily until the end, but without really adding anything.

But the Slits' version delivers constantly throughout the entire song. The whole thing is... just inspired. If you download one track this week, make it Slits Grapevine.

Taking Organised Crime Seriously

2006-04-03T15:39:00+00:00

The Serious Organised Crime Agency was formally launched on Saturday. It's their responsibility to deal with serious organised crime in the UK; they will, of course, be working closely with their colleagues in the Light-Hearted Organised Crime Agency.

The Weirdest Part

2006-03-31T19:07:00+00:00

When I heard that Coldplay would be releasing The Hardest Part as their next single, I thought they'd decided they didn't want a pop career any more — there are far better, single-material songs on X&Y than The Hardest Part, principally White Shadows. (Since the artwork for Talk turned out to be white I'm assuming that White Shadows isn't planned as a single.)

I've softened my opinion on The Hardest Part since then - it's a pleasant, reasonably catchy song, albeit just a strum-along. But then just now I saw the video, via the 6 Music playlist. Coldplay really don't want to be troubling our airwaves.

It's just... wrong. And weird. And wrong. And they'll be hearing about it for the next ever. 'Cos it's not a good idea at all.

On the plus side, they haven't edited the song, but that's about it. Four-and-a-half minutes of a still picture of Johnny Cash would've been better and more suited. And would've killed their career less.

The Hippy Test

2005-12-31T05:41:00+00:00

You like all kinds of Revels

If any of the above points apply to you, you are indeed a hippy.

Standards by Virtue of Shouting Louder

2005-12-31T00:56:00+00:00

Lots of people seem to be interested in having a common icon to depict web feeds, ever since Internet Explorer decided to use the same icon as Firefox.

A bloke decided to help popularise this new “standard” by recreating the icon in vector form and distributing high-quality versions of it to anyone who'd take them.

Despite having chosen the Microsoft version (the arcs subtend less than 90° in Firefox) as the canonical example on which the images are based (presumably because they gave the biggest example image), I think this is generally a good idea. But (oh, you knew it was coming) it undermines web standards.

Yes, in a roundabout way and yes, unintentionally - they're using the word “standard” all over the place, to describe something they (the icon's advocates) have just decided is a “standard”. It's a standard in the same way that Windows is a standard, IE6 and thus its non-standard interpretation of CSS is a standard, and Microsoft Word document format is a standard.

To coin a phrase, ubiquity does not a standard make.

I was once told to hand in some University work in “standard Microsoft Word format”, which is of course a contradiction in terms. Not only does the actual format used by Word change with each revision of the program, but the format itself is defined by the implementation. This means two things: any bugs in the implementation must stay there for ever and ever amen; and the format is undisclosed - other people can't also implement it. (Yes, they can try, but it'll always be imperfect.)

That last point is very important - only Microsoft can ever make a program that will correctly read Microsoft Word format files - because whatever they say is correct is correct by definition, and they won't tell anyone else what they say is correct. It's a bad idea to accept anything based on authority - the truth is true no matter who says so. (Getting pretty philosophical, aren't I? Yes I am - I said so.) And it's useful to have a definite truth about how to decipher a document, if you want to be able to read that document.

A mediocre analogy is the Bible in the United Kingdom several hundred years ago. It was written in Latin. Only the monks could read Latin; laypeople couldn't (I doubt they could read English). As far as the randomers were concerned, the Bible said whatever the monks said it said. Hence wars and lots of evil and stuff. (I just made that last bit up - I can't prove anything.)

Haphazardly calling a picture a “standard” isn't going to lead to wars. In fact, it's not important at all (why d'you think I'm writing about it?). But it's a bad idea for people to get too used to accepting “standard”s blindly. Of course, they will - people are sheep (in a manner of speaking; incidentally, the reverse is said to be true in Wales).

I'm not having a go at Microsoft just 'cos they're Microsoft (that's so last year) - I'm having a go at them for using closed formats. They have published their new Microsoft Office XML format - which is good - but I can now have a go at them for not using the existing standard, OpenDocument. See? - “standard” means nothing.

It's not important that Microsoft Word is proprietary software (although it'd be nicer if it wasn't) - Microsoft should be allowed to make money by developing and selling software. What's important is that secret information formats (the formats are secret, not the information) don't catch on. Yes, they've caught on already; it should stop. Which is why you shouldn't use Microsoft Word “.doc” format.

'Cos it's evil.

Probably kills kittens too - I haven't looked into it, but it seems likely.

Pinky and the Darkness

2005-12-30T06:05:00+00:00

Whilst watching a performance of Christmas Time (Don't Let the Bells End) by the Darkness on the Top of the Pops 2 Christmas special last week, after having watched the Pinky and the Brain Christmas special a few days previously, I noticed that Justin Hawkins' voice is exactly the same as Pinky's.

Google Desktop 2 Really Annoys Me

2005-12-28T21:18:00+00:00

After a while I gave in and am now using Google Desktop 2, rather than Microsoft Desktop Searchbox Toolbar, to quickly find stuff. I don't, however, use the sidebar, mainly because it was battering the crapputer's CPU, and because its search box makes all of the toolbars (or “desktop flaps”) I used to have obsolete. And it's more zen.

This is why I don't use MSN Desktop Google (hang on...) - with GD2 I just type something and press Enter; if I want to Google my computer with MSN (you know it makes sense) I have to type something, press down, then Enter. Otherwise a results window is launched, showing the least relevant results first (or so it seems).

So Microsoft Google (take that, trademark!) is out of the question. Most of my pet peeves about GD2 are resolved by not using the sidebar, but not all. It turns out GD2 does have a hotkey - Windows+G or Ctrl+Alt+G; neither of these can be changed to my preferred F9, but I can easily AutoHotkey that problem away.

But there are still little, niggly annoyances: I can't have the search box on the left of the taskbar because it's re-added to the taskbar every time I log on - on the right. There's no need for a Maximise button next to the search field - the drop-down menu includes the option to display the sidebar.

It's fortunate GD2 doesn't display times very often, because Google insist on using twelve-hour clock-style notation, that hasn't been used by anyone real since the twentieth century (yeah, that's a long time ago); and there's no option to change the format. If you're going to pick one time format for everyone, rather than letting them pick (and this is actually a good idea because it avoids unneccesarily cluttering the user interface), and you refuse to use the format the operating system tells you to use, at least pick a non-stupid format and not the one your country (alone) uses.

GD2 doesn't seem to want to find the music I have stored in Shared Documents. I've specifically told it to index the folder, but it responds with “What? What are you on about? That doesn't exist. Seriously. Nowt there. Now go away.”. However it does return music files on my Desktop; or rather they were on my desktop for a few minutes and haven't been there for the past month. Guess where they have been... “There's nothing there. Really. La-la-la-not-listening-la-la-la-la!”

And it's really, obnoxiously American - besides imitating a twelve-hour clock. A normal “I'm Feeling Jammy” search for “news”, from google.co.uk returns BBC News; an equivalent search from the search box returns CNN. This despite downloading GD2 from desktop.google.co.uk - I obviously want searches done via google.co.uk, and not google.com. And there's no option to change this.

It's really annoying when 90% of something is damned good and the other 10% is imbecilic.

November

2005-12-18T11:54:00+00:00

Another November has come and gone without a single Mooquackwooftweetmeow entry. I don't have anything against the month, honestly. It is the month that provokes the most complaining, because the commercial Christmas run-up is in full swing by then; but then that makes reasonable spiel-fodder.

I did have an excuse this year - I was away at York with what I fondly refer to as the shitputer (or “Jonny”) - an old, slow, probably senile thing that runs Windows XP using the same technique the Egyptians used to build the pyramids. It doesn't like the Mooquackwhatnotbot. When I try to run it, it complains that it can't find a file that's clearly present; when I move that file and tell the Whatnotbot to look elsewhere for it, it complains that the file's contents are invalid and nonsensical.

Which is probably true, but Gaz (the other only-about-2½-years-old computer) never complains. And I don't want to fix the Whatnotbot for Jonny as that'll break it on Gaz. Probably. And I have University work I ought to be procrastinating over.

So, you see, I have many varied excuses for not writing during November which, multiplied together, probably comprise 90% of a valid excuse.

And I was drunk. Probably.

Off to York

2005-09-25T01:17:00+00:00

I'm off back to York today; I'll be back on the Internet ...at some point.

Actually-Free Opera

2005-09-20T22:29:00+00:00

I wonder how long it is before it's just plain free? The correct answer was three weeks.

It's still closed-source though. And it doesn't have Firefox's extension system. But its use of tabs is far better than Firefox's.

Also, Captain Opera seems to have been fired. Damn - I quite enjoyed taking the piss out of him.

Party Shuffle on Crack

2005-09-19T23:19:00+00:00

Seems it's possible to add your entire iTunes music library to the Party Shuffle just by misdragging the Library icon into the main window.

They should probably sort that out.

Magically Disappearing Extensions

2005-09-08T10:28:00+00:00

Bug 275529 was fixed between Aviary 1.0.x and the imminent 1.5b1. It's going to cause lots of fun.

To summarise, Aviary 1.0.x and prior would accept any string as an addon's id, but Aviary 1.5.x requires the id to be in one of two specific formats. Novelly, there is clear documentation, on Devmo; note that letters other than A, B, C, D, E and F (upper- or lowercase) are invalid in GUIDs.

Users were able to install addons with malformed ids into Aviary 1.0.x. But when upgrading to 1.5.x, the new version will not recognise these addons; they will completely disappear from the extension or theme manager and the application will not attempt to find a compatible version.

An addon's id is defined in the <em:id/> element in the addon's install manifest (install.rdf). You can check it's valid by looking at it, or by trying to install the addon. If the id is invalid, Aviary 1.5b1 will display an invalid id error message and refuse to install it. Note that any other installation errors, such as an incompatible version of the application, will take precedence over the invalid id error.

Addon authors should update their addons immediately to include a valid id, instruct existing users to uninstall and reinstall the addon, and (optionally) apologise to them for not following the specification properly in the first place.

Bigger than an iPod nano

2005-09-08T04:23:00+00:00

iTunes 5 for Windows looks quite different to iTunes 4. After the square “LCD display” and the lack of a wide window border, the third difference I noticed was the combined menu- and title-bar.

Immediately, this prompted a horrible flashback to Netscape 8's appearance and wondering why they'd done it. After a few seconds I realised they'd cleverly incorporated OS X's trademark menu bar, that sits right at the top of the screen in order to benefit from Fitts' law. When iTunes is maximised, its menu is right at the top of the screen - another covert demonstration to Windows users of Apple's user interface superiority.

Except that it isn't. There's a several-pixel gap between the top edge of the screen and the clickable areas of the menu items. And there's a similar gap between the window's Close button and the top-right corner of the screen. That's just stupid.

The LCD display has been improved over iTunes 4. It now affords two lines to display which song is playing - the top line is always the song's title, while the second alternates between the artist and album from which the song came. In iTunes 4, all three were shown in rotation, so the song's title wasn't always visible... which it really should be. The elapsed time is now displayed to the left of the progress meter, with the negative remaining time (or optionally the total track time) to its right. This is much more efficient than just showing one of these at once, along with a label, and taking up an entire line of the display.

Podcasts are now fully integrated with the music library, which was inevitable but meant some of my smart playlists needed augmenting to exclude them. I like the new search bar, although I'm not sure if I'll actually find it to be of any real use.

But: when in Party Shuffle, I still can't use the search box without first switching to Library view. It makes perfect sense to be able to search the Library from Party Shuffle, for example when searching for a song to add, so it's daft having the search box disabled.

And right-clicking on context menu items still doesn't work; neither does using the menu key to activate a context menu.

Insert your own summary.

Le singe est dans l'arbre

2005-09-06T08:44:00+00:00

This may be running the risk of descending into linkblog territory, but anyway: this article about hidden settings in Mac OS X Tiger includes a nice reference to Eddie Izzard. The screenshot for the bit about spellchecking in a second language uses Le singe est dans l'arbre as a sample French phrase.

Stuart Maconie is going to get shot

2005-09-03T23:52:00+00:00

Today's Critical List was a special comprising just those albums nominated for this year's Mercury Music Prize. ...which, incidentally, is being awarded this Tuesday night and will be on BBC Four and Radio 1 at 21:00 and 6 Music at 24:00.

The favourites are, not surprisingly, the Kaiser Chiefs - their “faux-indie” style (pop in the style of popular, but still not mainstream, contemporary music) is very comparable to last year's winners, Franz Ferdinand (whose stated aim was to make the girls dance).

Also on the programme was Move On Now, from Hard-Fi's album Stars of CCTV, the style of which is vastly removed from that of their four singles to date. This song is a soft piano ballad, essentially down-tempo lounge music.

Of course, the clear winner ought to be Maxïmo Park's album A Certain Trigger. Stuart Maconie introduced The Coast Is Always Changing with this:

Here's another, this time from Wearside.

My immediate response to this was “Oh, he is going to get shot!”.

Wearside, of course, refers to Sunderland, through which the River Wear flows. Unfortunately, Maxïmo Park are from Newcastle upon Tyne.

As any map of Tyne and Wear shows, Newcastle is about 20 km west-north-west of Sunderland. And, of course, the Geordies aren't very fond of the Mackems.

After the song Stuart carried on, saying that Maxïmo Park are one of two indie acts from Sunderland this year, the other being the Futureheads (who are actually from Sunderland). I don't think he should visit any music venues in Newcastle any time soon. Or ever.

For historical reference, the eventual winner was Antony and the Johnsons, who were pretty much the favourites by the time of the announcement.

Free Opera

2005-08-31T23:30:00+00:00

Yesterday, Opera gave itself away for free. That sounds odd... Opera the company gave Opera the browser away for free. Or, perhaps, Captain Opera mightily morphed the in-chrome adverts into oblivion. Yes, by the way, you've missed it.

But don't despair - you can still get Opera for free by joining our affiliate program. Just put an Opera-button on your webpage, get 250 people to click it, and you're home free!

I wonder how long it is before it's just plain free? This would, of course, be a Good Thing™ - any more alternatives to Internet Explorer 6 are generally good.

But also, Opera is quite a good browser. Seriously. Their implementation of tabs is better than Firefox's; everything opens in a tab - including history, bookmarks and downloads.

And I don't care whether an “old-fashioned multiple-document interface isn't tabs” - it's better; one can view two pages side-by-side more easily than in Firefox.

Of course, I'm still using Firefox, for its extensions, particularly Adblock (with Filterset.G Updater). And its layout engine (Gecko) seems less prone to hiccups than Opera's (Presto). And it doesn't have Captain Opera.

Your Computer May Be Commandeered By Randomers

2005-08-31T21:18:00+00:00

I'm often amazed by how many screenshots of Firefox include a critical update icon. A red disc in the top-right of the browser window means there is a critical update to Firefox available and that you should upgrade immediately.

Yes, it's crap UI, which is why it's gone in Deer Park - there's a nice, big “You need to update Firefox now” dialogue instead. But I'm still surprised by how many people completely dismiss it. I assume they can see it's there; is nobody interested in finding out what it means? It only requires pointing at it.

Maybe the icon should have had a large label reading “Your computer may be commandeered by randomers. Click here if you'd prefer it not to be.”

Google Desktop 2

2005-08-23T23:01:00+00:00

Well, that was good timing. One day later (even less actually - it was a measly 14 hours before the relevant remaindering), Google goes and releases Google Desktop 2. I have installed it and, very generally, I like it.

I like that it integrates with Firefox and Thunderbird by default and automatically. I didn't have to tell it my Gmail username and password for it to display incoming mail from Thunderbird. Apparently, the Web Clips panel adds subscriptions for websites I visit frequently in Firefox, automatically. (OMG they're trying to rename RSS WTF STFU!)

At the moment I use a custom native Windows XP toolbar. At the top I have a collection of frequently used files and folders, below which is the MSN Windows tooltop deskbar search text field jobby. Below that I have the contents of the My Recent Documents folder, i.e. twenty of the most recently used files and their containing folders.

GD2 can replace much of this functionality with its Quick View panel, and I can merge the rest with the toolbar on the left of my desktop. But, there are a few things that'll stop me from getting rid of my current setup and using GD2 full-time:

The sidebar can be auto-hidden, but it stays “always on top”; so the far top-right corner of the screen is no longer the currently maximised window's Close button, it's now just dead space on the sidebar.
When I point to the right edge of the screen the sidebar waits for a short while before appearing; this is obviously to prevent it popping up in front of a maximised window when I'm just trying to scroll, but that wouldn't be a problem if the sidebar didn't insist on being “always on top”.
When I click away from MSN Deskbar Windows Tool Search, it automatically dismisses itself and leaves me alone; GD2 persists, in front of everything else of course.
I've already got used to pressing F10 and having Windows Desktop MSN Bar focus itself; GD2 needs this option (and I have to be able to make it F10, not Ctrl+Shift+G or something similarly intricate).
I'd like to be able to see more than ten search results without opening a webpage. It doesn't matter how accurate the results are, it's not going to find all of a 13-track album. Desktop MSN Whatever still only shows 12, but the full-blown results window isn't a webpage.

There are a few other things I'd like to see fixed but that wouldn't necessarily stop me from using GD2:

Much of the news content seems distinctly North American; maybe it's actually just international. Maybe me looking at more UK- and Europe-related news would fix this automatically for me. But it should be a bit smarter and offer more tailored content (and fix the spelling of the UI) based on my location.
Panels should scroll automatically (where it makes sense), rather than just showing the first item
It still seems a little eager to fire up a webpage; there should be an option to turn off all webpage-based UI and handle preferences through proper chrome (or it should just do that anyway)
The search box is stuck to the bottom; maybe I want it at the top, or somewhere in the middle.
When I resize the preview box for news items (as I'm invited to by the grippy), I expect more content to be shown, not more whitespace.
When I type Maximo Park I also want it to find Maxïmo Park, like a Google web search would.
It'd be nice if there was a To Do panel that could integrate with my Sunbird iCalendar files, like Konfabulator's PIM Overview widget can. It'd be even better if it was an editor rather than just a display (only if it was properly interoperable with Sunbird, of course).
I'm not allowed to move the deskbar out of the taskbar and into another native Windows XP toolbar, like I could with GDS and can with Desktop MSN Windows Search Toolbar.
It'd be nice if the panels could automatically resize themselves to suit the amount of content they contain (as long as it happened while I wasn't looking).

So for now I'm sticking with Search Microsoft Desktop Windows Toolbar...box. If Google had been a day earlier, they might've just won.

Microsoft Desktool MSN Windows Search…top…bar

2005-08-21T21:55:00+00:00

Earlier today I installed Desktop Windows MSN Search (or whatever it's called) and I'm actually pleasantly surprised. I'd had Google Desktop Search installed for a while, but I've never found it useful.

Its results always seemed irrelevant. Of course, calling a desktop search program “Google” is something of a misnomer - Google is founded on the principle that “a link is a vote” and there are no links to inspect for local files.

GDS had two options to display the results it found: relevance and date. The former seemed very arbitrary, turning up files I haven't used in ages (such as archived files) over ones I use all the time (such as mqwtm.xml, The Big, Bad Source File).

The other option, sorting by date seemed backwards - it showed the most recently used matching file first - the one that I've just used and haven't had chance to lose yet; I'd only actually bother firing up GDS to find a totally obscure file.

Another thing - the firing up. GDS seems slow compared to Toolbar Windows MSN Search Desktop, because the former is HTML-bound. I don't want to have to load a webpage to find a file on my computer, no matter how fast Firefox is. And since the results are just links, I can't right-click and use the system context menu.

Windows MSN Desktop Microsoft, on the other hand, pops up a window showing incremental results as I type. Hang about - GDS could also do that. Oh, yeah - I turned it off because I don't like allowing Internet Explorer to render webpages, and Google's results are in the form of a webpage.

MSN Deskbar Search Tool does come with a lot of links to msn.co.uk inbuilt, but all of them can be turned off, and any search service (i.e. Google) can be used for the web search. With a few minutes' Options-massage, it can be adequately non-annoying.

Desktop MSN Windows' full-blown results window's interface resembles the Details view of Explorer, although it's clearly just an imitation - there's no context menu for the column headers. But it allows sorting by any of many criteria in both directions, including “relevance”. The preview pane is pretty useful in most cases, except when previewing a Microsoft Word format or even Rich Text Format document. Then it's headed with “You Need To Buy Microsoft Office To Look At This Properly Yes You Do Don't Argue No Wordpad Won't Do £££”. Seriously. Direct quote.

It's quite amusing that the icon for the inferior - well, useless - inbuilt Windows Search function thing appears in the results window's toolbar and can't be removed. Right Hand, meet Left Hand.

To summarise, MSN Desktop Windows Search Toolbar actually works. But Microsoft (or MSN or whoever's supposed to be responsible for it) do need to figure out what it's supposed to be and then assign it a name - one name, that it calls itself throughout. Like, everywhere. (Have I introduced you to Left Hand yet?)

The Recent Entries Page

2005-08-20T17:38:00+00:00

In the category of “Changeblog”: The archive is getting increasingly heavy, so I've knocked up a Recent Entries page.

It's just a reworded copy of the archive page that only shows an entry <xsl:if> it was written during the one-month period prior to the site last being updated.

This is the first time since “for Workgroups” launched last July that I've deviated from the (sort of) original design of one page per entry plus the archive page and the front page and nothing else. Simplicity is cool. Seriously. That's why this paragraph isn't cool. 'Cos I keep inserting pointless full. Stops. And continuing typing when I should probably just stop.

Vega 2

2005-08-20T16:23:00+00:00

The process was bloody tedious but the site's now even colourfuller - this is Vega 2.

Grey's now an endangered species about these parts. ...Well, proper grey - all of the “black” text is actually grey, bar the main title. But you see my point - more colourifficness. Yay.

The aforementioned tedium came from having to calculate several background colours for each hue - 60 colours in total. It was just a matter of typing one number into Inkscape and copying out the colour code generated by it, but it was somewhat boring to do sixty times.

Just too much dedication - that's my problem.

A rant about foreigners

2005-08-19T21:27:00+00:00

I just blundered upon Death by Caffeine thanks to it having been Slashkottked (or whatever the proper term is), but I'm left still wondering how much beverage it'll take to kill me.

There are ostensibly three hurdles in the way of finding out how much I need to drink in order to die. Firstly, I have to pick my poison; of course, this is PG Tips.

Now, the poison list includes several tea options: Tea (Brewed, Imported), Tea (Brewed, US Brands), Tea (Green), Tea (Iced) and Tea (Instant). PG Tips is certainly brewed, but it's not imported. Neither it is a US brand. If it were green I wouldn't drink it; it may get cold but not because it's been iced. And while pyramid bags may be several times quicker than flat ones, they're not instant.

Never mind - just pick any and carry on, to the second hurdle: Weight (no problem) ...in Lbs (ah). Unfortunately I'm not one of the 5% of people in the world who know their weight in Lbs.

I did manage to click the button, though. Anyway, the moral of the story is that when you assume you make an arse out of yourself. Rant over.

Back/Forward Dropdown Menus - an Extension for Firefox

2005-08-03T02:00:00+00:00

Back/Forward Dropdown Menus is another little CSS hack created by request of BobFox. It removes the main Back and Forward buttons and styles their dropdown arrows to look like them. The net effect is that clicking the Back or Forward button shows a history list rather than navigating immediately.

This add-on is no longer being updated (by me)—there won't be an update compatible with Firefox 3 (or later versions).

It's not a good idea to use this extension with Back/Forward Dropdown Remover; combined, they annihilate all of the buttons' useful parts.

Known issue in version 0.1: the buttons' tooltips still include one page.

Bookmarks' Full Titles - an Extension for Firefox

2005-08-01T02:02:00+00:00

Bookmarks' Full Titles version 2.0 is a tiny extension for Firefox 2 that eliminates truncation of bookmarks' titles, in the Bookmarks menu and in dropdown menus from the Bookmarks Toolbar.

If you're using Firefox 3, you want Places’ Full Titles instead.

Bookmarks in top level menus - i.e. directly under the Bookmarks menu or directly under a folder on the Bookmarks Toolbar - don't expand to full width, because submenus would be inaccessible if they did. But this extension does make them somewhat wider than they are usually.

It was inspired by some code _Jim_ posted to MozillaZine Forums that I then packaged into an extension for ease of use and general good karma. Besides, it took about thirty seconds to hack up based on Back/Forward Dropdown Remover.

Back/Forward Dropdown Remover - an Extension for Firefox

2005-08-01T00:29:00+00:00

Back/Forward Dropdown Remover is a tiny extension that removes the dropdown arrows from Firefox's Back and Forward buttons.

This add-on is no longer being updated (by me)—there won't be an update compatible with Firefox 3 (or later versions).

It's now compatible with Firefox 0.9.x and 1.0.x, as well as “Deer Park” development versions and Firefox 1.5 beta onwards. I figured out compatibility with 1.0.x, despite it requiring a more complex, obsolete extension packaging system, mainly because lots of people couldn't read Requires: Firefox: Deer Park - Deer Park.

The userChrome CSS code itself has been floating around for ages on various Firefox tips sites; I just packaged it up into an extension for ease of installation, and in order to gain some limited extension-making mojo.

Atom 1.0 Coming Soon

2005-07-31T18:03:00+00:00

It's been on my to-do list since Rakaz published his guide to moving from Atom 0.3 to Atom 1.0, but now I've modified the Mooquackwhatnotbot to produce an Atom 1.0 feed.

Doing so was virtually painless. The only problem I had was ensuring that entries without any descriptive blurb got some nominal summary text; but that was my fault for repeating the same code in two places and only remembering to change one instance.

As of the next entry, the main Atom feed will be in Atom 1.0 format. For those who're using a feed reader that only supports 0.3, I'll keep an up-to-date Atom 0.3 feed online at http://gkn.me.uk/atom-0.3.xml for a while, but I will stop updating it pretty soon (probably when Thunderbird 1.5 Beta comes out).

Vega

2005-07-30T17:55:00+00:00

Yesterday I changed the site's design. I decided a while back that I didn't want multiple styles any more.

The main idea behind Sirius, an alternate style that never got off the ground, was to add a bit of colour to the site. Of course, being me, I couldn't decide on which colour to use so I decided to have them rotate per page. I picked some colours and applied them as background colours in Sirius; here I've used them mainly as text colours but also as the colour of the background image. And the background colours. I'll let you figure out the criterion for each page's colour yourself.

The overall design of Sirius was mainly inspired by Stopdesign v3, but my GIMP mojo is far too limited to match that sort of detailed quality. So I've decided to stick with the more minimalistic style that I'm reasonably good at.

I call the new style Vega. Yes, it's very similar to Arcturus (it's actually just a modification of Arcturus) but it is a distinctly different style. Arcturus' “starburst” logo has been kept as the background image. I was going to also use it as the site's icon thereby making it into an all-out Mooquackwooftweetmeow logo, but it doesn't look very distinct at 16 pixels square. Besides, Mooquackwooftweetmeow is just a collection of stuff by me so it's OK to continue using the “GKN” emblem.

Planet X-3: Pluto Still Isn't a Planet, Neither Are 2003 UB313 and 2003 EL61

2005-07-30T13:59:00+00:00

They finally found it - again - another tenth planet, this time unnamed but temporarily designated 2003 UB313. It was also announced yesterday that 2003 EL61 may be roughly 70% Pluto's size.

UB313 however, is definitely larger than Pluto, although perhaps only slightly. According to the Washington Post, Mike Brown has labelled the object the tenth planet; they acknowledge that there are astronomers who disagree with this label, but don't mention that Mike is actually one of them. As I wrote about last year, he doesn't consider Pluto to be a planet, and argues that if Pluto is considered a planet, many other objects (including Sedna) must logically also be considered planets.

So UB313 must logically be classified as a planet as long as Pluto is. I'd be willing to bet that by this time next year there'll be another object found to be larger than Pluto, if not several; then, the International Astronomical Union will have to reconsider their definition of what constitutes a planet (or come up with one). For now, if you're asked how many planets there are in the solar system, it's definitely wrong to say “nine”.

Discover Magazine discusses the outer solar system in more depth in their November 2004 issue; you'll have to log in to read past the first page of the article, which usually entails using BugMeNot.

The Style Switcher is Dead; Long Live CSS

2005-07-29T04:11:00+00:00

I've killed the Style Switcher - see? It's just an empty shell of a page. This is mainly because I've killed the multiple styleage.

There's no need for random websites to evangelise the capabilities of CSS-driven design any more - total style-switching like that's just plain goofy nowadays. And it allows me to come up with some sort of consistent visual identity. More on that shortly.

For posterity's sake (and because I spent a little while creating them), the styles' logos:

I don't like The O.C.

2005-07-29T02:45:00+00:00

It's me again. I'm back with similar complaints to those of about this time last year, but with a slight twist.

A week ago saw the end of Channel 4's almost as-decent-as-last-year term-time morning TV schedule, thanks to those damn kids getting out of school. Instead of Third Watch at 10:00, followed by ER and preceded by Frasier and the average Will & Grace; we now get to watch The O.C., Playing It Straight USA (the moral of the story being that men who're gay deserve twice as much money for seducing a woman) and endless repeats of Friends. (Funnily enough, as a 19-year-old I'm supposed to be squarely at the centre of this schedule's “teenager/young adult” target.)

A few years ago Channel 4 had a live breakfast show, shown between 07:00 and 09:00, The Big Breakfast. It was always much more likely to wake me up than either the dreary BBC Breakfast, comprising dull, inconsequential news-items masquerading as an entertaining (yet informative and thus worthy of licence fee money) magazine, interspersed with occasional news; or the dire, even duller and more inconsequential, woman-targetted GMTV, similarly interspersed with occasional news.

Among the many presenters of The BB were Denise Van Outen, and Richard Bacon, who also presented the obscure but excellent Get Staffed for BBC Choice, the obscure but excellent The Vicious Circle for Five and the slightly less obscure but equally excellent Flipside TV.

As I found out while randomly browsing Media Guardian about an hour ago now, these two are presenting This Morning this summer. I may get up.

(I'd still rather watch Third Watch and ER.)

A Party Election Broadcast by the Liberal Democrats

2005-05-03T19:18:00+00:00

The Conservatives would send genuine refugees back to their country to be killed. They have no intention of forming a serious opposition to the Government - when they lose Thursday's election, Michael Howard will be sacked. Their only goal is governmental power.

The Labour Party pledged not to introduce top-up fees for university students and to legislate to prevent them. When they are returned to Government, they will implement top-up fees.

Despite this, the Conservatives believed Tony Blair when he said Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and wholeheartedly backed invading Iraq before the UN weapons inspectors had finished.

Now the Labour Party justifies invading Iraq on the grounds that it removed Saddam Hussein, despite the fact that regime change is illegal under UN law; Kofi Annan has confirmed that the war was illegal.

The Labour Party doesn't want you to vote for the Liberal Democrats in case the Conservatives win. If that isn't an argument for proportional representation (which the Liberal Democrats have long advocated), I don't know what is.

Both the Labour Party and the Conservatives campaign relentlessly on the faults of the other party; I agree with all of their criticisms. Vote for the Liberal Democrats.

Netscape 4 is newer than Internet Explorer 6

2005-04-12T05:03:00+00:00

Browsing W3Schools, I've found something interesting – IE6 is older than Netscape 4.

Sort of. From their incomplete and somewhat dogmatastic overview of web browsers: Netscape Communicator 4.8 was released from Netscape in August 2002. whereas [Internet Explorer 6.0] was released in August 2001.

I know this has nothing to do with the age of the rendering engine, but dumb users know and care nothing about the rendering engine; in their eyes Netscape 4.8 is newer than IE6.

So if you're gonna stop supporting one of them next time you design a website, shouldn't it be the oldest? (Ideally, screw both of them.)

Obfuscating Tedium

2005-04-12T02:59:00+00:00

Featured Entries are “now more featured-y”™, come with “added front-page goodness”™ and “get printed in full on the front page rather than just showing the first paragraph and affording the rest of the page to the latest entry, which I explicitly wanted not-featured anyway”™.

To demonstrate the full effect, here's a nominal second paragraph.

Now go back to the front page and read that nice entry I featured for you so you didn't have to find it by yourself. There's a good reader.

Man-Driver

2005-04-12T02:43:00+00:00

Open Source software is usually good at changing its name – Firefox got it right (the second time) and Linspire's new name cleverly incorporates the word “inspire” because the OS is an inspiration to everyone.

OK, so I lied - they're generally crap at it. But how naff is “Man-Driver”?! I know it's supposed to be pronounced “Man-dreever”, but it looks like “Man-Driver”. That's what it says to me; “Man-Driver”. Say it to yourself a few times - “Man-Driver”.

Note that this entry does not define exactly what a “Man-Driver™” is. Answers on a postcard.

Map.search.ch Gets Cooler

2005-04-08T12:49:00+00:00

map.search.ch, arguably the “web application” that sparked the current AJAX trend, and undeniably the inspiration for Google Maps, has been upgraded since the initial hype surrounding it.

It now includes icons labelling the position of banks, cafés, cash machines, churches, hospitals and car parks among other things. Pointing to any of these shows more details such as the building's name, address and phone and fax numbers. But what's even cooler is that for car parks (at least in Basel), these details include damn-near-real-time information about how full the car park is.

The overall effect reminds me very much of the maps that came with the original Grand Theft Auto for the PlayStation – except it's the real world.

We need this in the UK – now... it's just far too cool.

Tabbed Thunderbird

2005-04-03T01:53:00+00:00

I've been thinking (albeit briefly) about a tabbed interface for Thunderbird, or rather a one-pane interface. It looks pretty simple.

(Disclaimer: it's 02:17 BST so thoughts may appear partially-formed, deformed, misinformed and/or Nazi-uniformed; I'll proof-read this at an undetermined future time.)

+---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| @ Mooquackwooftweetmeow Thunderbird                                                         - + X |
| File  Edit  View  Go  Message  Tools  Help                                                        |
+---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
|   @@@     @@@  |   @@@    @@@                                                                     |
|   @@@     @@@  |   @@@    @@@                                                                     |
| Get Mail  Stop | Compose  Etc.                                                                    |
+---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
|  _______   _______   ___________   _______________________                                        |
|_|*Gmail*|_|Airmail|_|aRSSe Feeds|_|Newsgroups of the World|_______________________________________|
|  ____   _____   ______   ____   _____   _____________________   ________________________________  |
|_|Home|_|Inbox|_|Drafts|_|Sent|_|Trash|_|Re: Taking over world|_|*Compose: Re: Taking over world*|_|
|                                                                                                   |
| Subject: Re: Taking over world                                                                    |
| From: rb@virgin.co.uk                                                                             |
| Date: 2005-04-01 08:32                                                                            |
| To: billyg@mozilla.org                                                                            |
+---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Friday sounds good                                                                                |
| --                                                                                                |
| Richard                                                                                           |
|                                                                                                   |
|                                                                                                   |
|                                                                                                   |
+---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| ~ |                                                                     | Unread: 0 | Total: 4781 |
+---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+

The basic idea is that the current 3-pane system is condensed into a set of nested tabs. Each account's Home tab shows pretty options like Thunderbird's current server pages. Inbox, Sent and friends look much like the current messages pane. Messages' previews would appear beneath the messages' list item, in the style of webpage-bound, JavaScript-driven expandable FAQ lists. All of these tabs would be immutable.

When a message is double-clicked (or middle-clicked) or a Compose-like action is chosen, a new tab would be opened under the appropriate account. These tabs can be closed and perhaps rearranged, imitating Firefox's tabs. When sending a message, progress would be indicated in the status bar, not in a pop-up dialogue.

This is why you should always keep your web browser window at a random size

2005-04-01T14:00:00+00:00

Whoever wrote the Google Gulp FAQ evidently doesn't unmaximise their browser very often and decided to size the main content column in pixels.

Update: And they've fixed it. Clearly the Google crew are avid Mooquackwooftweetmeow readers.

Where Next?

2005-03-31T05:58:00+00:00

I've finally figured out how to make the Mooquackwhatnotbot include next- and previous-entry links in each entry's page. The solution involves defining an XSL variable at the point where the link appears, and referring to the previous/next entry using the current entry as the axis; evidently I didn't think of this the first time round.

I included the “Find this entry in the archive by date” link as a substitute for next and previous links when I found the latter too tricky; it's staying because: it provides a nice chronological overview of the entry; the archive is primarily ordered chronologically; and it's doing no harm.

Also, because the solution uses <xsl:if>s anyway, I get the problem of cockups on the first and last entry fixed for free.

I originally planned to put the next and previous links at the bottom of the article, in the main content area. Looking at it now I think it makes more sense for them to go in the Blurb, with the links to the archive, thus leaving the content area for the content.

In loosely-related news, the address of the Atom feed is now tidier – I already had a PURL at http://purl.org/mooquackwooftweetmeow/atom pointing to http://purl.org/mooquackwooftweetmeow/atom.xml, which itself uses a PURL. So there was absolutely no reason not to drop the .xml to match the entries' new URIs.

Mozilla Europe is Useless

2005-03-31T02:17:00+00:00

Presumably Mozilla Europe is very useful for non-anglophones, but for European English speakers it's useless.

MoFo makes two English versions of Firefox available: “English (British)” and “English”, where the latter is actually United States English (en-US). (As a side note, this should be labelled “English (U.S.)” so it's evident that there's another English version and to be consistent with the other multi-dialect languages.)

The Firefox product page at mozilla.org is smart – it offers British visitors the British English Firefox (in most cases anyway), as do other download points at mozilla.org (such as the front page). Mozilla Europe – which is specifically targetted at Europeans, mind you – offers only the U.S. English version, because the United States is a member of the European Union and is physically located next to the continent of Europe, whilst the United Kingdom isn't.

Wait a sec...

You have to go and spoil it for everyone

2005-03-30T03:17:00+00:00

Someone with the same IP address as me, thus probably in Hartlepool and on an ntl broadband connection, has evidently been vandalising Wikipedia. This means that everyone with my IP address is banned from editing anything until 23:54 (presumably UTC) tonight. Normally I don't have too much of an urge to edit stuff, but at least when I can be bothered, I'm allowed to.

And for some unknown reason I can't connect to my ntl webspace, so there's gonna be plenty of lag in publishing this and the previous entry.

America's screwy

2005-03-30T02:24:00+00:00

I happened to be watching ABC World News Tonight on News 24 earlier, which included an article about how teenagers were the most sleep-deprived group:

With most high schools' classes starting at 7:30a.m....

07:30‽ No wonder American kids are so screwed up.

For the record, in the UK school nominally starts at 09:00 although we had to arrive at 08:45 for registration. It generally finishes some time around 15:20 although some private secondary schools go on to 16:30.

Hey, this probably explains why Americans like coffee so much.

Netscape 8 Beta Review

2005-03-05T20:07:00+00:00

Since all the cool kids are doing it, I decided to have a look at the latest Netscape 8 beta.

After installing, the Import Settings and Data From dialogue appeared much like with Firefox (only uglier) and I chose to import settings from Firefox 1.0. This was the result:

netscape.exe

netscape.exe has encountered a problem and needs to close. We are sorry for the incovenience.

If you were in the middle of something, the information you were working on might be lost.

Oh well.

Making M-Theory Simple

2005-03-03T06:06:00+00:00

Wikipedia has a Simple English version; it's primarily intended for users for whom English is a second language, but it's also for children and those who want to learn at a more leisurely pace - it's effectively a Newsroundised version of Wikipedia. Amusingly, it contains an article on M-theory.

Unfortunately, the article is currently marked Unsimple. I've simplified the section on string theory, under the motivation that if M-theory (and superstring theory and friends) can be made “simple”, anything can. The rest of the article, however, still needs more gigawatts.

If you've got five minutes to spare, try translating an M-theory article into Simple English - it makes a fun Sunday afternoon activity.

...And, as is to be expected from any project worth its salt, there's also a (somewhat more modest) tlhIngan Hol wIqIpe'DIya.

The Register's Inability To Do Research Mocked by All Everywhere

2005-02-28T01:59:00+00:00

The Register goofed; the date on their article about Mozilla disabling IDNs is a full eight days after Gerv wrote about how Mozilla's short-term solution to IDN-based trickery wouldn't be simply to disable IDNs.

Note: short-term - they were going to turn IDNs back on as soon as possible anyway. It'd be forgivable to goof like this if Gerv hadn't made his retractive post until just before the Register's article was published; or if the article had been retracted (or even amended) as soon as Mozilla's position became clear. But as of now the article is still on the Register's front page! I'm looking forward to this week's el Reg mailbag.

Also: only 65 minutes later, the Reg published an article with the correct facts. It seems the right hand doesn't know what the left hand is biting the hand of... something. So there.

IEBlurb

2005-02-21T00:25:00+00:00

Five months ago I wrote about how the IE weblog's Browsing the Web section was empty. Since then, they've written one item in this category, A fresh IE security update. Yes, that's what browsing the web is all about.

I seriously believe the only reason it's in this category is that it concludes with the phrase Surf safely!. Do you see? Surf? That's Browsing the Web, that is!

Afterthought

This is my hundredth entry.

Thinking Different

2005-02-20T23:57:00+00:00

Part of the front page of the Apple website:

And the equivalent part of the Apple UK and Ireland website:

One problem: here in Britain we have adverbs. Light cannot be travelled - it's intangible; fast cannot be travelled - it's a bloody adjective. (Similarly, happy cannot be browsed.)

But of course this is Apple - it's to be expected; at least they don't use “my” in place of “your”.

Computers Don't Listen

2005-02-20T12:53:00+00:00

It's the old adage of the technophobe and we usually dismiss it as foolishness. Let's be fair - they couldn't tell a JPEG from a dongle. But they're right - computers don't listen. They always seem to be doing something more important than listening to you, the nominal user.

The reason is a major design flaw in all operating systems - they give too much priority to doing things quickly. For example, if I'm moving twelve million files from a floppy disc to my hard drive, the computer might be a little slow, as a matter of course. But why need this be so? I, for one, would prefer if the computer paused doing that for a second in order to move the mouse pointer when I tell it to.

Computers should be programmed so that the top priority is responding to the user. I don't mind if a “working” indicator has to be substituted for genuine progress - at least the computer would seem to be responding. When I move the mouse, the computer should drop everything in order to comply with my instructions. It should ensure that my music continues to play smoothly, then that the visualiser displays smoothly. Then if there's spare processor power - and only then - should it go about completing background operations like file moves.

Now Slightly Less Cool

2005-02-09T15:51:00+00:00

“From York, the greatest city in the world, it's Mooquackwooftweetmeow with Grey Nicholson!”

Mooquackwooftweetmeow now lives in my university webspace, and as I now have a computer here, access to some internetage, and a slightly-modified Mooquackwhatnotbot, I figured I'd write something here.

Since the “real” URI of everything around here would be changing anyway, I decided it would be a good time to reorganise mqwtm's URI structure, despite it being uncool to do so.

I originally used dates in the site's URIs because all the cool kids were doing it. Unfortunately those dates were really quite arbitrary, and the fact that I tend to write a lot at about midnight just exascerbated the problem. Not only could I not remember the URI of an important post I made a couple of weeks ago, I couldn't remember that of one I made yesterday (or was it the day before?)

I've also chucked the .html suffix and adopted the practice of giving every entry its own directory and calling them all index.html. This way I can just link to the directory, and any files associated with the entry are explicitly so by being within the entry's folder; before they were just associated with the day I made the entry. I did this mainly because seeing .html or .htm at the end of a URI just annoys me - I've no good reason for using them. Besides, this is technically XHTML.

I've just about managed to avoid Atom sacrilege (changing supposedly-permanent URIs) because the Atom feed only shows the last month's entries and this is the only entry in the last month. In order to diminish the uncoolness caused by the change, old versions of every page still live (for now) at the old URI at ntl (mainly because I don't have access to delete them) and at the corresponding URI here, so old PURLs will still work.

So, entries now live at http://gkn.me.uk/<id>, where <id> is a unique id that I manually assign to every entry. For example, this entry lives at http://gkn.me.uk/nowslightlylesscool, my contact page is at http://gkn.me.uk/grey and the style switcher is at http://gkn.me.uk/styleswitcher. Cool, huh?

It's a Weblog Entry!

2005-01-08T02:48:00+00:00

OK, so the normal service has been a bit thin on the ground. Aaanyway... I'm back off to university tomorrow (Sunday); any new text and/or other whatnot will appear at Mooquackwooftweetmeow B, my university webspace.

Meanwhile

It took them four years, but this Christmas the people in charge finally cottoned on to the idea of putting two and two together, where the first “two” is a lot of homeless people in London and the second “two” is an empty Millennium Dome.

Over in Mozillaland...

Some guys decided to call Firefox “1.0” for a change. It seems to have worked. Then some other guys did the same with Thunderbird; that also worked reasonably well. And then roughly 20 million people downloaded them and they saw that they were good. And they divided the Firefox and the Thunderbird from the other applications; the Firefox and the Thunderbird they called “cool!” and the other applications they called “less so”. And lo Internet Explorer became without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of its developers. And Bill said “let there be users” but there were no users, for they saw that it was bad. And the grace of web standards be with us all. Amen.

Or something like that.

And in Operaworld...

They made a browser that can talk like an American, but it still insists on trying to sell me things I don't want, and I can't stop the browser or webpages from doing it. I guess they're firmly targetting users who can't see.

Oh! And...

It's 2005, you know - happy new year to everyone.

Normal service will resume shortly

2004-12-15T22:25:00+00:00

In case you didn't surmise from my contact page, I've been at University, and thus unable to access a Mooquackwhatnotbot, since October. Normal service will resume shortly and persist until the start of January.

To Do

2004-10-05T19:52:00+00:00

To-do list

Get Squirefox

2004-09-28T20:29:00+00:00

More silliness for its own reward, following the previous lot:

Get Fired

Y'know, you can “Get” other stuff too!

Self-Infringing

2004-09-27T14:00:00+00:00

An email I just received contains the following as part of the “small-print” at the bottom:

If you are not the addressee, you must not read, use or disclose the contents of this email.

Now how's that supposed to work?

The terrorists have already won

2004-09-24T02:12:00+00:00

“Covering” news is generally a bad idea; news should be reported, there should perhaps be a little analysis from experts, but then that should be it. Unless new information or further developments arise, news programmes and channels shouldn't dwell on what we already know.

The terrorists want people to be afraid. Constant news coverage of a kidnapping they have accomplished registers them in the public's collective psyche. The incessant media speculation has inevitably arrived at the discussion “Well, should we negotiate with them?”.

People have criticised Tony Blair and George Bush for not responding to these terrorists sooner. That criticism has achieved the terrorists' goal, by planting the suggestion that the Coalition's leaders are ineffectual. Responding to the terrorists is the worst thing they could do - terrorism must not become a means of achieving a political goal.

Another thing: the BBC is perpetuating the damage to the perception of Islam here in the UK - An Islamic website has published a video showing.... Islamic. The terrorists' actions do not reflect the views of the vast majority of Muslims; describing a terrorist website as an “Islamic” website suggests they do. It's equivalent to describing an IRA website as a “Catholic” or a “Christian” website.

Featured Entry

2004-09-22T05:22:00+00:00

Automation is all well and good, provided it's coupled with control. At this point this entry could go into a discussion of I, Robot; it's not going to.

To paraphrase something Andrei once said, “one of the things that had bugged me about Mooquackwooftweetmeow was the fact that as I wrote new articles, they always appeared as the lead story. I had no good way of adding new content without distracting from what I wanted to be the prominent entry, which was always the last thing I'd written. Maybe this is how weblogs are supposed to work, but I view Mooquackwooftweetmeow more as a publishing platform for myself than a weblog. I needed to break this model.” Hence the new “Featured Entry” item on the front page. Actually this addition was inspired by Andrei's change (which he later repealed), but my solution is a little less all-out.

Originally I'd intended to include the entire Featured Entry on the front page, but I ran into a problem with the Related Links list. It would be too complicated to display the Related list if either the Latest or the Featured entry had related links and if the Featured entry had related links include them and if the Latest entry had related links include them, but if neither had related links show the Perpetual Links list instead.

So I decided to display just the first paragraph of the Featured Entry on the front page. Then there wouldn't be the need to present the Featured Entry's related links, because there would be no pretense of displaying everything about the entry. A good side-effect of this is that it prevents the Featured Entry from completely obscuring the Latest Entry.

The Featured Entry is also added to the top of the Atom feed if it's not already present as a recent entry.

The key thing is that the Featured Entry is optional - I can simply empty the <featuredentry/> element in The Big, Bad Source File (which otherwise contains the Featured Entry's id) and the Featured Entry will simply disappear from the front page. No maintenance is required - fully automatic control.

Firefox-related miscellanea

2004-09-22T03:06:00+00:00

I was going to entitle this entry “Mozillanea” but realised that was intensely naff.

Modified Rewind/Fastforward extension for Firefox

I've cooked up a modified version of Piro's Rewind/Fastforward extension for Firefox, based on version 1.2.2004092001. The changes are as follows:

Changed three-arrow Previous and Next buttons (for the default Firefox theme only) to yellow versions of the equivalent two-arrow buttons
Changed toolbar button captions “Prev.” and “Fastforward” to “Previous” and “F.Fwd” respectively
Changed Previous and Next tooltips from “Previous page ([text from page])” and “Next page ([text from page])” to “[text from page]”
Added my name as a contributor

I made the changes mainly for my own use and packaged them into an XPI so I can reinstall the modified version more easily; it should install nicely over the official version.

2004-10-06

Additional changes, to improve Previous and Next link-guessing:

Removed “after”, “ahead”, “back” and “before” from the link-detection list

Get Drunk

Inspired by the slew of spoof “Get Firefox” buttons, I GIMPed up the following in knee-jerk fashion:

George Bush, Marilyn Monroe, Bill Gates, Oprah Winfrey, John McEnroe, Britney Spears, John F Kennedy, Paris Hilton, Bruce Willis, Michael Jordan, Jay Leno, Rudolph Giuliani... Your Boys Took a Hell of a Beating

2004-09-20T06:07:00+00:00

Live Bookmarks

2004-09-17T00:57:00+00:00

Firefox 0.10 is out, the first release to feature live bookmarks. Live bookmarks are essentially bookmarked RSS feeds, usually used to monitor news sites and weblogs without having to bother to visit them.

This entry isn't about how cool live bookmarks are - it's about making your own. Live bookmarks can be used as a list of actual bookmarks, which you (yes, you) can share with your friends, enemies and other humans. You can effectively say to your friends “here, you run this folder”.

As live bookmarks are just RSS (or Atom) feeds, anyone who knows how to make them will be laughing (proverbially); the following instructions are aimed at everyone else, and assume you are totally clueless. There are various formats available, but the easiest for our purpose is RSS 2.0.

Firstly, open up your favourite plain-text editor; Notepad is more than adequate. Don't use a word processor or anything that can visually style text - they add extra, error-causing information to the file.

Secondly, copy the following and paste it into your text editor:


<?xml version="1.0" encoding="us-ascii"?>
<rss version="2.0">
<channel>
<title>Grey's live bookmarks</title>
<description>Some links</description>
<link>http://purl.org/mooquackwooftweetmeow/</link>
<language>en</language>
<item>
<link>http://www.getfirefox.com</link>
<title>Firefox</title>
</item>
<item>
<link>http://www.getthunderbird.com</link>
<title>Thunderbird</title>
</item>
</channel>
</rss>

Everything down to <channel> can be safely disregarded - it just identifies the file as an RSS 2.0 channel (you don't even need to know what this means).

The next block gives general information about the feed; the bits you should alter are shown thusly: change me. The tags - <title>, </title> and friends - should be fairly self-descriptive.

The feed's title and description can be anything - they're intended for human consumption, so they might as well be descriptive.

The link for the feed should be to a web page, such as your homepage; note that it's not a link to the feed itself. If you don't have a homepage, you can just point it anywhere - Firefox doesn't yet use this information (but it's required by the RSS specification).

The language should be en - English. If you like, you can be more specific, for example en-GB is British English, en-US is American English, en-CA is Canadian English and en-AU is Australian English.

The next two blocks are bookmarks; each consists of a link to the page and a title to be displayed. You can have as many of these blocks as you want - just copy and paste the ones there.

Note that links must be full URLs - web addresses should include http:// at the start. Throughout the file, ampersands (&) must be written as & for reasons you don't care about. (This includes in long URLs you copy and paste in!) Also, steer clear of < and >. Otherwise, Firefox will fail to load the live bookmark.

The last block of text finishes the file - leave it as is.

Save the file; its name should end with .xml, for example livebookmarks.xml.

You can now upload it to a web host - any web host will do, even (shudder) GeoCities; I recommend FreeWebs for small web-hosting jobs. Note the file's web address - probably something like http://www.freewebs.com/yourusername/livebookmarks.xml.

To add the live bookmark to Firefox, open the Bookmark Manager (Bookmarks > Manage Bookmarks) and choose File > New Live Bookmark. Give the feed's location and choose a name to display, et voilà!

Of course, you can edit the file as often as you want to change your live bookmarks; your friends will see the changes pretty much straight away.

Start swapping bookmarks with your friends - it's good craic.

en-semantic

2004-09-14T01:31:00+00:00

I don't like being wrong. I like it even less when everyone else is wrong and I can't (or shouldn't) tell them, for reasons of etiquette. I suppose I'm just finicky, which is why I spend quite a bit of time reviewing my own websites, Here and There, enjoying their majesty. Or something.

It's OK when I don't know that a rule is being broken, or that something is just wrong. Unfortunately, I'm also just a little bit curious, so I eventually learn the rules, and then notice when things disobey them.

...which brings me to the semantics of the English language. Read the following:

“Practise” is the verb; “practice” is the noun - think “advise/advice”.
A does not comprise of B and C; A comprises B and C.
“There's” means “there is” and thus cannot refer to several items - it makes as much sense as “several items is...”; “there are” refers to several items (“several items are...”).
“Theirs” means “the item that belongs to them”; “there's” means “there is”.
“They is” and “their is” are wrong; “there is” is right.
“Must of”, as in “It must of been cold.”, is wrong; “must have”, as in “It must have been cold.” is right.

And the classics:

“There” refers to a place; “their” means “belonging to them”; “they're” means “they are”.
“Your” means “belonging to you”; “you're” means “you are”.
“Its” is used like “his” and “hers”; “it's” means “it is” or “it has”.

While we're on the topic, some abbreviations:

“Etc.” is pronounced “et cetera”, not “ek cetera”, and is not spelt “ect.”.
“1 gram” is abbreviated to “1 g”, not “1 gm”; “2 grams” is abbreviated to “2 g”, not “2 gms” - “s” is never added to SI units' abbreviations when pluralising them.

(By the way, feel free to report any cock-ups in the above to me.)

What prompted all this? Well, it was Andrei's use of Practice, practice, practice as a headline. ...trouble is, it's actually valid to use nouns like that. But we all know he meant “Practise, practise, practise”, right?

Remember that just because one can speak English effectively doesn't mean one can write English effectively.

Jukefox

2004-09-13T16:43:00+00:00

It'd be nice if more extension authors read the documentation all extension authors must read and learned about the Firefox Version Format. A lot of extension authors seem to think 1.5 > 1.45. This would be true if Firefox version numbers were decimal numbers... but they're not - they're a string of integers, each separated by “.”. So 1.5 is indeed “one point five”, but 1.45 is “one point forty-five”, forty-five is greater than five (no, really), so 1.45 > 1.5. Of course, 1.5 > 1.4.5...

I suppose it was smart to market Firefox 0.10 (whose release is imminent) as “Firefox 1.0 Preview Release”, even though some folk seem to think it's not a milestone... which it is.

Meanwhile, with crazy autohiding controls and drag-'n'-drop placement - FoxyTunes 0.61 turns out to be a highly polished extension.

Still, they should've called it “Jukefox”.

IEBlank

2004-09-13T14:39:00+00:00

The Internet Explorer crew over at Microdollar clearly spend a lot of time thinking about browsing the web - as well they should, since they're supposed to be making a web browser. Now, they've pooled their collective thoughts into the IE weblog's Browsing the Web section, which serves as a useful, entertaining and enlightening glimpse into... oh, hang on a sec... what's...? No, it's definitely empty.

Odd.

A-level exam results

2004-08-24T23:19:00+00:00

The A-level exam results came out last Thursday; this is me finally bothering to write about it.

For those living outside of the UK (or I suppose in Scotland), A-levels are the big, important exams on which universities base their admissions.

Students apply to six universities and receive offers back from them, prior to getting their A-level results. On rare occasion, a university will make an unconditional offer of a place (i.e. “you're in”), but most of the time, offers are conditional on receiving the grades the universities want.

Most universities make offers based on three A-level grades. For example to get into Durham I would require an A and a B in Maths and Physics (in either order), plus a B in a third subject; or an A in both Maths and Physics, and a C in a third subject. General Studies is usually excluded from grade offers, because it's a load of bollocks. Some universities require a minimum point total from three A-levels, where each grade is worth a certain amount; this really amounts to the same thing.

Students then respond to these offers by selecting one first choice university, their “firm offer”, and optionally a second choice, their “insurance offer”. I only chose a firm offer - Durham. The other five universities' offers were all at the same level or higher, because Durham lowered their offer from AAB to ABB/AAC for me, something I didn't know would happen until I'd applied to all six universities. Also, by accepting an offer as insurance, I'd be creating a contract to go to that university should they accept me.

Besides Maths and Physics, my third subject was Religious Studies, although it's really about philosophy, religion and ethics. The RS exams took the form of written essays - quickly written essays, which caused one's hand to develop a grudge against the rest of one's body, particularly the brain for getting it into the exam.

I was quite confident about Maths and Physics - I'd found the exams relatively easy. I wasn't quite as confident about RS, but I thought I'd done enough. The second-year exams are added to the first-year exams, in which I'd got a B for RS; so I only needed a D in the second-year exams to give the C I needed overall.

Evidently not. The first thing I saw of the results sheet was D(d). It took a bit of effort to get through to Durham - the UCAS website, which would confirm that Durham hadn't offered a place anyway, was jammed for a while. On Durham's admissions phone line there was “no-one available to take my call”, according to a particularly dull recorded woman.

Durham's main phone line - the telephonic equivalent of the reception desk - was available, and they were able to put me through to the admissions office... who told me I needed to contact the Physics department. They weren't able to put me through, as the Physics department was too busy, so I was given the phone number to call. Repeatedly. To no avail. So I phoned the reception desk again, who could put me through to the Physics department.

They told me that they were full and couldn't accept near-misses, despite my having more than enough spare UMS marks from Maths and Physics to make up for the 14 I was lacking in RS (one grade spans 60 UMS marks, except the highest and lowest), but York had some spare places going, and they'd probably take me. I phoned York and got through to the admissions office, who said my grades were plenty, but I should contact the Physics department. I got through to them quite happily, but the senior Physics admissions tutor was in a meeting, and I would have to phone back in twenty minutes.

Twenty minutes later, the senior admissions tutor's meeting had overran, so I'd have to phone back again in ten minutes' time. Out of her meeting, she was finally able to offer me a place at York. At this point I went to the pub - eight hours later than planned.

The moral of the story is: if you do fourteen points better in your exams, you get to spend an extra eight hours in the pub.

Firefox extension wackiness

2004-08-24T22:29:00+00:00

BlockXXX is a new extension for Firefox that blocks pornographic content (the anti-Pornzilla, if you will). According to its release notes: This seems to work pretty well, although there are definitely some holes (large and gaping). Definitely not working well then.

Until about a month ago, all Firefoxen contained the legend Cookies are delicious delicacies. to describe cookies. Then Mike Connor decided that Cookies are pieces of information stored by web pages on your computer. They are used to remember login information and other data.. Distraught, I incited the creation of an extension to restore the legend.

A month passed and the world had all but forgotten about our delicious delicacies... until Jesse Ruderman published the Delicious Delicacies extension, dramatically subtitled Restore the legend. The world rested in peace once more.

Bringing down the establishment one pillock at a time

2004-08-17T03:09:00+00:00

Anarchy!

UNcalled-for pUN

2004-08-02T23:38:00+00:00

Wow - the UN's website is godawful! In fact as godawfulness goes, it's Zeusawful - the king of the godawfuls.

It's not accessible via the “www”less version of its address; its charter uses frames; an animated GIF flag; unantialiased cursive text in an unalted image; and “practice” as a verb.

And this is the UN - the most influential body that exists. Are they really this inept?

Bandwagon-Jumping as a Scientific Experiment

2004-08-02T21:46:00+00:00

This posting is a community experiment started by Minding the Planet to see how a meme represented by a weblog posting spreads across weblogspace, physical space and time. It will help to show how ideas travel across weblogs in space and time and how weblogs are connected. It may also help to show which weblogs are most influential in the propagation of memes. The original posting for this experiment is located at: Minding the Planet; results and commentary will appear there in the future.

Please join the test by adding your weblog (see instructions, below) and inviting your friends to participate - the more the better. The data from this test will be public and open; others may use it to visualize and study the connectedness of weblogspace and the propagation of memes across weblogs.

The GUID for this experiment is: as098398298250swg9e98929872525389t9987898tq98wteqtgaq62010920352598gawst (this GUID enables anyone to easily search Google for all results of this experiment). Anyone is free to analyze the data of this experiment. Please publicize your analysis of the data, and/or any comments by adding comments onto the original post at Minding the Planet. Note: it would be interesting to see a geographic map or a temporal animation, as well as a social network map of the propagation of this meme.

Instructions

To add your weblog to this experiment, copy this entire posting to your weblog, and fill out the info below, substituting your own information in your posting, where appropriate.

Required Fields

(Note: Replace the answers below with your own answers)

I found this experiment at URL: http://blog.codefront.net/
I found it via Newsreader Software or Browsing or Searching the Web or An E-Mail Message: Newsreader Software
I posted this experiment at URL: http://gkn.me.uk/
I posted this on date (day, month, year): 02 August 2004
I posted this at time (24 hour time): 22:46:00
My posting location is (city, state, country): Hartlepool, England, United Kingdom

Optional Fields

(Replace the answers below with your own answers):

My weblog is hosted by: My ISP (ntl)
My age is: 18
My gender is: Nonbinary
My occupation is: Student
I use the following RSS/Atom reader software: Sage
I use the following software to post to my weblog: Human Brain v1.0, Notepad, the Mooquackwhatnotbot, FileZilla
I have been weblogging since (day, month, year): 2 February 2004
My web browser is: Firefox

Yes, I do refuse to abbreviate weblog.

First-come First-served Intellectual Property

2004-07-30T03:12:00+00:00

How can there be no prior art for this?! I'm not surprised no-one bothered patenting it.

Slight Delay

2004-07-30T01:06:00+00:00

OK, so I spent the last hour designing Sirius' logo. It is quite difficult to come up with distinct designs that look like stars and are viewable on a light background... so I've slightly cheated.

Anyhow, I might start writing some CSS soon.

Work-in-progress

2004-07-29T23:57:00+00:00

I've just been visiting Stopdesign; naturally, I'm inspired to do a bit of CSS design, so I'm setting about designing a new style for the site, Sirius.

It's a work-in-progress and probably will be for a while, but it'll be live on the site as I work on it. You may observe via the style switcher.

This title isn't funny, witty, quirky or original

2004-07-27T00:49:00+00:00

Turns out that attempting humour on the web, especially in a personal site, is completely lame. Everybody is witty, quirky and original, to the extent that wit, quirkiness and originality is lame, boring and old.

Shite.

InterCraps

2004-07-23T16:11:00+00:00

My name is not GrEy NicholSon. I don't live in HartlePool, nor in EngLand, nor in the UniTed KingDom.

Firefox is not called FireFox; Thunderbird is not called ThunderBird; Sunbird is not called SunBird.

The Emporium Can't Count

2004-07-22T16:21:00+00:00

In the category of “Evidence that businesses are run by people - stupid people”, look closely at the following, a loyalty card from the Emporium (a bar in Hartlepool):

This has probably never been an issue, since the card is valid up to 7pm.

Reorderiffic

2004-07-22T14:58:00+00:00

The Blurb is now above the main content in the site's source and thus also in Toliman - it makes more sense that way.

I didn't even need to modify Arcturus to retain its layout. As you were.

Loosing My Mind

2004-07-21T17:00:00+00:00

The following is a public service announcement: “loose” does not mean “lose”.

Yes you bloody did mean “losing”! Fools!

White People Proven Unfriendly

2004-07-20T01:00:00+00:00

Careful how you read this BBC News report. Whoever wrote the title obviously didn't read the article.

In reality it should probably be “Few white friends for ethnic minorities”. According to the article, more than 90% of whites have no or few friends who aren't white.

I'm going to pick an arbitrary definition of few - let's say it means “three or under”; as another ballpark figure, let's assume about thirty friends each in total (seems ever so slightly exaggerative, but what the heck).

This would mean that, for those people who are not in the 90%, i.e. those who don't have few or no non-white friends, more than 10% of their friends are non-white. If a person has fewer than 30 friends (I can't think of 30 people I'd count as friends) then few (up to 3) of them is an even larger proportion.

One of the findings of the 2001 Census was that, according to the BBC, 9% of Angles and Welshmen aren't white. Which means it's perfectly reasonable to have few - i.e. less than 10% (assuming my guesstimations are about right) - non-white friends.

It's even more reasonable if you're only counting blacks - they make up 2.2% of Angles and Welshmen. So if I have one black friend, and fewer than 45 friends in total, I have a disproportionately large number of black friends.

Disclaimer: the above maths is probably invalid and rubbish.

The more interesting part is that nearly half (let's call it half anyway) of non-white folk say most of their friends are white. Which means 50% of non-whites don't say most of their friends are white. Once again, 90% of people in England and Wales are white. That's most. Statistically, everyone should be saying that most of their friends are white.

Of course, this shows that friendships aren't distributed the same way as the population. It seems that white people have a statistically probable number of non-white friends, while non-whites have an improbably high number of non-white friends. My theory would be that most immigrants would tend to socialise with other immigrants, and non-whites make up a larger proportion of immigrants than of the general population.

The CRE's chairman, Trevor Phillips, said he had been surprised by the extent to which the majority community still did not really know minority communities.

There isn't any real majority “community” - just the society of which minority communities are part. Maybe people of those communities generally have more friends (as they're part of a community) hence the disproportionately high non-white friend count among non-whites.

Another suggestion might be that those communities are insular, but that's not borne out by the (alleged) fact that whites have a proportionate number of non-white friends.

The definite (not a trace of doubt) conclusion which can be drawn from this, then, is that white people in England and Wales aren't as friendly as everyone else.

So that headline should probably read either “Few black friends for whites; few black people around”, or “Few friends for whites”.

If only we had more minorities.

Plan Change II

2004-07-19T23:15:00+00:00

It seems that updates to entries are actually considerably less notable than new entries, and don't deserve the front-page prominence I thought they did.

A minute ago there was a bit on apostrophes on the front page. It's an old v3.0 weblog entry about a contrivance I had to use then. I've updated it to say I'm no longer using this contrivance (i.e. the entire entry's redundant and irrelevant) and it makes the front page.

Obviously this won't do. I've rejigged the gubbins (technical term) and now the entry that was written last (rather than updated last) makes the front page. The title remains “The Latest”; although that phrasiology was only chosen to be ambiguous about whether it was a new entry or an update, “Latest Entry” just doesn't seem to have the same mojo.

The Recent Updates list on each page is now a Recent Entries list, too. Also, something I tweaked a little earlier: if the latest entry has any Related Links, they now appear on the front page with it, instead of the Perpetual Links - they get boring after a while).

By the way, my use of the term “Recent Entries” in the blurb about the Mooquackwhatnotbot was just a cockup on my part - not a prophecy, nor a conspiracy.

I've Got A Brand New Content Management System And I'll Give You The Key

2004-07-19T02:15:00+00:00

...if you ask nicely. Mooquackwooftweetmeow is now, like The Twaddle, generated from arbitrary XML using batch XSLT. If that's completely foreign to you, the rest probably will be (but I'll try my best).

At El Twad, everything is done in nice, distinct articles - there are no piddly little entries like here. So for The Twaddle, each article can be kept in its own file. These files are then each passed through the same XSLT template/filter, resulting in similarly structured pages, each with different content. The filter uses a little class- and id-based trickery to implement the differences between the front page, the Articles page, the other admin pages and the articles; these amount to a different set of meta-blurb around the outside of the main content.

Here, however, it'd be hopelessly impractical - or rather, inconvenient - to have a separate file for each entry. Especially when an entry may be no more that a couple of lines. So everything must live in one big file - mqwtm.xml, The Big, Bad Source File. If I have one source file and want to create many pages (which would be nice), I need many XSLT filters.

The problem then becomes “How do I generate many filters, one for each entry?”. The only difference there needs to be between these filters is the id of the entry it will apply to - the layout will not differ between entries.

XSL allows one to define variables which can be used later in the XSLT template. So, the entry's id, i.e. the entryid is defined as an XSL variable which, surprisingly enough, I label entryid.

Later on in the template then, I can instruct the XSL transformer to concern itself with “the entry whose id value is the entry with which we are currently dealing”. This means I can instruct it to display “the current entry's title”, “the current entry's body text”, etc.

So, the only difference between each entry's XSL stylesheet/template (henceforth referred to as an “entrysheet”) need be one string of text, once. But how does one go about that?

To perform the batch XSL transformation, I'm using Xalan-C, the precompiled C++ version of Xalan; I was using Xalan-J, the Java version, for the Twaddlebot, as I had correctly assumed that a Java program would “run anywhere”. I'd also incorrectly assumed that I'd need some special software developers' tools to run the C++ version. In fact, the C++ version is simpler to use, in my (intentionally limited) experience, and much quicker - which is handy, as a lot of XSL transformations are required to pull this off.

Unfortunately, I know of no way to pass a variable to Xalan - to say, for example, “Transform mqwtm.xml using bigbadxsltemplate.xsl, with the keyword ‘cheese’.”. But I do know how to pass a variable to an MS-DOS batch program. Yup - those things.

The end result is incredibly hacky. The XSL stylesheet to be applied to all entries, to transform them from arbitrary, homebrew XML into world-famous XHTML, is kept in two chunks - the bit before the entryid needs to be inserted, and the bit after. I then have an MS-DOS batch file which copies the start of the template to a file, appends the name of the current entry (passed to it as a variable), then appends the remainder of the template. Hacktastic.

Next problem: I must pass the name of each entry, in turn, to the aforementioned batch program (entrysheetcompiler.bat). Solution: createentrysheetcompiler.xsl. Yes, XSLT can be used to rustle up text documents as well as XML documents. And those text documents can happen to form batch commands when read by MS-DOS. And they do. This XSL template, when run on The Big, Bad Source File, transforms each entry into a command which says “run entrysheetcompiler.bat with the variable [the entry's title]”. This is done using the magic of <xsl:for-each/> - go on, look it up - you know you want to.

Applying this transformation to The Big, Bad Source File creates an MS-DOS batch program which runs entrysheetcompiler.bat on said Big, Bad Source File, using each entry's title in turn as a keyword/variable/parameter.

Now, I have a stylesheet for each entry; each one will transform The Big, Bad Source File into a page displaying that entry. Let's do that then. I use the method I used to create entrysheetcompiler.bat, to create a batch that will transform each entry, using its template, into a page; I entitle that batch “entrytransformer.bat”.

createentrytransformer.xsl, the template used to make entrytransformer.bat, also contains a few lines to transform the Front Page, the Archive and the Atom feed. They are transformed using separate, hand-made XSL templates for each, designed to be run on - you guessed it - The Big, Bad Source File. The Front Page's template, the Archive's template, and the master template for entries, are all fairly similar (hence the consistent visual style); I could use another level of back-end automation to generate all three from a common source, but at the moment I maintain them separately and manually.

The XHTML which is cacked out by entrytransformer.bat isn't the cleanest it might be, so I need to run HTML Tidy on every file. Same process - use <xsl:for-each/> (have you looked it up yet? it's very useful) to, for each entry in the source, write a batch command which performs a set action on many files, whose filenames differ only by containing a different entry's id and published date (all of which can be readily extracted from TBBSF).

And that's basically it. All that's needed now is to run each of those components in order. I have a master batch file to do that, the Mooquackwhatnotbot.

First it runs createentrysheetcompiler.xsl, createentrytransformer.xsl and createxhtmlcleaner.xsl on TBBSF. This results in three new batch programs, entrysheetcompiler.bat, entrytransformer.bat and xhtmlcleaner.bat. These are then run in turn: entrysheetcompiler.bat generates a template for each entry, entrytransformer.bat transforms TBBSF using each of those templates in turn (that's what takes most of the time), then xhtmlcleaner.bat tidies up the output. The entrysheets and the three generated batch programs are then no longer needed - they'll be generated anew next time - so they are deleted.

I also back up The Big, Bad Source File at the start of each Mooquackwhatnotbot-ing session, in case I accidentally do something daft that erases it. This is done by another batch program, which simply copies mqwtm.xml to a location given by the last time TBBSF was updated; this batch program is generated from another (comparitively simple) XSLT template.

The whole process takes around five minutes on a good day, most of the time being taken up transforming the entries into pages. Xalan must be “phoning home” to check that the markup I've used is actually the valid XHTML is says it is - the process takes longer when my connection is clogged, and the text-mode transformation used to make the batch files is relatively instantaneous.

Static, manually-updated stuff like the CSS stylesheets (they're applied by your web browser when you view a page and are uploaded with the page to the web - not to be confused with XSL stylesheets, which I apply before uploading) and images used in entries and throughout the site, is kept separately from auto-generated stuff on my computer. This way I know what I can delete safe in the knowledge that it'll be regenerated next time I run the Whatnotbot. When uploaded, everything intersperses, keeping the images and other gubbins with the appropriate pages.

Over at El Twad, I need to maintain separately a central list of articles, in order to tell the Twaddlebot what to transform - this is the drawback of using a decentralised storage system (read: “separate files”) for articles. I also need to manually maintain the list of articles to put on the main menu; I've managed to combine that list with the Articles page's, but it's not ideal and it's certainly not automatic. That's not too much of a problem, as articles at El Twad are much more of an event than entries are here. It just adds a little more work per item. The beauty of this system is that I just add the entry to The Big, Bad Source File, push the button, wait for the Whatnotbot to work its magic, then upload.

Incidentally, I use FileZilla to FTP everything up to my mum's ntl webspace - that, and the fact that I'm already well over FreeWebs' 50-file limit, is why Mooquackwhatnot is no longer at FreeWebs. Besides, FTP is just faster and cooler.

The benefits of keeping everything in one file are quite cool; for example, those Recent Entries there, in an intentionally vague relative position due to multiple-stylability, are made possible because of it. I think it's possible to draw in content from other XML documents, but it's easier to (i.e. I know how to) draw in content from the same document. Those Recent Entries use logic like: “for each entry, sorted by the date it was updated, in reverse chronological order, if an entry is within the first five, show its title, last updated date, etc.; if it's also the first one, show the first paragraph as well.”.

This definitely couldn't be done without a central list of entries, and is much, much easier if all the entries are actually kept in the same document so Xalan, the XSL transformer, can look at them all at the same time. Those Featured and Perpetual Links only exist once in The Big, Bad Source File, but are propogated to every page (where they're needed).

If I want to completely overhaul the structure of the site (which I shouldn't need to - I've tried to use the most semantic structure possible) I'd only have to change three files - one for entries, one for the Front Page, and one for the Archive. It's not one file, but it could be a lot worse. I can change small details of every page quite easily.

This method is quite portable - I'm sure the batch programs could be ported to a Unix format. But more importantly, the end result requires absolutely no browser-side XSL (bloody Opera), no PHP, no SQL, no ASP, no Perl, definitely no .NET, and not even any JavaScript. This would work on GeoCities (if they didn't insist on attaching an HTML-invalid advert).

I haven't uploaded any samples of the Mooquackwhatnotbot, not out of principle or anything, but because you'd probably struggle to make sense of even the complete thing (I know I do). If you fancy a peek, I can send you all the gubbins and a sample Smaller, Not-Quite-As-Bad Source File - just email me.

I haven't made any mention of the actual resultant site, except to demonstrate its method of construction. This is intentional - I'll discuss the site's structure and styling (i.e. XHTML and CSS) in a forthcoming entry.

Foundation and Whatnot

2004-07-18T14:30:00+00:00

After determining that I spend a lot of time with sounds and pictures being pumped into my brain, I decided that yesterday I'd have none of it. No TV, no radio and no use of the PCing device. It actually worked quite well.

I ended up reading Isaac Asimov's Foundation; I'd read it before, but in smaller chunks, so I hadn't really followed it properly. Foundation and Empire, Second Foundation and Foundation's Edge have also been sitting on the bookshelf since 1998(!).

I read part of Foundation and Empire following on from my first attempt at Foundation, and Foundation's Edge prior to that. I had Prelude to Foundation and Foundation and Earth out of the library a while ago; I might see if they're in the 50p (to buy) bargain bin, to complete the set.

Bye Bye, Gormozilla

2004-07-17T02:55:00+00:00

Hurrah! The Gormozilla has gone!

I bet the ugly git was scaring off customers.

According to the document history, Gormoz has been out of action for two weeks. Also in the last two weeks, Firefox has been getting many more downloads. Coincidence?

The official line is that security problems in IE are persuading users to switch. Yeah, right!

No Blues

2004-07-17T00:50:00+00:00

It's a well-known fact that contemporary “R'n'B” isn't really R'n'B. There may be Rhythm, but there's definitely no Blues.

But rather than insisting that this isn't R'n'B music, it's possible to contort the phrase to allow the music to qualify as “R'n'B”. Firstly, it must be spelt “R n' B”, with one apostrophe-o'-omission, after the N. This apostrophe stands for an “O” and the music is “Rhythm-no-Blues” music.

- Which suits nicely.

RIP Decent TV

2004-07-16T15:50:00+00:00

I knew it couldn't last. For the last few weeks, Channel 4 have been showing Ed, ER and Third Watch every morning from 09:20 to 12:00.

Unfortunately it's now officially the school summer holidays so, from Monday, we'll be subjected to T4, their cool, wickid 'n' hap'nin' teen entertainment strand (i.e. it's for 12-year-olds with the mental age of 10-year-olds). I'll not be getting up.

Alright Now

2004-07-12T23:20:00+00:00

There she stood in the street, smiling from her head to her feet.

I've just realised that's nonsense.

Proper Multiple Styleage

2004-07-11T23:30:00+00:00

After several days' absence due to various combinations of inarsibility and drunkenness, I've returned, and finished up the site's restylifier. Observe hither.

Update: The Style Switcher is Dead; Long Live CSS

In partially-related news, I've also hooked up a meta-link for the site's Atom feed, for the purpose of playing nice with the Live Bookmarks feature in new Firefoxen.

Style Switcher

2004-07-11T22:50:00+00:00

Update: The Style Switcher is Dead; Long Live CSS

Print Away

2004-07-04T22:06:00+00:00

In a half-arsed attempt to provide some sort of styling for printed copies of Mooquackwooftweetmeow, I've tried to use Toliman when printing, even if you're viewing Arcturus.

I couldn't figure out how to make this work so, reluctantly, I've now spent the half hour necessary to add proper print styling, to both Arcturus and Toliman.

In fact, I've added an extra stylesheet, only used when printing, to do things such as appending URIs to links and removing useless sections (the recent entries list, for example). This stylesheet is called no matter what style you use, to avoid my having to repeat myself for each style.

The layout for Toliman is just left as is - it's already very plain (that's the point) and is thus already suited to printing. Arcturus is tweaked a little for printing. The content column is wider; conversely the blurb is thinner. The link boxes are forced below both the content and the blurb, so they can both be made wider, to accommodate the appended URIs.

See for yourself - print stuff out; report any deliberate mistakes to printaway@gkn.me.uk.

And finally, Toliman is no longer labelled “(beta)”. Although I think I might want to tweak a bit of the spacing at some point, it's good enough. Having said that, Google News is still labelled “beta”. Crazy Americans.

Toliman

2004-07-03T23:26:00+00:00

I've just uploaded a second stylesheet for Mooquackwooftweetmeow. As promised, it's a vanilla, lightly-styled, use-your-browser's-default-settings-fest.

It's not finished yet, but it's not too far from. I haven't written (by which I mean imported and modified) a style switcher yet - I probably will soon. Until then, just use your browser's built-in style switcher, which will generally only stick until you leave the page.

Ironically enough, the only mainstream graphical browser that really needs to use Toliman cos it can't handle Arcturus - IE for Windows - is one of few without a built-in style-switcher. Good, eh?

I'd appreciate any Toliman-related suggestions - for example, cases where I've inadvertently modified a default, to adverse effect. You can send them to me at toliman@gkn.me.uk.

Slight Change of Plan

2004-07-03T15:45:00+00:00

One-paragraph entries use their entry in the archive as a permanent link. This is because the first paragraph is displayed there; if there's only one paragraph then that's the entirety of the entry.

But if I update a one-paragraph entry, especially significantly, its permanent link should be its own page. For this reason, and for the craic, every entry will now have its own page. My apologies for duplicated items in the Atom feed.

Note that the “old” links haven't been broken - they still lead to the archive.

Welcome to Mooquackwooftweetmeow version 3.1

2004-07-01T01:15:00+00:00

Welcome to Mooquackwooftweetmeow version 3.1 “for Workgroups”.

Version 3.0's Weblog was set up so I could easily and quickly add new content to Mooquackwooftweetmeow - it was simply too much effort to manually create a new page for every entry.

The trouble was that I couldn't really make substantial entries in the weblog as it was sort of tucked away - anything “big” should, I felt, have its own page, and be a proper article.

So I ended up not writing about things I wanted to because I wanted to do it “properly”… which isn't good.

The idea behind version 3.1 was to merge the articles and the weblog so that significant entries would have their own page and short ones would only be part of an archive list. I've managed to do it. Version 3.1 is a complete overhaul of version 3.0. Some of the content remains, however, hence the “.1” version number.

Mooquackwooftweetmeow, like The Twaddle, is now driven by an XML+XSL-based offline page generation system… sounds complicated - and it is.

The most notable improvement this has allowed, in my opinion anyway, is the Recent Entries list to the left, which appears on every page. I'll write up a more detailed description of the Mooquackwhatnotbot some time soon.

The site's new design is entitled Arcturus; the old design, Shades of Grey has simply disappeared. Arcturus is designed to be a significant evolution - I certainly haven't tried to imitate the old style - but which still maintains much of the character of Shades of Grey.

Unlike version 3.0, there's no print stylesheet and no ever-so-slightly styled version - yet. Again, I'll write more details of the CSS in a separate entry in the near future.

There's also no RSS feed. RSS 2.0 uses a ridiculous date format (i.e. not numbers) so it'd take a bit of extra work to generate such a feed. It's probably possible though. RSS/RDF 1.0 is equally manky with its modules and whatnot.

Anyway, we've got a perfectly good syndication format in Atom; the Atom feed lives at http://gkn.me.uk/atom. If your RSS reader doesn't also support Atom, it's probably crap. Or you could use 2RSS to convert the Atom feed to RSS - subscribe hither.

Prototastic

2004-06-23T00:36:00+00:00

I've just got the backbone of the next version of Mooquackwooftweetmeow working.

Its big toe just wiggled.

Don't hash those numbers!

2004-06-21T21:30:00+00:00

I just remembered XHTML ids aren't allowed to begin with numbers, so it's probably not a good idea to give weblog entries permalinks like mine.

Never mind - they'll all be breaking soon anyway (I know - Atom sacrilege, but until URNs work better it's sometimes gonna be unavoidable).

Hash those hs!

2004-06-21T13:55:00+00:00

A quick request of everyone who writes web pages, especially weblogs, or who designs web page templates:

Give every heading an id, so that other folks (and you) can link to sections of an article or entry.

It's not quite Purple Numbers but it does the job more than effectively (and it's not half as overkilly). I reckon it's fair to assume that if someone wants to link to a part of your page in another page, they'll have the ability to view your page's source and find the ids. And if they can't, purple numbers would probably befuddle them anyway.

I do it automatically - it really takes little effort. Another point is to use proper titles, not #title4, so that if you add a chunk, nothing will break (and referring urls look much friendlier).

Trippin'

2004-06-21T12:30:00+00:00

For those of us who don't fancy the psychological side-effects of cannabis, but want to see what all the fuss is about, I've devised the following pseudo-stonedness induction technique (PSIT):

Step one: Make sure it's dark and you're in a dark room - switch off the light if necessary

Step two: Load up the Let It Be... Naked version of Across the Universe into iTunes

Step three: Set the Visualizer to full-screen mode, press play and turn it on

Step four: Stare at the screen

Works best when suffering from sleep-deprivation.

Whoops!

2004-06-20T01:20:00+00:00

It seems Google forgot to do their homework - gmail.co.uk

Quote of the Minute: 2004-06-19 23:34 BST

2004-06-19T22:34:00+00:00

From El Reg, In the tape, the Userland owner says he has no plans to host websites ever again - although this is probably a moot point, as no one will ever trust him to host websites again.

...Not that I'm advocating anti-Winerism. ...Not that it would matter if I was. ...But I love a good whatnot-take.

The Gmail Web Interface and How To Avoid It

2004-06-19T20:21:00+00:00

I have one fairly major complaint about Gmail's web interface - you can't open multiple emails in tabs by middle-clicking. (Pot+kettle sidenote: one can't middle-click links in this weblog either, but that's an XSLT fault in Gecko.) In fact, it seems the “links” one clicks to open emails aren't really links at all (right-clicking offers no “Open Link in New Tab/Window” options). This would put me right off using Gmail permanently.

Other, minor complaints are: the clock is in 12-hour format; I prefer 24-hour format. Also, the ad-frame isn't Adblockable (but I don't expect Google to want to fix that :) ). The clock problem could be fixed easily, and neither of these are at all important (just nits).

But I no longer have to use the web interface. Although it is much, much, much, much, much quicker, easier and better than Hotmail's, Yahoo's and mail.com's put together, I just don't like web interfaces. Not when I've got an excellent email client.

For Hotmail I've been using MrPostman as a web-interface-to-POP3 proxy. For the most part, it works well, although not flawlessly - if and when your account gets clogged up with emails, MrPostman is seemingly incapable of ignoring the “Buy More Space!” adverts added to the page, insists you have no new mail, and refuses to fetch the non-existant mail. But it's workable.

MrPostman is aimed at Hotmail, Yahoo.com (not .co.uk) and mail.com - not Gmail. Bobbins.

However, it's a good thing that I read an inordinate amount of Mozilla-related weblogs, and have the middle-click-every-link-in-the-text affliction (“tabbed-browsing syndrome”). For cheeaun led me to djst, whose comments led to PGtGM - a web-to-POP3 proxy for Gmail! Incidentally, the blurb mentions Thunderbird by name - extra marks. (It should also be mentioned that PGtGM is only for Windows.)

How to set up Thunderbird (or even Lookout Express) to use PGtGM isn't made obvious, but it's there - in the PGtGM interface, click Help/About PGtGM, then click the E-mail Client Setup tab to the left of the dialogue. If you're using MrPostman alongside (as I am), you may have to change the POP3 port setting in both PGtGM and Tb's Account Settings for the appropriate account, to something other than MrPostman's. Et voila - Gmail via Thunderbird!

Gmail invites by the busload

2004-06-19T18:26:00+00:00

After my unexpected Gmaily fortune yesterday (every mention of which must be suffixed by “thanks Jeff”), I just got the offer of another Gmail invite, from none other than Asa Dotzler. In fact, Asa was only a few hours behind Jeff (hard luck, Asa :) ).

I've transferred my Bugmail address to Gmail, and we'll see how it goes.

Gmail

2004-06-18T16:50:00+00:00

I've just received a Gmail invite from Jeff Walden. [insert your favourite deity/expletive] knows why he chose to send me one in particular - all I can say is “thanks!”

Indie Pop Rocks!

2004-06-18T00:00:00+00:00

(Thanks to DxF,) I've just discovered SomaFM and I can confirm that indie pop does indeed rock.

Microsoft Bollocks

2004-06-17T23:50:00+00:00

If you've ever visited msn.com, you'll probably have a couple of cookies from them stored by your browser. Whilst perusing my stored cookies just now, I found one from there entitled “MSNADS”.

It'd be fair to assume that this is to be interpreted as “MSN ADS”, i.e. “Microsoft Network adverts”, but I feel obliged to point out that it also could (and indeed should) be interpreted as “MS NADS”, i.e. “Microsoft gonads”.

What more evidence do anti-Microdollar zealots need? Microsoft bollocks sneaking on to your computer...

How to remove the borders from Firefox and Thunderbird's toolbars

2004-06-17T23:25:00+00:00

Qute, Firefox's old default theme (and Thunderbird's soon-to-be-retired default theme) doesn't have borders on its toolbars (at least in the latest Firefox version; see also the Qute FAQ). Winstripe, the new default theme, does. Personally, I prefer no-borders - it looks cleaner.

The Qute FAQ provides some CSS that can be added to your userChrome.css file to reinstate the borders. Based on this then, to remove Firefox and Thunderbird's toolbars' borders, add this to your userChrome.css file:

/* Remove toolbar borders */ toolbar {border-top: none !important; border-bottom: none !important}

The Wonders of MiracleGro

2004-06-16T18:50:00+00:00

SCO Grows Your Business, apparently. Using some kind of crazy business-compost? And a business-plantpot? Do they have business-gardeners to make sure your business is growing well?

And business-pesticide?

Does Your Browser Have An Add Toaster Button?

2004-06-16T15:00:00+00:00

One Tree Hill

2004-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

I've been using Winstripe for a couple of hours now, and I'm surprised to report that it's passable. Crazy, eh?

Also, One Tree Hill (a.k.a. Firefox 0.9) will be imminent in a few hours' time... Damn timezone difference.

Watch out - here comes the “link to other weblogs” trick!

2004-06-07T19:10:00+00:00

Redesigns, anyone? Looks like fun.

The Twaddlebot has been unleashed

2004-06-07T18:40:00+00:00

Last night version 1.0 of The Twaddle went live. It uses arbitrary XML and XSLT to generate valid XHTML pages... offline.

The idea of uploading bare-bones articles and an XSLT template, allowing the browser to generate pages as they're required, was a no-go. But I managed to rig up the transformation offline, to be run as a batch.

Following the tradition of giving XML languages names that are barely-logical acronyms beginning with X, I call the language XTw, which stands for XML... Twaddle... something.

Here's how I worked the magic (borrowing liberally from a newsgroup posting I made on the subject):

This assumes: no programming experience, but enough computer savvy to create XML and XSL files to need transforming in the first place; and a Windows (XP) machine)

First off, you'll need Xalan, available from http://xml.apache.org/xalan-j/ (and the requisite Java runtime, which you probably already have)

The actual file I downloaded was http://apache.rmplc.co.uk/dist/xml/xalan-j/xalan-j-current-bin.tar.gz

There's also http://apache.rmplc.co.uk/dist/xml/xalan-j/xalan-j-current-bin.zip if you prefer a zip.

The version I got was 2.6.0 (the Java version).

Unzip Xalan into a folder. I used C:\Program Files\xalan-j_2_6_0

Now the code from http://evc-cit.info/cit041x/batchfiles.html#transform:

echo off java -cp h:\java\xmljar\xalan-j_2_5_1\bin\xml-apis.jar;h:\java\xmljar\xalan-j_2_5_1\bin\xercesImpl.jar;h:\java\xmljar\xalan-j_2_5_1\bin\xalan.jar;. org.apache.xalan.xslt.Process -IN %1 -XSL %2 -OUT %3 %4 %5 %6 %7 %8 %9

The only line break should be after echo off.

Copy this into a plain text editor (e.g. Notepad), and save it as filename.bat (I used ANSI encoding, if it matters)

You should now have an MS-DOS Batch File.

(Apparently some versions of Notepad append .txt to filenames, even if they contain a file extension. In these cases, quoting the filename - e.g. “filename.bat” - allegedly solves the problem)

You'll most likely have to modify the code to point to the actual locations of your Xalan installation and files.

I only plan on using one XSL stylesheet with multiple files; the input files will be filename.xml. The output files will be filename.htm and will be kept in the folder above the one where the input and XSL files are kept. So, I modified the code a little:

java -cp "c:\program files\xalan-j_2_6_0\bin\xml-apis.jar";"c:\program files\xalan-j_2_6_0\bin\xercesImpl.jar";"c:\program files\xalan-j_2_6_0\bin\xalan.jar";. org.apache.xalan.xslt.Process -IN %1.xml -XSL "c:\path\to\an\xsl\file\xsl.xml" -OUT ..\%1.htm

This should all be on one line. %1 in the code will be replaced by the first argument passed to the batch file, %2 by the second argument, etc. ..\ means up one folder. The quotation marks around the filenames cause them to be treated as one item, despite their containing spaces.

You can add @echo off (without quotes) in an empty line above, if you prefer not to have masses of textual output in the command console. e.g.:

@echo off java -cp "c:\...

echo off turns off the display of subsequent commands; @ hides the echo off command.

To perform the transformation, open a command console (Start > Run > "cmd") and navigate to the location of your XML, XSL and batch files, by typing

cd "c:\path\to\files"

(including the quotes)

For simplicity's sake, I've shoved everything in the same folder, and used absolute paths for the programs. You could probably also mess around with relative paths or the path environment variable, but I can't be bothered.

I ended up having to use HTML Tidy to contort the output into valid XHTML. My final batch file reads:

java -cp "c:\program files\xalan-j_2_6_0\bin\xml-apis.jar";"c:\program files\xalan-j_2_6_0\bin\xercesImpl.jar";"c:\program files\xalan-j_2_6_0\bin\xalan.jar";. org.apache.xalan.xslt.Process -IN %1.xtw -XSL "XTw2XHTML.xsl" -OUT ..\thetwaddle\%1.htm "C:\Program Files\HTMLTidy\tidy.exe" -q -m -c --show-warnings no --output-xml yes --output-xhtml yes -latin1 --doctype strict --tidy-mark no --wrap 0 --ascii-chars no --drop-proprietary-attributes yes --fix-bad-comments no ..\thetwaddle\%1.htm echo Done %1.

(Line breaks have been doubled for clarity.)

The input XML files are all labelled filename.xtw; the XSL stylesheet is XTw2XHTML.xsl, and the output files are cacked into the folder thetwaddle, a sibling of the folder where the batch file lives, and assigned a suffix of .htm.

Those options shown for Tidy are the result of trial and error, or rather, trial and testing and reading Tidy's Quick Reference - no warranty implied. The echo command prints out a message for each finished file.

This batch file is wrapped up in another one, which repeatedly calls the first, thus:

@echo off echo Transforming XTw into XHTML... call xtw2xhtml afile call xtw2xhtml otherfiles echo Done.

The text output is just to make the command console more interesting while the batch program is running. It also helps pinpoint any errors, such as typos, which show up as blobs of text in the command console.

The result of all this fiddling is that I can change pages' contents more easily; I've been able to, fairly easily, implement a few minor changes that would have taken effort before. The final product lives here.

In semi-related news, it turns out that PURLs such as purl.org/mooquackwooftweetmeow, without the trailing slash, are possible - it's just partial redirects that have to end with slashes. The Twaddle's now on PURLs, too - purl.org/thetwaddle - with or without the slash.

While uploading “Unleash The Twaddlebot!” (The Twaddle v1.0), I was reminded that we're approaching the 50-file limit; that's not including styles, which are kept in a separate account. This means we'll probably have to change hosts.

Fortunately, ntl provide 55 megabytes of space, so I'm planning to shift everything there. This shouldn't be too troublesome now that everything's on PURLs.

On-the-fly page validation

2004-06-01T18:15:00+00:00

I wonder if this is possible. I've been dabbling with JavaScript a little recently, in order to produce The Twaddle's Expletatron and this seems like something that should be possible with JS:

I want a script that can load up a given remote page (internally - I don't want to display the page, just to extract info from it), look at an element on that page with a given id, and return its class as a variable.

What's this got to do with validation? Well say the remote page was http://validator.w3.org/check/referer and the given id was result. Then, if the returned variable is valid (i.e. the class of that element is valid) you've got a valid page; if the returned variable isn't valid you haven't.

So, you could, using JavaScript, whack in a “Valid XHTML” logo if, and only if, the page is actually valid. If you like, you could throw in an “Invalid!” image if the page is not valid.

I know it's possible to refer to an element by its id; I know it's possible to get the content of that element. I don't know if it's possible to get an element's class, and I'm guessing it's slightly impossible to do all this for another, remote page.

It'd be nice though.

Chameleon

2004-05-23T00:41:00+00:00

The Twaddle v0.21 is up. It now has multiple, user-choosable themes; the current options are the three (“modern”) themes that have already been published - Forest, St. George and Yellow Sky, plus the Default theme, currently Yellow Sky.

I've already created three more themes that have never been published - Mars, Ocean and Sphinx, and I have a nice photo of a sunset from which to create a Sunset theme. A now-revised version of Mars will be made the default theme some time in the coming week.

Stop! Thief!

2004-05-21T01:07:00+00:00

I've read articles about CSS design theft before - I never thought I'd be a victim.

Check out these beauties: 1, 2.

2 is obviously related to 1; I'm reliably informed that 2 is 1's brother. I pointed 1 towards my CSS for The (excellent) Twaddle (which we've just vamped once more - take a look) in order to help him learn CSS. I explicitly (although friendly...ly) told him not to nick it - to make his own. What does he go and do?

Some of the CSS can only have been nicked, as it's both identical to (a former version of) mine, and a bit daft (i.e. it'd be an hellish coincidence if any brain other than mine came up with it).

e.g.: in 1's stylesheet, the font declaration proceeds thus: 'Trebuchet MS', Trebuchet, Treb, Helvetica, Helv, Arial, sans-serif. I don't know of any fonts called Trebuchet or Treb; I just threw them in on the off-chance that there was a non-MS version or an incredibly old version (I know Helv does/did exist); I recently removed the extraneous fonts.

#content {list-style-type: none}?! I'm sure that was a daft cut-'n'-paste error I once made. Otherwise it's just stupid. .leftbox, .rightbox, .box-caption, .contentbox...

Thief! Get off my CSS!

He even has the audacity to include a Copyright Policy link to FACT! OK, so maybe The Twaddle isn't exactly the least copyright-infringing website in existence (we've used photography found via Google), but we recently (very recently) switched the main site header to original photography and plan not to borrow from others if at all possible.

In his defence... he's given us a link. That makes it OK then. Soon, I shall be providing a link to www.coldplay.com and creating a lot of original music.

Very curious...

2004-05-12T15:50:00+00:00

Mozilla browsers have long had an “easter egg” whereby if you enter about:mozilla into the location bar, you're presented with a nice quote from the Book of Mozilla.

What's queer, is that entering about:mozilla into Internet Explorer gives a blue page. No other about: address (that I've tried) does this.

Surely Microsoft aren't nicking source code?

Incidentally, why haven't Mozilla's copyright/trademark folks taken Microsoft to court over their use of “Mozilla” in IE's user agent string?

Free fastness

2004-04-27T18:30:00+00:00

I'm on ntl:broadband - “mint!”

I've actually just finished the last post...

2004-04-27T18:25:00+00:00

Aren't foreign websites funny? slaap lekker!

(By the way, I have no idea what any of those words mean... except perhaps Internet)

Adventures in XML

2004-04-27T17:40:00+00:00

I did manage to get the XML+XSL-based jiggery-pokery for The Twaddle working - quite nicely, actually. Getting the entire contents of the content field onto the page took a little bit of effort, as described on the mozillaZine forums.

I won't be implementing this on The Twaddle, though - for a start, Opera and KHTML don't like XSLT. And it's not half as accessible for non-standard browsers (relics, mobile devices, text browsers...) as plain, extraneous-menu-items-and-such-written-into-the-article XHTML is. Nonetheless, a working example is online for the time being.

Update: the real thing's gone live... sort of... so the prototype has been removed. Additional related blurb is contained in a later entry in this weblog.

There's a slight chance that I might implement an XML-driven article system on Mooquackwooftweetmeow, where I'm not too fussed about old and/or buggy browsers. The fact that mobile devices won't render the page is more of a concern.

Perhaps some way of pulling in external XHTML fragments could be handled in CSS3? Then again, why duplicate XSL functionality in CSS - small devices' browsers could just be taught to handle XSL.

One more Twaddle-related thing: thanks to Internet Explorer conditional comments (on which MSDN has an hilarious article), I'm now feeding IE users some nice propaganda in the foot of the front page:

You're using Internet Explorer?! You do realise that it's years out-of-date, and screws up most modern web pages, don't you? In fact it's screwing this one up right now and you don't even know it. Try a proper web browser instead.

Oh, and another tiny little piece of The Twaddle-related trivia: the version number on the front page is now in the title text of the copyright notice - it's tidier and it leaves room for a pointless codename.

Over to the Mooquackwooftweetmeow Weblog now, where, thanks to our old friend XML namespaces, and our newer friend the XSL copy-of element, proper links are now in use. I've gone back through the weblog and updated plain text URLs to be links. The more observant of you will have noticed that there have been a smattering of links throughout this post - that'll be the norm from now on.

The even more observant of you will have noticed line breaks as well. I'd use paragraphs but the XSL stylesheet inserts the content into a paragraph - I don't think the XHTML validator would like paragraphs within paragraphs (not that it'd like this Atom file at all...). And I don't think the site's CSS would like divs to hold the text, in place of paragraphs; it might - I just haven't looked at mqwtm's CSS in ages so I can't remember. Besides, line breaks are lighter on the markup than open-and-close <xhtml:p> tags.

And in a final twist of XMLish loveliness, I've chucked a few XHTML <code> tags in as well.

</epic>

Opera + XSL = Eugh

2004-04-23T14:16:00+00:00

Evidently Opera doesn't like XSL - this weblog shows up as a lot of plain text with the odd URL chucked in. The question is whether I care.

The Twaddle is more of a public offering than this weblog, so it matters a little more if it's inaccessible using Opera... but then how many readers of The Twaddle use Opera? I'd say few to none. (Checking the site stats for The Twaddle will probably show a few Opera hits - most of which are me).

IE + XML + XSL + XHTML + W3C = Get In!

2004-04-23T14:07:00+00:00

As a prelude to some major back-end renovation I'm planning for The Twaddle, I decided to see if I could get Internet Explorer 6 to display this XSL-ified weblog nicely, not accounting for IE-unsupported CSS (which is already taken care of at The Twaddle). Previously, IE displayed the DOCTYPE declaration as plain text at the top of the page; using strategic HTML commenting, I've managed to prevent it from doing so.

Actually, I bet simply removing the DOCTYPE declaration wouldn't affect either Gecko or IE's rendering of the page, as I think XML kicks both of them into standards mode anyway.

The next step is to try this with some of The Twaddle. And I'd probably best check Opera's effort, too.

Wow - two entries in ten minutes - you'd think this was a weblog or something

2004-04-23T02:25:00+00:00

This sort of thing should be better publicised. (By the way, I think that's his serious face.)

Hurrah for Ridiculous Quotes!

2004-04-23T02:12:00+00:00

While perusing this weblog at this ridiculous hour, I happened to follow my (text) link to the April Fools' Day thread on The Twaddle Forums, whereupon (oh, yeah!) I saw this most ridiculous quote from my cousin, who likes to call himself bob:

so far 197 posts have been affected by the_word kangaroo

- underscore and all. I think this calls for a colon-dee :D

And while making this post, I remembered that Britain is now on BST, so my last couple of posts may have actually been an hour earlier than they say (this one's about right). I shan't change them for I haven't the arsibility.

And finally, drop by The Twaddle over the next couple of days - it's been St.-George'sed.

Mandrakelinux

2004-04-18T18:15:00+00:00

A couple of weeks ago, I decided to take the plunge and install Mandrakelinux (10.0 “Community”) on my Windows XP box, for some dual-booting fun. Mandrake installed remarkably easily, and I found I could easily access my Windows documents from Linux.

And then I rebooted into Windows... oh, no, wait - I couldn't. Neither of the bootloaders that came with Mandrake could run Windows. I figured the only option was to reinstall Windows... which, of course, requires formatting the partition onto which one installs (I remembered this only after trying)... which entails losing everything.

Windows refused to install. I don't relish the idea of seeing Error loading operating system. ever again.

The eventual resolution was to remove all the partitions on the hard drive (none of which now contained anything useful) and reinstall Windows. I had my documents backed up, but my music and settings are all gone - for ever and ever and ever amen.

So if you fancy trying Linux, but are still rather fond of Windows, either stick to Knoppix, or buy yourself a cheap second box. You have been warned.

April Fool!

2004-04-01T20:40:00+00:00

Only kidding - it's not really.

Last Wednesday (the 24th) we “relaunched” The Twaddle. In fact, the only change made to the XHTML was the addition of unique page id's - something I've always done on Mooquackwooftweetmeow but never used. The rest of the jiggery and/or pokery was accomplished using just CSS and a few Google Image Searches - a testament to the power of CSS and the excellence of my XHTMLing.

We've also got some nicely foolish spiel on the front page about The Twaddle shutting up shop. In case the date of March 32nd, and the Can you say April Fool? message at the bottom of the page didn't tell you: it's an April Fool, fool. And finally, we've screwed with the forums' word filter, replacing innocuous conjunctions with words such as cheese and Alan Shearer - see http://thetwaddle.proboards27.com/index.cgi?board=atrium&action=display&num=1080773096 for the complete damage assessment.

Planet X-2

2004-03-15T19:52:00+00:00

The press release is now online, as is Mike Brown's Sedna page, at http://www.spitzer.caltech.edu/Media/releases/ssc2004-05/ and http://www.gps.caltech.edu/~mbrown/sedna/ respectively. Right then - Sedna isn't a planet - it's not even a Kuiper Belt Object. According to Mike Brown, the Kuiper Belt has a fairly sharp edge at 50AU (1 Astronomical Unit is the distance from Earth to the Sun, 150 Gm); Sedna comes no closer than 70AU. The appropriate term for Sedna is “Inner Oort Cloud Object” (and I'd like to take this opportunity to lay claim to the acronym “IOCO”).

The Oort Cloud was theorised by a bloke named Oort, hence the name. It's a cloud (duh) of small icy bodies which inhabits the outer reaches of the solar system; Oort inferred the cloud's existence to explain the origins of dirty snowballs (comets). The Oort cloud is thought to lie much further out than this; it seems there is also an Inner Oort Cloud, apparently created when a passing star... passed.

Mike Brown also gives a very interesting suggestion of how to define a planet. He says a planet is any body whose mass is greater than the total of all other masses in similar orbits. By this definition, Pluto isn't a planet... but we knew that already.

Planet X

2004-03-15T16:20:00+00:00

Well, they finally found it, “Planet X”, a.k.a. Sedna. Of course, if it is decided that it is actually a planet, the name will have to be changed to a Roman god. Sedna is the Inuit goddess of the ocean, and the Roman god of the ocean - Neptune - is already taken.

Interestingly, the Discovery Channel website reports (http://dsc.discovery.com/news/briefs/20040315/planet.html) that the body appears to have a companion (read: “moon”), which is the second reddest object in the solar system, after Mars. Wow, these NASA fellas can even measure redness accurately! Since the rules of moon-naming are less strict than those for planet-naming (or rather there's a justifiably greater set of allowed names), perhaps this moon will end up being called “Sedna”?

Of course, the big question is “is it a planet?” Well, if size is your criterion, most probably yes, given that Pluto is officially a planet and Sedna is (expected to be) not much smaller, and may even be bigger than Pluto. But size isn't the best criterion - Pluto is actually smaller than the Moon, and the Moon's not a planet (although astronomers sometimes describe Earth-Moon as a double-planet because of their relative sizes).

There's some debate over whether Pluto should qualify as a planet - it's usually described as a Kuiper Belt Object (KBO). (The Kuiper Belt is a field of small, rocky bodies orbitting beyond Neptune - essentially a second Asteroid Belt.) Pluto, Sedna, Quaoar et al. are rightly not classified as asteroids - they're too big - but they're basically the same thing... just bigger. The truth is there's really little intrinsic difference between the smallest of space rocks (meteorites and the like) and much larger objects like Mercury and the Moon.

Sedna orbits the Sun at three times the distance of Pluto (taking a whopping 10,500 years to do so). If Sedna is actually a KBO, that means the Kuiper Belt must be absolutely colossal. If it's a KBO, it's as much a planet as Pluto. If it's not part of a belt, then I think it must qualify as a planet.

NASA will give a press conference at 18:00 UTC.

Apostrophes

2004-03-15T16:10:00+00:00

I'm now using the aforementioned RSS Reader to read this weblog. So it has to be valid Atom, the content must validate when RSSified, and still validate when XHTMLified. Thus, to save hassle relating to escape characters and other such technicalities, I'm now using straight apostrophes as “quotes”. It's ugly, but it works.

Update: with the advent of the Mooquackwhatnotbot I'm now using proper HTML quotes - <q> and </q>. The usual disclaimer about Internet Explorer's crapness applies, as does one about Atom feed readers - they probably won't show any quotes.

Bye Bye, Sharpreader

2004-03-14T20:30:00+00:00

Since the demise of the free FeedDemon betas, I'd been using Sharpreader or Wildgrape NewsDesk (depending on what mood I was in) to read RSS feeds. Neither was perfect, but I'd settled on Sharpreader, despite the oh-so-slow notification pop-ups (this on a 2.5GHz machine...). But today I thought I'd give the RSS Reader Panel for Firefox (http://texturizer.net/firefox/extensions/#rssreaderpanel) another try. Guess what? It's pretty good. The Open In Contents Area option now produces a spiffy-looking display, with the option of customising the CSS used (so you can't complain even if you don't like it).

The addition of new feeds isn't as slick as it might be, but it's just as easy as creating a new bookmark ...because you just have to create a new bookmark. There doesn't seem to be an option for intermingling all of the items into a single date-sorted list, but that's not too much of a worry.

VirtuaWin

2004-03-12T17:45:00+00:00

Multiple-desktop-ery is allegedly a somewhat standard feature of Linux desktops; here on Windows, however, it's incredibly cool. Two desktop multifiers for Windows that I've recently used are DoubleDesktop (http://www.fatfreesoft.com/) and VirtuaWin (http://virtuawin.sf.net/).

DoubleDesktop, as the name aptly suggests, doubles your desktop's width; windows can span desktops and there's a nice, simple switching arrow icon in the system tray.

VirtuaWin doesn't allow windows to span desktop, but it does pretty much everything else. You can have up to nine desktops (or up to several tens of thousands if you fancy editing config files), in any rectangular arrangement you like. To switch desktops, you just move the mouse and keep going; or, if you prefer, you can require one of Alt, Ctrl and Shift to be pressed; you can specify a delay of up to four seconds to prevent accidental switchage. You can cycle through desktops, move to the next desktop in a given direction, and switch straight to a specific desktop, using configurable keypresses.

Other than the lack of desktop spanning (which is pretty fun), VirtuaWin's pretty damn good. And it's open source.

The Twaddle is now printastic, and other web-authoring-related digressions

2004-03-08T19:30:00+00:00

A while ago I added a print stylesheet to Mooquackwooftweetmeow; now, The Twaddle's had the same treatment. On Saturday I also gave The Twaddle a site icon, so the site's now approaching Mooquackwooftweetmeow in completeness. Does this mean v1.0 any time soon? Probably not...maybe.

I've been meaning to overhaul Mooquackwooftweetmeow's underlying XHTML/CSS for a while, mainly due to unnecessary over-id-ing in anticipation of some sort of use in future. My approach to The Twaddle was exactly the reverse - things were added in as and when needed. The Twaddle went from idea to reality in two days, and from blank files to website in one evening, so I didn't really have time to consider what id-s might come in handy later.

The Twaddle was initially based around some content - the website only existed to purvey the content. By contrast, Mooquackwooftweetmeow has only ever existed “for the hell of it”. The approach taken with The Twaddle seems to have worked better. Mooquackwooftweetmeow seems perhaps over-designed now; the Georgia font probably didn't help as it prompted the small-caps for the “UTC” at the foot of each item; this is titled with “Co-ordinated Universal Time”... all of which seems rather over-elaborate.

Another source of much annoyance is the fact that the menu items aren't centred; I might have another bash at centring them nicely...

RSSification

2004-02-24T19:20:00+00:00

2RSS (http://www.2rss.com/) has a nice converteriser which outputs any Atom feed (such as this one - wink, wink) as RSS, available at http://www.2rss.com/software.php?page=atom2rss So now even if your newsreader isn't Atom-enabled you can still read this weblog; now you've got no excuse.

Lulu

2004-02-23T17:10:00+00:00

If you were expecting an entry about a singer, or a female pet or something, you'll be disappointed. I've been having problems with the L and U keys on my (fancy, wireless) keyboard. Turns out the keys can be popped off; after a few minutes fiddling with the pseudo-rubber doings inside, and performing a transplant between L and Esc, all keys now work fine ...as you can probably guess from the fact that I've typed this.

Winwall

2004-02-22T02:25:00+00:00

I had been using Microsoft's Wallpaper Powertoy to rotate my desktop backgrounds; I now use Winwall (http://net-session.com/winwall/). The biggest limitation of Microsoft's Powertoy is that it only recognises GIF (boo!), JPEG and BMP images - i.e. not PNGs. Winwall, however, recognises all four formats (and probably more), and its automatic resizing looks much nicer. The program is closed source, but freeware.

Pluto Isn't a Planet

2004-02-21T02:45:00+00:00

Officially, Pluto is a planet. In reality, it's a member of numerous Kuiper Belt objects which orbit the Sun beyond Neptune. When it was found, 74 years ago, Clyde Tombaugh was searching for a planet and so assumed what he had found was one.

Another large Kuiper Belt object was found a few days ago, as has been reported by the BBC (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/low/sci/tech/3506329.stm) - 2004 DW. Its diameter is estimated as between 1500km and 2600km; Quaoar, another Kuiper Belt object found in 2002, is about 1200km across; Pluto is 2320km across. The evidence is mounting that Pluto is simply a large example of an ordinary Kuiper Belt object. If 2004 DW turns out to be as large as, or larger than Pluto, will it be called a planet?

Mooquackwooftweetmeow's Going Nowhere

2004-02-20T23:00:00+00:00

I now have my own PURL top-level domain. “What in the heck is a PURL top-level domain?” PURL stands for Persistant Uniform Resource Locator - an URL is just a normal web address. A PURL is simply a redirect, designed so that it persists indefinitely; I can change what purl.org/mooquackwooftweetmeow/ points to, but the PURL itself never changes. This means that if I ever move to another webhost (which I don't expect to happen very soon), I can point purl.org/mooquackwooftweetmeow/ there instead. This weblog can be found at http://purl.org/mooquackwooftweetmeow/weblog, but unfortunately KlipFolio doesn't understand HTTP redirects. Bugger.

Nonetheless, if and when - :) - you link to Mooquackwooftweetmeow, use http://purl.org/mooquackwooftweetmeow/ for the main site, and http://purl.org/mooquackwooftweetmeow/weblog for this weblog (note the distribution of slashes). Now that I've got my own PURL, I've changed the Atom feed so that the items are IDed using PURLs; items' IDs are never suppose to change, so PURLs are perfect for that. This means you may get duplicate items in this feed now (and only the once), but you never will later.

Update: Yeah, well - I can't always be right. The appropriate URL to link to this weblog is now http://gkn.me.uk/ for the web page, and http://gkn.me.uk/atom for the Atom feed.

Klipfolio + Atom = 1/2

2004-02-20T19:20:00+00:00

OK, I can't embed an Atom feed in a Klip, but you can view Atom feeds using Klipfolio. Its Feed Reader Klip (http://www.klipfarm.com/farm.php?page=info&klip=916) accepts Atom as well as RSS 2.0 and RDF (RSS 1.0).

Isn't XML wonderful?

2004-02-20T19:15:00+00:00

Despite an hour of valiant effort, I've been unable to convince Gecko to render XHTML embedded in an Atom feed. I've tried encoding the arrow brackets, various namespace trickery... to no avail. So you're gonna have to put up with plain text URLs, until someone can show me how it's done... anybody?

No Knoppix

2004-02-20T19:05:00+00:00

The 2004-02-09 version of Knoppix (http://www.knopper.net/knoppix/) doesn't seem to want to play nice with my computer. It's probably something to do with Nero's burning of the CD; if it's as good as its proofreading, I've got no chance. A couple of days ago, when writing over a CD-RW, Nero kindly warned me that I might loose some data. Yes, loose, not “lose”. As in “My shirt is quite loose.”, “Did you lose weight?”.

I'm redownloading the previous Knoppix version, 2003-11-19, using eMule (http://www.emule-project.net), which tells me I have another forty hours of downloading to wait. Why was it that so few people use Linux...?

Namespaces are fairly fun

2004-02-19T18:30:00+00:00

The Feed Validator (http://feedvalidator.org) gave me a thumbs-down :( Entries' IDs have to be valid URLs, you see, and I'd been using them as arbitrary labels. I'd also been leeching off these arbitrary labels in order to create anchors in the XHTML representation of the feed; those using a web browser can check they work by clicking this item's title; those using a news aggregator can visit the alternate link; in both cases, the item's title should be at the very top of the browser window.

I managed to circumvent Atom's rigidity using XML's flexibility - I invented a new arbitrary label for each item - label, under my own namespace; I now have everything working as before, plus a valid feed. Glory!

I think I'll go and play a bit of pool now...

Wow! Internet Explorer can even mangle XML!

2004-02-19T16:15:00+00:00

Here's me thinking Internet Explorer wouldn't display this feed properly! Obviously, it doesn't... but it at least has a go at mangling it, leaving this text (and this) legible. You do get a nice piece of HTML above the title, however.

So, then - Hello! to all you fools reading this in Internet Explorer! Do yourself a favour and fetch a web browser (http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/).

Actually, on the topic of plain text links and Mozilla Firefox, I've now reinstalled the text/plain extension for Firefox (http://extensionroom.mozdev.org/more-info/textplain), so I can now select plain text links, right-click 'em, and do stuff. I suggest you also install it; it'll come in handy for this log.

Freewebs aren't very good at MIME types... part II

2004-02-19T15:40:00+00:00

Sorta got side-tracked there... Anyway, to get around the incorrect MIME type problem (which made Gecko refuse to play ball), I've tagged .xml onto the end of the weblog's files; hopefully that'll satisfy most browsers.

Freewebs aren't very good at MIME types

2004-02-19T15:30:00+00:00

Freewebs is obviously designed to cater for “webmasters” who've never heard of Jeffrey Zeldman... Like most, if not all, free web hosts, Freewebs use filename “extensions” to determine what MIME type to serve for a file; this is OK, until they get it wrong. Granted, Atom and XSL aren't the most commonly used file formats on the web but nonetheless Freewebs could bother serving them with the proper MIME types.

A few months ago, I asked them if they could serve .xhtml files as XHTML rather than plain text. They responded by saying they wanted to comply with web standards; could I please send them the reference to the W3C recommendation. Great! ...except that nothing's happened since (or at least they haven't told me about it if anything has) - a couple of weeks ago I checked and .xhtml files were still being served as plain text.

I'd appeal to Freewebs now, except I suspect they use Internet Explorer, and thus won't be able to read this...

Klipfolio + Atom = 0

2004-02-19T15:25:00+00:00

Well! It seems that one can't (easily) use an atom feed as klipfood :/ By “easily” I mean I can't just point it towards the URL and have it automagically work, like it does for RSS. Eh, well... I'm gonna hold the klip back until I can get it assimilating this feed; at the moment it's just a rehash of the RSS feed, intermingled with The Twaddle's RSS feed.

Copy and paste...

2004-02-19T14:30:00+00:00

By the way, those URLs in the previous post are just plain text; unless your browser parses plain text URLs, you're just gonna have to copy and paste them for now - I'm not an XML expert and the prospect of digging about trying to force Atom and XHTML to work together to produce links, isn't appealing... maybe later.

Hurrah once more!

2004-02-19T14:20:00+00:00

That w3schools (http://www.w3schools.com/) is pretty decent. I've now concocted an XSL stylesheet for this feed, so visiting its URL in a (good) web browser should display it as a nice page.

I managed to cajole XML namespaces into doing what I want with a little help from a random blog entry (http://today.icantfocus.com/blog/archives/entries/000430/) by Christopher H. Laco, and his one-size-fits-all feed stylesheet. Those who are interested can have a gander at my resulting stylesheet (http://purl.org/mooquackwooftweetmeow/weblog.xsl.xml).

Next job: rig up a klip.

Hurrah!

2004-02-19T13:00:00+00:00

Well, then... this is an atom weblog. Why's it only in atom format? Everything on Mooquackwooftweetmeow is done the old-fashioned way - using the human brain, a plain-text editor, and no PHP, ASP, SQL or any other fanciness. And I don't want to have to copy every entry out into an XHTML page. I'm thinking of having a bash at some XSLT, to automatically generate a fancy front for the weblog; I tried it with the RSS feed, but didn't quite manage it satisfactorily; perhaps my standards are just too high (after all, I am using a free web host).

Take Back the Web

2004-02-17T19:23:00+00:00

Mozilla Firebird has reached version 0.8 and has been renamed Firefox; Mozilla has an FAQ explaining why. That gets the obligatory announcement out of the way; now on to the original content.

Still To Do

Ben Goodger's Firefox roadmap outlines what will actually be included in the 1.0 release; this is a collection of other noteworthy shortcomings (a.k.a. “pet bugs”).

Don't Steal Image Associations

Currently, when you set Firefox as the default browser (in Windows, at least), it automatically assigns itself as the default application for PNG, JPEG and GIF images. In the days when Microsoft Paint only handled BMP bitmaps, this sort of thing was OK; but now the ability to not only view, but also edit these types of images is built in to Windows, Firefox has no business associating itself with them.

Uninstall Extensions

Firefox won't be widely adopted by businesses and workplaces until one can easily remove any extensions that are installed. Bosses don't like their minions making any changes to their standardised computing environment, let alone irrevocable ones.

Single Window Mode

This one's a bit chewy. When its developers say Firefox is a “tabbed browser”, they mean it has the capacity to open multiple pages in one window. However, some folk interpret “tabbed browsing” as where all documents are opened in the same window - always; there have even been complaints that tabbed browsing is broken because this isn't the case.

Until Firefox does have the option for single window mode - which won't be until after version 1.0 - the developers should go easy on describing Firefox as a “tabbed browser”, to avoid disappointment.

Miscellanea

There are various other minor improvements that would easily and quickly make Firefox friendlier, and just plain better. The Windows installer should ask before creating Start Menu, Quick Launch and desktop shortcuts - it's only polite. The link toolbar present in Mozilla should be there in Firefox, too; perhaps then more people would start using <link>. And finally, MNG support. There's really no excuse for its absence - there's a patch waiting which only needs the thumbs up.

The Location Bar

The location bar is, in my opinion, Firefox's best feature, and the one thing that stops me from liking other browsers too much.

Any phrase typed into the location bar gets I'm-Feeling-Luckied, courtesy of Google UK, except for phrases which include dots. These are interpreted as URLs and invalid URLs generate an error page... but I can get around this using smart keywords.

Keywords

Firefox's bookmarks can be assigned keywords, which you then type into the location bar and - Hey, Presto! - the bookmark loads. This is great, but smart keywords are even greater.

If the URL of a bookmark contains %s, and the bookmark is assigned a keyword, anything you type into the location bar after the keyword (and a space), will replace the %s in the URL.

So, if I want to I'm Feeling Lucky some search terms (including ones with dots in them), I type goto followed by a space, and then the terms - simple. To enable this, all I had to do was create a bookmark whose URL is http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=%s&btnI=I'm+Feeling+Lucky and assign it the keyword goto. When I type, for example, goto hell into the location bar, Firefox converts this to http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=hell&btnI=I'm+Feeling+Lucky, which results in Google sending me to its first match for “hell”. The whole process takes less than a second.

I've also got other smart keywords set up for Google Image Search, Mozilla's Bugzilla database, Dictionary.com and IMDb.

All of this means I've practially done away with URLs. If I want the BBC's website, I just type BBC, and Firefox and Google do the rest. This ludicrous ease of use is, for me, Firefox's killer feature.

Google UK

By default, Firefox uses Google USA, but you can change this in about:config; it's pretty easy to do.

First, type about:config into Firefox's location bar and press Enter. You'll be presented with a plethora (or two) of settings. Into the box next to Filter:, toward the top of the window, type keyword and press Enter; this filters out the other settings we won't be using.

Double-click the line containing keyword.URL and enter http://www.google.co.uk/search?btnI=I'm+Feeling+Lucky&q= into the dialogue box that pops up. (I'd copy and paste it.) Finally, make sure keyword.enabled is set to true, and Bob's your uncle.

Brand New

As mentioned above, along with the new version came a new name and brand, Firefox. The previous plan was that “Mozilla Firebird” would be the project's code-name, and it would eventually be known simply as “Mozilla Browser”. Gladly, that's now changed, and we have a browser whose logo looks like this:

The new identity lays to rest previous dissent over the icon/logo Firebird was using - an image of red and orange flames, whose form was also reminiscent of a bird's feathers (this logo is still visible in Firefox 0.8's Help > About > Credits screen). While I always liked it, some felt it stood out too much from other Windows icons (which in my opinion is good), or that it became an amorphous red blob when shrunk to 16×16 pixels.

This name will stick - it's been thoroughly researched, and no-one else is using it for anything resembling a web browser. This means you can start posting your favourite Firefox propaganda about the web (and anywhere else), in good conscience that it'll still make sense in a few years' time. All of which is lovely, as the logo looks bloody brilliant!

Doing the Job

The purpose of a web browser is to display web pages. Mozilla Firefox uses the Gecko layout engine, which displays pages more properly than, say, Internet Explorer. By “more properly”, I mean Gecko better conforms to web standards, as described by the World Wide Web Consortium. Firefox displays web pages better than many other browsers - it does the job better.

Incidentally, Mooquackwooftweetmeow conforms to these web standards (as should all websites), with no regard for how Internet Explorer mangles its pages, so Mooquackwooftweetmeow looks better (i.e. decent) in Firefox.

It's Still Not A Tree

2004-02-10T00:15:00+00:00

Mooquackwooftweetmeow's been a bit dead recently, but with good reason. I've been working on The Twaddle, a magazine-style thing I and my most esteemed colleague, Matthew Gardner, set up a couple of months ago.

The site first came about in mid-December, in response to our college (Hartlepool Sixth Form College)'s new newspaper, entitled “I Was Once a Tree”, or “I.W.O.T.”. To put it mildly, we thought it was a bit rubbish, and set about creating an alternative, better, web-based college magazine. The site's original title was “This Wasn't A Tree”, and we used the acronym, too.

The college paper having been released on a Monday, we were rather pleased to have the site going, and our first visitors, on Wednesday night. Then came the Christmas holidays and, for a while, the site was dormant; but in January, we embarked upon a monumental, unauthorised postering spree. (i.e. we printed off some posters and stuck them up about the college.)

Now, it turns out one requires permission to put posters up in the college; we'd assumed one didn't, given the proliferation of “Happy 18th!” posters. And I don't think the fact that our name was written acrostic-style helped.

That Friday, the head of the English Department “had a chat” with us, and it was agreed that our parodytastic name would be changed; and that our (few, passing) references to I.W.O.T. would be removed, on account of their having demoralised the I.W.O.T. writers.

That evening, I decided upon the new name, and relaunched the site, as “The Twaddle”. As a result of the “chat”, we could no longer claim to be the “unofficial” college magazine; evidently “unofficial” wasn't unofficial enough. This actually worked in our favour, as participation in the site was no longer restricted to HSFC's students, as it'd felt before.

Soon after, we launched The Twaddle Forums, which currently comprise over 3800 posts (most non-Twaddle related, it must be said); and we recently launched an RSS feed and klip. Just yesterday I received an email from the organisers of the unofficial college parties (we'll be starting an unofficial college soon), asking us to announce the parties on our site; this has only reaffirmed our ties to the college.

Yet one of the regulars on the forums lives in America, and we're getting page views from all over the world - Israel, Germany, Australia, Canada... OK, so I suppose none of them stayed very long.

I won't bother with a conclusion - just visit The Twaddle.

Norwegian Beer

2003-10-19T23:08:00+00:00

I once had a drink
Or should I say
It once had me

I went to the pub
Isn't it queer?
Norwegian Beer

I purchased a drink and imbibed many more for a dare
Then I looked below me and noticed there wasn't a chair

I sat on the floor
Nursing my rear
Drinking my beer

I stayed until two
Then my friends led
Me home to bed

They told me I worked in the morning and started to laugh
I told them I didn't and promptly collapsed on the path

And when I awoke
I was at home
This beer had thrown

So I fetched a mop
Isn't it queer?
Norwegian Beer

Grey Nicholson

Strategic voting

Vote for someone else

Vote tactically

For how long?

Whose confidence?

Vote strategically

A raft of politics

About Me, Grey Nicholson

Consume!

21st century season calendar

Self-driving cars: software crashes

Responsibility

Open source

Reproducible builds

The Patriot Act

Big New Tab Button

Into the Fire

Remove Close Buttons from Tabs

The Laissez-faire Paradox

Just Give Me A Back Button

“You're the Cables that Connect Me” (the 2009-02-13 Friday Fetch-it)

↓

How to set up a Canon i250 printer in Ubuntu 8.10

Welfare State Fail

Ssss­ppppp­llllllll­aaaarrr­gghhh!!!!

New Elements in HTML 5

The í element

The spam element

A corollary to Arthur C. Clarke's third law

Line of Sight

Unprecedented Occurrences

“You Wrote Your Number on My Hand & It Came Off in the Rain” (the 2008-02-29 Friday Fetch-it)

Seventeen (“Localised Black Hole”)

The BBC Loves Them Some Microsoft

Places’ Full Titles

The BBC Mis­understands DRM

“I Did Your Wife a Favour” (the 2008-01-11 Friday Fetch-it)

Sixteen, part 3

Sixteen, part 2

Sixteen, part 1

Dumb Lock

The New Illiteracy of the Internet

Being “natural”

Beavers' Dams

Thinking

Columbo

An American entry

Responses

“It's Forgetting that would Beat it All” (the 2007-11-23 Friday Fetch-it)

Random Stat

A Quick Vignette, Using the Gimp

The Poppy Appeal

Hydroelectric

Three Blogger bugs

A Human's Guide to Relating to Other Beings

Exploding Articles

Some examples of things I’ve done that have taken ages

“Necessity Conquers Fear” (the 2007-10-26 Friday Fetch-it)

Shingai Shoniwa’s socks

Brothers or Sisters

“It's in the Eyes of the Beholder” (the 2007-09-28 Friday Fetch-it)

BBC msPlayer

Whoever wrote the Job Centre’s website should be fired

Playing well with others

The Big Brother Final is tonight, but what’s the weather like?

19:12 (UTC—20:12 in Britain)

20:22

20:28

20:33

20:37

20:38

20:39

20:42

20:43

20:45

20:48

20:50

20:51

20:53

Sssspppppllllllllaaaarrrgghhh!!!!

The `í` element

The `spam` element

The BBC Misunderstands DRM