Archive for February, 2007

Meme^2

Posted on in Doctor Who, Memes, Science.

Your Squid Quotient = 156.25

Interpreting your results: An average Squid Quotient is around 100. A SQ of 100 means you have a normal affinity for squid. A SQ above 100 means you have an attraction or fondness for squid. Below 100 means that you should probably stay away from the deep ocean.

find out your squid quotient

You scored as Sgt. Benton. You are Sgt. Benton! Calm, fixed, resolute: for being such a nice person you have a bit of cynicism that you keep hidden. It helps you sort out the good from the bad when you deal with people. Not easily fooled by mere charm or facade, you are, all the same, a simple soul. You long for love but don’t quite comprehend romance. you recognize that a stable home, longterm friendships, and trust and respect are the foundations of a happy life.

Sgt. Benton
 
 68%
Captain Mike Yates
 
 57%
Jo Grant
 
 57%
Brigadier Lethbridge Stewart
 
 50%
The Master
 
 46%
Doctor Who (Third Doctor)
 
 29%

Which Doctor Who Character are you?
created with QuizFarm.com

Mmm, beer…

Posted on in My Life.

So yesterday was seven weeks after New Year and hence that last day of my no-alcohol resolution. I made it (some of my other resolutions haven’t been so lucky). So today I have my first beer of 2007 (‘cos alcohol-free beer really isn’t the same). Oooo, it’s good.

Video Accessibility

Posted on in Work, WWW.

I’m working on a new web site that will be live for the next two or three years, hence I’m keeping an eye on both versions 1.0 and 2.0 of the WCAG guidelines. One of the things that has been requested is embedded videos (similar to YouTube) within relevant pages as opposed to having a standalone video section.

Thinking about embedded video meets accessibility and looking through WCAG 2.0 I’ve come up with the following:

To meet Priority One guidelines

  • Provide a full text based alternative to the video, i.e. a transcript plus a label explaining, more or less, “there’s a video and this is the transcript of it”.
  • Provide synchronised on screen captioning replicating the dialogure and important sounds in the video.

To meet Priority Two (our goal) guidelines

  • Provide synchronised audio description (noting changes of location, identifying speakers, etc.) in the gaps in the dialogue of the video.

To meet Priority Three guidelines

  • Provide an extended audio description that pauses the video in order to create room for extra information to be relayed aurally.

Does this agree with everyone else’s interpretation of the guidelines?

Bug Hunt

Posted on in Dinosaurs, Science, TV.

When I saw the trailers for yesterday’s episode of Primeval I wondered whether they were going to give any explanation of how the giant arthropods could survive in our atmosphere, and pleasantly they did – oxygen rich air leaking through the rift anomaly from the Carboniferous.

Then they go and spoil it by having the good looking bloke use a blowtorch right in front of the rift anomaly with no side effects what so ever. If the oxygen levels were high enough to affect the soldiers then wouldn’t any flames also be affected?

Oh, and they doubled the size of Arthropleura. There could be a larger species that simply hasn’t been found in the fossil record yet…

Science aside, it’s fun tea time nonsense, but the geek is very annoying and only Douglas Henshaw shows any signs of actually being able to act.

One last thing. We’ve all been conned. On the ITV web site for the series there’s a list of creatures. Have a look and see if you spot whats missing:

  • Coelurosauravus
  • Scutosaurus
  • Gorgonopsid
  • Giant Spiders
  • Arthropleura
  • Mosasaur
  • Hesperonis
  • Dodo
  • Parasite
  • Pteranodon
  • Agnurognathus
  • Predator

Not one of those is a dinosaur. No dinosaurs. Weren’t we promised dinosaurs? But all we get is arthropods, synapsids, and birds (I know birds are dinosaurs). Give us some proper dinos!

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Grumpy weekend

Posted on in Films, My Life, Work.

So, there’s big project X at work, that’s eating up all available time for the next few months. Them emergency Y crops up and the solution to that could easily be incorporated as part of X, but it will probably need to be fixed sooner. And then long standing problem Z raises several of its hydra headed forms at once. Gah. I just know I’m going to be in a bad mood all weekend even though I’m going to be trying hard not to think about work at all.

This afternoon we’re off to see Hot Fuzz. It had better be bloody funny.

  Comments Off

Posted on in Blogs, WWW.

From Mark Pilgrim’s latest post:

Official Google Blog: From Gmail with <3
no comment, i just like blogging things with angle brackets in the title to watch the chaos in rss readers

Snigger

Word Press 2.1 vs the world

Posted on in Blogs, Books, Browsers, My Life, WWW.

I upgraded to Word Press 2.1 earlier in the week and it went fairly smoothly.

As is now customary I had to hack a few files because there is still no standard way of making the category and archive counts appear inside the links rather than after them. I also had to comment out a section of the new categories list function as I couldn’t get it to not include the default header to the list in addition to the header I was supplying.

And I’ve just realised that if I comment out the code that inserts a <ul> I should also find and comment out the code that inserts </ul> ‘cos right now all my pages are invalid.

I’ve also hacked the Now Reading plugin to link to LibraryThing rather than an internal library page. It makes more sense to only tag, rate and (sometimes) review books in one place rather than two. If only LT provided a feed based on its date started and date read fields I could probably do away with Now Reading altogether. I also haceked together a link to the book edit page directly from each sidebar entry. I hope you can’t see that. ;-) And I’ve just seen that this too is producing invalid XHTML. Sigh.

The Live+Press plugin controls has vanished from the write post page but everything important is still working behind the scenes. I just can’t set my Live Journal userpic, or the mood and music fields, any more. Quick test: is it still parsing lj tags like this one: ?

[Update] – Odd. The Live+Press options are present in the edit page, and whether a post gets cross posted or not seems to depend on whether I save a draft first or not. Curious.

On the bright side, I seem to be unaffacted by the PHP 5 fiasco that hit my host. And I’ve finally got around to enabling friendly permalinks, though I wonder whether http://www.stevepugh.net/VTT/2007/01/13/i-♥-the-taxman/ will work in older browsers.

Prime Nonsense

Posted on in Dinosaurs, TV.

Just watched the first episode of Primeval. Hmm, The X-Files (the lead character even has a family member who vanished in mysterious circumstances) meets Jurassic Park (academics versus “dinosaurs”).

Fairly predictable stuff all round. The creatures are presented in a now-familar fashion – on the technical side this is from many of the same people as Walking with… and Prehistoric Park – and it doesn’t look like the plot is going to find a cliché it doesn’t like.

Oh well, there’s nothing else on the telly on a Saturday evening for the next few weeks. Let’s see, six episodes takes us to March 17th and the 24th is the rumoured start date for Doctor Who. Not taking any chances with the ratings on this one are we ITV?

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Wales v Ireland

Posted on in Sport.

Six Nations time again, so this blog suddenly starts talking about sport.

Most people, including myself, predicted a close match and that’s certainly the case, it’s just not a hugely exciting match so far.

Wales are relying on strength and perserverence whilst Ireland are showing some genuine flair. Which is why Ireland are scoring tries and Wales are scoring penalties. :-(

Fingers crossed for the second half.

[Update] – Second half was certainly more exciting and some very nice bits of play from Wales, but luck, Irish defending and a bit of dodgy refereeing meant they came to nothing. Can’t fault the Irish tries – all the result of thinking fast in the heat of the moment, which is really what Rugby is all about.

Failed, just.

Posted on in Books, Memes, My Life.

From The Stacks Winter Reading ChallengeSo, my attempt at the From The Stacks Winter Reading Challenge came close but just failed, I fell asleep last night with just twenty pages of my last book to go (I would like to assure people that the falling asleep was entirely down to a twelve hour day in the office and nothing to do with Tom Baker’ writing).

And I haven’t written any reviews yet either. But I’m off work most of next week so we’ll see what we get done.