Archive for the ‘WWW’ Category

Book Meme

Posted on in Books, Doctor Who, Memes, My Life.

I was tagged by Jack on the grounds that I’ve “not done a meme for a while”.

Total Number of Books Owned

According to my LibrayThing profile, 858. I know I have at least one more to add to that list and I’d also need to subtract the 27 tagged as !borrowed or !sold. So 832. Minimum, as there may be more hiding somewhere that I haven’t added yet.

Last Book Bought

A couple of out of print role playing games from eBay. Last ‘real’ book would appear to be Clarissa Oakes by Patrick O’Brian which I found in a bookshop in Amsterdam and made Lettice buy because I’d only just bought something else there and the shop assistant was a bit on the scary side.

Last Book Read

I finished re-reading Human Nature this morning. I’ve been wanting to refresh my memory since the TV version came out. The book is bloodier and does a better job of creating the historical context. However it does have a number of elements that are really superfluous and which the TV version correctly ignored.

Five books that mean a lot to me

In reverse chronological order in my life:

  1. Life by Richard Fortey

    I bought this whilst on holiday in Tennessee visiting and so it reminds me of a great time as well as being a great book. Fortey takes a look at the history of life on Earth from the moment if started to the dawn of human history. Richard Dawkins did the same trip backwards in The Ancestor’s Tale but for me Fortey’s book is more engaging.

  2. Ships of the Star Fleet, Volume One

    Very, very geeky. But as well as being one of the best Treknical fandom works ever it’s also the first book I bought online.

  3. Thieves’ World

    I could have listed several works of fantasy or science fiction that I read during my adolesence – The Lord of the Rings, Dune, the Pern novels and The Colour of Magic prime amongst them, but this collection of low fantasy stories set in a seedy city at the arse end of an empire is the one that stuck in my mind the most.

  4. The Warlock of Firetop Mountain

    I was the pefect age for this when it was first published. And from this book sprung my interest in RPGs and wargames. It has a lot to answer for.

  5. Read About Me and the Yellow-Eyed Monster

    A childhood treat – a book with me and my family and my friends in it.

Four People You’re Tagging With This Meme

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The Dancers at the Heart of Time

Posted on in Doctor Who, Memes.

When you see this post, quote from Doctor Who on your blog/journal.

Points at the top of the page, I have a quote from Doctor Who there all the time, but here’s another one:
“My theories appal you, my heresies outrage you, I never answer letters and you don’t like my tie.”

Anyway, The Sound of Drums/Last of the Time Lords — A bulging set of homages to SF/Fantasy – Harry Potter/Wizard of Earthsea; Captain Scarlet; Peter Pan; Flash Gordon; Return of the Jedi.

Harold Saxon, PM seems more based on John Culshaw’s Tony Blair in Dead Ringers than the real thing, and the “Britain, Britain, Britain” opening to one of his speeches was highly reminiscent of Tom Baker’s voice overs for Little Britain.

All of which briefly makes it all seem like some sort of attempt to screw with the minds of the media studies/crossover/slash/post modernism/irony obessessed sectors of fandom. Which actually makes me like it slightly more.


The ninth Doctor said that he didn’t do domestic, but here the Master apparantly does domestic violence, which is terribly petty and human of him. Is this meant to be the point? Without the demi-god socierty of Time Lords the Doctor becomes greater, more God like, whilst the Master becomes less, more mortal? His final choice to die a mortal death rather then be chained like Loki might be a pointer in that direction.

Martha, she’ll be back, but maybe not for much of net year. But even if she leaves now for good, I disagree with the people who think that her character’s been hard done by. Her love for the Doctor, he total faith and trust in him, became the key to defeating the Master (without that trust being manipulated and betrayed) and she decides at the end that “it’s him, not her” and that she is more than good enough, and that somewhere there’s a stubbly paeds doctor who doesn’t yet know what’s going to hit him. It’s not the story arc that a lot of people wanted, but it works and it is a positive thing for Martha.

The Doctor is the loser here. He saves the world but loses his oldest friend/enemy. His companions re-evaluate their place in the lopsided relationship, but he doesn’t. Taking for granted that modern Doctor Who is ‘about’ the relationship between the Doctor and the companion(s) can next year show some sign of growth on the Doctor’s side?

A final observation: In many ways the John Nathan Turner years didn’t happen as far as Russell T Davies is concerned. Most of the references to the Master’s and Doctor’s past came from the Third Doctor era. The depiction of the Time Lords picks up in 60s and 70s aspects and avoids the 80s (not such a bad move). The returning villains (Autons, Daleks, Cybermen (sort of), Macra, The Master) all predate 1975. The way the Daleks and Cybermen are portrayed owes more to their early appearances than their later ones. The Doctor’s lost at least a few decades and probably a few hundred years if he’s ‘only’ 900-odd in the new series. Just how much of his history did the Time War wipe clean away?

IE form post bug

Posted on in Browsers, Work, WWW.

Consider the following code:

<form action="whatever" method="POST">
<input type="hidden" name="foo" value="a very long string" />
<input type="checkbox" name="confirm" />
<input type="submit" />
</form>

In Internet Explorer (confirmed in both 6 and 7) submitting this form with the checkbox ticked results in no response from the server. (Submitting it without the checkbox ticked just brings you back to where you started.) No problem at all in Gecko-spawn or Opera.

Anyone seen anything like that before? And better still, got a solution?

HTML tables for the post-CSS generation

Posted on in WWW.

Recently I had a conversation with a web developer who had never used HTML tables. They’d come into the business after the web standards movement had established itself and had never learnt to use tables. As a consequence they were using divs and CSS floats, etc. to lay out things that could (or even should) have been done with tables and running into the sort of issues you might expect when you use a generic tool to do a specialised job.

So I was wondering if there were other people like this out there, and if so would they benefit from a short tutorial explaining HTML tables from a CSS perspective? Such a tutorial might prove useful for others as well – it might provide an alternative way of approaching the tables-to-CSS transition that some people are still struggling with, and it might help explain just how CSS and tables interact. After all the table elements have their own layout model in the CSS specification and it’s not the easiest thing to grasp.

If I were to write such a tutorial I guess it would fall into two halves. The first half would look at the “simple” table model (table, tr, td and th elements) used for simple data tables and *gasp* layout tables and how their default behaviour compares with the standard CSS box model; whilst the second half would look at the “advanced” table model (caption, col/colgroup and thead/tbody/tfoot plus the accessibility enhancing attributes) and how to build complex data tables.

Anyone interested in seeing this?

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Top 5…

Posted on in Dinosaurs, Memes.

…Dinosaurs

As tagged by . Post a comment with “top ten” or “top five” and I’ll give you a subject to base your list around.

  1. Stegosaurus

    Maybe because we start our names with the same three letters but I’ve always liked Steggy. One of the classic dinos that all the kids know, and one of the most fantastically strange looking creatures to ever walk on land.

    Stegosaurus

  2. Allosaurus

    A big mean predator, not as unbalanced to look at as T.rex but still big enough and toothy enough to give you nightmares.

  3. Brachiosaurus

    Of Lofty as we call him round our way. Not only is it one of the biggest dinos but it’s also unusual in having longer legs at the front than at the back (hence the name).

  4. Anklyosaurus

    Walking tank. My default user icon.

  5. Deinonychus

    Velociraptor : Deinonychus = Hobbit : Human

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?

Idiot Bashing

Posted on in Blogs, Spam.

A charming individual, dklover@hotmail.com, has been posting abusive comments (now deleted) on an old post of mine, accusing me of over reacting when I laid into some idiots who decided to use the word gay as an insult.

His/her latest missive is presented below, as he/she didn’t included any punctuation I’ve had to guess where one sentence ends and the next begins.

you must be the biggest loser on earth not one person has wrote to you for a long time so i thought i should say some thing

A few facts first, since your last comment on 23rd November, six people have posted comments here (some multiple times, hi Jack) and a further three people have commented on the LJ mirror of this blog. As I’ve only posted seven posts in that time that’s fair number of commenters for a modest little personal blog like this.

your last comments were quite rude implying that im gay and bigot

They were meant to be rude. You came to my web site and attacked me, you reap what you sow.

However, I did not imply that you were gay – I suggested that you might have fun in a gay bar, something that lots of straight people do all the time. Also, I did not imply that you were a bigot – I stated it clearly.

well thats a big word for a small minded person like your self you are strait up and down stupid and i dont have to go off at the deep end like your self and try and use words hat you dont even understand good one brainiack

Bigot. Five letters, two syllables, easy to pronounce, quite easy to define. That may be a big word to you – judging by your spelling, punctuation and grammar you have problems with the English language. However, as your IP address resolves to the Netherlands you may well not be a native speaker.

ha ha ha your such a fool i await your reply wich im sure will be inthrouling

Did you mean enthralling? I don’t know about that, but I’m sure this post will raise a smile or two somewhere.

Stardates via RSS?

Posted on in Blogs, Computers, My Life.

Got a short e-mail today about my StarDate Converter:

Have you considered making the current stardate available via RSS?

Hmm, interesting. First of all I’d have to translate the calculator to PHP or whatever to do the calculations on the server, but after that making the output available via RSS would be easy enough.

But would it be practical: the second decimal place represents a period of little over five minutes, so if someone wanted this to create a stardate ‘clock’ they’d be hitting my server at least that often. Not a disaster on its own but something that would need keeping an eye on if it proved popular.

Maybe I should test it out with the French Revolutionary Calendar first (I really need to convert that to PHP anyway so that the dates on this blog aren’t reliant on JavaScript). Hmmm, let’s see where this leads.

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Making history

Posted on in Computer Games, Magazines, Memes, My Life, TV, Work, WWW.

As we’re all blogging for history, here’s a bit about my day.

Alarm went off at 7:00. Lettice got up. I didn’t. Whoops. Staggered out of bed at 8:00 and between checking e-mail, showering, eating breakfast and faffing about managed to get into work around about 9:45. No meetings this morning so not a problem. Check work e-mail and calendar and tell the project manager that I love her because she’s worked out that in our incredibly tight schedule for the site (www.visitlondon.com) redesign I actually have no tasks allocated to me between the end of November and the sometim in February so I can take some holiday after all. But then I groan as I realise that Friday is booked up with meetings from 10-12 and then 12:30-16:00. Ouch.

Spent most of the day working on a project for our kids’ site (www.kidslovelondon.com). Nothing terribly exciting – a bit of CSS, bit of XSLT, bit of JavaScript (enforcing my own recently written coding standards to avoid document.write and use appendChild() etc.). Minor panic regarding the half term edition of the kids’ newsletter but it got sent out on time and everyone seems very happy with the new style.

Went to lunch with Lettice – she’s working at VL for a few weeks. And after that it was time for today’s round of meetings about the redesign project. Time and money versus ambition. Same as every project I’ve ever worked on. We actually have a very good team (and soon to be a much bigger team, an ad will be appear in this week’s New Media Age for six positions within the web team at VL) and doing most of the work in house will cut down on some of the headaches.

Ended up working until 18:30 which makes up for the late start, though a fair chunk of the last hour was spent playing Bang! Howdy (www.banghowdy.com) whilst waiting for other people to go through the designs of the Christmas pages with me. We need to have some pages up very soon in order to cover the switching on of the Christmas Lights.

London Bridge was busy and I just missed the 18:39. I bought this week’s New Scientist (suckered in by the ‘what would happen to Earth if humans vanished cover story) and this month’s .net (a couple of articles that I can quote mine for a brainstorm in one of Friday’s endless meetings). Ran into Séverine and we caught the 18:51 to Tulse Hill and then walked up to West Norwood together.

Home, sausages for dinner, then watched CSI: Miami with Lettice before sitting down to write this.

So there you are, not my usual sort of post and probably not of any great historical interest.

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Real Life / Online Life

Posted on in Books, Music, My Life, WWW.

On Saturday I bought a song from iTunes by Drill Queen, one of whose members I know in real life.

On Monday a package from Amazon arrived for me, I didn’t remember ordering anything but thought that I might have done when I set up work as a delivery address (Amazon’s courier company is totally incapable of delivering to home). Today I checked the delivery note and discovered that someone else had bought it for me off my wishlist.

I didn’t recognise the name and so checked my Gmail archive to see if it was anyone who had ever spoken to me. It was, a little while ago he had sent me this e-mail:

Hi there, you responded to one of my messages on Usenet, full details here.

http://groups.google.com/group/comp.infosystems.www.authoring.stylesheets/msg/…

I was wondering if you could please remove it from Google’s archives (you can do this by creating a Google Groups Account, looging in, finding the message and pressing remove).

I’m just not keen on having that URL on the Internet now that it’s used for something different.

Thank in advance,

Used for something different means not used for an escort site anymore. (I’d answered a technical question about the site coding not anything related to the content.) Anyway, today I sent back the message

Bribery worked.

Nice to know that after all these years of giving free advice on Usenet I’m finally getting some reward.