Three for three

Posted on in Computer Games, Sport.

Last night Frankenstein’s Fumblers lost an exhibition match against the lizardmen of the Turbo Freaks. That’s played three, lost three.

Oh well, those were the pre-season warm-ups and with the cup nearly over we have the league to look forward to.

Despite losing the Fumblers continued to provide entertainment and raked in a sizable purse, which along with it being a casualty free match means that we have the cash to spend on new team members.

Say hello to our new Flesh Golem, Bride of Frankie, (pictured on the right in characteristically stoic mood at a press conference to announce her signing) bringing that much needed feminine touch to the squad. Any notion that this is nepotism on the part of team captain, Big Frankie, is strongly denied.

 

Google Accessible Search

Posted on in WWW.

Google Labs have launched an accessible search engine. Accessible in both the sense that the search engine interface is more accessible (I haven’t evaluated this to see whether its true or not) and in that it aims to return accessible sites in the results.

“Accessible Search is designed to identify and prioritize search results that are more easily usable by blind and visually impaired users.”

A read of the FAQ reveals that the only sort of accesibility being considered at this time is visual impairment. This is a bit of a shame because it will reinforce the erroneous view that accessibility = blind. I hope that in the future it can be extended and customised to return results tailored to particular requirements.

The number of results returned is much lower, sometimes only 5% of the number returned by the main search.

The main Google site: Results 1 – 10 of about 3,370,000 for steve pugh. And pages related to me rather than the comics artist, etc. are at numbers two, four and five.

Accessible Google: Results 1 – 10 of about 157,000 for steve pugh. And pages related to me rather than the comics artist, etc. are at numbers two, three, four and ten.

One little thing I’ve noticed is that Wikipedia pages must be highly accessible according to Google as they come near the top in any search.

The main Google site: Results 1 – 10 of about 526,000 for tanita tikaram. And my site comes in at number two.

Accessible Google: Results 1 – 10 of about 57,900 for tanita tikaram. And my site is now at number one. The site TanitaTikaram.com (which uses frames) moves down from one to three. So frames don’t exclude you from these results but may hurt your position. Amazon doesn’t fair well, slipping from number ten to number thirty five.

Google indexes Flash, Word and Acrobat as well as HTML but I haven’t seen any such results yet. These formats can be made accessible but presumably Google’s spiders aren’t yet able to parse them for the signs that the authors have done so.

As with most products aimed at providing an accessible service, there are benefits for all users. If you find that Google often returns too many search results, and if you don’t want to see any paid links, and if you want to get results that only include easy to read and navigate pages, then this could be the search engine for you.

Meanwhile, I’m interested to hear what others in the accessibility field think.

Magister Militum dinosaurs and friends

Posted on in Dinosaurs, Miniatures.

Via TMP, Magister Militum have launched a new range of dinosaurs in 10mm (1/160 scale).

Magister Militum, DIN003, Suchomimus

Meanwhile back in 28mm, I discovered a while back, but forgot to blog it, that Das Schwarze Auge – The Dark Eye range available via Ral Partha Europe, contains a handful of prehistoric creatures.

Das Schwarze Auge, 17016,Devourer
A dancing T. rex, just don’t paint him purple…

Frankenstein Fumbled

Posted on in Computer Games, Sport.

Last night the Fumblers became the first team to crash out of the Cup. After losing 0-2 to the Dwarf Giants and 1-2 to the Numinous Comets they creep back to their crypt in shame.

But, like all good undead, they will rise again!

Frankenstein’s Fumblers are now available to play exhibition matches, so all other losers, or any late comers who missed out on the Cup, or any confident winners up there in the heavenly half of the draw, come and have a go if you think you’re soft enough.

‘cos the werewolves are getting hungry, and want some more star player points…

First Blood

Posted on in Computer Games, My Life, Sport.

Last night the 2006 Old World Cup started. This, in contrast with the recent rubbish in Germany, is a Blood Bowl tournament played over the web with a few friends. My team, Frankenstein’s Fumblers, played the opening game against the Dwarf Giants.

The Fumblers have a nice mix of muscle, speed and cannon fodder. The Giants have muscle, more muscle and some muscle on the side. The Giants won 2-0.

As the cup is being played as a double elimination tournament this means that I’m not out but I do have an uphill struggle if I’m going to win. My next match will be against the loser of Numinal Comets (elves) vs Veni Vedi Viking (um, Vikings).

Legendary

Posted on in Browsers.

I promised a test case for my latest problem and here it is: Gecko’s stubborn legend.

A few things worth noting:

  1. In reality the yellow background will be a gradiant background image within each box, so I can’t just apply the background to the form.

  2. Opera starts out displaying the upper form as FireFox does. The addition of position: relative (with no top, left, etc.) to the styles for legend magically changes that.

  3. IE7 breaks the * html hack so some further work will be needed to align the legend horizontally without breaking things in any other browser.

  4. Gecko doesn’t seem to apply float or display (except display: none;) to legend elements at all.

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Great sporting events

Posted on in Doctor Who, Sport.

I take it that all the shouting and honking of horns outside means that England did okay in the footie?

Doctor Who – Fear Her last night was an interesting companion piece to The Idiot’s Lantern earlier this season. Both set in London, both take place around a major televised event, both feature a single alien, both feature an abusive father, both have one of the TARDIS crew taken out of the action by the alien.

The differences – East London not North London, set in the near future not the recent past, a lonely alien child not a hungry alien monster, the haunting memory of a dead father not a n everyday living father, the Doctor captured not Rose.

Both stories also have low body counts (especially by DW standards), only the unfortunate Mr Peacock and the Wire itself died in The Idiot’s Lantern and no one dies in Fear Her.

The news reader, Huw Edwards, really hammed up those lines about the torch being a beacon of hope and love and so on. I would have preferred a couple of lines of technobabble over that.

Loved the Doctor lighting the Olympic flame. But I suspect that in reality there would be a back up runner around to take over. Anyone fancy tripping the runner up in seven years time to see?

The plot was predictable and the production seemed a little lifeless apart from the two leads – possibly David Tennant’s best performance yet and a good showing from Billie Piper. Nice to see positive Rose in full swing (literally with the pick-axe), but clingy Rose is really annoying. Oh well, nect two weeks should sort that out. 😉

Overall, another good solid 8/10.

I know I haven’t written much about Love and Monsters. I can’t think of much to write that doesn’t turn into a rant. I can’t believe that some people saw it as a negative portrayal of fans – it was incredibly positive for about fans in general, just negative about the sort of bossy, uber-fan represented by Victor Kennedy. I did enjoy it for the most part but Peter Kay’s performance kind of spoilt it for me. 8/10 for sheer novelty value and Marc Warren’s performance, maybe not something we want every week but let’s have another experiment of some sort next year.

Well, that was different.

Posted on in Doctor Who.

Love and Monsters – instant reaction, no spoilers

That was a very odd episode. I’m not quite sure it worked but I couldn’t help but love it none the less.

Oh, and I was right. Basically, it was the novel Who Killed Kennedy (notice the name? Hmmm.) being played for laughs.

More later.

Not the pits…

Posted on in Doctor Who.

…and certainly not The Pit 😉

I said at the end of my review of the last Doctor Who episode: “I do have a bad feeling about part two though.”

I was right and wrong. Or to put it another it, The Satan Pit was better than I feared but not as good as I hoped.


The one thing that new Doctor Who is bad at is resolving cliffhangers and this season is even worse than last year. After all the tension at the end of last week, what happens? Jefferson shoots the Ood, the power comes back on, and nothing comes out of the pit. Oh dear.

Maybe at some point the contrast between the action in the base and the more philosophical conflict in the caves looked good (and is a reversal of the normal pattern) but it really didn’t work. The two halves needed to be tied together a bit better.

It was good to see proactive, thinking on her feet, Rose, she’s been missing for a while. Shooting the windscreen (or whatever you call that part of a rocket) wasn’t the smartest thing in the world but if you know that you’re going to die would you rather (a) die in a little while with the devil in the chair next to you all the time, or (b) die sooner but after having the statisfaction of killing the devil? I’d go for (b) too.

The Doctor’s leap of faith when he dropped off the end of the cable into the darkeness was logical within the confines of the story (what else could he do?) and in character for the tenth Doctor (who does tend to look before he leaps, and is a hypocrite for pointing out the same flaw in the humans) but still seemed like poor writing. “We have cool descending through the darkness whilst talking philosophy with Ida scene, and we have cool confront the devil scene, but how do we get from one to the other?”

So what do we make of the Doctor’s belief in Rose that allowed him to smash the vase? What exactly does he believe? Looked at coldly, it could only be the belief that Rose would want him to sacrifice her to save the universe. But that doesn’t really fit with the emotional tone of the scene. It was a good line but sadly doesn’t make much sense.

Bad science – I can forgive almost everything except the way the rocket swung round towards the black hole when the gravity funnel collapsed. Why? Yes it would be pulled into the black hole but what caused it to rotate so that it goes nose first rather than tail first?

Design work, performances and directing were all excellent, and the number of old series references raised a smile. If only the script had been just a bit tighter and the resolution made a bit more sense then this would have been an all time classic.

I think this was a very good 9/10

Next week looks like another rummage through the Virgin scrapbook. This time taking Who Killed Kennedy and playing it for laughs.

Web site graphs

Posted on in Work, WWW.
Graphical representation HTML structure of Very True Things

What’s that? That’s the output from a rather nifty applet that draws diagrams of the HTML structure of web pages (technically, it produces a graphical representation of a first order approximation of the DOM tree by examing element nodes only). In this case that’s the front page of Very True Things as of Thursday evening.

The big grey blob at the middle top is the page head, here full of the <link> elements that Word Press generates. The main content of the page is to the left and the side bar is to the right. The red clusters at top left and bottom right are tables – a meme result and the calendar respectively.

Have a look at the examples given by the creator to see how some big name sites compare. And then see the graphs for everyone else’s sites on Flickr. (Via Pharyngula.)

What’s really scary for me is that when I look at the graph for VL I can instantly spot where one extraneous (but harmless) link has been inserted by accident.