Slipping between the cracks

Posted on in My Life, The World.

The water board don’t have any record for our flat that’s distinct from the shop below and as they, very nicely, don’t want to charge us commercial rates want us to go and check with the landlords.

The gas company also don’t have any records for our flat, which only came to light after I asked them to double check – they were quite happy to sign us up to pay for the whole property.

I haven’t heard back from the electricty company after I asked them to make the same double check.

But we do have water, gas and electricity. Here’s hoping we get it for free…

BT have heard of our flat. They have it listed as “flat above Unwins”. Unwins shut at least two years ago. They also say that the earliest they can get an engineer out is September 21st which is rubbish.

Green Raptors

Posted on in Dinosaurs, Miniatures.

Reaper Minis have released a pic of some Dennis Mize sculpted Raptors.

Reaper raptor greens

Avarice

Posted on in Dinosaurs, Miniatures.

Quick update on some previously mentioned dino-mini-goodness items:

Jeff Valent Studios have a cool pic of a painted version of their T-Rex.

Dragonblood Miniatures now have The Hunter on pre-sale. (I’m hoping the promised riderless version materialises.)

Drool

Posted on in Dinosaurs, Miniatures.

From TMP news item, there’s a great new dino miniature coming from Dragonblood Miniatures. According to comments from the manufacturer, a version without the rider is planned.

'The Hunter' from Dragonblood Miniatures

Tags, Clouds and Operas

Posted on in Browsers, WWW.

Looking over the Technorati redesign as plugged by Eric Meyer (same old stuff – nice CSS but fixed width design, fixed font sizes in IE, breaks with only a couple of font size increases in FireFox, minor validation errors) I saw that the Tags page didn’t display properly in Opera 8.01.

The relative frequency of the tags are indicated via nested <em> elements with a CSS style font-size: 1.03em to produce the increased size.

But Opera screws up and rounds the font sizes down. I’ve written up a description of the bug and submitted a bug report to Opera.

Until Opera and/or Technorati do something about this issue there’s a quick fix that Opera users can apply. As Technorati includes id="technorati" on the <body> tag it’s relatively easy to add
#technorati .heatmap em {font-size: 1.06em !important;}
to a user stylesheet and restore the tag coloud to its full glory. The exact size value needed will vary depending on your particular default and minimum font size values.

Moving away from the Opera bug we’re still left with the larger issue. What’s the best way to (a) mark-up and (b) indicate relative importance in various media.

As far as the mark-up goes HTML doesn’t offer us that many options and <em> is probably the best choice. Things are slightly confused by the presence of <strong> – how does strong emphasis relate to multiple levels of emphasis created via nested <em> elements?

By default browsers don’t change their output for nested <em>s so there’s no way short of viewing the source for the user to see the level of importance. For graphical media increasing the font size is one possibility but even when Opera’s shortcomings are ignored this might break down (consider mobile devices for example). In non-graphical media the font-size is meaningless.

Volume or pitch are options in aural media but don’t make for an easy listening experience (this sort of tag cloud is designed for visual skimming and doesn’t really work the same way when listened to linearly; but if a listener chooses to listen to it they should get the same information as the reader, via some means or other).

The best solution I can think of would be to add title attributes to each tag giving the relative level of importance. So a tag surrounded with four levels of <em>s would have title="Level Four" or something similar.

Whilst not ideal (and maybe tag clouds aren’t such a good idea) this does have the advantage that it brings together mark-up, styling and metadata (the <em> elements, the font-sizing and the titles) to reinforce the same message. The message. Ah, that’s the real problem. The relative popularity of the various tags is the message and the message should be in the data not in anything else. But that means turning the funky tag cloud into a boring table. 🙁

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Three kisses and a regeneration

Posted on in Doctor Who.

“Do they think we have nothing better to do until Christmas?” – pink_weasel

So very true.

11/10

Just watch it, don’t read bollocks like this on the interweb, just watch it. Doesn’t matter if it’s on BBC3 at 10:50 tonight or 7:00 tomorrow, or if you taped it, or of you borrow a tape off someone else, or even if you need to download it off the web, just watch it.

A decade on the web

Posted on in My Life, WWW.

In all the confusion (new job, planning wedding, flat hunting, being ill) it completely slipped under my radar that sometime over the last few months marked the point where I had been online for ten years.

I’d used the departmental network at university and pre-web systems like Prestel before then but in the spring of 1995 I went online in the sense that we mean today and started using e-mail, FTP, telnet, usenet, gopher (remember that?) and the WWW.

Ten years ago I’d never seen a web site, I’ve spent the last eight years creating web sites for a living.

You need help…

Posted on in Dinosaurs, Doctor Who, WWW.

… if you’re the person who ended up on the SFSFW web site after searching for “centaur bestiality”.

The word ‘bestiality’ appears exactly once on the site, on the same page as the word ‘centaur’ though not at all close together. I’m afraid that the searcher would most likely have been disappointed.

Other search terms that somehow ended up at the SFSFW in the first half of June include:

  • “disadvantages of being vertically challenged”
  • “lap dancers devizes”
  • “why gamers should go to anime conventions”
  • “why does pooh have mr sanders on his door”
  • “inca drawing of dinosaur killing a man”

The worrying thing is that the society has such wide interests that all of these, except possibly the lap dancers (especially as GZG are not based anywhere near Devizes), are topics that we could cover.

But the number six term overall was “emperor dalek”, only just behind “troublesome trucks” and “bob naismith”. Will it be higher by the end of the month?

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Woof!

Posted on in Doctor Who, Miniatures.

“We have your associate. You will obey or she will be exterminated.”
“No.”
“Explain yourself.”
“I said no.”
“What is the meaning of this negative?”
“It means no.”
“But she will be destroyed.”
“No. Cause this is what I’m gonna do. I’m going to rescue her. I’m going to
save Rose Tyler from the middle of the Dalek fleet, and then I’m going to
save the Earth, and then, just to finish off, I’m going to wipe every
stinking Dalek out of the sky.”
“But you have no weapons, no defenses, no plan.”
“Yeah, and doesn’t that scare you to death? Rose?”
“Yes, Doctor?”
“I’m coming to get you.”

Bad Wolf wan’t bad at all. Three months ago, did you think the phrase “they’ve killed Billy Piper” could ever be a bad thing? (And a nice Absolom Daak homage in there as well.)

First twenty minutes: 7/10, Middle twenty minutes: 8/10, Last five minutes: 11/10

Overall: 9/10

Next week looks like every fanboy’s wet dream. I’m looking at my miniatures shelves and thinking “I need more Daleks”. BTD must be laughing.

Shaggy Dog Stories

Now the mysterious voice at the end of the trailer, who or what is it? The theories are coming thick and fast:

  1. Davros – the obvious choice. He was creating Daleks from humans back in Revelation of the Daleks (which presumably is the fate of the gameshow losers), an act which made him an enemy of the racial purity fanatic main Dalek force.
  2. The Emperor Dalek – the voice is very much like that from Evil of the Daleks, but does it make sense to bring back a villain that appeared in one, deleted, 1960s story (and once as a disguise of Davros in the 1980s)?
  3. The Dalek from Dalek – The phrase “they survived through me” is very similar to a line from that episode and this Dalek, already contaminated with Rose’s DNA would have less problem in using humans to create a new Dalek army. Oh dear, that would really destroy the ending and impact of that story.
  4. Adam – he has 20,000 years of knowledge in his head (or does he, if he does then why would he need that answering phone message?), he’s seen a Dalek, he has a grudge against the Doctor. Stupid idea.
  5. The Master – not likely.

And to add to the fun these choices can be mixed and matched (Adam is Davros; Davros is the Emperor Dalek (again); The last Dalek is the new Emperor Dalek). A whole week of wild speculation :-).

No boom today. Boom tomorrow. There’s always a boom tomorrow. … Boom, sooner or later. BOOM!

Posted on in Doctor Who.

Mmmmm, Susan Ivanova.

Anyway, Boom Town. I wasn’t expecting much from this based on the trailers but it turned out better than I expected. Not brilliant but certainly not terrible.

It was a collection of “greatest” hits from the series so far – Slitheen from AoL/WW3; the rift from tUD; incidental music from Rose; Mickey; reversing the teleport from tEoftW; some of which deserved a repeat performance more than others. It was also more than that.

It was a look at the Doctor’s morality and whilst Russell T Davies is clearly against the death penalty (see his interview on Doctor Who Confidential) the episode was no where so clear cut, Margaret’s arguments didn’t really hold water when held against the lengths she was prepared to go to save herself, and the Doctor’s attitude was a mixture of factors – part “leave local customs alone”, part “Everything has it’s time and everything dies” and part traumatised post-Gallifrey Doctor.

The moral debate would have been more interesting if a human had taken a larger part. Maybe we could have been spared some of the Rose/Mickey (non-)relationship and instead had them involved in the discussion between the Doctor and Margaret.

In the end the debate was rendered meaningless by a deus ex machina resolution. I liked the heart of the TARDIS and I wonder if it’s foreshadowing something, possibly connected to regeneration?

7/10

And the Doctor notices the Bad Wolf at last. Just in time for this week’s episode that looks like it could be very, very good and very, very bad at the same time.

IMDB is listing Norman Lovett (the original Holly from Red Dwarf) as Davros in the season finale. But anyone can update IMDB with any old information (it’s not quite a Wiki but it’s nearly as bad) so we’ll have to see. I doubt that such a genre favoutite actor could play such a genre favourite part without it leaking out before now, and I think he’d make a bloody awful Davros. But you never know.

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