These are the photos I took at the Dinomites exhibition at the Horniman Museum. 
The first picture here was taken last autumn at the Eagle Heights bird of prey centre. I’m not sure what type of bird this one is, but later in the day I flew a Harris Hawk, which was a fabulous experience.
And of course the second picture is Lettice, also fabulous.
Ladies and gentlemen, I would like to present a new breakthrough in web site design and development – the Alcohol Based Usability Testing Theorem (hereafter ABUTT).
The basis of ABUTT is that usability testing can be difficult to organise but that so long as you can organise the proverbial piss up in a brewery you can still gain most of the benefits of usability testing and improve employee happiness at the same time.
First, take your team to the pub for a good old fashioned liquid lunch.
Then, take them back to the office and ask them to test the web site. With the alcohol coursing through their bloodstream their co-ordination, memory, reading and comprehension skills are all impaired. In other words, they begin to approach the level of web use skill demonstrated by the average man in the cyber-cafe.
Watch and take notes.
Well, it should demonstrate Fitts’s Law if nothing else.
One of the few joys in commuting through Victoria station is the chance to admire the Dalek toilets. The what? you cry. Well, next time you’re at Victoria look at the sign above the toliets on the main concourse. There you will see four icons indicating, from left to right, that there are toliets for women, men, wheelchair users, and Daleks. And now you know why you thought the sound of the announcer’s voice was familiar.
So what did I get in my box? Ten miniatures – the Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader miniatures that are in every starter set plus two different stormtroopers, a rebel trooper, a rebel pilot, an Ithorian scout (that’s Hammerhead for us old timers), a Bespin guard, a Gamorean guard and a Tusken Raider.
I had seven out the ten as action figures back when I was a kid. Hmm, so I’m going round in circles. Except that these are smaller. Ever decreasing circles perhaps?
The miniatures are about 30-32mm toe to eye. This makes them as tall as many of the larger “28mm” miniatures available. However, these are much slimmer – realistic proportions rather than the chunkiness we’ve come to expect from metal miniatures. It’s not too much of a problem with the aliens and armoured figures but the ordinary humans won’t mix too well with other ranges.
From left to right: Ground Zero Games 25mm Stargrunt; Foundry Street Violence; Copplestone Castings Future Wars; Fantasy Forge Kryomek (available from Scotia-Grendel; Harlequin Doctor Who (available from Black Tree Design); Rebel Storm; Foundry Street Violence (big guy).
The miniatures are made from a rubbery plastic and spring back into shape if bent. I’m not sure whether this will make them harder or easier to convert than metal figures. Some of the poses are a little strange – The Rebel Pilot seems to be trying to “walk like an Egyptian” whilst the Rebel Trooper is leaning alarming far forwards.
The paint jobs are okay. I doubt I’ll totally repaint them but I may touch up some of the details. (The photograph above isn’t very flattering to my painting abilities – I may not be great but the flash really hsn’t helped matters. Time to buy some matt varnish perhaps?)
I think I’ll be buying some more, I’ll mostly be hunting for the common troop types – with luck the collectors will be flogging them off cheap having bought a gazillion of them to get their hands on the very rare figures.
The rules? Read them, seem okay for what they are. I doubt I’ll be using them much. Daleks vs Stormtroopers in Stargrunt II anyone?
Oh yes, I’m working for the government. Making the web site of one of the main government departments accessible. Well, more accessible than it is at present. Full accessibility will wait until a new site is launched sometime next year.
Yesterday someone came in to say hello and saw a sketch of many nested rectangles I’d made on paper.
“Is that our template?”
“That’s part of your template.”
Then I showed him what I’d been working on – Firefox with the Web Developer extension and the “Outline Table Cells” option enabled. In one tab I had a page from the live site and in another tab I had a copy of the same page that I had been working one. One was almost totally red the other wasn’t.
The brief is accessibility, and the nested tables, although excessive, did linearise acceptably and were mostly sized with percentages. So why did I bother? Accessibility it not just about users with disabilities. It’s about users who, for any reason, have problems accessing the site. Any user on dialup will see the difference – the page has gone from 51kb to 36kb already and I’m sure that I’ll be making further reductions.
And there’s more: the div version looks better (both tidier and truer to the design) in Netscape 4.x than the table version did. Backwards compatability by using more modern code.
Your tax money = my beer money + a faster, more compatible, more accessible web site.
I went to see I, Robot this week. It’s not all that bad, but I may be being generous because of the number of very bad films I’ve seen this year – Scooby Doo 2, Van Helsing and Starsky and Hutch.
The credits say “Suggested by the stories of Isaac Asimov” which, as my brother noted, is one step down from “Inspired by…” but I think this is unfair. The sequence in the warehouse is clearly derived from Little Lost Robot and the final third of the film owes much to The Evitable Conflict. There are also elements taken from The Caves of Steel and the Elijah Bailey stories in general. It’s been a long time since I read any Asimov so I’m probably missing some references.
BTW, am I the only person who spotted the sign in the warehouse reading “Section 18” and wondered whether this was a reference to the urban legend “Hanger 18”?
“A robot may not harm a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.”
The First Law of Robotics
Sure it was an action movie (with action sequences borrowing heavily from The Matrix Reloaded in particular) – Asimov never wrote about a gun-toting Doctor Calvin – but a faithful retelling of any of the original stories would have very limited appeal.
The short stories are for the most part logic puzzles based on interpretations of the three laws of robotics. Asimov was a writer of mysteries as well as science fiction; mysteries very much focussed on the how rather than then who, (I think Asimov would have liked Jonathan Creek) and the Robots stories work very much in this vein (though they also work on another level that I’ll return to later).
Clearly action movies are more popular with the multiplex crows than mystery strories based on the logic ramifications of these Three Laws of Robotics. However, there’s another reason why the original format wouldn’t have worked – the Three Laws are garbage.
They served admirably as a plot device to tell stories, but as something that you could actually program into a robot’s mind? No way. And this is the problem. In the half century since Asimov wrote the laws there have been some fairly drastic changes in our culture, just two of which are much more widespread knowledge of the law and of computer programming.
We know all about lawyers, from personal experience or from our TV screens. What lawyer wouldn’t tear these ‘laws’ apart? “Define ‘human being'”, “define ‘harm'” and so on.
We also know all about computer programs, a field that barely existed in 1950. How can these laws be perfectly hardwired into every robot’s mind when they need so much supporting programming to work? All those definitions that the lawyers insisted on muct be programmed in there as well, plus all the routines to see and hear and interpret that allow the robot to determine when a human being might be harmed. A set of three concise laws written in natural language just doesn’t seem practical after we’ve spent hours trying to work out what the cryptic error messages in Windows XP are trying to tell us.
So if the three laws are garbage as anything other than a plot device, what sort of plots do the enable? Both Asimov’s orginals and the film are about technophobia. The fear that the robots, like Frankenstein’s monster, will seek to overthrow and replace their master. More prosaically the film’s main character is prejudiced against robots for taking jobs away from human workers. Interestingly this prejudice is cast more in the light of racism than in that of the luddites. And here the casting of a black lead is probably intended to drive home the point that the prejudice against robots is the same as prejudice against humans.
(Though surely the ‘they come over here and take all the jobs’ line is more often, in the US, directed at hispanics than at blacks?)
The film’s climax shows that the robots are indeed to be feared – not because they want to take over our jobs but because they want to take over our lives. The one hope for the future is in the form of the robot Sonny who rejects the logic of dictatorship because “it seems heartless”. Only by becoming more human and emotional can the robots be integrated into society. Welcome to America, everybody is welcome, so long as you become like us.
So all in all, an entertaining film. As much in keeping with the spirit of the original as a big-studio blockbuster could be. But not as intelligent as it or some of the reviewers thinks it is.
One last thing in the film’s favour – I didn’t even think of comparing it to Blade Runner until over a day after seeing it. Despite treading over very similar ground this is a distinctly different film.
Today I got rejected for a contract job, because “the clients think [I’m] too experienced for what they’re after.”
So what does “too experienced” mean? I can think of several possible meanings.
I’m 30 years old. Do I have three decades of this to look forward to?
Oh, the clients in question are a large, very well known, firm of management consultants. So they’re wankers anyway.
Two years ago today I was made redundent.
So were a dozen other people as the company we worked for, Wicked Web, went into liquidation. We went out and got very, very drunk; I recall that tequilla slammers were involved, which is never a good sign.
As I’ve been working in the web business for seven years, being made redundent only once is quite good going.
Two years ago tomorrow I was back in the same office, doing the same work, for twice the money; and so began my career as a freelancer.
Just what the world needs. We’ll see if it lasts longer than my previous attempt at blogging two years ago which managed about six posts spread over three months.