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Recommended Viewing

• 300†
  Does exactly what it says on the (comic book) tin. Loved it.
• Little Miss Sunshine†
  Very funny, disturbing (the beauty pageant) and completely messed up -- but in a good way.
• Laputa: Castle in the Sky†
  Story great, characterization a little on the weak side -- though the big robots are cool.
• Porco Rosso†
  Stylish, funny, exciting.
• Grave of the Fireflies†
  Very sad, which was a little unexpected since I didn't know much about it before watching it. Can be a little too slow in places though, otherwise it's very good.
• Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind†
  The story can get a little dense at times what with the various factions, but still really enjoyable, inventive and engaging.
• X-Men: The Last Stand†
  Opportunity, talent, money - all blown. Over 3 films X-Men has hinted of something great that could have been, this last one says "No, sorry - not going to happen". Bah.

flickr.com

Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening - Robert Frost

Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound’s the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

2 CommentsMay 30, 2005

4 Easy Steps to being A Good Web Designer

Acquire Content
Everything starts with content, it’s not good enough to say that ‘this will go here’ and ‘that will go there’ you must deal with the specifics of the content from the beginning. The content is the rudder, it determines the course. Good web designers have to learn to wrangle content.

Edit Content
Ultimately webpages are documents which must be read, the best webpages are those that are clear in message and purpose, that clarity doesn’t come from an animated menu or a flashing light bulb, it comes from well written and structured content. No amount of photoshop can help a badly written and structured site, therefore good web designers are good editors.

Markup Content
Markup the content in HTML, set out the site in the structure derived from your editing process, no scripting yet, this is just laying out the pages before the book is bound. Read the site, roleplay the site, pretend to be your gran (or better yet get your gran) going through the site. Good web designers are empathic, and it goes without saying that good web designers know how to markup a document properly.

Design Interface
A book is an interface, a postcard is an interface, a web page is an interface. Remember that the interface exists as a means to an end, it is not the end itself. If you’ve followed the first 3 steps regarding content this will be clear to you and your heart will sing with joy at the prospect of what you can achieve. You are responsible for communicating a message, your skill can be the difference between a person learning something new or giving up out of frustration. Good web designers know that with great power comes great responsibility, gwasshoppah.

Wax on, wax off. Wax on, wax off.

0 CommentsMay 28, 2005

Nice Stationery

And so it goes. Yes, next time I will vote. Yes she is still hot.

So, for Jojo, it reads: “Thanks for your kind words…Next time you will of course vote! And you will also volunteer to be my lookalike for my photographers!!” Yes Ma’am. Not sure how I should take that though, I’m a little bit too big and ugly to pass as Sylvia, but anyhow.

The rest is thank your for saying nice things and it’s an honour and privilege to have been re-elected and to serve the people of North Down for another Parliament etc. She really is a nice lady.

6 CommentsMay 27, 2005

CSS Gravity

Today I wish for CSS gravity. With CSS gavity I could create a box and then tell an element if and how gravity affects it. An element with gravity of 2 would fall to the bottom of the box, below anything with a gravity of 1 or 0 (zero gravity is what happens already, content flow starts at the top and works down). An element of gravity 3 would always fall beneath my gravity 2 element. And so on.

The many reasons why this would never be implemented by the W3C is left as a research excercise for the reader.

3 CommentsMay 24, 2005

The FA Cup Final, 2005

Not the first time and certainly not the last time the Toaster will be wrong, to wit:

17:13 <@StrayTaoist> arse are nowt without terry henry

See also: IDQCT.

2 CommentsMay 22, 2005

How art made the world

Art and Personality experiment results:

Your favourite type of art is Impressionism.
In the personality profile you had a high intellectualism score, which suggests you like to think about abstract ideas and have a creative imagination.
People who are the same age and sex as you are most likely to prefer Cubism
People who also score highly in your dominant personality trait are most likely to prefer Japanese ukiyo-e

I was average in everything but had a high intellectualism and emotional intelligence. Ladies, form an orderly queue…

0 CommentsMay 20, 2005

FIR - Dwyer Method

<h3 id="header">
<span>Revised Image Replacement</span>
</h3>

/* css */

#header {
	width: 329px;
	height: 25px;
	background-image: url(sample-opaque.gif);
	}
#header span {
	display: block;
	width: 0;
	height: 0;
	overflow: hidden;
	}

This technique is buggy in IE5.5 on Windows 98. The hidden text within the spans while not displaying will actually still create a box which will flow to the total natural height of the measure. So if you have something that flows to 3 lines in the width of that h3 tag the h3 box will be 3 line-heights in depth dispite the fact you’ve told it not to display.

More on FIR.

0 CommentsMay 18, 2005

Crimson Tide

As Gene Hackman once said:

This is the Captain. Set condition 1-SQ for strategic missile launch. Spin up missiles one through five, and twenty through twenty-four. The release of nuclear weapons has been authorized. This is not a drill.

That is all.

0 CommentsMay 18, 2005

Your Questions Answered

Joanne Lundop (21) of Journalesque writes:

“Who do you think make better friends, men or women?”

I’ve had more female friends than I’ve had male friends, but I’ve kept more male friends than female. My closest friend was female, my best friend is male. If I was stuck on a desert island I’d want my man Friday to be female.
That doesn’t answer the question really, or maybe it does - (for me) there are more possibilities in a friendship with a female, it is more complex and maybe that’s why a female friendship may be better, but is more fragile.
My answer is neither are ‘better’, they both have pros and cons.

“What’s the most embarrassing thing that’s ever happened to you?”

Probably getting sacked for criticising the management at BlackStar on this weblog, though not immediately embarrassing nothing I have done has haunted me quite so much as that has, and left me looking quite so stupid in the eyes of quite so many people.

“What’s your favourite holiday?”

Skiing. I love skiing. My favourite holiday was during university when we all spent a week in La Plagne in the French alps. Which was nice.

“If you could eat only one food for the rest of your life, what would it be?”

I dunno. Stew? That way I might not die an early death from some mineral deficiency or other. At all costs avoid the scurvy.

“What do you think are positive aspects of religion?”

Where to start? Well, sticking with the tangible: education, law, government, human rights, justice, literature, art, philosophy…

I hope this has been as exciting for you as it has been for me. Until next time, tarra!

0 CommentsMay 16, 2005

Romeo and Juliet (The Unlikely Version)

Sylvia Hermon was having some snaps taken for the Irish Times today, in Donaghadee. I was sitting on a park bench killing time before heading back into work. First there were the looks. I’ll not deny it, there were looks. But she’s married, she’s a public figure, she’s the only UUP Member of Parliament left! This could not be!
Anyway, she came over and said “Hello”, I invited her to have a seat and she obliged but in a ‘we can’t do this Stephen’ sort of way. We talked about the weather, the pretty boats, the price of a loaf, anything but the one thing that was on both our minds. Then she left, and it was over. The End.

(PS. If you ever happen to read this Lady Hermon please, please don’t have me deported from North Down or anything, I’m only joking.)

(Though, to be fair you are hot.)

3 CommentsMay 13, 2005

A distant ship smoke on the horizon

Just as it was in my teenage years these days there is now essentially only one song in my music collection - Pink Floyd’s Comfortably Numb. At exactly 4 minutes and 30 seconds my eyes close and I am no longer here.

1 CommentsMay 11, 2005

pal·imp·sest

noun.

1. A manuscript, typically of papyrus or parchment, that has been written on more than once, with the earlier writing incompletely erased and often legible.
2. An object, place, or area that reflects its history: “Spaniards in the sixteenth century … saw an ocean moving south … through a palimpsest of bayous and distributary streams in forested paludal basins” (John McPhee).

0 CommentsMay 9, 2005

del.icio.us Ajax

So, my first bit of toe dipping into Ajax is right there on the left, the “Want to see the tags instead?” link. It shows my del.icio.us tags, as produced by an XSL transformation. It’s not very complicated JavaScript, I’m just using xmlhttp.responseText to dump out an HTML fragment created in the XSLT. Not very interesting, but it makes me happy. Also not very well finished off as I have to go get some food, so I’m sorry about the mess. Any pointers or advice anyone has are gladly recieved.
Things it should do:

1. should have a switch back to the original state
2. the css needs to take advantage of the weighting classes (each tag is assigned a class dependant on it’s frequency)
3. it would be cool if I could actually do some inline editing of my del.icio.us tags from here
4. sort alphabeticaly, sort by frequency, sort by date (tags and links)

1 CommentsMay 2, 2005

Backpack

I’ve been playing with Backpack from 37Signals a little over the weekend and first impressions are very good. If it wasn’t already clear that to me Ajax was the (immediate) future of web app’s, it is now. Almost everything I do I can think of a way of making it better with some use of XMLHTTPRequest (Ajax), and by ‘better’ I mean better for the end user, more immediate, more intuitive, more informative.

In a very short space of time web application development has changed substantially, frameworks (this’ll explain why) and Ajax have a big part to play in that but in my opinion it’s driven by people who really care about and understand the end user. It’s all rather nice to see and really quite inspiring, I wonder where it’ll all lead?

0 CommentsMay 2, 2005

Buttery Asses

During a discussion about the upcoming elections I stumbled upon an idea of such genius that I feel it should be shared with those outside the rarified atmosphere of the cabal elite. To wit:

12:54 <@beowulf> i think everyone should leave the island, and let me spend a few hundred years planting trees
12:54 <@beowulf> and breeding wild animals
12:54 <@beowulf> then we butter up the thugs, and set them free
12:54 <@rory> sounds sensible…
12:55 <@beowulf> a few wolf hounds chasing their buttery asses through the woods
12:55 <@beowulf> that’d sort the men from the boys

I’d vote Green if they weren’t all such hemp knitted cardigan wearing hippies.

0 CommentsMay 1, 2005