This is as days pass by, by Stuart Langridge

Eric Meyer has written an essay called "Considered Harmful" Essays Considered Harmful, so Jeffrey Zeldman has entitled all today's posts "Foo Considered Harmful". Ha! I laughed. :)

Aquarion's been busy writing Epistula, specifically the comments section, and I've been working on transferring video files (in a variety of random formats; DivX, MPEG, ad nauseam) to SVCD format so that I can burn them with my new CD writer and watch them on my new DVD player. Hoorah for the mplayer-supplied mencvcd script, not that I can get it to work. Oh, and blowing the froth off a couple of beers, too. Best wishes for the season, especially to those who I didn't get to wish one to properly. A Merry (coding) Christmas to you all. -----

Sam links to a story of Neil Gaiman's about how he once received a letter addressed to "The author Neil Gaiman. Lives in a big house of uncertain location in Minnesota USA". Bill Bryson apparently once received a letter addressed to "Bill Bryson, Writer, Yorkshire Dales", which proves that both the Royal Mail and the US Postal Service can sometimes act above and beyond the call of duty. Better still, the DJ Dave Lee Travis once had a letter addressed to "DLT, London, England", which is even more impressive. So why is it that half the stuff I send gets lost in the post, eh? -----

Tantek clarifies his position regarding explicitly styling links as class="local" with some very good points. Although I still don't like the idea of having two ways of telling whether a link is local (the URL, (implicit) and a class (explicit)), because of the danger of inconsistency, he makes a very good point about degrees of locality; it might well be very useful to class links with finer granularity than just "local" or "external". And he makes a very neat point about adding similar classes to a user stylesheet. Actually, it might be quite nice to style links to "javascript:" URLs with a big red X before them, or as text-decoration: strike-through, or something, to warn myself. I must start thinking about user stylesheets more; could be an invaluable guide to my in-head parser for the web. -----

XSL Considered Harmful sums up all the things that I thought were wrong with XSL but never managed to articulate. (No, I don't take time off being a web geek for Christmas, why do you ask?) -----

Lame Flash games and high scores, an essay on how Flash coders need to pay some attention to security.

Tantek complains about how much code my CSS3 rules for styling local and external hyperlinks differently take:

There is also something to be said for simplicity. If you go read Stuart's article, you'll notice how many CSS3 rules it takes to emulate "a.local".

That's a little unfair. It actually takes two rules: one to style all links with http, and one to style absolute links that are to this domain (which could be local links). If you don't use absolute links inside a domain, then it's only one rule. The reason that my code listed six rules were that I do sometimes use absolute links in the domain, I also wanted a different effect on link hover, and I wanted to style one particular external link differently (which most people would not want to do). Moreover, a fair few of those rules could be combined together by putting multiple selectors in and separating them with commas. Personally, I think that explicitly tagging local links as "local" is bad, because it leaves open the possibility that a local link might not be classed, or that an external link might be erroneously classed. Browsers don't support the CSS3 selectors yet, but that's not the fault of the technique. -----

Google vs. Evil, an article on how Google's policy of providing better searches for users to the exclusion of all else may be beginning to conflict with what's best for Google and the net as a whole. Given Google's pre-eminent status, there may be interesting times ahead. -----

Finished. No more work for me until 2003. What a very nice feeling. :-) -----

Isidore-of-Seville.com (via blog-fu) is a collection of collections of links on all sorts of interesting subjects. -----

Bah! Looks like the BBC, in showing Once More With Feeling, the Buffy musical episode, cut it to shreds. Including Dawn's line about the pterodactyl, which is the funniest bit in it. And "The hardest thing in this world is to live in it", from Dawn, which is a classic line and a hark back to the scene on the Meccano tower (as some people will remember). I didn't watch it; I was at a Christmas dinner, but I've seen it about forty times anyway. I wonder if Hixie did the cuts list himself or used the useful one that somone posts to the UK Buffy newsgroup? I never understand why Auntie Beeb cuts half the bits it does. -----

I have found a GUI mail client that works the same way as mutt! It's called Arrow, and it just reads and writes your mailbox in /var/mail/foo, which means that it and mutt interoperate perfectly. Fantastic. Sadly, it's non-free -- there seems to be no source for download, and it's built using a non-Free (and non-free, i.e., costs real money) widget set. So, not perfect, but I'm still using it. -----

The Buffy Sex Chart: a snogweb for Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

Mark posts a long excerpt from Tom Stoppard's play The Real Thing, where the character Henry, a writer, talks about what writing means and the sacredness of words. So ask yourself, what does reading this do for you? Me, I've got some thoughts.

Now, I don't normally like plays. To some people that's a meaningless statement; it's like saying, I don't normally like blue things. But it's the way it is. I can't read playscript properly; I can never immerse myself into the story. I can't get over the unreality of plays when presented on a stage, either; it never seems remotely real, because the people are just standing on a stage, not in a bedroom or a street or a lunar base. Films don't have this problem, although this is only because film directors can choose their camera angles. (And a further point might well be made: why is reality, or seeming reality, important?) But back to the point: I don't normally like plays. I quite often don't like great works of literature, either (you may fill in your own definition for that term). But I do like reading quotations. Similarly, I enjoyed reading this excerpt; removed from its context, from the surrounding body of the play, the words take on a little mystique of their own, I think. We don't know about the characters (except for any internal evidence, and Mark's very brief introduction), and we don't need to; their ideas come through much more strongly when shorn of anything other than a mouthpiece through which they're presented. So I enjoyed reading this.

I do wonder why Mark posted it, though. There's a little thought in my head that says that it'd be an interesting little social experiment to see which bit of it those who read and comment upon it choose to comment upon. How they summarise the piece -- I saw it as commentary on the sacredness of words, but someone else might see it as a vilification of the arrogance of writers, or as an example of how everyone thinks that they can do an expert's job, or... and so on, ad nauseam. There aren't that many people who would generate enough links, enough commentary, to perform this kind of experiment without making it explicit: read this text and tell me what you thought, which would alter the results. I doubt Mark did do it for this reason -- doubtless he either just likes the piece or it has peculiar relevance to something he's doing -- but it's a fascinating thought, just the same.

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Do your entries for the W3C site redesign competition. If I had any design skill at all I'd be entering this. Actually, I think it'd be more interesting if all you were allowed to change was the stylesheet, not move the content around... -----

Blimey, I go away for a day and a half and loads happens.

Elcomsoft and Dmitry Skylarov are innocent (via everybody). The jurors said, "Under the eBook formats, you have no rights at all, and the jury had trouble with that concept". This reaffirms my belief that ordinary people, which is what a jury is, don't like rights being taken away and see it as a bad thing. Excellent.

Dave Farquhar is debating shifting to a different blogging system. I wish Vellum was done so I could recommend it to him.

The difference between content and attributes, or why you should put some stuff in a tag and some stuff between tags, by mpt. I never really knew why you should store some data in one place and some in another, and this is a really useful point he's made.

Mark talks about moving friends to cold storage -- having a mail folder called "Friends" and moving people from there to their own folder (good) or to cold storage (bad). I don't think I could do that; it'd be too stressful to have to categorise the people I know into "indiscriminate friends", "friends worthy of their own folder", and "people who used to be friends". So I essentially do the same thing, but manually and in my head every time; categorising these things explicitly would make it real.

Signs for librarians (via trainedmonkey): the FBI can now monitor the US public's use of the internet using library facilities, and the libraries can't tell them. These signs take much the same route that was taken by some people after the UK's Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act: you put up a prominent notice saying "this data hasn't been seen by the government" and then warn people to watch for the removal of the notice. Or just caution people that their viewing habits may be being monitored and to act accordingly, but that's a less elegant solution.

Zaurus Doom (via Sarabian). Something else for me to do in meetings other than read ebooks, then.

The contents of this weblog are licensed under a Creative Commons License. This boils down to, "the licensor permits others to copy, distribute, display, and perform the work. In return, licensees must give the original author credit."

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The Secret Diaries of the Lord of the Rings characters are still running, and are still amusing, if you're not totally sick of LotR stuff by now. Someone did point out that the author has eschewed reading the books in favour of waiting to see the films, which is a bit weird; then again, having not seen the film(s), I don't know how closely the book storyline is followed (so doing diaries based on the books might look a bit weird if the film cuts one of the bits you're writing about). -----

This is great, this. I've got a half-day holiday today, tomorrow I'm in another office (and therefore am practically excused work, apart from helping out one of my staff with something she's working on), and that means that I've only got three working days to go (Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday this week) before Christmas! Woo! I regret all year not taking much holiday, but then when it comes to mid-December I remember why I always do it :) -----

So, I'm sitting in a cafe in a big shopping centre, and I'm trying to decide whether I can afford a camera for my father-in-law. The camera shop I passed on the way to the cafe had cameras for £80 (this is real cameras, not compact ones). Too much (who do I look like, Evelyn de Rothschildt?). So I thought, Argos, that's the place. However, I was in the middle of a cup of tea and a cigarette -- very nice cup of tea, as it happens, but then you'd expect that for two quid -- and didn't want to get up and walk to Argos to see their prices. Clearly a time for the web. So, whip out the Zaurus and my mobile, connect (IR from Z to phone, net via Freeserve) and connect to the Argos website to check their prices. Now, I think that that's pretty neat. Those of you thinking, that's pretty neat, it is, isn't it? Those of you thinking, Gordon Bennett, stop poncing about on your palmtop and get up and walk, I admit I can see your point, but, hey. What would have been rather nice is for there to be a wireless network inside the shopping centre, even if it only allowed you access to websites of firms who had shops there (although this would be difficult to police in a web containing hyperlinks). Can't imagine it'd cost them much (and God knows the people who run the place are not hurting for a bob or two), and it'd be a really outstandingly neat feature. Not that I've got around to getting a wireless CF card yet, but I will do eventually, and I'd be first in line if there was actually a reason to do so (like the existence of publically available wireless networks, even with limited connectivity). Paul's already written about the glorious future that awaits us with this kind of thing out there on the streets. I can't wait for this, it'll be great. We're still very much in the infancy of this kind of tech. Argos didn't have any non-compact cameras for under about fifty nicker, which was my budget. It took me 12 minutes online to find that out, although I have to tip the hat to the Opera people, because the Opera browser on my Z handled the Argos site with no qualms at all, JavaScript included. Nice one. Now, it took me so loing because I was using normal mobile dialup, which is 9600 baud. Very slo-o-o-o-ow. But, although my phone does GPRS, I (a) haven't signed up for it, because the T-Mobile people pretend innocence when I ask about using GPRS and their APN (like it tells you in the Zaurus FAQ), (b) can't use it, because coverage seems absolutely appalling (my phone, an Ericsson T68, apparently shows a little symbol when it's in a GPRS-able area, and I've only seen the symbol once (and I live practically in England's second city), and (c) I have no intention of using it, because it's horrifically expensive by all accounts. In a world with cheap GPRS and a Bluetooth CF card for the Z, or better still a countrywide wireless network with cheap or no subscription, I'd probably have my Z connect every hour and get my email. That'd be outstandingly neat. Until then, I'll settle for mobile phone dialup and sshing to my home machine. It's low-tech (compared to the potential alternatives), but it gets the job done. -----

MT-RefSearch "helps travellers from search engines by finding related content on your blog"; it queries the MT databases when someone follows a link from a search engine and gives you a list of links to similar content. Nice idea. However, the new version, 0.7, "also includes JavaScript to highlight the search terms on the page the visitor is looking at". So I thought, oo, wonder how they did that, since my searchhi does that. And, lo and behold, the code appears to be ripped right out of searchhi, right down to the variable names. Come on, guys. I've got no problem with you using it, but surely it wouldn't have hurt to at least chucked a link in to the original?

So, sound stopped working on my machine. Really random. It always worked before, and, like the man said, "I didn't change anything!. About the same time, I upgraded from 0.5 to 0.9, and couldn't work out why this broke it. So I recompiled all the modules. I got two different mixers and checked in both that I didn't have channels muted or low-volume. I rang people up and asked questions. I asked on IRC for help. I recompiled the kernel. Read the documentation over and over again. Recompiled everything again. Checked my speakers on another machine. Tried using different speakers on my machine. Still nothing. Two weeks without sound; no music while I'm working, not good. I was about tearing my hair out, especially since, in that time period, Bill went from having no sound at all to getting it working and driving both sets of speakers on his machine, and then sending me mails about how he could do it and I couldn't, the git. He did come up with lots of suggestions as to why mine didn't work too, none of which helped. Then last night I unplugged the speakers from the audio output of my modem and plugged them into the soundcard instead. I felt such a twat. -----

It's Christmas, which means, once again, trying to work out who I should be sending Christmas cards to. Always a fun game; every year I wish I'd saved last year's cards so I could see who sent them. Every year I get cards from people I hadn't expected. I know someone who doesn't do Christmas cards at all, really, which is a pretty sensible solution, but the question then is whether I send them a card: a more poignant question this year than most, perhaps. There's a kind of expectation that sending a card should guarantee receipt of same, but it's a fairly flawed hope for a fair few; the people from whom you can reasonably expect that response are normally close enough to you that you don't need to see a card from them to affirm your closeness. Maybe I'll just send emails or something. -----

The Legal Technology Insider report that TFB, a long-standing major supplier of technology and software to the legal industry, are backing Linux. Since technology for lawyers is what I do for a living, and since, as you might expect, I bang on about free software solutions quite a lot, this is jolly good to see... -----

Ten Taxonomy Myths: "taxonomy" is the word of the moment at work, although to our credit we have recognised that we're using it all the time and started to take the piss out of ourselves, so we haven't gone entirely Dilbert just yet. -----

Aquarion is back and baking, with a partially-finished version of his new weblogging system. And glace cherries. -----

Anil suggests that Windows should have a "system-level registry of XSL transforms", now that Office 11 supports transforms when saving a file as XML, so that any application can supply its own format as a transform. I don't see how this would work; as far as I'm aware, to do that you'd need to supply your format as a transform from some kind of defined "base" format into your format, and where's this base format coming from? You could supply your format as a transform from, say, Word 11's XML output, but what good does that do you? Essentially that lets your application import Word files, but apps can do that already (don't get me wrong, I'm not suggesting that XML won't make that process easier). But unless there's one magic XML format into which all data can be pressed (which there isn't), I'm not seeing what a registry of applications' XSL transforms will do to help. -----

Phoenix 0.5 is out (although, as Mark points out, this isn't a permalink and will subsequently point to future versions of Phoenix, bah) -- should I be using it? I'm still using 0.3 rather than 0.4, because I still have to recreate my profile every time I upgrade; what does 0.5 give me above 0.3 that makes it worth upgrading? Looking at the 0.4 and 0.5 release notes, I can see lots of things that I don't have a use for, like having multiple homepages and having a fixed download sidebar, but nothing vital. Those of you who've upgraded to 0.4 and 0.5, why did you do it? Was it worth it? -----

Brent complains about the perversity of inanimate objects:

I'm all, leave me alone, you things.
And the things all go -- hey, we just want to help you, Brent. We got smart because we love you.
And I'm all, where's my rubber mallet?

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Privacy International are hosting a public meeting on the UK government's proposed "entitlement card" (for which read: national identity card). The Government have gone to pains to state that carrying the card won't be compulsory, but, as PI put it: "You will not be required to use a card unless you wish to work, use the banking or health system, vote, buy a house, drive, travel or receive benefits". Hm. The meeting is tomorrow, Wednesday 11th December 2002, 1415 - 1700, at LSE. Please attend if you want your voice to be heard (see PI's ID card FAQ for some reasons why you might want your voice to be heard), and tell your friends. Especially those in London.

Michael Barrish has a dream about marrying somone with his name. "How are we going to tell who the mail is for?" I've got that problem. Mail arrives addressed to "S Langridge", my wife (who has the same initial as I) opens it. Mail arrives addressed to "Mr S Langridge", my wife opens it and claims that it says "Mrs Langridge" on the front. Then again, I don't get any interesting mail any more; as Edmund Blackadder once pointed out, I'm like a pelican. Whichever way I turn, there's always an enormous bill in front of me. -----

A new story that has just leapt its way into my "favourite techie stories of all time" list: 500 mile email (via Sarabian) -----

Best friend called yesterday and I missed her, telling me that Glenn Quinn has died. Who he, I hear you ask? He played Doyle in the first series of Angel, and was allegedly fired for spending too much time on the town (and taking David Boreanaz with him). He was a talented actor, despite his fondness for the brown fluid.

Is that it? Am I done?
Doyle, Hero

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Aaron Swartz talks about the problem with conferences, summed up neatly by his sharp quote: "What did all these people come out here for? I can watch infomercials at home just fine, thanks." Conferences should be about interaction, not about silently watching talks. -----

Richard Gabriel, the author of the essay Worse is Better, has suggested that we treat coding not as an engineering discipline but as a fine art in The Poetry of Programming (via Sarabian).

When I'm writing poetry, it feels like the center of my thinking is in a particular place, and when I'm writing code the center of my thinking feels in the same kind of place. It's the same kind of concentration.

There's a sort of mysticism about coding; the Jargon File tries to explain this a bit, and the hacker mentality parodies it rather a lot (see terms like "black magic" as a verbal shorthand for very complex code that no-one really understands), and it's very easy to step over the line into ridiculousness or self-parody by taking this sort of thing too seriously. But coding is an art, rather than a science, although it's an art where only other coders can really appreciate your artistry, unlike, say, painting, or architecture. I don't think coders are artists, who do the work purely for the art's sake, but I do think that they may be artisans, which is a term I've picked up from Dorothea Salo. Craftsmen, if you will. (Should that be "craftspersons"?) -----

I shall be buying Google Hacks, a book by Tara Calishain and Rael Dornfest, when it comes out. Partially because it looks cool, but mainly because my Google Art creator is hack #89. Fame at last! -----

Freevo is a home theatre package for Linux, which uses MPlayer to do the playback and things. I'm seriously toying with the idea of doing something like this, although it's possible that I'm getting a DVD player for Christmas and therefore won't need half its functionality :) -----

How to get window and element heights from JavaScript in a variety of different browsers in a variety of rendering modes: an excellent article by Peter Paul Koch. This has just bitten me a lot when writing some styles and scripts for IE5.5, IE6, and Mozilla. -----

The BBC are shortly to start streaming radio in Ogg format (via Baldur) as well as their current RealAudio. Excellent! As Baldur says, "So soon we'll have a public service broadcaster broadcast in a public, open format."

Another in-browser editor for Mozilla: Wrapper. -----

Lots of stuff to mention, so a Mark-esque catchup post is in order. Phil Ringnalda notes a change required to your blog this page MT bookmarklet for Mozilla. I hope Ben's seen this and rolled it into the new version. Vampire Ecology in Sunnydale (via Lots O'People): how many vampires are there in Sunnydale, and is this a stable population? Amazingly (and I can't believe, despite Joss' legendary attention to detail, that he set up the populations such that there were the appropriate numbers of humans and vampires), it all works out: a town the size of Sunnydale can support a number of vapires which seems reasonable, given what we've seen on Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I am well impressed with this. Mark's got a TiVo. I've acquired a couple of video capture cards, so I've toyed with the idea of essentially building my own TiVo; at the very least, I could lay down my current video collection onto VideoCD. I have no intention of recording to DVD, because DVD recorders are thumpingly expensive, and blank DVDs are equally expensive, presumably at least partly because the movie people don't want punters to be able to lay down video of their own, especially in a world with filesharing in it. But VideoCD would do me nicely, especially given that it's not hard to find a DVD player that will play the format. I could also record stuff from the telly direct to the hard drive and then either watch it later or write it to VideoCD if I wanted to keep it. How good does a machine have to be in order to do these things? Clearly to convert a video to VideoCD you have to be able to grab the video input and convert it to a digital format in realtime -- I've got no problem with laying it down to the internal hard drive as an uncompressed format and writing a compressed CD later, but how performant does a machine have to be to do this? Simon notes the existence of YAML, a non-XML-based data transfer language much like XML-RPC's data serialisation format. This is much like Aquarion's ESF in concept. I wonder if we've all be using CSV or something if someone had pushed it in earlier years? A game design tutorial which is actually a log of an IRC session. Am I the only person who finds IRC logs really hard to read? The black page background doesn't help either; that's so 1996, man. Understanding web typography, an introduction (via Dorothea): notable for some historical information on fonts, which is a very good grounding for novices to typography (which is, er, damned near everyone, I reckon -- there is a lot more skill in this than I thought, although I suspect that Dean Allen could have told me that if I'd asked), and its up-to-date-ness; I've seen too many "typography" guides which ignore stylesheets, for example. Jonathon Delacour talks about Myers-Briggs personality typing. I'm an INTP. I shall be interested in his conclusions, although the self-selecting nature of the sample might tend to select for some personality types over others. Moreover, Jonathon doesn't actually reveal his own classification, although we know that he's INxx. Those people who understand these things could potentially guess based on his style and see if they're right; a fun new game for all the family! Should there be a Myers-Briggs category in FOAF, I wonder? If there were, it would reasonably quickly because a very large potential sample population, with writings (since they're all webloggers) against which you could gauge their personality type. Ronaldo over at reflectivesurface sums up the XHTML/RSS debate with some thoughts of his own. A couple of minor misconceptions; RSS discovery isn't hard with Mark's RSS autodiscovery LINK element, and I'll bet money (although I have no proof of this) that the majority of Movable Type users are not using MySQL. But these are minor points; he stresses that "the burden of implementation is on the developer", and gives me some food for thought on the nature of representation as opposed to direct meaning in XHTML. Even if this conversation dies away (which it may have done, although Tantek hints at private discussions which may lead to more), it's got a lot of people to think about the nature of XHTML and the potential that the semantic use of markup promises. -----

I've got my Sharp Zaurus back. Hoorah! I hope the little scrote who stole my previous one has his hands rot off or something. I'm even more pleased at the speed of replacement. Huh?, I hear you asking, it was snatched about a month ago! True. However, once the decision to replace had occurred, it was extremely quick; I spoke to someone at a place called The Source yesterday afternoon at about 3pm, and my replacement Z arrived today at 9am. So they were very quick to replace it indeed, once they had authorisation from my insurance company. It seems that the insurance company don't actually replace things themselves, but contract out that part to this other firm called The Source -- presumably the actual insurance people are too busy ignoring people's applications for three weeks to actually do any work. So once it got from the besuited insurance morons to people who actually nede to do something (by which I mean assess the market for the best price, buy it, and get it send to me), the process took less than 24 hours. Big up to The Source; big slaps to the insurance people. -----