This is as days pass by, by Stuart Langridge

Another bit of code put together: this time, an automated web browser for Python. It's something like Perl's WWW:Mechanize -- use it to navigate to a page, follow links, fill out forms, and the like. Get the code, or look at the documentation or the syntax-highlighted code.

I just don’t have enough time to work on Vellum. I hate that. So I’ve converted the back end of this site to PyBlosxom. Essentially, were I to rework Vellum’s plugin architecture it’d end up looking like PyBloxsom anyway.

Doesn’t mean I’m happy about having to abandon the project, though. I can hope it’s only temporary, but don’t hold your breath.

On the other hand, PyBloxsom is actually pretty neat. I had to throw together a whole big pile of plugins and special page flavours to make as days pass by keep going the way it was, but that’s OK. I’ll do a more decent writeup of everything I did (mpt-style permalinks! recent comments list! SSI in head.flavour files!) at some point. Just let me mourn my project for a bit first.

I’d come across Reverend, a Python Bayesian classifier, before. Ronaldo mentioned Lupy, a Python port of the Java-based Lucene search engine, which I like the look of (but don’t like its Java requirement). I’ve just discovered they’re at the same place, divmod.org. Good work, chaps! I can see me using stuff from here…

Verity Marriott, a sixth-former from a North London comprehensive school, is organising a set of "school strikes" -- walkouts from schools across London in order to participate in an anti-war (or anti-Bush, depending on who you are) demonstration. She was interviewed on the Today programme last week. It's good that she got a chance to put her view. However, both the R4 interviewer, and someone from the education system (from an LEA, I think) were appallingly patronising to her. Constantly repeating a cant about how it's just purely truancy, and doing everything short of patting her on the head and saying "run along now, little kiddie". I remember burning with a blue flame of rage at being so dismissed when I was that age. It was a shame that Ms Marriott wasn't slightly better primed for the interview; I'd have expected her to note that if this counts as unauthorised attendance then working strikes are exactly the same. The group are obviously conscious of this parallel, given that they're referring to "school strikes", but they failed to make it explicit, which I felt was a shame. In later news reports, comments on the strikes included one man claiming that it was completely ridiculous, opining "my dog will want to be on a protest march next". Yes, that's the best way to teach young adults to think; compare them to dumb animals. No wonder there's so much teenage resentment. One teacher suggested that she would let students attend the marches as long as they wrote up a report on it afterwards; essentially co-opting the strikes as a kind of school trip. That struck a reasonable balance between outright permissiveness and overbearing patronisation, I thought.

I'm Sorry I Haven't A Clue is back on! Hooray! And you can download the most recent episode through the BBC's excellent Listen Again scheme. I just wish I had a digital radio in the car so I could get BBC7 and listen to comedy all the time.

An appalling moment for web usability on the Today programme this morning, as James Naughtie explained that lots of people were attempting to view the pictures from Today's 6am picture competition. He pointed out that to get to the images you simply click the big picture in the middle of the Today homepage, and then followed up with "It's obvious really, isn't it?" No, James, obviously it isn't. If you have to explain how to find something on a website, you've already lost. And Auntie Beeb are normally pretty good at web usability...

Giles Wemmbley-Hogg (two Ms, two Gs), the fictional "upper-class twit" in Radio 4's Giles Wemmbley-Hogg Goes Off, is reasonably funny (although very cringeworthy), but I am thoroughly offended that they decided to make this useless posturing snob moron attend the university of Durham! It's not like that, really. Really!

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A summary of Microsoft's inductive design guidelines. This seems rather interesting...worth a read. I wonder why I didn't know about this.

Don't answer that.

(In a HCI sort of mood; have just spent all day writing up a spec for one window that will make it, hopefully, a lot more usable and understandable to our ordinary people.)

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• Pixy's online CSS editor is rather nice in concept.
• dsofile.dll seems to be an MS DLL that lets you interrogate MS Office documents for properties such as "title". Very nice. It's instaled on my work laptop but not on the servers, so I'm wondering what installs it? The laptop is Win2K+Office XP, the server is NT4. Anyone got any ideas?
• Eric Lippert on thin clients and using browser interfaces to mimic client-side programs. He states it's not a good idea, because JavaScript and similar aren't designed with the robustness you need for a proper application development tool. While this sounds a little like a shill for using the all new .NET marvellousness stuff, he has got a point. This deserves some real thought and posting on my part, rather than just a link, but I'm too busy.
• Storing Hierarchical Data In A Database (via Ned) is a really neat technique that I saw a while back (forgotten where) and then forgot about. I need to use this.
• Simon talks about CSS's nature and how it may not be ready for new people just yet. "At any rate, it's obvious that we as a community still have a long way to go in creating useful resources for people who want to make the switch to CSS." Yes. Are we making progress along that line? I sometimes forget that there are people who aren't web hackers...
• Invisiblog (via the Daily Python-URL), a weblogging host that is set up for completely anonymous posting using GPG and Mixmaster. Neat.

Have seen so much stuff over the last few weeks and I haven't had time to post about /any/ of it...and there's a little story thing in my head about the people I see on the way to work that I haven't got time to do either, and I haven't done any creative writing in ages. Ah well.

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The Creatures in my Head - daily illustrations by Andrew Bell. This is just excellent. New desktop wallpaper for me, I feel.

I saw Revolutions. A review crammed full of spoilers, so don't read any further if you don't want to be spoiled!

It was shit.

Not at all impressed.

The first part was boring and tedious bullshit (I actually fell asleep in the cinema for a few seconds until I was nudged!), the middle part was cliched war film bullshit, and the last part was incomprehensible bullshit.

Not a favourable assessment, I think you'll agree.

It's possible that it's deep and meaningful and I am too stupid to understand it. Entirely possible. But I didn't understand it. Not the end, anyway, and not most of the film either. For example:

• Was it all a clever master plan by the Oracle or what?
• When did Smith go from being a random ex-Agent who could duplicate himself to being such a serious threat to the whole fabric of existence that the machines were prepared to end the war just to be rid of him?
• What the fuck did the little girl have to do with anything?
• How lame was Bane, eh? "Ha haaa! I'm Smith in the real world, come to kick your arse, Neo! Ahaha! Oh, I'm dead." He did manage to blind Neo, though, which leads me to:
• Oh no, Neo's blind, we'd better give him sight made out of fire so he's not blind at all! What's up with that? He already had special green Matrix vision; bloke must have forgotten what real colours look like.
• Was there any point at all to the bit in the train station? The Train Man seemed to just be there to leer a bit and look menacing, and the Merovingian was barely even in it?
• Why would you have Larry Fishburne on the payroll and not use him hardly at all? Criminal!
• Keanu can't emote for shit, either, looking at Trinity's death scene.
• The fighting was all arse! It was pretty arse in Reloaded, too, mind; don't know whether this was just familiarity breeding contempt or something else.

Essentially, I could rant for hours about its sheer randomness. When we watched Reloaded, everyone said that it was obviously impossible to assess it without having seen Revolutions, because it was so obviously half a film. Having watched Revolutions, I'm still waiting for the second half of Reloaded, because that just wasn't it. No questions raised by Reloaded were answered, hardly any plotlines resolved. In the midst of Reloaded's plethora of random fight scenes and Neo superheroism it was at least not too difficult to find really good bits (Morpheus' speech to Zion, the car chase, the Oracle's explanation). I'm hard-pushed to find one thing I actually liked about Revolutions.

Words cannot describe how completely and abjectly let-down and disappointed I am by this.

Matrix Revolutions? Matrix Revulsions. Spare me the inevitable next film.

fc2rss, a thing to turn the fucking abysmal FirstClass web interface to conferences into an RSS feed to be read in your aggregator. Completely useless to you unless you're an OU student who doesn't mind poking a Python script a little. Very, very useful to me indeed.

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So, I put down the deposit on a Fiat Coupe 2.0 20V Turbo in Broom Yellow. It's really, really. cool. Should be picking it up in a fortnight or so. It's also a space rocket. Acceleration, jeez. I thought it was going to rip off my face at one point -- tickle the accelerator slightly and it's doing eighty. Oof. It's lovely; black leather seats, Pininfarina styling, 0-60 in 6.0s, etc etc. Pictures when I get it and a digital camera in the same place. You may take the smug "my car is faster than yours" look as read. Can't wait!

Another little DHTML thing, although perhaps less useful than the sortable tables one; JavaScript Event Sheets. I've been thinking about some kind of thing like this for ages, so I coded it up; I fear that its limitations will overwhelm it, but it's a useful little experiment if nothing else.

I have been exhorted repeatedly to write more content. But if I did, would I be content? Love those puns. :)

Anyway, the Kryogenix House of Javascript Weirdness presents sortable tables, an unobtrusive DHTML library to allow you to make tabular data sortable by clicking on the headers.