This is as days pass by, by Stuart Langridge

I’m going on holiday. Yay! To Italy! So I’ll be out of touch for the next week. Those of you who have bought the book, I hope you get it soon and you like it. Those of you who are LugRadio listeners, there’ll be a show out a week on Monday without me in it, and I’m sure it’ll be excellent; I’m certainly looking forward to listening to it. Those of you who work at Mills and Reeve, ahahaha, I’m on holiday and you aren’t. Unlucky. Anyone want to give me another job? :-)
I’ll be back in a week. Later, all.

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Well, my book DHTML Utopia is now available from SitePoint for all you lovely people’s reading pleasure. Please excuse the author photo, and trust me when I tell you that it was the best of all the ones that were taken that day. Plus, there is a hangglider on the front of it—the hangglider book? I think it’s really rather good, although I would think that. Also, thanks to Simon Willison, Simon Mackie, Kevin Yank, and Nigel McFarlane; couldn’t have done it without you, guys.

There's a chicken and a frog talking, and the chicken hands the frog a paperback, and says "Buk? Buk, buk, buk, buk buk." And the frog says "Reddit, reddit, reddit, reddit." All this is by way of saying: the Official Book Of The Stylish Scripting Weblog And ... [Stuart Langridge]

Syndicated from the SitePoint Stylish Scripting weblog

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I signed up to a pledge to mail my MP to get free wifi in the British LIbrary as long as 20 other people would do the same. Twenty people have pledged to do the same, and consequently I have written to my (new) MP, Lynda Waltho.
The text of (the relevant bit of) my letter (sent through Write To Them unsurprisingly) was:

I’m writing to ask you to help convince the British Library to offer free wireless (WiFi) access to the internet. Currently, the Library do allow people to connect to the internet while inside the library, but charge a rather high rate of £4.50/hour. While the Library is a
(perhaps the) superb place to garner knowledge, it’s good to supplement that knowledge with that available on the internet, and libraries are the best example of the government’s drive toward better free public education. The New York Public Library (in its significantly more
free-market-biased economy!) offers free WiFi access to visitors to the library, and I’d like to see the British Library follow suit; it leads the world in most areas of free access to knowledge, and it would be a shame to see it falling behind in this one thing.

Tonight I buried our cat, Bert.
Apparently someone ran him over this morning. A bloke in a Mini, who was doing 40 or 50 mph down our (rather tight) street (with cars all down the side). I came home to find Sam and Niamh crying their hearts out, unsurprisingly. The neighbours had picked Bert up and packed him into a box, which was nice of them; I went and collected him. And then I buried him.

Neighbours: thanks.

Bloke in a Mini: I hope your dick rots off.

Bert: goodbye. We loved you.

L.I.V.
E.R.P.
Double-O L
Liverpool F.C.

Day not completely bad, then.

Fritz Weisshart has put together a German translation of my instructions for searchhi, the search term highlighter JavaScript. Cool! Cheers, Fritz.

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Talking to Jono and Ade in the pub, it appears that I’m not the first person to notice this. I have implicit one-character shortcuts for some websites. For example, if I want to go to forums.lugradio.org then I seem to have subconsciously trained myself to just hit “f” in the address bar of my browser, and then down-arrow, enter. I didn’t explicitly set that up, but I go there often enough that it always works. Herewith, a list of the other ones I have subconsciously trained myself to use:

a: internal server at work
b: Bloglines
c: Daniel Davies at Crooked Timber
d: internal server at work
f: LugRadio Forums
g: Gmail
k: My site
s: The Straight Dope

Obviously each letter does bring up a list of URLs, but that’s just coincidence; the ones above I’ve actually learned, Pavlovianly, to use as shortcuts.

Where do your letters go?

Is anyone else getting lots of bounces of German spam recently? It’s very annoying. On the other hand, it’s easy to filter the bounces, because I don’t get much mail with the word “Auslaender” in it normally…

I seem to have been passed a musical baton. Very well!

Total volume of music files on my computer: 973MB.

The last CD I bought was: blimey, er, er. I don’t buy CD’s much. Maxinquaye, by Tricky, I think. About ten years ago. I’ve bought CDs as presents since then, but none for myself.

Oh! Wait a sec. I bought Jono’s CD, didn’t I? So: Caged by Seraphidian.

Song playing right now: nothing. I can’t work with music on; if I try then I listen to the music and don’t work.

Five songs I listen to a lot, or that mean a lot to me:

1. If I Can Dream – Elvis Presley
2. Take The Power Back – Rage Against The Machine
3. Hellhound On My Trail – Robert Johnson
4. Kim – Eminem
5. Roads – Portishead

Five people to whom I’m passing the baton:

1. Jono
2. MrBen
3. Tim
4. Richard Rutter
5. Tom

Have you ever drunk a bit too much and then done something you were embarrassed about later? Don’t lie, of course you have. Now you have the chance to expiate that sin at beershame.com by declaring your “beershame” for all to see. “It’s human behaviour taken to frighteningly embarrassing new lows. It’s the beershame.” You can submit anonymously, too; I’m feeling a massive urge to declare some of my own past shameful behaviour…

I run into this problem a lot. Imagine I’ve got a picture of, say, Sam and I at a party. I’d like to post that picture here. So, I’d have the picture and then, below it, a caption saying “This is Sam and I at the Beckham’s party“. But then what should I use as the alt text on the picture? Clearly the alt text should be “Sam and I at the Beckham’s party“, or perhaps even a longer description of the image. However, then the caption is redundant; if someone browses the page with images off then it will (correctly) display the alt text in place of the picture, leaving the page saying “This is Sam and I at the Beckham’s party. Sam and I at the Beckham’s party.”
Those of you saying: appropriate alt text for that image is therefore the empty string, since there already is a caption in the HTML; what should I do if i want the image to be a link to beckhams-party.com? If I make the alt text empty then the link is unusable in text-only browsers.
Perhaps I should, for example, make the alt text empty and wrap both the image and the caption in the link, thus covering both those bases. That only works if the caption is the thing immediately following the image, though. Semantic HTML people, what would you recommend?

The MySociety crew, who are responsible for excellent things like WriteToThem (which replaces FaxYourMP), have built PledgeBank. PledgeBank is a central clearing house for “pledges”—you say “I’ll write to the BBC and ask them to do things in ogg format as long as 30 other people will too“, and the site handles all the administration of collecting those thirty people. You still have to convince thirty people to do it, but at least you don’t have to try and track all their names and email them to remind them.

OpenWAP.org has a useful list of open source phone apps; there’s an RSS reader and a Google Maps viewer which I shall be trying out soon, in addition to the gmail client that I’ve already mentioned. Coolness. Phone becomes a mobile internet platform. Yay!

Anyone know how I can back up my K700i once I’ve got all this cool stuff installed on it?

Update: Oh my God, the Google Maps viewer is the coolest thing in the whole fucking world. I am not kidding. It does UK maps as well. Wow. Just, wow. I will never, ever be lost again. Wow. It’s brilliant. Download it and run it on your phone. Really.

Update 2: And an IRC client. Wow. My phone suddenly feels like a real platform.

This is—as Mark so adequately puts it—what he does. Dive Into GreaseMonkey is “a book about programming with Greasemonkey, a Firefox extension for customizing web pages“, and it covers things in Mark’s inimitable style. Read and enjoy.

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I’ve been wondering how best to get at my email when I’m elsewhere. I use gmail, and my phone’s poor-quality POP3 client doesn’t do authentication, meaning that I can’t download mail from gmail directly. I don’t want to run my own mailserver, either. Then I came across gmail-mobile which is a WAP front-end to GMail. These blokes score high points for genius. They have a running example of their WAP server at http://gmobile.hopto.org/ which works perfectly in my phone’s WAP browser. You can also download the code and run your own server if you don’t trust theirs to not remember your password or something. They get high points for this. Well done the gmail-mobile team!

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Steve Chipman over at SlayerOffice has released version 2.0 of his Mouseover DOM Inspector bookmarklet. The MODI, as he calls it, "allows you to view and manipulate the DOM of a web page simply by mousing around the document". Tools by web developers, for web develop ... [Stuart Langridge]

Syndicated from the SitePoint Stylish Scripting weblog

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The marketing machine for LugRadio Live is starting to march. It’s on The Inquirer and The Register and there should be something coming up in NTK at some point too. Get your tickets now!

I achieve an ambition, in a tiny way, and become a contributor to the Gnome desktop. Davyd Madeley emailed me to ask about some JavaScript stuff, now that Yelp, the Gnome help browser, is based on Gecko; I responded with a script, and it seems to be in CVS. Cool! My name is in a Gnome changelog! I am completely proud of this.

So, I’ve just got my results for an interesting online political survey, and you can read those results. I tend to be most like Green Party voters, which is interesting. More interesting is that it thinks that I am “slightly left-of-centre“, which differs from my self-characterisation of “fairly left-wing“. However, I think that it actually knows where the centre is, and I don’t; in every single point on this survey, a large majority of people were to the right of me. So much so, I think, that I believe that I’m defining “centre” as actually being a bit right-wing, because the British population as a whole isn’t normally distributed about the centrist position; they’re normally(ish) distributed about a right-of-centre position. This is why we have one a-bit-right-wing party in power, and the Tories have had to go even further right to distinguish themselves.
It’s reassuring to note that I consider myself left-wing and so does the site, so I’m not totally deluded. I shall be voting neither Labour nor Tory tomorrow.
Do your own survey (assuming that you read this before you vote tomorrow…)

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Since I am a pathetic follower of Planet Gnome people:

( get yours )

via Zaheer

No time to do proper writeups on any of the stuff I’ve got bookmarked, so one of the (all too frequent) linkdumps:

• Robert Love pimps the F-Spot photo manager. I still can’t decide whether I want a local photo manager and then publish my galleries to the web, or whether I want them just to be on the web in the first place. I’m having much the same problem with email: at the moment I’m using Gmail. Its UI falls down by comparison with Thunderbird, and there are some things that I’d like to do with mail that I can’t do with Gmail, but it’s such a faff having to fetch all your mail down and then read it by connecting to your home machine; means I need to open up SSH ports, run an IMAP server, all that crap. It’s a lot easier just to use it at Gmail. Not sure what to do about this. F-Spot seems to be the best photo manager around; of course, it being a Mono app doesn’t help, what with my unreasonable anti-Mono prejudice.
• Bryan Clark on consistency versus design. “Eat a McDonalds hamburger, then spend 4 days walking in the Sahara desert with no food come back and eat that same burger; it will be the best burger you’ve ever tasted in your life. Context is everything.”
• Glyph, the eccentric genius behind Twisted , has a neat little hack that pops up a Python window linked with Nautilus from a Nautilus window. This would be very useful when experimenting with nautilus-python, which is something that’s key to a fair few of the ideas on my projects list. I did play with it before, but it just segfaulted; that bug will have been fixed by now, but I haven’t had time to get back to it.
• Fundable.org looks pretty cool.
• Jeremy Keith with an excellent monograph on not using CSS for behaviour—no more :hover, because that’s behaviour and should be done in the behaviour layer. I’m all in favour of this.
• More Jeremy, with Adactio Elsewhere which aggregates all the bits of Jeremy across the web: photos at Flickr, wishlist at Amazon, links at del.icio.us. These web services with open APIs make it possible to construct a complete application for managing all your digital stuff without actually doing any work, hardly, yourself. This distributed nature of apps is really cool. I was a bit disappointed that Adactio Elsewhere just displays the various things and doesn’t integrate them into each other or into an overarching “digital Jeremy“, but I’m expecting that for version 2, assuming that I don’t write it first :-)
• Simon Willison points at an SEO presentation that is worth reading (beware PDF), from Andy King.
• Musings on the presidential, leader-focused nature of UK Election 2005 from Tom. He’s not wrong. I think El Tony is dying out to have the stature and personal recognition of W—in short, to be a president—and therefore the Tories are fighting the battle the same way. It’s a shame to see the Lib Dems going along with it, though, because they’ve got by far the most rational platform. Well, they have if you don’t like nanny-state authoritarianism and you don’t hate black people, anyway.
• Sdogi congratulates me on releasing stuff: This is actually very good time to mention Stuart Langridge, LugRadio presenter. Very nice job posting your works.. I really liked that. That’s what I do all this shit for, words like that. Gave me a nice warm feeling inside.
• Jono has been playing with Xgl. It’ll be cool. When it actually happens. Please let it happen; if I knew a way to make all this cool stuff happen quicker I’d do it. We really have a chance to steal a march on the Longhorn guys and achieve parity or better with the Mac in this area, and I’m worried that it’ll just stay as a compile-it-yourself-from-CVS project until Windows do it, and then suddenly it’ll be important. Of course, I’m not doing anything to help that, but that’s (partially, I admit) because I don’t know what I can do.
• LugRadio series 2 episode 15 will be out on Monday. It’s really good. :-)
• While we’re talking about LugRadio, LugRadio Live 2005 is pretty much sorted now, and it’s going to be superb. It really is. I’m very excited about it!

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To: Everyone on the entire internet

If you receive, in your email, a virus from [anything]@kryogenix.org, I didn’t send it. If you receive an email addressed to someone at your firm who no longer works there from [anything]@kryogenix.org, I didn’t send it. If you receive an email from [anything]@kryogenix.org and you feel the need to send an automated, computer-generated bounce message, then I didn’t send it.

Please stop sending me “informative” bounce messages.

Thank you.

A bloke has used, and liked my Tory poster generator. Unfortunately, despite the specific instruction to the contrary, he hasn’t saved his own copy of the image it generated; instead, he’s linked directly to the image that the Generator generates. That means that it’ll disappear in about half an hour, because the queue gets cleaned up (so that it doesn’t eat all the disc space on my server; his was the 53327th generated image). So I thought I’d post a comment to tell him to not do that, just like he was instructed. But I can’t post a comment on his weblog, since apparently I need to have a .NET Passport to do so. Fuck that. Why should I sign up to some massive overarching identity thing just so I can post comments? I haven’t got a TypeKey identity for exactly the same reason. So, that bloke’s image link is going to be bust. Sorry, that bloke, but you should have read the instructions.