From TMP news item, there’s a great new dino miniature coming from Dragonblood Miniatures. According to comments from the manufacturer, a version without the rider is planned.
Archive for June, 2005
This should raise a smile over at the Virtual Stoa —
Ex-Tory MP Tim Collins, always a prominent [Doctor] Who fan, perhaps spent too much time during the election campaign talking about the new show rather than about school discipline and controlled immigration (he lost his seat).
–Gareth Wigmore writing in TV Zone #191
Perhaps, or maybe the good voters of Westmorland & Lonsdale simply were no longer receptive to “school discipline and controlled immigration”…
And I’d like to know what Tim Collins CBE, ex-MP thinks of the political slant of the new Doctor Who. After all this is the man who described the Doctor as being “the Donald Rumsfeld of the cosmos, not the Robin Cook”.
Looking over the Technorati redesign as plugged by Eric Meyer (same old stuff – nice CSS but fixed width design, fixed font sizes in IE, breaks with only a couple of font size increases in FireFox, minor validation errors) I saw that the Tags page didn’t display properly in Opera 8.01.
The relative frequency of the tags are indicated via nested <em> elements with a CSS style font-size: 1.03em to produce the increased size.
But Opera screws up and rounds the font sizes down. I’ve written up a description of the bug and submitted a bug report to Opera.
Until Opera and/or Technorati do something about this issue there’s a quick fix that Opera users can apply. As Technorati includes id="technorati" on the <body> tag it’s relatively easy to add #technorati .heatmap em {font-size: 1.06em !important;}
to a user stylesheet and restore the tag coloud to its full glory. The exact size value needed will vary depending on your particular default and minimum font size values.
Moving away from the Opera bug we’re still left with the larger issue. What’s the best way to (a) mark-up and (b) indicate relative importance in various media.
As far as the mark-up goes HTML doesn’t offer us that many options and <em> is probably the best choice. Things are slightly confused by the presence of <strong> – how does strong emphasis relate to multiple levels of emphasis created via nested <em> elements?
By default browsers don’t change their output for nested <em>s so there’s no way short of viewing the source for the user to see the level of importance. For graphical media increasing the font size is one possibility but even when Opera’s shortcomings are ignored this might break down (consider mobile devices for example). In non-graphical media the font-size is meaningless.
Volume or pitch are options in aural media but don’t make for an easy listening experience (this sort of tag cloud is designed for visual skimming and doesn’t really work the same way when listened to linearly; but if a listener chooses to listen to it they should get the same information as the reader, via some means or other).
The best solution I can think of would be to add title attributes to each tag giving the relative level of importance. So a tag surrounded with four levels of <em>s would have title="Level Four" or something similar.
Whilst not ideal (and maybe tag clouds aren’t such a good idea) this does have the advantage that it brings together mark-up, styling and metadata (the <em> elements, the font-sizing and the titles) to reinforce the same message. The message. Ah, that’s the real problem. The relative popularity of the various tags is the message and the message should be in the data not in anything else. But that means turning the funky tag cloud into a boring table. 
… or another reason to hate Coldplay, as if one was needed.
Coldplay are playing a gig this evening. At Crystal Palace, on a Monday evening. Guess what the trains coming home from London Bridge were like today?
The current (2005:06:24, 08:20) headline on BBC News is “NHS bodies warned over finances”. You would think that there’s some style guide somewhere that advices against using “NHS” and “bodies” like that, ‘cos it can’t be just sick minded weirdos like me who read it and get entirely the wrong mental image.
Last night on the train home, two lads get on. Baseball caps and Sarf London accents, chav-meter goes ping. The carriage is crowded and they find seats in different rows. The one next to me continues the conversation they were having on the platform by shouting over his shoulder at his mate. Seems that my new neighbour is currently unlucky in love.
“If I chat up five women a day, in two months one of them’s got to ‘ave it.”
He treats us to a sample of his technique:
Him - “Do you know what I fancy?”
Victim - “What?”
Him - “You”
A few stations later they leave the train and the whole carriage can stop suppressing their giggles. As he steps out of one door a young women (low cut top, wonderbra, croydon facelift) steps in through the carriage’s other door and sits down opposite where he had been sitting. Fate is cruel sometimes.
Yes, the whole point of this post was to show that Wikipedia has an entry for “croydon facelift”. Love the See also: traction alopecia.
On University Challenge, Jeremy Paxman has just endorsed wikipedia. Good for him.
“Do they think we have nothing better to do until Christmas?” - pink_weasel
So very true.
11/10
Just watch it, don’t read bollocks like this on the interweb, just watch it. Doesn’t matter if it’s on BBC3 at 10:50 tonight or 7:00 tomorrow, or if you taped it, or of you borrow a tape off someone else, or even if you need to download it off the web, just watch it.
(And why does CBBC have this news but not the official DW site? Hang on, I’ve worked for the BBC, why am I even asking?)
Tonight was the screening of the final episode of series one at BAFTA. I wasn’t there The Internet is now rife with spoilers so Avoid the Internet.
In all the confusion (new job, planning wedding, flat hunting, being ill) it completely slipped under my radar that sometime over the last few months marked the point where I had been online for ten years.
I’d used the departmental network at university and pre-web systems like Prestel before then but in the spring of 1995 I went online in the sense that we mean today and started using e-mail, FTP, telnet, usenet, gopher (remember that?) and the WWW.
Ten years ago I’d never seen a web site, I’ve spent the last eight years creating web sites for a living.