Was that the most expensive piece of fanwank ever?

Very True Mood: surprised

Via a few people but most immediately uninvitedcat.

The Big Read reckons that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books they’ve printed.

1. Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2. Italicize those you intend to read.
3. Underline the books you LOVE.
4. Strike out the books you have no intention of ever reading, or were forced to read at school and hated.
5. Reprint this list in your own blog so we can try and track down these people who’ve read 6 and force books upon them

1. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2. The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4. The Harry Potter Series - JK Rowling
5. To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6. The Bible
7. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8. Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9. His Dark Materials - Philip Pullmam
10. Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11. Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12. Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13. Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14. Complete Works of Shakespeare
15. Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16. The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17. Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18. Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19. The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20. Middlemarch - George Eliot
21. Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22. The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23. Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24. War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25. The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26. Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27. Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky (I’ve read about a third, but a long time ago so I really should start again)
28. Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29. Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30. The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31. Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32. David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33. Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis (I’m sure I’ve read some other than TLTWATW but I’m not sure how many)
34. Emma - Jane Austen
35. Persuasion - Jane Austen
36. The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis (Why is this separate to 33?)
37. The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39. Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40. Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41. Animal Farm - George Orwell
42. The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43. One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44. A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45. The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46. Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47. Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48. The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49. Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50. Atonement - Ian McEwan
51. Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52. Dune - Frank Herbert
53. Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54. Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55. A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56. The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57. A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58. Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60. Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61. Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62. Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63. The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64. The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65. Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66. On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67. Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68. Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69. Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70. Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71. Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72. Dracula - Bram Stoker
73. The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74. Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75. Ulysses - James Joyce
76. The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77. Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78. Germinal - Emile Zola
79. Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80. Possession - AS Byatt
81. A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82. Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83. The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84. The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85. Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86. A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87. Charlotte’s Web - EB White
88. The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90. The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91. Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92. The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93. The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94. Watership Down - Richard Adams
95. A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96. A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97. The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98. Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100. Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

ObHTML: I managed to resist the temptation to add <cite> tags to every title. If I had an editor open with better RegEx support…

Very True Mood: thoughtful

On the dino pages I’ve updated the lists to include the latest releases from Fenryll, some very old Metal Magic caveman now available via Mega Minis and a general update of the Jeff Valent listings.

As promised only two and half months ago I’ve now upgraded the blog to use the standard WordPress sidebar syntax which makes it much more widget-friendly. I’ve also converted what little JavaScript I was using to use jQuery as part of my ongoing learning process.

I’ve added a few new plugins to the mix: Sociable, Better Blogroll and MyTwitter.

I’ve been meaning to learn how to use a JavaScript library for some time. I first learnt JavaScript when it originally appeared in Netscape 2 and wasn’t working with it much in the years when it was knocked into shape by some proper programmers, so a library seemed to be the best short cut to more modern coding styles.

Looking at the various libraries I ranked them in order of attractiveness as jQuery > YUI > Prototype > Dojo. This was based on a first glance at file size, amount of documentation and supported features. That was over a year ago.

With jQuery in the lead it would be surprising of John Resig’s talk at @media would do much to change it my mind. But I decided to put his advice into practice and download a library and try it out. Twenty minutes after downloading jQuery I was starting to update a copy of the code used on VisitLondon.com

From this (not the greatest piece of JavaScript in the world - it was written by multiple authors in a bit of a rush - but not the worst either):

function topmenuClear() {
 var navRoot = document.getElementById("topmenu");
 for (var i=0; i<navRoot.childNodes.length; i++) {
  var node = navRoot.childNodes[i];
   if (node.nodeName=="LI") {
    node.className=node.className.replace("over", "");
    node.childNodes[0].className="";
   }
 }
}
function topmenuHover() {
 if(document.getElementById("topmenu")) {
  var navRoot = document.getElementById("topmenu");
  for (var i=0; i<navRoot.childNodes.length; i++) {
   var node = navRoot.childNodes[i];
   if (node.nodeName=="LI") {
    node.onmouseover=function() {
     clearTimeout(navTimer); topmenuClear();
     this.className+=" over";
     this.childNodes[0].className="over";
    };
    node.onmouseout=function() {
     navTimer = setTimeout(topmenuClear,2000);
    };
   }
  }
 }
}
function showlang() {
 if(document.getElementById('lang-list').style.display == "none") {
  document.getElementById('lang-list').style.display = "block";
 } else if (document.getElementById('lang-list').style.display == "block") {
  document.getElementById('lang-list').style.display = "none";
 }
}

To this:

function topmenuClear() {
 $("#topmenu > li").removeClass("over");
 $("#topmenu > li > *").removeClass("over");
}
function topmenuHover() {
 $("#topmenu > li").mouseover(function(){
  clearTimeout(navTimer); topmenuClear();
  $(this).addClass("over");
  $(this).find(":first").addClass("over");
 });
 $("#topmenu > li").mouseout(function(){
  navTimer = setTimeout(topmenuClear,2000);
 });
}
function showlang() {
 $("#lang-list").toggle();
}

Okay, so that’s probably the easiest part of our code to modify as it’s doing a very basic task - toggling visibility and adding event handlers - but it makes a dramatic difference to the complexity of the code. I’ve still got a lot of work and testing to do but I’d like to reach the point where the only JavaScript coding I have to do is implementing our functionality rather than reimplementing common functions.

Very True Mood: chipper

Better late than never, what did I make of @media last week?

• Number of talks that included LOL Cats: 1½
• Number of talks that included Rick Rolling: 2
• Number of talks that included comedy graphs: 2
• Number of talks that included mention of Twitter being down all the time: I lost count, but at least 4

There are a few technical subjects (HTML 5, WAI ARIA, jQuery) that I hope to post more about later so here are a few impressions of each session:

Jeffrey Veen included some of my favourite charts in his talk (I have favourite charts/graphs/maps - what do you mean that you don’t?). Indi Young made me think that every single project I’d ever worked on had been poorly planned. Drew McLellan says “everyone hates their CMS” and he’s right. According to Stuart Langridge the fact that we use 410 responses on VisitLondon.com puts us in a very elite group. Nate Koechley explained why what I do is really very important. Richard Ishida baffled the audience with Unicode.

Good fun all round, roll on 2009.

I have a four year old Acer Aspire 1680 which yesterday refused to boot, complaining about a missing hal.dll file.

This laptop came with a system recovery disk but not a Win XP install disk.

The laptop didn’t see the system recovery disk as bootable. So no chance of repairing or reinstalling it from that.

I stuck in the Win XP disk from my desktop and went into Repair mode. This couldn’t detect any installations of Windows on the laptop. So no chance of repairing it that way either.

I installed Windows from the desktop’s disk and then stuck the laptop’s system disk in to install drivers, etc. This worked and I now have a working Windows system; but, of course, I can’t activate it as the laptop’s product code doesn’t match the desktop’s install disk. And there’s no wireless at all despite isntalling the correct drivers, and no LAN either - it always says the cable is unplugged.

Any ideas of where to go from here?

Install linux instead? How much pain will it be to find wireless drivers that work?

[Update] - Got the wireless working, and the LAN works sometimes, but the DVD drive has packed up. How useful will it be to phone MS and explain that I have two legitimate copies of XP but only one working install disk?

Very True Mood: frustrated

1 pack of Star Wars Force Unleashed collectible miniatures from Forbidden Planet, @ £14.99

2 issues of Wargamesd Illustrated, @ £4.00 each

1 issue of Wargames Soldiers and Strategy, @ £3.95

Brontosaurus Rex RPG from eBay, @ £9.99 lost in post, money refunded by seller

Total: £26.94