Archive for the ‘WWW’ Category

2011 Books

Posted on January 1^st 2012 at 9:53am in Books, Memes, My Life.

Fewer graphic novels (especially superheroes) this year – almost certainly down to Croydon libraries being a lot poorer in that respect than Lambeth.

Available as a poll over on Live Journal (you don’t need an LJ account to vote, just an OpenID account which means an account from WordPress.com, Google, Yahoo, Blogger, etc.)

League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Century 1969

Graphic Novels

The Boys Volume 6: The Self-Preservation Society by Garth Ennis
The Boys Volume 7: The Innocents by Garth Ennis
The Boys Volume 8: Highland Laddie by Garth Ennis
The Boys Volume 9: The Big Ride by Garth Ennis
Dark Entries by Ian Rankin
John Constantine, Hellblazer: Pandemonium by Jamie Delano
John Constantine: Hellblazer: Bloody Carnations by Peter Milligan
Angel: After the Fall Volume 3 by Brian Lynch and Joss Whedon
Angel: After the Fall Volume 4 by Brian Lynch and Joss Whedon
Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season Eight Volume 8: Last Gleaming by Joss Whedon
League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Century 1969 by Alan Moore
Tom Strong Volume 1 by Alan Moore
Eternals by Neil Gaiman
Fables Volume 15: Rose Red by Bill Willingham

Elisabeth Sladen: The Autobiography

Doctor Who

Doctor Who: Dragon’s Claw by Steve Moore, Steve Parkhouse and Dave Gibbons
Doctor Who: The Eyeless by Lance Parkin
Doctor Who: The Indestructible Man by Simon Messingham
Doctor Who: Wolfsbane by Jacqueline Rayner
Elisabeth Sladen: The Autobiography by Elisabeth Sladen
Running Through Corridors: Rob and Toby’s Marathon Watch of Doctor Who (Volume 1: The 60s) by Robert Shearman and Toby Hadoke
Time, Unincorporated 3: The Doctor Who Fanzine Archives: (Vol. 3: Writings on the New Series) edited by Graeme Burk and Robert Smith?

The Windup Girl

Science Fiction and Fantasy

Never the Bride by Paul Magrs
Something Borrowed by Paul Magrs
Enter Wildthyme by Paul Magrs
I Shall Wear Midnight: A Story of Discworld by Terry Pratchett
Shades of Grey by Jasper Fforde
Transition by Iain Banks
Surface Detail by Iain Banks
The City and the City by China Mieville
Looking for Jake and Other Stories by China Mieville
The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi
Rivers of London by Ben Aaronovitch
Moon Over Soho by Ben Aaronovitch

Other Fiction

Flash for Freedom! by George MacDonald Fraser
Flashman and the Mountain of Light by George MacDonald Fraser
Flashman and the Redskins by George MacDonald Fraser
Flashman at the Charge by George MacDonald Fraser
Flashman in the Great Game by George MacDonald Fraser
The Fort by Bernard Cornwell
The Kingdom of Light by Giulio Leoni

Non-Fiction

God Collar by Marcus Brigstocke
Map Addict: A Tale of Obsession, Fudge & the Ordnance Survey by Mike Parker
Millennium: The End of the World and the Forging of Christendom by Tom Holland
Robin Ince’s Bad Book Club: One Man’s Quest to Uncover the Books That Taste Forgot by Robin Ince
Seven Million Years: The Story of Human Evolution by Douglas Palmer
The Story of English: How the English Language Conquered the World by Philip Gooden

Very Stale Things

Posted on December 21^st 2011 at 5:28pm in Blogs, My Life.

Before this one I’ve only made thirteen “real” blog posts this year. Twitter, Facebook and work have eaten up my time and creativity. But maybe I need to spring clean this place first – always easier to work in a pleasant environment. (Or maybe that idea’s just classic procrastination…)

Remove the Sociable plugin – every upgrade breaks my layout. Done
As a replacement for the above add Twitter, Facebook and Google+ buttons directly in the theme template.
Exclude the Weekly Twitter posts from the front page – having a backup of my tweets is a good thing, displaying them on the homepage of this blog isn’t.
Rethink syndication – how exactly do I want to share posts with Live Journal, Facebook, Google+, etc.?
A new design?
Most importantly – more content

But not as you know it

Posted on May 23^rd 2011 at 1:03pm in Blogs, Books, My Life, Work.

'Out of this World' at the British Library

Last Thursday evening I attended the launch of the Out of this World science fiction exhibition at the British Library. I’ve blogged about the exhibition for work.

The launch night was fun in a peculiarly geeky way as I got to play spot the author/critic/BNF. Some people (Kim Newman to give the obvious example) are easy to spot but far too many fall into the general category of middle aged men with greying beards. In fact I could easily have been looking at the crowd at Salute or @media instead.

At the same time that I was listening to China Miéville give a speech to open the show, Lettice was at a different exhibition launch with Cilla Black and Ringo Star. There’s probably something profound in that contrast but I’m really not sure what.

Tags: british library, London, science fiction

KiloPost + 1

Posted on April 11^th 2011 at 4:42pm in Blogs, My Life.

Sunday’s automatic weekly twitter round up was the 1000th Very True Thing.

Well done me.

HTML5, or is it?

Posted on February 7^th 2011 at 3:56pm in WWW.

I’m late to the party as usual, but here’s my summary and opinions of the recent fuss over what is and isn’t HTML5.

HTML5 means two things:

A standard published by the W3C
A label (analogous to DHTML or Web 2.0) for a group of new web technologies, including the standard referred to above but also CSS3, SVG and other technologies.

So that’s one precise, technical meaning, and one vague, fuzzy meaning. If you’re talking to developers, web designers, browser manufacturers or CTOs you use the first meaning; if you’re talking to marketing types or CEOs you use the second. If you’re talking to a mixed audience you need to clarify what you mean. It’s not ideal but it’s not the end of the world.

The W3C produced a new logo as part of their effort to promote HTML5. This was marketing activity and the usage seemed to be close to the second meaning above. However, this is the W3C and their core audience is technical and hence expected the first meaning. Some fuss and a few edits to the FAQs later and the situation was clarified.

Meanwhile the WHATWG have decided that from now on they are working on the living standard of HTML and that version numbers are passé.

This actually makes a lot of sense. Browsers don’t implement versions of HTML, they implement a hodge podge of features that appeal to them. Most web sites are thus created based on what works on browsers. When we say that we’re building a site in XHTML 1 and CSS 2.1 we mean the subset of those features that are both useful for the site in question and supported by IE7, etc.

But developing (a site, an API or a browser) to a moving target is difficult and troublesome. Having a standardised version of the spec is useful, it means that my example site using that subset of XHTML 1 can be checked against that standard today, tomorrow and five years from now.

The good news is that there’s no longer two HTML5 standards to cause confusion. Now there’s HTML at WHATWG – an iterative, ever evolving specification that acts as an ideas generator and prototype for the future of the web, and there’s also HTML5 (and maybe one day 6, 7, etc.) at the W3C – a slice of the living standard, reviewed, refined and eventually set in stone as a standard.

I’ve been using parts of HTML5 for over a year now – I’m using a fairly safe subset of features (and <hgroup> which some people seem to have a problem with and want to remove or change) and can refer to the W3C spec for details whilst keeping one eye on the WHATWG for future developments. This seems like a sane approach for most front end developers – there’s a lot of exciting changes coming out and only a few people will have the time and resources to keep on top of all of them.

Still, we’ve got a logo now.

Tags: html, html5, w3c, whatwg

2010 Books

Posted on December 30^th 2010 at 2:36pm in Books, Memes, My Life.

Last year I said “I think 2010 may be slightly less weighted towards graphic novels”. Whoops.

How many of my 2010 books have you read?

Available as a poll over on Live Journal (you don’t need an LJ account to vote, just an OpenID account which means an account from WordPress.com, Google, Yahoo, Blogger, etc.)

Read the rest of this very true thing…

Tags: 2010, comics

Must Try Harder

Posted on December 9^th 2010 at 4:58pm in Blogs, My Life.

I have been a bad blogger. My mojo has deserted me. Posts have become rarer than Wales rugby wins.

There are dinosaurs to talk about. Adventures with HTML5 and microformats/microdata to discuss. A Doctor Who Christmas special to look forward to.

I will do better.

Very True Mood: (sad)

sad

All your comments belong to ????

Posted on September 1^st 2010 at 10:25pm in Blogs.

Latest storm in a teacup over at LiveJournal is worth a few notes.

Much of the functionality in the latest release is good or at least inoffensive (pingbacks, cross-post posts to Twitter and Facebook, add Facebook Connect alongside OpenID for non-LJ users to log in and post comments). But one item, the ability to cross-post comments to Facebook and Twitter has caused a bit of a fuss (understatement, this is LiveJournal so toys have been ejected from perambulators with great vigour).

It seems like a dumb idea, badly implemented.

Context
Why cross-post a comment out of context from the post it is commenting on (and indeed out of context of an any comments it may be in reply to, LJ having a decent threading system for comments unlike some other blogging systems)? It seems pointless.
Privacy
The fact that the choice to cross-post is entirely at the hands of the commenter and ignores the privacy settings of the original post has caused the biggest fuss and rightly so. If someone posts a friends only post to their blog, then should their friends be able to share their (out of context) comments on that post with everyone on Twitter or Facebook? Well, at least you’ll find out who your real friends aren’t…
Poor User Interface
The positioning of the checkboxes for cross-posting between the comments field and the comments submit button is likely to lead to accidents. And considering the context and privacy issues such accidents will be at best nonsensical and at worst deeply intrusive.

I would never have gotten beyond the context issue if someone had brought this up in a brain storm with me. The sheer pointlessness of this function means it should never have been developed, and now that people have expressed almost entirely unfavourable opinions because of the privacy and UI issues, should mean that it gets removed rather than “fixed”.

I hope that the cross-posting of comments, and only the cross-posting of comments, is removed soon, as it threatens to overshadow the other features in this release which offer useful functionality that can enrich the LiveJournal experience for users who use it as a general blogging platform rather than a private, anonymous, slash-fiction, walled garden.

BTW, this post was created in the WordPress blog on my personal site; cross-posted to LiveJournal; syndicated via RSS; a notification tweeted; and Facebook notes will pick it up from the RSS in a couple of days. Your comments and replies will only appear in the place they were made however, unless you use (on purpose or by accident) this misguided feature on the LiveJournal version of this site.

Very True Mood:

contemplative

Tags: facebook, livejournal, privacy, social networking, syndication, twitter, usabilty

Top 5, First Letter, Music Meme, in the key of W

Posted on June 17^th 2010 at 10:55pm in Memes, Music.

Reply to this post and I’ll assign you a letter.
List (and upload, if you feel like it) five songs that start with that letter.
Post them to your journal with these instructions.

ggreig gave me the letter “W”, well he gave me “Z” first but with only eight Z-tracks in my iTunes that would have been somewhat limited so we mutually agreed to go with the second choice.