I’ve upgraded to the latest version of WordPress and started updating the theme (it was so old it pre-dated widgets and so kludged together that it has three different ways of producing the same rendering). Things may be a little rough around the edges for a while.
I’ve also defined the first post on the homepage (actually, come to think of it, on any page) as an IE8-ready Web Slice - I’m not sure that this is really a good idea and I have some misgivings about Web Slices in general.
This blog now has a theme tune courtesy of Brother Typewriter of the Burning Lodge.
Very True Things is a tribute to my friend Steve’s blog of the same name. The idea was to have a 16-note sequence running throughout the whole song and then play different stuff against that - which sort of worked, I think. Actually it was more to do with the fact that I couldn’t be bothered to write any more complex sequence in Moog Modular V. I am VLT - Very Lazy Thing.)
Thank you Howie, I think…
The past couple of columns extolling the virtues of Firefox were enough to tell that he was ‘one of us’, but this week Stephen Fry is blogging about the W3C and WHATWG. In fact, this makes a lot of sense, if the W3C’s efforts were to be compared to a gameshow then one, like Mr Fry’s QI, where the contestants regularly end up with a negative points total would be an appropriate analogy.
Recently: Opera takes Microsoft to court, which leads to calls for the CSS Working Group to be disbanded, which is, unsurprisingly, shrugged off by the working group itself, and then Microsoft announces that IE8 passes Acid2.
And as you’d expect there’s been a lot of froth and nonsense across the interested blogs.
My thoughts are that progress is being made, both by people like the the IE team (the current versions of Opera and Safari already pass Acid2 and Firefox 3 will pass it as well) and by the W3C which has made some good efforts this year to be more open and transparent.
It’s good to question the way things are, and Andy Clarke’s post about the working group has certainly made people take a good look at the status quo. But I feel that his proposed alternative would take us back to the time where the W3C created specifications that bore no relation at all to what the browsers were actually doing or planning to do.
As far as Opera and Microsoft goes, this is more about commerical advantage and business models than it is about web standards per se. Opera’s current business model aligns itself with web standards. Microsoft’s business model is so large and complex that it can be both for and against web standards and as the Acid2 result shows the team building IE8 are for them. I think the lawsuit is a sideshow and shouldn’t be allowed to dominate the standards discussion.
For many of us the shenanigans of the CSS working group hold a strange fascination, but I think that Mr Fry is right to point out that it’s in the areas of video and audio that the next big battle will be fought. As such Microsoft aren’t the main bad guys, Apple and Adobe probably are. Going back to business models, these companies are both secretive and fond of closed proprietary solutions. I’m not saying that either of them are evil through and through, but I’d love to see a lot more openness and cooperation from them in 2008.
Anyway, Stephen Fry is blogging about W3C working groups and open source video formats. He’s so one of us.
rushedSo I’ve managed to have two weeks off work and not make a single blog post. Okay I was out of the country and off the www for three days but still, it’s shocking.
Have I turned into one of those bloggers who only posts to talk about how they’re not posting? Oh dear.
The world cup starts today. Wales don’t really stand a chance. Fingers crossed that they don’t fuck up the group matches and finish second behind Australia. Then it’s England or more likely South Africa and that’s probably that.
I’m not sure about the new White Stripes album.
I fixed the broken shower. This makes me feel all manly and capable and productive. 
Amsterdam has a ridiculous number of shoe shops - be aware of this fact if you plan to take your wife or girlfriend there. Also, as everyone speaks English there are a number of English language bookshops and even the Dutch ones have English sections, and apart from Waterstones (which presumably is supplied and priced like a UK branch) the prices are good.
Speaking of books, I attended the launch for Stuffed and Starved by my old university mate Raj.
A war between an authoritarian government and a set of independent planets. The central government wins. Our heroes were amongst the fighters on the independent side. Meanwhile a remote planet is devastated by a chemical that causes the population to become wildly violent. Not actually a summary of the background to Serenity but actually the background to the old roleplaying game Living Steel that I picked up from eBay recently.
Oh, I’m flogging some stuff on eBay. Only Star Wars miniatures at the moment but I hope to list a few books and vids plus some other miniatures over the weekend.
pensive
Another day, yet another social networking site. So, I signed up to Friendster and what do I think?
Design is a bit plain and corporate looking, even a bit old fashioned. There are some limited skinning possibilities, including the ability to write your own CSS - I cut and pasted in the standard Very True Things CSS and it worked reasonably well. If I wanted to I could probably make the page look fairly decent with a little effort.
Signing up was straight forward. The profile is composed of preset fields (once more I did a quick cut and paste directly from Facebook, which I cut and pasted more or less directly from LiveJournal and so on…) and like LiveJournal and MySpace some of them allow you to enter HTML code for extra formatting. University and school details were easy to fill out.
Once again there’s nowhere on my profile where I can enter the URL of my web site, and also it lacks the ability to import my blog RSS feed so that I can update my main blog and have the posts appear automatically. Like Bebo yesterday this lack of interoperability is going to be a major downside for established web users.
Friendster charge for blogs although an ad-supported standard also exists. Setting up a blog was easy and the system supports trackbacks (which puts it ahead of LiveJournal for starters) but the post didn’t show up on my profile page straight away.
None of my friends seemed to already be members already.
Overall, competent but unexciting.
calmI’ve just taken a look at my posting rate, and being a science nerd I ploted it out on a graph.
So what does that mean? Well, clearly my posting rate has been in decline for the past year and working huge amounts of overtime can only be partly responsible (seeing as I’ve never had a problem taking ten minutes to write a post in a break at work). Partly it’s because some of the subjects I posted about before simply aren’t generating an news storues to comment on anymore, and partly because I’m no longer making any regular thematic posts (e.g. the Counting the Cost of War(games) series.
The spikes in the spring of each year are down to the Six Nations/Doctor Who double bill that always gives me some reason to post.
Another day, another social networking site. So, I signed up to Bebo and what do I think?
In looks it’s a classic Web 2.0 site - big chunky navigation, rounded corners, bold colours combined with subtle fades, lots of white space.
Signing up was easy. The profile had just about the right mix between preset fields and flexible fields that you can customise as you like (or cut and paste directly from Facebook, which I cut and pasted more or less directly from LiveJournal and so on…)
But there seems to be a walled garden approach. There’s nowhere on my profile where I can enter the URL of my web site and it lacks the one feature that really sold Facebook to me - the ability to import my blog RSS feed so that I can update my main blog and have the posts appear automatically on my Facebook profile.
There are also far fewer of my friends already signed up than on Facebook, MySpace, Last.FM, LinkedIn or LiveJournal. And no “Also on…” feature that lets me list my membership of all these other network memberships.
Sorry, but my online presence is widespread and diffuse and any site that doesn’t join the party is going to get left out.
So, okay design, good usability, but poor networking. Probably not something I’ll be coming back to regularly.
curiousSeeing as it’s his birthday, it seems like a perfect opportunity to plug my brother’s blog - where he writes about film reviews, scottish politics and his travels in roughly that order.
So there’s this news story that everyone’s blogging about and I’m not. I’m not even commenting on it on other people’s blogs. I was writing a comment to make a minor factual point about a background issue when I realised that it would either be the most boring comment ever or seem to be a comment on the main issue. So I gave up and wrote this instead.
contemplativeVery sad to have the news that Chris Lightfoot has died pop up in an RSS feed this morning. Like many others I never met Chris but always enjoyed reading his blog for his analysis and wit.