May 2004

20 May 2004
A dog's life

16:00 Live for the moment. Live like a dog.

20 May 2004
Immoral majority

14:32 Notwithstanding the matter of abuse, if children were born with the same responsibilities and social skills as adults, then maybe legislation would be the answer. In the meantime, I'd like to see how these hippies do discipline their children.

20 May 2004
Exploitative

14:20 Safari has a problem. Actually, it's not Safari, as such: it's the way 'Help' implements scripts. Over on ucsm, Martin says Click on this link and be prepared to be a little shocked by what happens to your Mac: http://bronosky.com/pub/AppleScript.htm. And then find this AppleScript on your Mac:/Library/Documentation/Help/MacHelp.help/Contents/Resources/English.lproj /shrd/OpnApp.scpt And replace the contents with the one that you'll find here: http://users.adelphia.net/~lively/fixbug.dmg Which will give you the chance to cancel a script that is launched via a URL.

Elliott uses a fix that doesn't break protocol mapping, Change /System/Library/CoreServices/Help Viewer.app/Contents/Info.plist Down near the bottom is an entry for using applescript. Make it false. The downside is that "Open mumble for me" in help does not work.

13 May 2004
Tamper tentrum

11:59 John is pondering toddler tantrums. Well, let me tell you, we've had our fair share, but Sophie (now 4.5) is turning into a good natured little sweetie now and is a lot better than she used to be - part of it is we know how to divert her now, too. We can see the problems coming and can often sort it out before the screaming stage, and she's finding fewer things to have tantrums about, which is part of growing up, I guess.

Still, 'A Fresh Approach' does have interesting implications, even if a wife and mother of my acquaintance did comment on it, Bit too much tree-hugging liberal crap trap but I think I see what they're getting at.

13 May 2004
Buck Rogers

11:56 Starbucks coffee is crap anyway. Oxfam has to do better.

11 May 2004
Dickheads united

16:18 It gets worse.

 </td></tr></table> 

It's the half-arsed XHTML/CSS table layout monster small-b bastard website from hell.

11 May 2004
Dickheads united

16:18 It gets worse.

 </td></tr></table> 

11 May 2004
Humbug

15:52 I'm sat at home trying to write a paper. I check PubMed for some information I need. I follow a link to the paper. I can't get full text access because I don't have a subscription. I do have a SSH session to the ork box running, so I fire up lynx. And I see

The browser you are using to view this site does not support basic internet standards.

Upgrading to a newer or different browser (such as the latest versions of Netscape, Internet Explorer for Windows or Macintosh, or Opera) will improve your browsing experience on Wiley InterScience.com. However, it is not imperative that you upgrade immediately. This site will continue to function satisfactorily in your current browser, although the visual design may be sub-par.

Now, while they are to be applauded for moving to CSS/(X)HTML, they blow it all with that first line. What mucking forons. There is a world of difference between 'not supporting basic standards' and not supporting CSS. Part of the point of CSS is that a properly behaved browser should be able to render the content without reference to the visual design of the site. Internet Explorer does not support 'basic internet standards'. Lynx does. Which is why I can see that warning and actually get the PDF I'm after. It doesn't show me all the corporate wank that I'm not interested in, and it laughs in the face of your javascript. Ha ha ha ha.

Except of course I can't get the PDF. Because Wiley are wankers. I swear at their javascript. Thank goodness for X tunnelling over SSH, eh?

11 May 2004
Call me

14:19 If I were a serious web dezyner I'd be seriously tempted to have a look at PhoneAnything. It's a voice portal for the interweb. Government departments are using it already. Web access for the non-computer able. Serious (and not unwelcome!) implications for disabled folk, too.

11 May 2004
iCal

13:50 Those clever people at Mozilla are creating a calendar application based on Apple's open iCal file format. W00ty.

11 May 2004
Heath Robinson #2

13:48 The Frankencraft has its own page now.

07 May 2004
. . . and the living is easy

09:07 Let's hope the weather stays fine and sunny, with a gentle breeze. I haven't yet had chance to take Coventina on her maiden voyage.

07 May 2004
Heath Robinson

09:02 One of - if not the only - good things about being depressed is the motivation to get stuck into a project. I'm building a model hovercraft, and keeping a (somewhat half-hearted) log of progress. Rob has threatened to come and help me with it, which would probably be a Good Thing, for both of us.

Oh, and listening to the 'O Brother, Where Art Thou?' soundtrack helps, too.

07 May 2004
Brood X

08:47 I guess you've heard of the '17 year cicadas' by now; a plague of Biblical proportions that is set to devastate the Mid-Sest US Real Soon Now, again. It's a regular thing, cometary in its predictability.

The event itself is not so interesting as the evolution of a somewhat bizarre predator-prey relationship that is being observed. Briefly, some of the 17 year brood hatched four years early, in what appears to be an attempt (but we mustn't talk like that - evolution is blind, natch) to avoid the cicada's only major predator, actually a parasitical fungus. It'll be interesting to see what happens nine, 13 and 17 years from now.

01 May 2004
Cuius testiculos habes, habeas cardia et cerebellum

22:05 Nature. What a magazine^Wjournal. Sometimes I quite enjoy the 'arty' bits they have - especially Martin Kemp's bit. When art meets science can be productive, entertaining, thought provoking and a general, all round, Good Thing. But when it's done badly, it's twee, embarrassing, and soul-less.

It stinks.

Which is why I'm riled enough to mention this week's little treasure.

If you don't have a subscription, I'll reproduce the text of the object of my ire here:
The Final Straw
Corn, like the tide coming in. Year on year,
fat, flowing grain, as it had always grown.
We harvested clockwise, spiralling home
over undulations of common land
till nothing remained but a hub of stalks
where the spirit of life was said to lurk.

So childless couples were offered the scythe -
the men invited to pocket the seed,
the women to plait dolls from the last sheaf.

But a Spix's macaw flapped from the blade,
that singular bird of the new world, one
of a kind. A rare sight. And a sign, being
tail-feathers tapering out of view, being

blueness lost in the sun, being gone.

All right, so it didn't help that there's a review of a novel by the only author whose work I could not put down (I had to throw it at the wall with great force), and a Kraftwerk concert report (which is surely taking the piss) in the space of the same 3 pages, and the reviewer has already explained what the sodding thing is about, but come on. I was writing better poetry than that at school.

Look - it's prose, not poetry. There is no rhyme, no metre. There are, what, four stanzas? Who can tell? There are gratuitous line breaks in the the middle of a sense, that 'lurk' at the end of the first 'stanza' is obscene, and the '... one/ ... being/ ... being/' endings vulgar in their obviousness. It sacrifices all poetry to make a political point. It does not touch or move me (well, it does, because I'm writing this. But I am not moved by the message, rather by the messenger). And, saving the worst till last, the whole thing breaks the first law of poetry (and of any decent prose, come to that) and tells; it shows not.

There is, in the article, a favourable comparison with Ted Hughes. This is an affront to the late Laureate's memory; Hughes was a man who could grab the reader's attention and hold it, and terrify you with garden birds.

A well respected blog

01 May 2004
OXfoooord!

21:55 While checking out the googleome for 'uxorious' - a lovely word, that I stumbled across while looking for something else in my 'Concise' Oxford Dictionary (dead tree, not online. Wow) - I saw Ask Oxford. This is a must have for logophiles like myself.