A Donkey on the Edge

I thought this application worked so well, I modified it to regenerate four other diary-style web sites. Oops. Oh well, these things always go a little wrong at first ;-)

Please hang in there, the system should be running smoothly soon

(honest).

I wish I had more time to share my thoughts on the current crop of CSS issues. This from Owen Briggs’ excellent website www.thenoodleincident.com (reprinted here without permission)

“This isn’t news to anyone. But the web isn’t screen either. Or more accurately it is print, and screen, and voice, and many other things.

Right now it’s December 2001 and chances are you’re reading this on a PC or a Mac, so you think you’re building pages for PC or Mac. Well, just stop. That’s going to confuse the heck out of you as you build with CSS.

The idea of the web is to digitalize your message for a variety of retrieval methods — for methods we have now, and for methods that we haven’t thought of yet.”

Well told ;-)

My most recent attempts at table-free pages culminated late last year with the re-launch of Pumpernickle’s corporate site. Two bizarre issues (or new to me anyway) with that site, I had to manually assign properties to children that should have inherited them automatically and the inconsistencies of type ‘zooming’ - it seems to be working (try upping and downing your type size) but I haven’t been able to describe the behavior in a repeatable way?

Bless his cotton socks - he is Donimo and if you haven’t been there already, you’ll find his impressive source of CSS_politik at:

http://www.webnouveau.net/

As they say in that little red book, “vaux le détour”

Before they changed its name to “Flash” (I really need to take a look at use of case on this site). I’ve followed the development of flash from it infancy and have been endlessly impressed by its capabilities. When futuresplash came out we had only just discovered how to assemble a multipart gif by leaving out the spaces in table - heady times - so when I first saw a demo by a uk developer I was hooked. There I was wishing there was some way to control the leading of web-page type and here comes this demo with a silver spaceship that crosses the whole screen - it was magic.

I’ve spent a considerable part of my waking hours since we all started building this beautiful mess trying to limit the number of layers between user and content - client and server. If reality is the information out there, then the pages describing it might be seen as some sort of meta layer. We interact with this layer to interact with the creators of (or perhaps with the info itself) all that lovely information.

So I guess I haven’t worked out any specific answers, but it seems to me increasingly crazy to add processes that live in the browser to the interactive experience. Or in other words, why add a window in a window? I’d like to think that most truly interactive experience could use whatever a devices main ‘window’ is.

Maybe I should put this another way… I like video and sound. I like what I can do with Java, I’m not saying we should stop adding these enhancements to our design. I guess my question is more to do with the amount of effort involved in squeezing more out of the existing object model. How can we move our clients towards truly intelligent universal pages that are beautiful fast and rich?

Just to finished this disjointed ramble on a positive note, the upside of all this effort is that our work should blossom with variety, the joy of discovery, the learning that comes from play. Flash has lured designers into a world where everyone uses the same effect, the same transition - no variety, no freedom, no learning (ok, I’m exaggerating). As object-model manipulators, we should fear this conformity and be pushing for something a little different.

Hi Mom,

I wonder if we shoulda spent more time with Mary. I grew up thinking of her as hopelessly square and Dad quite the opposite, but as I grow older, Mary seems more eccentric than square ;-) ahhh well.

I’ve started a blog (a web log) which is just a random set of ramblings and a platform for me to experiment with internet technologies in a client-free environment.

I occurred to me you might like to have one too? It is very simple and a great way to record your thoughts for your grandchildren (seeing as we’ve another one on the way.) All you do is send a message to the blog email address and your message is posted (this letter is being posted - see the cc field above).

Let me know if you’d like to have a go - I’ve caught the bug and am now rambling aimlessly into the ether ;-)

Re baby, we went to visit our friend Sophia in Oxford on Sunday. She’s a month more pregnant than Nicki - quite a sight when you put them tummy-to-tummy. I mention Sophia, because she is one of a growing list of friends who have shared horror stories about their pregnancy going wrong with us.

With just about everything else going wrong around me, my Nicki is having a perfectly normal pregnancy - I guess you get to our age and you just focus on all the things that could go wrong and you forget that normal, healthy babies are the norm, not the exception…

So fingers crossed, it looks like we’ve a healthy kid on the way.

All the best, Dug

But am sleepy, so sleepy… Why is it any time I try and write a review I get sleepy and crash? Darn!

There’s a great article by Peter K. Sheerin on alistapart for those out there who care about both web and typographic standards. Well worth taking a look at, but watch out for some sub-editorial quirks (remember the twenty percent language gap between ourselves and our American brethren) before you quote the article as gospel.

Hyphens are not dashes.

Stop! Go back and re-read the subhead above—at least 2–3 times then let it sink in before continuing.

The sentence above illustrates the proper use of the hyphen and the two main types of dashes. They are not the same, and must not be confused with each other. In some fancy fonts the difference is more than just the width—hyphens have a distinct serif. If you don’t know the rules already, let’s review them. First, though, a definition:

An “em” is a unit of measurement defined as the point size of the font. 12 point type uses a 12 point “em.” An “en” is one-half of an “em.”

Though some of the finer points in the rules are complex, their basic applications are clear-cut and their misuse easily identifiable. First, neither an em dash nor an en dash should be confused with the hyphen (-), which is used to join compound words together. (continued)

Reprinted here without express permission.

But we had a great week-end. Nicki and I drove out to the Suffolk coast and spent the week-end at Andrew’s wee house in Thorpeness. Andrew and Peter have just got a dog (he’s called Potter) which meant lots of walks on the beach which is always uplifting.

If you don’t know Thorpeness, you should. Imagine “The Prisoner” meets “The Avengers” all done in the style of a medieval English village. Beautiful quaint cottages which appear on closer inspection to be entirely manufactured from poured concrete - strange and wonderful. Or, following on from the previous post’s pointers, poured concrete — strange and wonderful.

Ok, strange train of thought here. I’m listening to a song by Serge Gainsbourg “Torrey Canyon” and I have this terrible habit of listening to music without decoding the words. It’s crap really, but for a long time I thought Fear’s “Let’s have a war” was actually “Let’s have a word” (ha ha ha) - I guess my brain just goes into neutral and I happily hum along, missing the point of the song entirely.

So all of a sudden I decide to start listening to the words. What is “Torrey Canyon” about? (my subconscious had registered it under ironic-French-singer-does-funny-piece-about-cowboy) Well, it’s the story of the first oil-tanker disaster. The earliest one I can remember from childhood was the wreck of the “Amoco Cadiz” in 1977. The Cadiz is still the largest single spill on record. It was a major disaster that prompted the shipping authorities to change lane behaviour in the Channel and the French government to set up C.E.D.R.E. to organise effective methods for dealing with these emergencies.

But back to Torrey Canyon. After letting the Gainsbourg song sink in, I Googled the name of the boat (as you do) and found an amazing page on a UK university site entitled The Torrey Canyon’s Last Voyage - this is a truly chilling account of how events led to the wreck. And I was reminded of usability issues by the language of the site which is all about users failing to see the things they’re supposed to and being confused by those that they do. If you care about usability and design, have a read.

On a different note, I can’t believe the wreck of the Torrey was now thirty-five years ago and we are still spilling oil into our oceans…

Been messing with templates (there should now be exactly thirty characters in every line) - ed and del buttons might not work terribly well. Oh, I finally wrote my first review for the food site - the trick is to just sit down and write it as soon as you get back home (which is hard if very pissed…)

and just generally being ugly and crap, win98 and win2000 are failing to render my head-of-dug graphic. Arse. Take a look at the source code - we’re validating to xhtml here. The mac (OS9 and X) versions of IE render it fine, both netscape and mozilla do to.

Arse arse arse.

Sometimes you just can’t beat a quality expletive like arse to sum up your feelings about a technology created by gods for the benefit of men but highjacked by bill gates for the benefit of bill gates.

Anyway, I’d be curious to hear any suggestions from windows users. Note that I’m trying to avoid putting the “border” information outside of the “style” call, preferring instead to describe the replaced element’s characteristics from within (which seemed like the right thing to do).

but this em thing is killing me– just got off the phone to Ben in DC and he says the type’s to small. How can that be? 0.8EM (fractionaly smaller than your usual) seemed like a WAI compliant, sensible, robust and just generally do-the-right-thing kind of body copy measure.

Right, hello giant type face– I’m leaving it at 1/1.5em for now…

The following is an address from the President of the United States of America.

“The way chosen by the United States was plainly marked by a few clear precepts, which govern its conduct in world affairs. First: no people on earth can be held, as a people, to be an enemy, for all humanity shares the common hunger for peace and fellowship and justice. Second: no nation’s security and well-being can be lastingly achieved in isolation but only in effective cooperation with fellow-nations. Third: any nation’s right to a form of government and an economic system of its own choosing is inalienable. Fourth: any nation’s attempt to dictate other nations their form of government is indefensible. And fifth: a nation’s hope of lasting peace cannot be firmly based upon any race in armaments but rather upon just relations and honest understanding with all other nations.

“In the light of these principles the citizens of the United States defined the way they proposed to follow, through the aftermath of war, toward true peace. This way was faithful to the spirit that inspired the United Nations: to prohibit strife, to relieve tensions, to banish fears. This way was to control and to reduce armaments. This way was to allow all nations to devote their energies and resources to the great and good tasks of healing the war’s wounds, of clothing and feeding and housing the needy, of perfecting a just political life, of enjoying the fruits of their own free toil.

“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its labourers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some 50 miles of concrete highway. We pay for a single fighter with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. This, I repeat, is the best way of life to be found on the road the world has been taking. This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.”

President Dwight D Eisenhower, 1953

http://www.iranmatch.org/ “dating, romance and friendship with other Iranian people around the world” - fantastic.

I wonder if Microsoft would be willing to pay me for the hours I lose attemping to repair damage caused by their software? Office v.X is beautiful to look at, but has a number of ‘surprise’ features designed to waste as much administrator time as possible.

nice.

Maybe I’ll start keeping a tab of the hours and send them an invoice…

and asked me to have a look at it first. The guy has the most amazing list of jobs on it. In one, he describes how he had Harrier fighter/bombers drop 500 pound charges around the building he was working in. The idea was to measure the impact vibration and its effect on the equipment in the building.

Which, it turns out, was the FBI at Quantico.

How come I never get to do stuff like that where I work?

Nicki and I had dinner with Billy and Ohna last weekend. We got talking after dinner about stuff that happened years ago when we were kids growing up in France. There’s been quite a lot of talk about childhood recently what with the baby on the way…

Anyway, don’t know if anyone else has had this experience, but this kind of conversation can rapidly turn into “spot the paedophile”

Ohna reminded me of this one guy called “Mickey” (did he have a song? a club? big ears?) who lived a few door down from us. My only memory of him was that he was really friendly and that he used to give us gifts. In some cases, really nifty gifts, like a casting rod that collapsed into a nifty little fibreglass case. I seem to remember him being a “salesman” and that he justified giving away all this loot because it was promotional stuff he didn’t pay for…

Anyway, I had completely forgotten about Mickey, turns out he had ulterior motives for being so friendly. Nothing happened but he disapeared from view after one incident were my mom got involved. It’s crazy how the bad guys manage to exploit one’s natural tendency to assume the best of people…

And as I write this, I’m reminded of the construction worker who use to try and kiss me every morning on my way to school (he managed once and I then had to walk the long way ‘round to the tube station), and the newspaper seller by Michel-Ange Molitor tube who talked to me every morning until one day he tried to shove my hand down his pants.

I can only conclude that a) I must have been one horny-lookin Ten-year-old b) men in France are all paedophiles c) shit happens.

These stories are upsetting because of what they do to your perception of the world. The construction worker was an Algerian immigrant. I’m not sure if anybody reading this has any knowledge of France, but I can assure you North African immigrants do not have an easy time. I won’t go in to France’s colonial history or the other political issues surrounding the matter, but what I get out of this is a challenge to myself to try and stay level-headed.

So instead of thinking “Algerian men are slimy” which is the gut reaction you might get from this type of interaction. I focus instead on “These men are treated as sub-humans and they haven’t seen their wives in five years and they live ten miles out of town in a high-rise shanty-town were they bunk up fifty to a small room and survive off beans in a tin…” at which point, you take all this pain and suffering, add your normal manly hornyness and the guy could just as easily have been an Englishman in Germany.

As I type this, I am reading Mike’s blog and he mentions Jon who is currently linking to the political compass site. I mention this because after doing the where-do-you-stand test on the site, I find that my politics put me left of Tony Benn (grin) a whole two grid squares away from the bottom-left-hand-side of the positional grid.

I suspect I probably knew this already, but even if you’re not the “political” type, I urge you to take it. As it could lead to some eye-opening conversation.

Don’t you get tired of reading biographies on websites that say the person was there at the beginning of the commercial internet? Just as a reality check, the next time someone points out how they were writing for netscape 3 in 1994, point them to a screenshot of Netscape beta 0.93 dated 1995 that ought to put them back into propper context ;-)

NASA fakes moon landing! (reprinted without permission from brainsluice)

Heroic images or NASA fraud? At last we have the conclusive proof… gawrnthen

I can’t seem to focus. Just got a lovely T68 (phone) that has this gizmo where you plug a digital camera in and now all I can think of how cool it would be to buy the (too expensive) camera…

Maybe it’s because I’m trying to sort out my housing association’s accounts (yawn…)

And whoever’s in charge at Orange and has done nothing about it for the last two years is an even sadder w*****.

When I started the log, it was going to be somewhere for me to put thoughts about our pregnancy. It seemed like I had never written anything down and life was most definitely feeling like sand between fingers. So there has been the odd post about the pregnancy and there will be pictures as soon as we have some (scans don’t show much as the one we have a print-out from is quite early) and if Nicki changes her mind, there/05/even be a webcam in the hospital. Mind you, this last idea is probably not such a good one as who really wants to watch somebody else’s birth first hand?

Recently, I find that instead of reporting on daily goings on, I am spending considerable time with memories.

If anyone reads this thing, and you think my past is less interesting than my future, (and who wants to listen to dug waffling on about something that happened ten or even twenty years ago) write in and complain. For now, my take on it is that I’m going to enjoy the reminiscing on paper for a wee while longer, because in a way, it completes the log - not that I plan on dieing any time soon, but better be on the safe side ;-)

For those that don’t know me and don’t connect with where I’m from, the potted start-line summary is as follows (semicolon / colon ?):

Born in San Francisco, USA on 20th January 1963 - a few months before Kennedy is shot. Mother (Ruth - which means mercy if I’m not mistaken) is American, from New York, daughter of Norwegian immigrants Tonny and Reidar Ohna. Father (Jed - Americanised from John Edward Douglas) is English, escaping post world war UK gloom in the groovy sunshine of California (probably quite sensible). He is the son of Douglas and Elsie Falby.

I lived in sf for a couple of years, then moved to New York City (August 1965), living on 3rd Ave and 9th street (Ruth tells me) in Manhattan. A year or two later, Jed and Ruth make the inevitable evolutionary step and move to Cos-Cob Connecticut (April 1967) where they buy a perfect house and set about raising their perfect children (because I have a sister - Ohna, born a year after me). I say perfect, because a) the one or two fleeting memories I have of the house are all happy ones and b) because Jed worked in advertising, Ruth stayed at home and this really was the American dream incarnate.

1968 arrives and Jed and Ruth embark on the European adventure (moved to France July 1968). More about this when I’m not falling asleep (it’s 1 am here in London). Suffice it to say that my Eurotrash roots are now set in motion (one can’t set roots in motion but you know what I mean) as I am not to return to the united states until the Summer of Sam.

Strange dug trivia - Manhattan has only ever had two complete black-outs. The first in 1965, the second in 1977. I was caught in both of them…

Ruth, my mother, reads this log and has sent in corrections about the previous post. I have edited the post the get the facts straight (thanks Ruth). I’m trying to get her to keep her own web log as I know so little of her pre-married life, and I’m sure my children would like to read about it too at some point in their lives.

Will continue suggesting…

Nicki and I just had a fantastic day down in Kent.There’s a particularly enjoyable type of British leisure activity that involves grey skies, wet lay-bys and hot mugs of tea (or pints of real ale) and today was definitely one of those. Had lunch in a gorgeous little pub in the Creek in Faversham (very good bitter), dropped off broken Snell speakers at obscure little audio supplier in an oast house stuck in a muddy field between a working farm and an adult education center, and visited the Isle of Sheppey (http://www.wyc.org.uk/).

I don’t know about you, but I like nothing more than finding places that you’re not supposed to visit. At the end of the Shellness road on Sheppey, there’s a bizarre community of beach chalets standing up against the beating wind. The ness is quite literally made up of shells, and Nick and I braved the gale-force-winds to walk along the beach (which is making me feel really good today :-))

(note to self: at some point post photographs from trip to nuclear bunkers of Orford Ness)

If anyone reading this has had a good experience with bathroom designers (that’s another word for building contractor…) in London, UK please drop me an email with contact details. I’ve spent the day talking tub widths and my head is ready to explode. Also, the bloody prices are incredible grrrrrr :-(