Year: 2004

On my first check this morning, the comment blacklist plugin for this blog had blocked about twenty junk messages. Unfortunately, almost sixty had managed to sneak past it, an unusual occurrence (it’s normally blocking about 90%). While I was despamming those, another arrived. “Great,” I thought, “More spam.”

Not as such, no. It was a reply to my naïve query about Rails, “If anyone reading this happens to have used Rails at any point….” Well, yes, my correspondent does happen to have ‘used’ Rails, in a manner of speaking.

He wrote it.

Sometimes – just every now and then [1] – I start to think that this whole blog thing makes some sense. Thanks, David!

[1] In a ridiculous coincidence, that earlier example of ‘the original author getting in touch following an idle comment’ appears also to be the first entry on which I had comment spam… almost exactly a year ago. I think I’m going to have a lie down now…

Years back, my exec producer wanted to run a magic strand on one of my shows. The idea was, frankly, half-baked, but we met up with a leading young magician to discuss possibilities. The magician was Dominic Wood, now co-presenter of the BBC’s Saturday morning slot.

He came in and did a bunch of simple tricks for us, but of course for a science show I needed to know how they were done. Which was fine by Dom… but the others involved elected to leave the room. Which of course meant that Dom and I spent a jolly half-hour or so discussing the nature of magic and why people actively don’t want the secrets revealed.

It occurred to me at the time that a corollary of Clarke’s Law – that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic – is that magic is simply technology one has yet to understand. Which, curiously enough, persuaded me that putting magic in a science show wasn’t as half-baked an idea as I’d thought. Except there was still a fundamental problem – that of reconciling peoples’ desire to be deceived by magic, with a show that aims to reveal. That is, a science show.

For Dominic’s part, he was rather keen to tell all, on the grounds that when you know how the trick works, and it still works for you, you know that what you’re watching is the performance and not the trick. Also, he was fed up with shinning up drainpipes to place playing cards on the outsides of windows without anyone ever appreciating the sheer effort involved. “I wish I could read minds – it’d be a lot easier.”

I mention all this because BBC2 are running a new history of magic series (no website at the BBC that I can find). The first programme, tonight, covered mentalism – from psychics to the rehabilitated-after-his-Russian-roulette-farce Derren Brown. And entertaining enough it was… except that I’m absolutely none the wiser about anything much. Which, since the show was a documentary, I consider somewhat akin to a cheat. See, for me the show ducked the fundamental question of whether to reveal secrets or not. Or rather, it came down firmly on the safe side of telling us nothing.

Which rather begs the question of what it was about. A history, yes: but not a history of the development of techniques, since we never learned about the techniques. So merely a procession of names and a few acts, then? Pity.

We never did do the magic strand in the science show. I still think that was the right decision.

At the Henley Regatta this year, a large drama crew was poddling around. Looks like the result is Midsomer Murders, on ITV1 tomorrow at 9pm. I believe they were filming in the country club opposite the Steward’s enclosure, so it should provide a reasonable idea of just how barking the whole thing is.

Update: Monday 18th.
Well, that was fun. The abysmally slow racing starts were, I thought, the most glaring goof: second up was the director’s delight in reinforcing the idea that the actors were in the boats by ensuring thoroughly alarming quantities of splashing occurred behind their heads, apparently quite independently of any stroke movement.

However, to my heavily jaded but only vaguely knowledgeable eye, it held together rather better than I’d expected. Nonsense, of course, but probably less nonsense than the near-total absence of proper police procedure. And at least some of the rowing looked vaguely exciting, in stark contrast to John Nettles’ acting. Has he been dope-tested for performance-decreasing drugs?

Henley, meanwhile, looked suitably blazered. Insufficient Pimm’s in evidence, however. Shocking!

Vinay pointed me to a glorious examination of the future as depicted in the early nineties. Somewhere down the line the black and silver PVC and wearable cameras and personal nanotech vision evaporated, just as the swooping chrome fins of the fifties’ future had. Where did it go?

I wasn’t The Guy I Almost Was; how narrowly I wasn’t is a matter for others to judge. To have a clue what the story’s about you probably have to be of the narrow generation who remember Gopher and Mondo 2000, in which case you likely don’t need the story to tell you what happened, but you’ll chuckle in horrified remembrance.

Did I mention that, a decade ago, I spent a day at the ICA under a pseudonym, slagging off pretentious ‘cyberart’ nonsense? Final word, however, goes to Danny O’Brien, who said in a different context but still deeply mired in the whole Wired thing, “I think this is all our fault.”

Tonight, I had multiple invites to the BBC SSO performing Haydn at the Concert Hall (not a great shock, they were giving away tickets – presumably so Matt didn’t have to fake the applause as much for Radio 3). I declined, since I was intending to go to a RTS bash with the commissioner of BBC Three. But that was cancelled at the last minute. Ho hum.

But then Adrian, bless him, calls with an invite to the opera: Bartok’s Duke Bluebeard’s Castle. A minimal staging, but suitably powerful; very much enjoyed from our box, thanks very much.

We elected not to stay for Schoenberg’s Erwartung, however, and instead skipped out and repaired to the Clockwork. I’ve never been before. In fact, I’d never heard of it, which seems preposterous when one learns that not only is it fairly local (not quite walking distance, alas), and not only do they have an entirely separate Belgian beers menu, but they’re also a microbrewery. The first I’ve been to since I was in the US last year.

It’s a hard life.

If anyone reading this happens to have used Rails at any point (unlikely, I know, since it’s only been out for about two months, and by-and-large the readers of this blog are less geeky than I, but there are some odd sorts lurking and one never knows…), I have a query:

Suppose I use Rails to auto-generate all manner of web application goodness, and I hack on that generated code a bit to make something passably pretty. If I subsequently realise that I naffed up the database schema, do the tools neatly integrate the changes, or do I end up with a tangled mess?

Please answer in small words, typing very slowly, as if to a small child.

Just a test post to check something out. I’m going to babble on a little here to make sure the lines wrap. In fact – hey, I have an idea!

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Mauris blandit nunc. Donec eu metus. Proin non tortor. Maecenas commodo. Quisque at velit eu turpis cursus porttitor. Suspendisse potenti. Praesent congue. Mauris aliquam, risus ut condimentum porta, odio neque sollicitudin nulla, at molestie ante urna ac mi. Aenean eleifend facilisis dui. Sed elementum ultrices nisl. Class aptent taciti sociosqu ad litora torquent per conubia nostra, per inceptos hymenaeos. Etiam lorem pede, consectetuer quis, dignissim fermentum, lobortis quis, orci. Duis egestas arcu eget tortor. Quisque odio diam, sodales sit amet, molestie nec, convallis vel, arcu. Proin id justo. Morbi rhoncus consectetuer nibh. Vivamus vestibulum libero at urna. Ut placerat diam quis odio eleifend dapibus. Phasellus nec mauris.

Now here’s another paragraph to gap the blockquotes, and you’re about to see the lorem ipsum placeholder again…

“Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Mauris blandit nunc. Donec eu metus. Proin non tortor. Maecenas commodo. Quisque at velit eu turpis cursus porttitor. Suspendisse potenti. Praesent congue. Mauris aliquam, risus ut condimentum porta, odio neque sollicitudin nulla, at molestie ante urna ac mi. Aenean eleifend facilisis dui. Sed elementum ultrices nisl. Class aptent taciti sociosqu ad litora torquent per conubia nostra, per inceptos hymenaeos. Etiam lorem pede, consectetuer quis, dignissim fermentum, lobortis quis, orci. Duis egestas arcu eget tortor. Quisque odio diam, sodales sit amet, molestie nec, convallis vel, arcu. Proin id justo. Morbi rhoncus consectetuer nibh. Vivamus vestibulum libero at urna. Ut placerat diam quis odio eleifend dapibus. Phasellus nec mauris.”

Hmm. Interesting. My page isn’t validating at the moment (unencoded ampersands, tsk), but seems effectively clean, and my CSS validates. OmniWeb and Safari both render drop-caps on those blockquotes, but the ‘first-letter’ is apparently interpreted as ‘up-to-and-including-the-first-genuine-letter,’ rather than ‘first-character’ as I’d expected. IE6/Win and FireFox/Win ignore it completely. Anybody?

Lorem Ipsum text via Lipsum.com.

So, perhaps the cover art search in Sofa might not be absolutely perfect. Matt Johnson does not, I’m fairly confident, have crimped frizzy hair.

For a few years I’ve been idly hawking a series I really wanted somebody else to make. Not me – it was hardly within my realm of experience – but I was dead keen to see the show. It was, in summary, “Be James Bond for a weekend.” Or, if you like, Splinter Cell played as a live-action TV game show. It’s a crazy idea, but it might just have worked.

Unfortunately, it was never properly pitched, and I suspect the idea’s effectively dead thanks to the BBC’s deceptively not-similar-at-all series Spy. This showed up earlier in the year on digital channel BBC Three, which my TV can receive but my aerial can’t, so I didn’t see it until last night’s terrestrial debut on BBC2 – it’s being stripped all week in the odd (graveyard?) slot of 6:45pm.

Oh. My. Heavens. It’s not often I lose patience with a show, but with this I lasted all of seven minutes. How is it possible that the entire production should take itself so utterly seriously? I watched, mouth agape, as the candidates explained earnestly why they wanted to be spies – only, of course, they weren’t going to become spies, they were being filmed for a TV show. Sure, the exercise was made as realistic as possible, and I’m sure the producers were delighted when one of their ex-spy trainers insisted on appearing in a bad wig to conceal her true identity, but at that point they should have been hearing alarms bells blaring right next to their heads.

Espionage, you see, is a deadly serious business. Punters playing at being spies, on the other hand, is on the faintly camp end of patently ridiculous. So far as I can tell, however, the producers managed to deceive themselves into believing they were making a deadly serious documentary about the life of the field agent. But if that had been the case they should surely have centred on the genuine spies and used the punters as, more-or-less, actors in a reconstruction. That could have been interesting and genuinely illuminating. But focussing on the punters while being utterly po-faced makes it neither documentary nor game show. Terrible.

I’ll likely steel myself later in the week for another attempt to view the ill-conceived monster, in case I’m wrong, but for the moment all I can taste are the ashes of a series that could have been genuinely fun.

Now: does anyone have a clue how to turn the buggy and generally flawed but nevertheless magnificent game Evil Genius into a TV show? I mean, who wouldn’t want to be in a series where your ultimate goal is sixties-style world domination with giant lasers and earthquake machines and secret underground lairs?

Ooh, pretty! Ever since a weird payment snafu with Objective Development’s web store, I’ve forsaken the glory that is LaunchBar for the similarly wonderful and even more beautiful masterpiece that is Quicksilver. If you’re like me and constantly running a couple of dozen applications at once, the quick keyboard access provided by these things is a blessed relief. That Quicksilver works with such panache is no mere window-dressing; the visual fluidity reinforces the flow of one’s work, and the style entices one to use appropriate tools appropriately. For me, at least.

Quicksilver is, however, one of those applications that seems in permanent beta, and there are occasional quirks. Searching the support forums for a solution to one I encountered recently, I came across reference to another piece of the ongoing puzzle that is the perfect desktop environment.

iTunes is all well and good, you see, but while the full version of its control window is capable, it’s also thoroughly massive. The minimised version, however, carries altogether too little information. Not to worry, it can be controlled remotely, and there are any number of Dock, menubar, Konfabulator and application widgets to do just that. I’ve played with most, and rather like Clutter, which actively attempts to emulate the unruly heap of record sleeves one’s real-world collection adopts over time. You know, where there’s no initially discernible organisation but nevertheless a serendipitous madness to the way the CD cases have slid and grouped. Well, maybe you don’t know, if your brain isn’t wired that way, but hey – if it is, Clutter’s worth a look.

For straightforward play/pause control and track information, however, I’ve struggled. The iTunes Companion was a favourite for a while, but I’ve drifted away from Konfabulator of late (too many weird bugs, too many sucked CPU cycles, just a bit too fiddly in practice).

Behold my latest obsession: Sofa. A neat player bar with autohiding mouse-over animations and transparency goodness, shortcuts to most of the stuff I really want, and a ridiculously cute animating album cover doobrie. All skinnable, with more preferences than you can shake a stick at but an attention to detail that makes it all worthwhile.

Highly recommended. Weird icon, though.