October 2004 Archives

Speaking of reminiscing; with all the craziness of having done an actual honest week's work last week (no, nothing exciting, just a quick development gig, but thanks for asking) I forgot to mention a moderately bizarre occurrence on a flight back from London on Monday. Taking my seat, I was forced to interrupt a chap who was scribbling on a scrap of paper, writing 'λ' far more often than is conventional when doing, say, the crossword.

Eventually I concocted some sort of vague excuse to mention that my diffraction physics was somewhat rusty, and there ensued a conversation involving more than the average quotient of the word 'Fraunhofer'. But this was not the coincidence.

The chap turned out to be Australian, and he'd taken his PhD at the University of Sydney. In the summer of 1989, he was showing students around the high-energy physics department; students from the School of Physics' International Science School. Five of those students were from the UK. One of those five was me.

No, of course we didn't remember each other -- but we must have first met fifteen years ago, and not on BA1498.

Small world.

In a further coincidence, at this moment the top story on the website of the UK end of the whole shebang, the Association for Science Education, is the start of the selection procedure for the next '5 for Sydney'. (PDF flyer). Good luck, kids. I had a blast, and apparently it's still affecting my life.

With the last piece of furniture -- at least for the moment -- now delivered, I've been pressing ahead with the general project of 'sorting things out.' Which means, in practice, filing and chucking out. While it takes me a considerable time to build up speed in these activities, neither is without its rewards.

One completely random thing I came across today is the visitors' guidebook for my degree ceremony, more than a decade ago. While I can remember the day at least reasonably clearly, none of it made any sense at the time since the evidently important bits were conducted in Latin. Mix in some genuinely arcane tradition -- grabbing a finger and being led forward by it? -- and it was all delightfully baffling. Now that I've actually read the accompanying notes, however, it starts to make a semblance of sense.

In the same pile of papers was my degree certificate, which makes up for the florid extravagance of the ceremony by being the least flowery formal document I think I've ever seen. It's so plain, it's not even vaguely convincing. Mercifully, I've never had to produce it. I doubt anyone would believe it.

Richard, Harro, Alan -- this is for you lot.

The availability of relatively cheap video cameras has led to the mass production of two sorts of movies. Firstly, of peoples' babies and toddlers being cute. Secondly, of people plain mucking around and playing up to the camera, often with whatever props are to hand. We're in the latter situation here, with nutters who would appear to be French, bless 'em. They're in a desert somewhere. The props they're goofing around with are Mirage F1 jets.

Quicktime video here.

Remember, kids: 200ft minimum, gear up after you've established positive rate of climb.

My bed has arrived. As of tonight, I shall no longer be attempting to find the least uncomfortable angle between the broken slats of my once-glorious-but-lately-too-squashed-to-be-any-good futon. No. I shall be reclining in the glorious accommodations of a gigantic mattress, with pocketed springs and all mod cons, on a slatted base, on a terribly fashionable pale oak frame, supported by oh-so-modern little chromed legs. It will, I think, be the first time since I left America last year that I've slept in a bed longer than me.

I've some serious recreational sleeping ahead of me.

Just as one might have thought American politics couldn't get much more surreal, Bush has been endorsed by a major tabloid newspaper. The paper? Bild. Um... right.

At least there's a flash of sanity: the editor felt he had to assert that his paper's support wasn't a joke. Because, you know, we might all have thought those whacky Germans were having a laugh again.

The Radio Times' website has, in my humble, been the best TV listings site in the UK for some time now, long periods of flaky server availability notwithstanding. However, the competition has been so dire that I still didn't think it was up to much. It did mostly work, and the design was at least reasonably clean, but that was about all one could say of it.

They've now unveiled a sparkling new redesign, and the site is genuinely prettier, with a neat little hover-box telling you exactly when the show you're pointing to starts and ends (a basic problem with the previous version). All well and good. But... will they go the extra mile and provide us all with customised RSS feeds of programme times? Because then we could, you know, do really cool things with keyword extraction, scheduling systems, capture cards, and so on. Roll-your-own-Tivo would be a darned sight easier if listings were so readily available. It's possible that The Radio Times might now allow this, but as I write the link to their 'services' page (mobile phones and PDAs mentioned) goes here... which is 'not found.'

Meanwhile... why is scheduling information so hard to find? Surely it's in the best interests of the broadcasters themselves to make the data as widely-available as possible? Or do they provide the raw data to publications like the Radio Times as a commercial venture? That is, is the schedule itself a revenue stream?

I'm just asking.

John Peel has died. Story covered everywhere, of course. I shall treasure the recording I have of him quoting something I penned in an email to friends, on Home Truths; I'll see if I can't post it here tonight.

No joy for me in the Children's BAFTA nominations, again. Surprise! It's a somewhat odd year all told, I reckon: Dick & Dom are set to stir up some controversy, what with OFCOM's formal comment that Parent Bogies is not the sort of thing the BBC should be doing. Props to the Jungle Run team for securing another nomination, and I'm glad Globo Loco is there again -- it gets neither the credit nor the audience I think it deserves.

One of the things I've forgotten to post here, that came out of my London jaunt, was that my chum Jem had finished his stint on Scrapheap Challenge and had picked up a jolly little gig making film props. For a Kevin Bacon film.

At which revelation, Alom^* and I immediately started petitioning the poor chap to the effect that, if he wanted to remain our friend, he quite simply had to contrive a cameo in said film. Why? Because both Alom and I have been on screen with Jem, so Jem appearing in a Kevin Bacon film would give each of us a Bacon Number of 2. 2! How cool would that be?

Also, I entertain the vague possibility that I might actually have an Erdös number; my only real scientific paper listed a couple of authors who must, at some point, have co-authored with mathematicians (computation chemistry was our game), so it's just about feasible that I have an Erdös number of maybe seven or so. Which would give me a Bacon-Erdös number of around 10, but hey -- at least I'd have one!

Unfortunately, Jem finished the props and immediately took a job at Screenhouse. Which is, one suspects, the end of the endeavour. I'm never speaking to him again.

* I think I first met Alom Shaha, briefly, when I put him up for interview for The Big Bang about six years ago. We didn't meet again until the other week, despite our paths crossing on more than one occasion -- we tended to interleave at places like Screenhouse. Anyway, we bumped into each other at a bash at Imperial. Seriously nice guy: one of those people I very much hope I manage to work with sometime.

Tonight (I do like the drop-cap 'T' -- apologies again for non-Mac-viewers), the first emailshot from the Virgin Galactic folks. The mail is signed 'Stephen Attenborough, Head of Astronaut Liaison.' Now that's a cool title to have on one's business card.

(and yes, of course I signed up for their mailing list. Durrr. Oh, and I wonder if it's the same Steven Attenborough as the one who's interested in traction engines?)

The last time I did this, Anil noticed, so I figure it's worth another try: Movable Type v3.12 is out. Anil comments that the update "should be fairly straightforward to upload on top of your current ... installation." What does 'fairly straightforward' mean? Is there reason to believe it won't be entirely straightforward?

'No problem,' I think, 'I'll check the upgrade docs.' Only, they don't cover upgrading from a version any later than 3.01D, as I noted in a bug report six weeks ago.

Yes, I'm being prissy, but this is the sort of lack-of-joined-up-thinking that I was having a dig about a while back (see comments). People who live and breathe MT will guess that one simply uploads the new files, pausing briefly to consider any personal hacks that may have been applied to the old versions. The rest of us... actually, I still don't have a clear picture of an 'average' Movable Type 'user.' 'Developer,' yes, but 'user'... that's tricky.

One good thing: the MT2.6 templates and stylesheets have reappeared on the appropriate page.

Dubai: a property developer is building a collection of 300 artificial islands in the shape of a world map. Is this for real, or has somebody taken Neal Stephenson too literally again?

Via kottke.org.

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.

Wil Shipley and Mike Matas, two of the leading lights of arch Mac OS X developer OmniGroup, left early in the year to found Delicious Monster Software. We've known for a while they've been planning a library/cataloguing application: now we know more. Worth a look if only because the website's really rather cool, but one suspects the software will be too.

Can anyone tell me why it's more secure for me to key in a four-digit PIN -- an easy action to crib over my shoulder -- rather than to sign my name -- an action that requires considerable practice to imitate convincingly?

I'm just asking.

Surely it can't have anything to do with the little stack of petrol station chits I collect which I appear to have mistakenly signed 'Abraham Lincoln.'

On the other hand, there is a simplification involved in the payment process, thanks to all of this; we've gone from a system nobody remembered to check, to one nobody remembers. Well, do you know all your cards' PINs?

Many of the interfaces I use in daily life now feature soft buttons -- the kind that's unlabeled but adjacent to a display screen. At some point, a label pops up next to the button: 'OK', or 'Cancel,' or whatever. Cashpoints (uh... ATMs, for those who don't read English) do this, for example. My car has something similar but rather more complex, in the manner of aircraft navigation screens only, sadly, not offering anything by way of navigational data. But anyway, you'll have seen the sort of button I mean.

This morning, I made my first so-called 'chip&pin' purchase; the 'new' bank card with the chip that's been present for years (and that stores data I'm not allowed access to, nor indeed will my bank tell me what kind of data anyway) is jammed into a slot above a little keypad, into which you enter your pin number. A screen next to the keypad offers instructions, and beside it are a row of dinky little buttons that get neatly labeled 'Enter' and 'Cancel' when appropriate.

Only, they don't work. No, one is supposed to press not the button next to the text 'Enter', but the large green 'Enter' key. The little button doesn't do anything. Arrrghh! Haven't these people read Donald Norman?

This blog will, at some point in the not-too-distant future, move. It's been clear for some time that I should have something like the traditional 'About' section, and I've eventually realised that the way to do it is to demote the blog and throw up another set of pages at the root of quernstone.com. My personal blatherings are all well and good, and I won't stop (you can't make me!), but I should make at least a token effort to present a more professional face.

What I'll try to do, with my rad new mod_rewrite skillz, is arrange matters such that all links to archives and old entries on this blog are redirected to their new locations. Which would be really very smart. But heaven help me trying to make that work...

A little advance warning, anyway. If you're reading this through NetNewsWire or another aggregator (and if you're not, why not, for heaven's sake?), and the feed suddenly disappears, this is what happened, OK?

It could still take me weeks to sort it all out, mind.

My iPod, bless its silicon innards, seems to be playing an awful lot of Bjork these days. Which is odd, since I put very little Bjork on it. It's also playing altogether too much Unkle, and seems to have a penchant for a track called 'Dancing Drums' by Ananda Shankar. It's completely ignoring Jools Holland, U2, and The Cure, however, so I probably shouldn't question its tastes too closely, lest it develop opinions more like mine. Which would be disastrous.

Heaven knows where it got the Peter Gabriel from, though. I don't own any Peter Gabriel! I'd know if I did, and I don't! So where did it come from, eh?

(all of which is a roundabout way of saying: I lean towards the 'they have a mind of their own' position, too.)

Rutan's won the X Prize. BBC story, X-Prize home page, Scaled Composites.

Rock on.

Bull racing. Blimey. Then polo at 12,000 ft.

What a world. And this, incidentally, is what one suspects the BBC is for.

"Ladies and gentlemen, I'm pleased to announce that the train is now running at its maximum speed of a hundred and twenty-five miles an hour, and is operating in tilting mode. I'm less pleased to report that due to a shortage of catering staff the shop can serve only tea and coffee, and the boiler's broken so right now it's not even doing that. On behalf of Virgin Trains I'd like to apologise for living up your expectations."

Actually, the journey was very pleasant. The trains are quiet and smooth, and Virgin's staff notably human. For my money, however, the only advantage of First over Standard is the power socket in the table. Yes, the seats are spaced more widely, but they also recline at a ludicrous angle which proves distinctly uncomfortable after six hours. And thanks to a fancy lighting system, headroom is down to only 6', too. Bizarre.

Back in Glasgow, anyway. London a hoot; meetings useful if not directly productive; friends amusing; etc etc.