Category: Uncategorized

One of the subsidiary religions of Mac users is that there is One True Text Editor, and Its Name is BBEdit. All gainsayers are decried as fools, unless they use Emacs in which case they’re sort-of tolerated as being clearly harder than us, or vi, in which case they’re clearly insane.

I’ve used BBEdit myself since… uh… gee, I don’t know, was it out in 1992? I’m not sure. Anyway, for most of that time I’ve liked it, apart from the way it handles indenting, wrapping, and folding. See, it’s common practice with program code to indent it to aid readability. Most people do the same thing with HTML, but BBedit’s handling is optimised for the (typically short) lines of program code. The longer paragraphs of text in web pages wrap awkwardly. There’s a neat work-around via a very clever manual-rewrap function, but I’ve always wanted that to happen automatically as I type.

Sadly, the recent v8.0 update, whilst brilliant in many respects, still doesn’t change this behaviour. It also inexplicably fails to use sheets for file save operations, despite using them just about everywhere else, which is bonkers and unexpectedly narks me more than not using sheets at all did.

For a while I used BeOS-refugee Pepper, despite it being buggier than the banks of Loch Lomand in a particularly midge-infested Summer. But Pepper broke some time ago (amidst unfortunate acrimony), and the continuation PepperX hasn’t been updated in over a year. Last time I tried it, it featured a radical new code-simplification technique: every time the document became sufficiently complex as to verge on the interesting, PepperX fell over catastrophically and junked it. While this did successfully encourage the writing of simple code, it was also mind-numbingly irritating.

jEdit does what I want, and even adds some fantastic outline-folding whackiness that’s genuinely useful. Unfortunately, it also does a million things I don’t want, and it does them in a well-disguised but still Java-application sort of way that simply doesn’t ‘feel’ right on a Mac these days. I still use it occasionally, but it makes me wince.

Cue TextMate, about which almost nothing is known. But one can hope, right?

It turns out that mod_rewrite doesn’t really work with PHP-CGI… which of course is how my server is configured. I could turn that off, but then I’d have horrible security problems. Or I could do something really freaky with rewriting to a non-existant dummy file handler, but frankly…

Arrghhh!

If none of the above makes any sense, pray that this continues to be the case for you. As Vinay puts it, regular expressions are straight out of the realm of Satan.

Posted to the British Interactives Group chat-list:

“Interesting stuff, Marmite. I recently started a large new jar, and apart from the seasonal shock at how damned expensive the stuff is, I find myself musing on the yeasty material’s viscosity. As one does.

Marmite-haters will, tragically, not be aware, but it’s an extremely stringy substance, doing near-everything it can to land somewhere between the jar and one’s toast, with a secondary goal of clogging the jar-top thread. By the end of a jar it’s not unusual to find more Marmite clinging to the thread (and the lid) than to the sidewalls. However, the flow rate of the material is exceptionally low; even after several months, the Marmite surface within the jar will not be absolutely level. High crests and troughs left by the gouging actions of a table knife will be smoothed, but not completely flattened.

The possibility occurs that Marmite is thixotropic, or possibly that it may be used to illuminate the distinction between viscosity and ductility. I confess, however, that material properties and the underlying mechanisms are not my strong suit.

I then find myself pondering whether it might be possible to measure Marmite’s surface tension. Indeed, could one blow Marmite bubbles? Alternatively, could one produce an analogue of Kelvin’s tar drop experiment, only with a rather more ‘interactive’ period between drips?”

Posted by, yes, me.

Fascinating conversation this evening with Colin, who’s sitting on some grand BBC committee that’s trying to work out how they’re going to use their flashy new base in Glasgow once it’s finished in a few years’ time.

Which means they’re trying to work out not just how one goes about making television, but also how one could go about it if given a free hand to write the production model from scratch, and a serious equipment budget if that’s justifiable in the medium-to-long term. Which is not a simple problem, by any means.

I’ll confess to being profoundly jealous of Colin on this, since this sort of systems thinking fascinates me. The central management problem of production is stark – bringing together a small group of highly creative individuals for a short project against tight deadlines is a bold approach, but it’s absolutely routine in the industry. What makes it work, and which parts do we only think we need?

We spent some time tonight musing on the rôle of Executive Producers, who too often symbolise the unwanted extra layer of bureaucracy but occasionally provide essential backup at a critical juncture. I’ve been on the receiving end of both sides of that balancing act – indeed, with Colin as the Exec. in question! – but I’ve also made a series with absolutely no exec involvement at all, and that was bonkers: “I’ve just spent a third of a million quid. Here are your tapes. If you want me to change anything it’ll cost you, ’cos I’m off contract.” No way to run a business, that.

And of course, I’m only looking at it from a production viewpoint. If you’re the BBC you’ve other constituencies to please too. I can’t help thinking, however, that one could progress considerably via the guiding principle that the process of making a programme should be as straightforward as possible. Which sounds obvious, but in all the ITV companies I’ve worked actually going out and filming something has been unbelievably complex. The contrast with one of the indies I’ve worked at couldn’t be greater – they had their own camera and edit suite. We filled in a risk assessment, emailed people with an address and a rendezvous time, and… that was it. Result.

Asides:

1. Yes, Colin does have an entry in the Internet Movie Database. As do Patrick, Kim and Dougie. Cool.
   Though none of their entries are remotely up-to-date. Less cool.
2. I now find myself choosing the first word of a post carefully, trying to imagine what the drop-cap will look like. Is that wrong of me?
3. I’ve spent the day rewriting wikitext documentation to make it less comprehensive (and thus more comprehensible), for reasons which will become clear shortly. And I’ve spent the rest of the evening with my head stuck in the mod_rewrite documentation, for reasons ditto. These are, I fear, amongst my less transferable skills.
4. The mod_rewrite docs lead off with a quote that it’s voodoo. This marks a refreshing openness and honesty in technical documentation, as well as being quite funny.

Mirrors have never held much fascination for me, perhaps because being in the bathroom usually involves quantities of water, and that in turn involves not wearing my glasses. At which point I can’t see as far as the end of my nose: the utility of a reflecting surface a few feet away is thus moot.

I’ve compensated for this admittedly unusual foible by developing spectacular skill at shaving by feel alone — on average I only fill the sink with blood once a week, now — and I’m far better at tying ties with my eyes shut than with some insane lunatic standing opposite me doing it the wrong way around.

Or at least, the above is what I’ve thought for the last eight years or so. It turns out that I must have had mirrors in my previous flats, since I find the curious lack of mirrors here in Glasgow irksome. Both mirrors lurk in the bathroom, one safely but inexplicably above head-height, and both are steamed up for the entire period between showering and leaving the flat.

Wiping the droplets away, I’m invariably greeted by an horrific apparition, his hair lurching across to one side at some insane and improbable angle. For a while I assumed this was because I’m rubbish at getting my hair shorn, but no — as I write, it’s short, and it’s still making a bid for freedom. The only rational conclusion is that, in previous dwellings, I must have sorted the unruly mop while it was still wet.

But that would require having had mirrors extra-bathroomia, as it were. Mirrors I do not recall ever possessing.

I do like starting the day with a good mystery.

Currently playing in iTunes: Erase-Rewind by Cardigans

Hitch-Hikers! Hurray! What, you missed it? Listen again on Thursday night (Radio 4, 23:00 BST), or after that it should be available as a RealAudio stream from the BBC’s page. [coughWireTapcough]

Oh, sorry – you wanted to know if it was any good? Well… depends what you expect. Personally, I was expecting a well-delivered reminder of Adams’ incomparable turns-of-phrase and leaps of fancy. Flolopping matresses, the man who hates Sunday afternoons so much he’s resolved to insult every individual in the universe in alphabetical order, time-travelling Chesterfield sofas. That sort of thing. That’s what I got, and I’m happy.

Anyone seeing deep and nasty weirdness on this page should hit ‘refresh’; sometimes your browser will fail to catch the most recent versions of things, and thanks to iMark there’s a new stylesheet which fixes a couple of niggles with my ham-fisted version. Thanks!

This month, five people have arrived at this page directed by Google, after searching for ‘Jem Stansfield.’ [snigger]. Also this month, I’ve had 4706 page requests from ‘MSNBot’. That’s equivalent to crawling every single page on this site every two and a half days. And note that it’s a development project — it’s not even producing anything useful outside Seattle. It’s been doing this for more than a year.

Search optimisation from the company who — let’s not forget — were until recently making a big deal of including proper search in the next Windows filesystem. Sheesh.

Very minor stylesheet tweaks only this morning. Slightly more white space around the main content block; body text leading a pixel greater, which not only makes it slightly easier on the eye, it also helps the slightly improved dropcaps. They now look pretty good in Safari and OmniWeb as well as FireFox. There’s still far too much right padding in Internet Explorer, but… ach, just get FireFox. It’s betterer.

The only other blemishes I can see are the lined corner under the date heading, which doesn’t quite join up in IE6 – tough luck, see above – and the faint lines above peoples’ names in comments on the individual item pages. Fixing the latter would involve tweaking templates, and frankly it doesn’t bother me enough. I make TV shows, I’m not a graphic designer! Sheesh!

So, onward to other things. But if anyone does spot anything amiss, do leave a comment.

Listening to: IV : Nachtmusik 2 from the album “Mahler – Symphony No.7 in E minor” by Klaus Tennstedt. (don’t you love incongruous templates?)

I went to the loo. I came back. It was still annoying me.

OK, now I’m done.

Listening to: Strange Happenings from the album “Come Get It I Got It” by Rex Garvin & The Mighty Cravers