Pursued by a bear

Monday, 24 June 2002, 7:56 am

After a whole week in hospital Miss Kitty, the appetite with legs, has returned. Dr Deb & Dr Leigh elected to anaethetize her on the table and thoroughly clean her wounds. The necessary shaving revealed that another cat, or possibly a small bear, had chewed vigourously on her tail.

Anyway, she has returned in robust health, with no ill effects apart from the indignity of a shaved tail. Four inches at the base of her tail have been shaved, leaving her looking like a malformed and irritated poodle. An incensed lashing of the tail lacks the desired impact when it resembles waving a Tribble on a stick.

Oh no, not again!

Tuesday, 18 June 2002, 5:47:23 pm

Miss Kitty, our furry friend who’s fun to be with (to extend the H2G2 reference) is once again in hospital. An abscess that had been hidden under the base of her tail burst last night. No wonder she has been very reluctant for us to touch her tail in the last few days.

Knowing her proclivity for falling seriously and bizarrely ill — remember this is the cat that managed to strain her back — I whipped her out to the vet surgery for Doctor Debbie to have a peek. Sure enough, after reviewing her file and watching Miss Kitty climbing the walls in an attempt to get away from her, she decided that Miss Kitty needed a bit of a hospital stay for observations and antibiotics.

The prognosis today from Doctor Debbie and Auntie Leigh is that she’s doing fine and should be home in a few days none the worse for the experience apart from a partially shaved tail. Robyn will now be able to accurately call her a poodle kitty.

Private Investigations

Sunday, 16 June 2002, 4:34:00 pm

I’ve just finished reading an omnibus edition of the first three books by Reed Stephens. I’ll say up front that crime and mystery aren’t my thing, generally. If the reported crimes and investigations remotely approach reality, they’re to banal, sordid or depressing. If they’re elaborate mysteries solved by an octagerian and her terrier, they resolve into pretty but not very satisfying games with the author as the story evaporates into irrelavance.

Avid readers of the genre will probably take justifiable exception to my comments. In my defense I must plead that they are informed only by my limited exposure to the field. A mystery is probably one of the hardest story forms to write really well, which explains why I’ve read so few that have satisfied me.

So why the Reed Stephens books? Because they were written by Stephen R. Donaldson under a nom de plume. I’ll freely admit that Donaldson’s fantasy writing is definitely not to everyones’ taste, but he’s a damned talented wordsmith who really knows how to write. Even if you wish Thomas Covenant would stop whining and do something.

As Donaldson/Reed explains in a preface, these mysteries are something of an antidote to the fantasy books, giving the author an opportunity to experiment with the story form, stretch his legs and have some fun. I can heartily recomend them, with the caveat that as usual most of Donaldson’s characters are seriously dysfunctional people. And there’s the pleasure in the books — believable characters in feasible situations inside plots which are improvisations on familiar themes.

Swinging From Chandeliers

Tuesday, 11 June 2002, 6:44:42 pm

To quote a bard — not the Bard, of course, but a bard — I feel good. I ascribe this to having had some exercise. In particular most pleasant exercise in good company. I am of the opinion that this is a Good Thing, Part of it is the usual twaddle about exercise swamping your brain with endorphins, but primarily it’s the simple fact of getting of my backside and indulging in my yen to hit something.

Robert, Chris and I had a substantial work out on Sunday. I spent most of the morning wearing a mail shirt, and was astonished at the end of the day to find that I did not feel like I’d been inside a cement mixer. This suggests that I must be approaching some level of fitness sufficient to allow me to walk up a flight of stairs without gasping when I reach the top.

Then today, much to the bemusement of the other lunchtime users of the work gymnasium, another contractor and I spent a good forty minutes ploughing backwards and forwards trying to remember kendo skills from twenty years ago. Right now the knuckles haven’t swollen, and the muscles in my forearms are just gently waving and saying “Just wait until tomorrow, Mr Not-Twenty-Anymore”. Nonetheless, there is something terribly cathartic about getting up from my desk and swinging a sword. It certainly gives a certain degree of equanimity when you return to your desk — perspective is another Good Thing.

Speaking of good things, I’ve found the logical successor to the pet rock: Origami Boulders. As Marvin said: I think I feel good about it.

(Don’t) Steal This Code

Friday, 7 June 2002, 7:32:19 pm

I’ve been keeping an eye on the apparently never-ending silliness going on in the USA in the realm of copyright protection. I won’t bore you with any of the details, there are plenty of sites that will give you those. Hang around in SlashDot for a few days and you’ll see plenty of references. Matthew Ruben’s article Celine Dion Killed my iMac! is a pretty good place to start if you’re not sure how why this is something to be worried about. That article pulled me over to Marc Zeedar’s Cries in the Wilderness which revealed a mind-numbingly stupid attempt by the MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) to kill off ADCs. If you know what an ADC is, go read the article, just so you can experience your jaw hitting the desk. This particular little scheme, which horrifyingly stands a reasonable chance of suceeding unless the technological community slaps the US Congress around the ears, is possibly one of the most brain-bendingly stupid things I have ever heard. If you don’t know what an ADC is , you really should read the article as well.

Why should people outside the USA care about any of this? Because most of our technology, and most of our media, come from companies based in the USA. If these idiots can push it through the US Congress and into law, they’ll push the same Congress to reach across international borders to protect their private interests. And even if that doesn’t happen, you may be looking at a future where you can’t watch television without feeding coins in a slot in the side. If you live in Australia, do you really think that our politicians wouldn’t roll over and follow the US line when asked? Let me use a few words: Digital Television, Telstra. Richard Alston. Zeedar’s article, or at least the rather scary speculative fiction he wrote, may seem like a certain degree of alarmist panic. Don’t be too sure — this Salon article shows that we should be worried.

On other matters, I stumbled across a very attractively laid out blog by Dean Allen which is a thoroughly delightful demonstration of his interest in elegant typography. Well worth a peek, even just for his survey of twenty great typefaces.

If you’ve converted to OS X, you probably aleady know, 10.1.5 is out. What you may not know is that Apple have enabled pretty well all Carbon applications to take advantage of the same gorgeous text handling as all the Cocoa applications. Providing they’re modified to take advantage. Less than a day after the release, some very clever people produced Silk which tweaks the system so that many Carbon applications get the magic touch. This means that Internet Exploder from that-which-shall-not-be-named now displays text as well as Omniweb, while providing significantly better standards compliance. This may mean that I’ll abandon Omniweb until Omni Group finish it.

Sultans of Swing

Thursday, 6 June 2002, 8:03:21 pm

I may be wrong, but I think Sultans of Swing was the first CD released in Australia. It’s reasonably easy to remember what the early 1980’s were like. It’s a bit harder to remember what we thought 2002 would be like, but I’m pretty sure we got it completely wrong.

We sure got the technoloqy and culture wrong. That goes without saying. But we got other things wrong as well. A re-unified Germany? Post-apartheid South Africa? Russia forming an alliance with NATO? In 1982 they would have been the realm of very silly science fiction. We more or less expected that the world would be shivering in a nuclear winter, or sweating shoulder-to-shoulder in an overcrowded Malthusian nightmare.

On the other hand we had some great movies and some seriously rocking music. Pick your favourite movie-inspired cultural meme and I can guarantee we probably saw it on the big screen when it was first released. And the music! All those bands who listened to the Beatles and the Stones when they were 14 years old finally hit their straps and blew away a decade of disco-pop.

I was accosted on the street a few days ago by a feral reporter and his tame photographer looking to fill the space between the ads in the free weekly rag. They wanted a head-and-shoulders and a sound-bite to put in their “this is what the plebe on the street is talking about” section. It came out today, and I’ll admit to being mildly impressed that the scribe scribbled something close to what I had said, and that the photographer managed to conceal the dribbling rain we were standing in. I said I’d been talking about Douglas Adams, partially because the press definitely doesn’t need to know about the myriad other things occupying a niche in my attention these days, but mainly because that’s what I’ve been talking about.

I’d been re-reading So Long, and Thanks for all the Fish, looking for something DNA had written about Mark Knopfler. I did find it, and was slightly suprised to discover that it wasn’t what I remembered. It was damned good though. I’ve been listening to Dire Straits pretty well non-stop for a week now. I’m astonished, stunned, excited. How on earth did I forqet how good they were?

I only got to hear them live a few times. If you never heard them in concert, here’s how you can get close. First find a reasonably large football stadium, and set up a speaker stack the size of comfortable house. Hook the speakers up to some military-specification amplifiers, the sort that they use to lift submarines from their sleep on the ocean floor. You’ll probably need access to a nuclear power station to keep it running. Plug in a CD player with a remote control — this part is very important — and put in Love over Gold. Go to the other end of the stadium, and use the remote to turn the volume way up and skip over to Private Investigations. Press “Play”. Once your heart starts beating again, you’ll hear mind-numbingly talented instrumentalists carving out these huge Mount Rushmore slabs of music, really leaning back into three decades of rock and roll craftsmanship and frightening levels of raw audio technology. You’ll probably need to skip back a few times to really hear the music, and begin to grasp the jaw-dropping complexity of what they’re doing. OK, I’ll grant that it’s a studio album, and they had the benefit of all sorts of mixing magic. Here’s the trick: they could do it on stage, real time, longer and better. If you want to know what Johann Sebastian would be writing if he were around today — well, you get the idea. It’s not just that the ensemble sound is mind blowing — the individual instrumentalists are staggeringly skilled. In particular Mark Knopfler’s guitar playing is sometimes like a fantastically expensive and rare engraved crystal vase, and sometimes like the sound that vase makes when you drop it over the balcony of a cheap hotel just for the hell of it.

You could say that I like the music. A lot.

Salmon of Doubt

Saturday, 1 June 2002, 4:35:34 pm

I bought a book yesterday I didn’t intend to buy. That is not to say that I didn’t intend to buy a book yesterday, because my intention to buy a book was partially why I was in a bookstore. It’s just that I found a book that I didn’t know was on the shelves yet. “Found” may be too strong a term, as it was on one of those big cardboard displays right in front of the door as I entered, so there wasn’t much in the way of obscure serendipity.

Robyn and I had gone into Ron’s so that she could pick up the latest Kerry Greenwood novel (we are both fond of the fabulous frolics of Phryne Fisher), and so that I could buy another Terry Pratchett. Some months ago I resolved to read all of his Discworld books again, in order of publication. This means that I’ll have to buy some of the earlier ones that I’d borrowed from other people or the library. And I’ll have to buy at least two that I’ve already bought and lent, and never seen again. Somebody, out there, possibly reading this, has my copies of The Last Continent and Carpe Jugulum. Hello, wherever you are. I just want you to know that because you haven’t returned them, this particular lending library has forever closed it’s doors, and I shall crouch over my books like a slavering watchdog. Unless I give them away.

So, I’d gone in to pick up a copy of Equal Rites, expecting the shock of GST and the condition of the Australian dollar — for those overseas readers, you may not be aware that you can feed a family of three on the price of a paperback book in Australia now. That is why we are styled “The Clever Country”. Lounging insouciantly in front of me was Salmon of Doubt, which is fragments of the last novel by Douglas Adams, and various other collected writings published posthumously.

I don’t think that any single writer has had such an enormous impact on me as Adams. In part it’s because the things he writes still make me want to get very angry at the state of the world, have a stiff drink and a quick walk around the block, then come back and read some more. In part it’s because I was accidentally, indeed casually, exposed to his writings at a very vulnerable age and forever changed by the experience. As I recall it came as a cathartic shock to discover that much that was going on in my world really was as stupid and pointless as it appeared. Reading his books the first time was something like having the top of my skull lifted off and a poisonously strong espresso poured in.

I think that I’ll spend the week listening to Dire Straits and Pink Floyd, reading Douglas Adams, tinkering with obscure technical toys, and contacting some old friends. Sort of a 1980’s thing.

Extreme Cleverness

Wednesday, 29 May 2002, 7:17:01 pm

Oh dear. I thought I was being so clever in the way I’d tried to obfuscate my email address on these web pages, to try to hide them from address harvesting programs. So much for that: I stumbled across an article at A List Apart which showed pretty categorically I didn’t know what I was doing. Fortunately correcting my error was quick and painless, thanks to the super goodness of CSS and strict HTML4.01 markup. A little further walking from that point threw up a directory at Google of spam prevention sites.

While I was googling, I tried doing a quick check to see what sort of footprint I was leaving on-line outside of my own web pages. I was a bit startled to find an ancient program that I wrote for the Apple IIgs is still on-line. I was even more startled to find an interview with a journalist I did some years ago that I had completely forgotten about!

Apart from that, I’ve mainly left bits and pieces in various archives of mail lists. The fragments at the WayBack Machine of the first incarnations of the website are a bit difficult to track down, since the server they were on kept changing it’s name and address. I have them tucked away locally so that I can shudder at their design. I can’t believe I actually used frames in one incarnation.

Some other snippets of interest — well they interested me — were a commercial blog about blogs and a very good set of resources about constructing trebuchets and other siege engines. Maybe I should build a little one.

Rant of the Day

Tuesday, 28 May 2002, 7:52:41 pm

What is it about Australian society that lead it to be dominated by boof-heads who sincerely believe that The Great God of Sport takes precedence over all else? Couldn’t they at least keep their religion to themselves instead of imposing it on everyone else?

Why the rant? I taped something last night to watch this evening. Except the station boof-heads decided that the French Open Tennis would be broadcast instead of their advertised offerings. No warnings earlier in the evening. No mention anywhere on-line, or in print. So what was the point of changing the programming? Anyone who wanted to see the tennis wouldn’t have known it was being broadcast, except through serendipity.

No, Sport comes before all, including rational thought.

Weary, weary, weary…

Tuesday, 28 May 2002, 6:36:27 pm

I’m tired. Weary to the core, for no readily apparent reason. Well, to be honest, maybe a few reasons. Perhaps it was the fairly intensive workout I had on Sunday with Chris and Robert — I just hope they have no bruises like the one I have on my knee after all that. Perhaps it is the numbing grind of code construction I’ve been suffering for months. Perhaps it’s because for weeks we’ve been training Miss Kitty, the cat-who-eats-everything, to sleep indoors during winter. Sleeping indoors, often on our feet, does not pose much difficulty. Waking us any time between 1:30 and 4:30 for breakfast and a game seems to be the tricky issue. I think I need a short holiday — a few years, perhaps — or a career change. Federal politician seems attractive.

As I type I’m playing Leningrad Cowboys We Cum from Brooklyn quite loudly. Think of it as aural caffeine.

Some recent discoveries that may amuse: A Grrl and her Server is an interesting place to visit, with some quite nice design. For the Mac OS X users out there (hello!), the guy who does the icons for OmniWeb has a collection of icons and so forth which are positively lickable. And very likable. And for those of us who remember the early 1980’s, someone has mounted an on-line museum of the Beagle Brothers.

Brotherley Love

Saturday, 25 May 2002, 1:38:39 pm

I just received this from Ian:

Funny man…

Ripping Good Yarns

Friday, 24 May 2002, 7:22:46 pm

We took ourselves off yesterday to see Episode II. The consensus fromRobyn and I is that we both found it a very satisfying film. It definitely met the expectations of my inner adolescent, and Robyn described it as "Almost as good as The Empire Strikes Back" After the film we took ourselves off to Pane é Vino for a very hearty meal. Robyn is quite taken by their tomato, mushroom and bacon gnocchi. I tried a nice chicken, spinach and olive spaghetti. If you’re in town, we can heartily recommend it as a place to eat. The décor looks a bit forbidding and sparse initially — all chrome, concrete and open doors to the street, but once you’re inside it’s very comfortable and relatively quiet. We’ve taken to going their for breakfast every few weeks, and it provides a perfect vantage to watch everyone hurrying past to work.

Miss Kitty has decided to help me type this by sitting on the mouse before climbing down and trying to sit on the G4 tower. This is a new spot, and she is pretending that it’s very comfortable. I think I’ll mover her off onto Robyn’s comfortable chair in case she tests the quality of the tower case as a scratching post.

Every adult male in the western world has a 13 year old boy inside them. You can confirm this by carefully examining global politics and the entertainment industry. I found a wonderful toy today that would satisfy this particular 13 year old boy for at least a week: DraganFlyer III is a remote controlled flying machine with four helicopter blades and a wireless video camera. The possibilities are endless: I could finally find out what our gutters look like from above, peer into the possum’s holes, and seriously startle passing cockatoos.

Design Grumbles

Tuesday, 21 May 2002, 11:00:00 am

Given the hordes of industrial designers who graduate each year, and the mountains of usability and human interface studies available, why are their so many truly awful devices?

The Wintel PC I use at work has three headphone jacks on the front and one on the back, and two volume controls — excluding four software controls I’ve found so far. And there are keys on the keyboard with little speaker glyphs whose functions elude me. All the jacks behave differently and interact with the software differently. By default the fax machine loudly echoes it’s duet to the world — unless you navigate many layers down it’s configuration menu to shut it up. The shredder beeps shrilly to announce it has eaten what you fed it — an electronic belch to wake the dead, or perhaps to remind the user to check whether they still have their full complement of limbs. Doesn’t anyone stop to think "Is this a sensible thing to do?" before they start manufacturing in quantity?

Usability News is an interesting quarterly journal of usability tests of Web designs. Derek M. Powazek, real person, has a collection of links to sites that prove the Web is not a boring place.

Disco Tent

Monday, 20 May 2002, 7:17:23 pm

I have long thought that Wm. Shakespeare had some sympathy for his Richard III. Setting himself to write a flattering portrait of the somewhat bland Welsh Henry, the temptation to write a really good villain must have been overwhelming.

Robyn and I, and some other Ricardians, trotted of to see the Bell Shakespeare Company’s latest Richard III. Quite aside from outstanding acting, it was an excellent production. The decision to play straight through — no interval, no curtains — emphasised the escalating awfulness of the story. John Bell’s Richard was on stage for almost the entire time, and vigorously drove the show and the narrative at a cracking pace. Even off-stage Richard looms, as the other characters look over their shoulders, start at shadows, and whisper in corners.

The production was mounted on a sparsely set stage that served well as everything from a blood-stained Tower cell (complete with a worryingly sinister drain) to the opposing camps before Bosworth. The seamless staging allowed for, indeed required, some very deft stagecraft. All in all a most satisfying event.

The next day — yesterday — we went off to Shorncliffe with Dr. Leigh & Stephen to eat fish & chips for Robyn’s birthday. We walked about 2 km along the foreshore, met an odd drunken Irishman, then returned. A windswept, autumnal birthday celebration.

And All Who Sail in Her...

Saturday, 18 May 2002, 2:23:21 pm

After moving the files up on to the server and passing them once more through the W3 consortium validators, I sent out mail today to a large number of people announcing the relaunch and inviting comment and critique.

There are still some technical behind-the-scenes things to get done, but since we’re off tonight to see Richard III performed by the Bell company, they’re not going to happen today. Sending out a stack of email at once also showed up a drawback with the Macintosh OS X Address Book — it’s not synchronised with my Palm and Palm Desktop. Yet another project to put on the list, if Palm ever get around to releasing the OS X conduit development kit.

A random thought from the past week: why hasn’t anyone written an opera or musical about programmers?

If you’re interested in this whole "web log" thing, Nathan Torkington has an interesting article about his daily prowl across some favourite news sites.

Episode IV: A New Hope

Friday, 17 May 2002, 8:32:31 pm

More than six months ago I decided that my existing web site, the third incarnation, had to go. It was tired, stale, and somehow very Twentieth Century. So was I. While I quietly considered my strategy, various fragments floated into my field of view. Some of these were articles at A List Apart talking about boldly adopting CSS and other web standards. Another was a lovely little program called MacJournal, whose only purpose is to act as a diary. Various web logs also caught my eye.

Eventually the pieces came together in my mind, and this, the Fourth Incarnation of my footprint on the web took shape. The old site was torn down, and replaced with a notice that reconstruction was in progress. That reconstruction was going to take only a few days. Almost two months later, I’m finally done.

There have been many false starts and hurdles, not the least of which was my chronic time deprivation. Teaching myself CSS2 was fairly straightforward, but discovering how to deal with the vagaries of semi-compliant browser software took weeks. Various journal entries were made in anticipation of this grand release, then quietly vanished. In the best tradition of the Australian public service: if no written record remains, it never happened.

Now, at last, the framework is essentially done, and I can start writing. I have chosen to turn the website into a web log or online journal, albeit one which will be updated at random intervals, for a number of reasons. An interesting study I read some months ago tentatively suggested that the half-life of the Web is about three months. That is to say, approximately half of the web changes in three months, three-quarters in six months, seven-eights in nine months, and so forth. The first two Incarnations were essentially big lists of links for my own reference. The third put in place a lot more information, and a structure which allowed me to easily add pages into a tree, move them about, and remove them. The half-life of the Web meant that I then spent most of my time maintaining the external links, and neglecting the content. I wanted content to be available which gave the reader some idea of what I was doing, what interested me. Hence the journal format.

A web log also allows me, compels me, to write English again. For the last few years I have done an enormous amount of technical writing. I began to worry some months ago that I would no longer be able to write readable, coherent, cogent English prose but instead would be doomed to produce highly structured, carefully tuned jargon. Here then, is an opportunity, a new beginning. I hope. (I had intended to name this entry "A New Beginning", but couldn’t resist the title I used, given the film that has just been released.)

Please come and visit occasionally. Criticism, comment, input are all welcomed. This may be a voice aimlessly mumbling in the dark, it may reach the ears of thousands. Who knows? There is still some structural work to be done, such as adding my resumé, and automating the processes to add the MacJournal entries to the web page, but otherwise the only thing I need to do is to do what I want to do: write.

I’ll leave you with an obligatory web site or two to visit. Nuck’s band has put up a very non-standards compliant web site that is still rather pretty. Hopefully by the time you go there, they’ll have some MP3 files available for your listening pleasure. It’s not my listening pleasure, but they’re very good. boingboing is an interesting web log, with links to many others worth reading. Finally, have a peek at http://www.hoary.org/browse to see the enormous number and range of web browsers available from companies other than that-which-shall-not-be-named.

Colophon

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