The Easy Way.

Wednesday, 12 March 2003, 7:23 pm

Michael noticed that I had gone nuts and revised these pages to be agressively XHTML and CSS2 compliant. This was all part of a grand plan to make the pages amenable to programmatic manipulation, such as periodically hosing the main page out into an archive. Following the precepts of Larry Wall, I can do this the easy way — by hand — or the hard way. Doing it the hard way once means, of course, I never have to do it the laborious and time consuming “easy way” again, so I’m off to hack up some AppleScript code to do it for me. Thinking is in progress…

Movies…

Saturday, 8 March 2003, 6:51 pm

Why do filmmakers insist on putting in scenes of heros effortlessly hacking into computers which are so fatuously implausible. I really enjoyed The Recruit, apart from the scenes showing Colin Farrell sitting down in front of the login prompt of CIA computers, popping open some sort of terminal window, and hammering out a hundred lines of code in a few seconds to crack the password. Code which runs without compilation, and without error the first time. Attention Hollywood: this is 2003, and much of your audience is moderately computer literate now. A better depiction of reality would be to show the hero accessing a computer because the user has written the password on a PostIt™ and stuck it under the desk.

Robyn shopped while I saw the first film, but we went together to see About Schmidt. Robyn’s comment: “I’m glad we saw that so we don’t have to see it again.” Don’t get me wrong — we both thought it was a great film, and Jack Nicholson was outstanding. It was just too gray and depressing. Before going to see this one, make sure you’ve had some sort of amazingly successful day beforehand, otherwise its theme of helpless ineffectuality may really get you down.

Amazing…

Tuesday, 4 March 2003, 6:51 pm

As I drove home from the railway station today I heard something astounding. The people who publish the Brisbane UBD street directory have just released a new edition. The representative said they have added 21,000 km worth of new streets since last year. That’s about the distance from here to Ireland. Amazing.

Oh, and I thought all the headlines were a bit big, so I shrunk them. You’ve gotta love CSS!

A Busy Weekend

Sunday, 2 March 2003, 8:43 pm

We seem to have been on the go all weekend. Saturday we trotted off to see Gangs of New York, and to get out of the filthy hot humid weather and into air-conditioning. After that, we nipped out to Shorncliffe with Clan Barry to eat fish and chips by the water’s edge and get eaten alive by mosquitoes. I think that constitutes one of the quintessential moments of life in Brisbane: sitting by the bay in the evening, watching lightning crackle out to see and over Moreton Island, while an armada of flying foxes wheels over head.

This morning I spent an hour or so training with the Boyz. In a fit of madness I decided to throw on my mail shirt, which comes in at about 12kg. Robyn’s designation of my state when I took it off: “Eww!” Did I mention that it was pretty hot and humid? We went straight from their to a planning meeting for the Ricardian Convention, and finally got to meet two very nice cats we’d heard a lot about.

A couple of things I’ve stumbled across. I’m not completely sure how valid Daypop’s word bursts are — the sampling mechanism may not be sufficiently broad or random — but it’s an interesting idea. I definitely would like one of these: a contrabass saxophone. This beast stands seven feet tall, and sounds like God making funny noises with his armpit. Amazing. Finally, absolute proof that some people may have too much time on their hands: Pencil Carving. It says something profound that there are human beings capable of this sort of feat. I just don’t know what.

It’s the little things that count.

Thursday, 27 February 2003, 8:09 pm

Like this. Something someone alluded to recently (hi Kel!) was the idea of “Everything Is Wonderful” (yes, like the Everclear song, which I’ve just listened to). Or not Wonderful. Now, if you’re as weary as I am at the moment (long story, don’t ask), there is a certain profundity in this. Of course everything is not wonderful. Africa is a disaster, North Korea is weird, and Iraq is en-route to being a parking lot for tanks. And, of course, John Howard is still Prime Minister.

On the other hand, a lot of things are wonderful. Kittens. Sunrises. Dr. Seuss. I think this implies a whole spectrum from John Howard to Kittens, with minor irritants (Simon Crean) and minor pleasures (mmm, ice-cream) between.

A couple of small things gave me a warm glow today. There’s this, for Dr. Ruth. And there’s a great rant about stopping Web robots. And something really sweet in Jaguar: highlight text, ctrl-click and rip off a Google search. It’s certainly a good way to find out what apophenia means.

A Manifesto

Tuesday, 25 February 2003, 9:09 pm

To quote Zeldman: to hell with bad browsers. Consider this a declaration of independence. From this point on, no more hacks and tinkering to keep any of this site working in badly borken web browsers.

Let’s make an agreement. I will do everything I can to ensure that all these pages remain rigorously compliant with W3C recommendations and standards. I won’t do anything too leading edge — let’s say that I’ll mainly stick to standards that have been around for three or four years. That means XHTML 1.0 and CSS 1, with a bit of CSS 2 if I’m feeling frisky. Sooner or later I might start putting in some DOM magic, just for fun, but that won’t be until I’m confident that Safari is standards-compliant in that arena. The WaSP upgrade-your-browser message will remain, but any other crutches go.

Your part in this is to not complain to me if your browser garbles this into unreadibility. Feel free to comment on the contents, the design, my hair cut, or what I said about Bill Gates, but take your bug reports where they belong: the browser authors. If enough people tell them that their software is borken, maybe, just maybe, they’ll realise that web standards are important.

Thank you for listening. Normal services will resume as soon as possible.

Here Comes The Rain Again

Tuesday, 25 February 2003, 6:39 pm

I’ve given up in disgust: MSIE in various flavours is still borken when faced with the XML prologue I had in the pages. For those who came in late, I had done the “right thing’ and put XML Stylesheet PI markup at the top of the document. MSIE gets horribly confused by them, and cannot quite decide where the document body begins. What part of this is not completely wrong? I admit defeat, and for the time being, the XML prologue is reduced to a simple version and encoding statement.

On a completely different matter, some folk have responded to a response I made to a message at Surfin’ Safari. I made some fairly off the cuff comments along the lines of ”Standards Compliance is a Good Thing“, and that there is no good reason for browsers to not stick to them. I’ll cheerfully concede to one and all who have had experience in trying to implement CSS parsing that no, I haven’t done it myself. In my defence, I didn’t say it was easy, just that I thought it was a good target to aim at. My ill-constructed demi-rant was at least partially driven by my problems with MSIE recently.

Oh, yes. I almost forgot. It’s still raining.

Completely Borken.

Monday, 24 February 2003, 5:23 pm

At least I know I have some readers (don’t you have anything better to do Nuck?), since they took the time to tell me that my pages were completely fouled up. Once again, the power of cut-and-paste strikes. I’d very carefully put an XML stylesheet reference at the top of each page, per the W3C recommendation. The only problem was that I had specified the main sheet to be for media type srcreen instead of screen. Oops. Let’s try that again.

It was mildly interesting to see how different browsers behaved when faced with this problem. All of the Mac browsers I tried handled it well, as did a ’zilla clone under Windows (thanks Chris). It could be that those browsers ignored the XML prologue completely. Netscape 4.x appeared to ignore the XML prologue, and the CSS sheets, and thus trundle off to present a plain vanilla version of the pages. From my point of view that’s the correct and desired behaviour: if you cannot handle what your given, do something simple.

Naturally, MSIE behaved bizarrely, and in the case of 5.5 under Windows it behaved differently depending whether the file came from a web server or was stored locally. In the former case, it appears to half understand the XML prologue, get horribly confused about what stylesheet to use, and turn the page into goulash (to be precise it stripped out all formatting, got the colours right, swallowed the links, and turned all the text into one big paragraph). When the file was stored locally, things got down right weird. It looks like MSIE bases a lot of it’s behaviour on the file name extension, not on the content of the file. When the filename ended with “.html”, MSIE 5.5 assumed the file was HTML, ignored the XML prologue, and found the required stylesheet. Why did it not behave that way when the document was delivered by the server? Bad programming and design, I’d say. If the filename ended with “.xml”, MSIE thinks the file is XML, burps on the stylesheet specification, and paints garbage on the screen. When I took the xml-stylesheet markup out, MSIE decided to display the document as an XML tree, complete with little collapse and open widgets. In other words, it completely ignored the unambiguous and completely precise markup which detailed exactly what kind of document it was. In what way is any of this behaviour not completely borken?

Things euphonious …

Sunday, 23 February 2003, 7:08 pm

We’ve just returned from the semi-regular musical afternoon at Joanne’s. This particular session was notable: it’s the first time I’ve dragged my tenor sax out in public for something over a decade. Given that much of what I was doing was sight-reading, and I was desperately trying to remember how to transpose (one tone up, add two sharps if it’s C or sharp, take two flats away if it’s flat), I’m pleased with my effort.

The only problem now is that I feel as though I have had a watermelon stuffed sideways in my mouth all afternoon, and have carried a small child in a strap around my neck. Music is just so glamourous.

MSIE Does It Again

Saturday, 22 February 2003, 4:45 pm

I was going to go nuts and replace all of the <img> markup of pictures in this site with <object> markup instead, with a view to being able to do funky things for browsers which are suitably funky, and ordinary things for stupid ones. Being a little paranoid, I whacked up a quick test page first. Safari handles it. Chimera handles it. Opera handles it. Internet Explorer 5.2.2 for the Mac throws up. In fact, it threw up in several unique ways.

Firstly, it was able to figure out that there is something of a certain size to paint on the page, since I indicated in the <object> markup how big the image is. So MSIE sets aside a nice blank space — then leaves it blank. Thinking that maybe it assumes that a JPEG image should be described as image/jpg instead of image/jpeg, I changed the file, then told MSIE to reload the page. It immediately crashed. Lets hear it for quality control.

I will probably abandon the idea for now, although I’ll poke at the test page with a Windows version of Explorer to see if it can handle it any better. I’d be tempted to go ahead and replace all the <img> with <object>, with a message in the body of the <object> saying “There should be a picture here, but your browser is too stupid to display it” except MSIE so far appears to be too stupid to display the text when it can’t display the picture. Geeze, don’t programmers and designers ever read the specifications?

Quotable

Saturday, 22 February 2003, 3:51 pm

John Gruber gets it: correct typography is a Good Thing, and browsers that can’t cope with it are Bad Things.

That print typesetting is a 400-year-old art form doesn’t make it obsolete. Quite the opposite, it means we’re fortunate enough to have a tremendous body of knowledge to learn from. Digital technology has dramatically changed the media and tools, but the fundamental issues of typesetting remain the same: style, tone, texture, weight, and, above all else, readability. The idea that web designers ought to ignore the lessons of traditional typesetting is as silly as recommending photographers ignore the lessons of composition, framing, and color from the art of painting.

And exactly whose paradise is ASCII? The ASCII character set is comprised of a measly 128 characters, many of which are non-printing control characters. It’s the crummiest character set imaginable, the lowest of lowest common denominators. Compatible? Yes. Cripplingly deficient? Yes, that too.

We’ve just returned from Ellis’s first birthday party. I think we’ve had our annual dose of small children, thank you very much. I really need a cup of very strong coffee. Thankfully Robyn has just put one at my elbow.

Digging Away

Saturday, 22 February 2003, 10:45 am

I’ve been plugging away, doing more of the grand XML + XHTML conversion of all of this. The best thing I’ve found so far is that you shouldn’t be able to see any differences. This is a Good Thing, because it suggests that modern browsers are slowly starting to creep toward supporting standards that are anywhere up to six years old.

Most of the work over the last day or so has been driven by the W3C documentation on XHTML Media Types, with a sprinkling from some rather impressive and detailed test documents. All of this is about as exciting as counting pebbles in the desert, but quite apart from making the documents leading-edge and very good for my resumé, it does a lot to ensure that they will be amenable to automated manipulation into the future, which has never been true of any of the previous incarnations of my personal web presence.

I got quite excited earlier today to see that Mark may have found a way to make <q> work, but his addendum and some testing I did confirm that effectively all browsers still break this horribly.

Another Good Thing is the little bug button in Safari. Everytime I found something in the W3C test pages that Safari burped on, or anything I did that was legal that it had trouble with, I could just hit that button and whip off a bug report faster than a proverbially fast thing. Of course, it is pure blind faith that any of them will get read, but I do hope that Safari may become the Holy Grail: a web browser that fully and correctly implements rendering of document markup standards.

Wonderful Things

Tuesday, 18 February 2003, 8:29 pm

Hmm. I just noticed that the time stamps on the last few entries had indicated March rather than February. Never underestimate the power of cut-and-paste to endlessly reproduce errors…

I haven’t yet finished the XHTML conversion of all the pages yet — there are still various hidden magic incantations to mutter over the top of them, relating to thinks like <link> and <object> — but I have little enthusiasm for doing them tonight. Instead, for your viewing amusement, some random things of interest.

Kryogenix.org has some rather nifty tricks for highlighting and annotating HTML links, as well as some very nifty things going on with the proper use of <link>. Expect to see some of the ideas borrowed and reimplemented here.

Have you ever seen Terry Gilliam’s Brazil? Here is the screenplay. Definitely worth reading. Or for something else, entirely, how about the Wikipedia guide to the 15th Century. It appears the Wars of the Roses didn’t happen, and the only significant king was that Welsh usurper…

Would you believe a Potato Powered Web Server?

Finally, the Laurell K. Hamilton fan-site is a good example of how truly awful webpages can still be. It’s a harsh thing to say, but someone has to say it.

Light Relief

Friday, 14 February 2003, 6:15 pm

I rather like this — a collection of the worst software seen. I don’t know which is worse — that somebody wrote this stuff, or that they actually think somebody will pay for it.

Sweeping Changes

Thursday, 13 February 2003, 5:10 pm

In theory, you won’t be able to see the change, but underneath the hood all of these pages have been changed from HTML to XML (or rather XHTML). In some regards this was painless, in others it was a pain in the butt. First up, it was relatively trivial, thanks to the Unix goodness of OS X, to run the W3C tidy tool in a batch mode. On the other hand, that tool cheerfully absorbed all of my typographically correct quotes and dashes and replaced them with there extraordinarily bland and incorrect equivalents.

You might not have noticed that the quotes displayed are correct (see The Trouble with EM ’n EN for a good introduction to the use of correct typographic characters), but it is fairly easy to see the difference between "this isn't very nice" and “I’ve done this right”.

I will admit that there might be a better way to do this than what is suggested by the article above. In theory the <Q> and </Q> should work correctly, but as the saying goes Your Mileage May Vary. And I have not yet found a browser that puts the quotes around that saying correctly. The best that I’ve found is the addition of the good old " symbol. I suspect that there may be a trick to get CSS to put the symbols I want in, but the rest of that trick relies on CSS being correctly implemented by the browsers. What fun.

There is still a little bit of work to do here. The tidy tool correctly ripped in-line style specifications out of tags and replaced them with classes so I’ll go back and roll those classes into the external CSS sheets. I also want to replace all of the <img> tags with appropriate <object> tags, since <img> is technically deprecated. It will be interesting to see how many browsers throw up on that little test!

Thursday, 13 February 2003, 5:38 pm

Well, I must have done something right:

Me and My Girl

Saturday, 8 February 2003, 2:14 pm

Robyn has taken some great photos of me and of Miss Kitty recently. We got them developed today (despite having recently seen One Hour Photo), after having breakfast at Pané et Vino with Clan Wilson. This photo of me and Miss Kitty really tickles my fancy.

Despite the book on the floor, don't assume that I was doing anything constructive. Given that I’m wearing headphones, I'm probably plaing Ghost Recon. Actually, casting my mind back, I might have been doing something constructive afterall, testing iMovie 3.

So there you have it — me and two of my favourite things, with almost everything else important very close by. Which reminds me that it’s almost the 14th of February…

Good News, Bad News

Wednesday, 5 February 2003, 7:28 pm

There seems to be a never-ending stream of bad news at the moment. Columbia, a looming war, bushfires in Canberra and Victoria, several nasty train crashes. And I seem to be coming down with the virus that has knocked my dear wife off her feet. Much too much bad news.

On the other hand, I've discovered some nifty toys. NetNewsWire Lite from Ranchero Software is well on it’s way to being a big favourite after playing with it for a little while. It does exactly one thing, but it does it very elegantly: keep an eye on RSS feeds from various news sites and give you a little blurb you can burrow further into. I know next to nothing about RSS, beyond knowing that it's some XML magic. I do intend to find out more. I’m just dipping my toe into the big wide world of XML, and will very soon transform all of these HTML pages into XHTML, via the tidy tool pioneered by the WWW Consortium. Meanwhile, I've found a nifty little tool at Hiveware which seriously simplifies the magic java trick I use to obfuscate my mail addresses on these pages. Highly recommended.

Oh, and it’s been raining. I know exactly how to make it rain heavily: leave my umbrella in the car before jumping on the train when the lowering clouds loom threateningly.

Trudging On

Friday, 31 January 2003, 7:16 pm

After a nicely refreshing break, I returned to work this week. I must admit to not being particularly enthused about this, but I do have a cat to feed. Wherever she is at the moment. The little devil let herself out the back door about 3:00pm, and is off having Adventures in the dark — something that is now a rare experience for her.

That aside, there is something about my back-to-work experiences that I particularly noticed. Everyday, more or less, I go for a walk at lunch time. Sometimes this is a semi-aimless stroll, other times it is a determined rush to fulfill errands. I leave and return to my current workplace in Roma Street, and usually head down George Street. Sometimes I stop at Napoleons on my way to cofee, usually at Merlos. Sometimes I need to go further, and will trudge down to the mall, or up to Pulp Fiction, or through to McGills. Occasionally I go almost all the way across to the river, or well down toward the Gardens.

Maybe because it’s been hot in the middle of the day, but I’ve come to the conclusion that the CBD of Brisbane is not pedestrian friendly. There are two elements to this, both related to our climate. You may recall that Brisbane is sub-tropical. That means that it is often hot, frequently humid, and is prone to very heavy rain (when it does rain, which is currently not happening). The problem for pedestrians is that there is very little shade or shelter from the rain through most of the CBD. When this is coupled with a good number of intersections that may require two changes of traffic lights to get through, it means that pedestrians like myself are often standing or walking in very hot sun, or pounding rain.

A very simple, and not particularly expensive, way for the Council to significantly improve the daily comfort of a very large number of people would be to put awnings over all the sidewalks in the CBD. Are you listening Jim?

The Quiet American

Tuesday, 21 January 2003, 4:38 pm

One of the most striking images of The Quiet American, the recent film by Phillip Noyce, occurs during the opening few minutes, where the lead character played by Michael Caine is ruminating in a voice-over. In the foreground is a river by night, torchlit, with small boats punting back and forth. Behind that is a busy waterfront boulevard, and behind that some forest, with storm clouds looming on the horizon. Initially it looks and sounds like a thunder storm brewing in the distance, and it takes a few minutes to become apparent that somewhere just over the horizon a battle is taking place.

I just wish that more world leaders would remember that military interventions in the destiny of nations, no matter how well intended, are as likely to succeed favourably now as they did in Vietnam in 1955.

The Joys of ipfw

Monday, 13 January 2003, 7:52 pm

I’m not going to post my firewall configuration up for all to see. That would be just asking for trouble. If you desperately want to know how I got it all working with Telstra Bigpond, I’ll reveal I did the following:

• Stopped pretty well everything coming in;
• Allow anything from 10.192.24.1, which appears to be something at Telstra that keeps knocking on the door;
• allow everything from 61.9.208.0/24, which are the Telstra DCE servers;
• allow udp to port 427, and ports 5350-5355.

The über-restrictive approach I have taken has caused some problems, as I keep finding things I’ve locked out that I didn’t want to, but for the time being that’s not too much of a hassle for me. Now that I understand how this works, I can see that the firewall settings turned on by Apple via the sharing control panel are quite fine and dandy, although they don’t do any logging, and I will probably simply revert to using those settings for convenience.

For anyone looking to figure this stuff out, there are three references that answered pretty well all my questions. First up Section 10.7 of the FreeBSD Handbook is a fine introduction to the field. Several “how to” documents expand on this greatly. Finally, the man page for ipfw will tell all — eventually.

Both the outstanding Brickhouse and Apple’s Sharing preference panel will set up a perfectly good firewall for you. The disadvantage to the Apple configuration is that you don’t get any logs. The disadvantage to Brickhouse is that it’s more complicated. And the advantage of both is that they are easier than using the Unix command line. In order to use Brickhouse, you need to turn off the Apple firewall configuration, and vice-versa. My digging around revealed that Apple store the firewall configuration in /Library/Preferences/com.apple.sharing.firewall.plist, and appear to use a little helper application to parse this and feed the results to ipfw. The start/stop button under the Sharing preference panel toggles a key called “state” in that configuration file between true and false, as well as flushing all the firewall rules.

One interesting thing that I figured out, once I realised how ipfw is used, is that you can set up your firewall using the Apple sharing panel, then monitor it with Brickhouse, since Brickhouse basically just calls ipfw show to see what’s going on. Or you can pop out to the terminal and do it yourself.

There you have it. Here endeth the ramble. If you need or want more information, I’m happy to help out. Cheers.

Cable and firewalls and sendmail, oh my.

Sunday, 12 January 2003, 9:29 pm

For the last week or so I have been trying to wrap my head around the OS X firewall (aka ipfw). I think I’ve got it more-or-less sorted out now, and will get around to writing it up in a day or so. Meanwhile, I returned to the problem of getting sendmail to behave. When last I left it behind, it was having some problems coping with the apparent local host name while I was on-line with cable. I finally got around to writing a chunk of code which alters /etc/mail/local-host-names. This gets called when the BigPond Launch! program is finished logging in, and looks up the current host name and the Rendezvous name and rebuilds /etc/mail/local-host-names with that information. Finally it sends a SIGHUP to any sendmail process it can find, so that sendmail notices the new information. The process has to run as the root user, so it’s got the suid flag set appropriately. Not a bad days work, if I say so myself, and I know a bit more than when I started, which is always satisfying.

I won’t post the code — it’s a bit long, and I haven’t written any accompanying documentation, so it’s not suitable for handing out as a freebie package to all and sundry. If you want the code, let me know, and I’ll mail it to you.

Addendum — Thursday, 6 February 2003, 9:24 am

Some other ways of dealing with the problem of local host resolution (or lack thereof) are described in this article from sendmail.org discussing new relaying features in sendmail.

Safari

Thursday, 9 January 2003, 6:41 pm

I’ve been toying with Safari and so far am very impressed. I stumbled across a comment at MacOS Rumours which I disagree with, although I do know what the author is thinking about:

I think the point is that provided that browser authors rigourously adhere to the W3C standards, authors will have less variations to worry about — they should simply write compliant pages, and users of non-compliant browsers can hassle the browser authors for releasing buggy software. Here endeth the rant.

WooHoo

Wednesday, 8 January 2003, 8:03 pm

Apple have been busy behind the scenes again. Some of the stuff announced — new versions of iMovie, iDVD and iPhoto — won’t be available for another two weeks, but meanwhile they’ve thrown the slavering hordes some bones, particularly an Apple branded web browser, Safari. Having a look at the way that Jobs presented it, and the PR around it, I get the feeling that this product, and the presentation tool “Keynote”, are very much a gauntlet thrown down in front of That Which Shall Not Be Named. Exciting times for dedicated MacAddicts!

Despite the foul-up with iCal 1.0.1, I’m impressed at Apple’s ability and willingness to get a fix out within a day or so of the problem being found. The nice thing that seems to be happening is that Apple, as a company, is once again coming back to having a clear technological vision. The very nice thing is that vision definitely includes the idea that advanced technology should be sufficiently advanced to not be an absolute pain in the neck to use. Obviously this is going to take some time — the personal computer industry has a thirty year history of not bothering to try to be user friendly, and instead relying on selling new toys to geeks. Computers have only really been consumer items for less than a decade, and Apple is the only major industry player who seriously seems to understand that consumer items have to be usable by consumers. Here endeth the ramble.

And What A Time It Was.

Sunday, 5 January 2003, 8:35 pm

The Christmas / New Year period wound up being, as usual, busy. I’m no longer sure why people refer to it as the holiday season, since generally it’s a season of frenetic activity. Oh well, it’s also supposed to be a season of good will to all men, so I guess we can be grateful that George W. has not (yet) turned Iraq into a parking lot.

Christmas day was actually very relaxing — the family gathered by a lake, had a barbecue, played around with a miniature cricket bat and oversized water pistols, and generally ate and drank ourselves into somnolence. The coordinates pegged out by those points — family, going places, eating, drinking — mapped out the rest of the week, culminating in a lovely evening with the Barry clan and various acquaintances. We spent much of the evening sitting on their balcony, eating (of course) and listening to the flying foxes fall out of the trees.

On the afternoon of the 31st I took it into my head to race out and buy some wool flannel to make a costume piece — new 15th century hose — for an upcoming event. The Ricardians are having a convention this year, with a high point to be a feast catered by the Knights Guild. So, wearing my RIII hat, I was invited to the Guild’s Twelfth Night feast, which was last night. I washed the fabric several times on the 31st, then on New Years day when it was dry sat down and cut it out. Robyn encouraged me to get out the sewing machine and start sewing right away — which was when I found that the fabric was too thick for my sewing machine to plough through! Three days of furious hand sewing ensued, but I finished with at least two hours to spare before the event.

I only wish Apple had not (as it appears) made a similar sort of rush effort to get some updates out early in the New Year. On Friday afternoon (our time) they pushed out a new version of iCal and iSync. Which I installed, and ran, only to find that it horribly garbled my calendars and schedules. The various news sites around the world have reported it, and the bug appears to be restricted to a few time zones. Helpful people have pointed out that it’s possible to revert to the previous version and fix or recover all the garbled calendars. At this point I’m guessing that Apple will have the fix out pretty quickly, since it’s a stuff-up of biblical proportions, so I’m just going to sit tight and move forward, rather than moving backwards and then forwards again. This evening I’m delving the mysteries of firewalls, trying to get the firewall built into OS X behaving just so. Unfortunately the Bigpond cable service sends out a periodic “heartbeat” signal to test if the client is still awake and active, and trying to figure out how to let that sidle through the firewall safely is a bit of a mystery at this point. Thinking is in progress — which is probably why this entry is so dull. Oh well, Wassail! to 2003.

That time of the year.

Tuesday, 24 December 2002, 12:14 pm

Earthquake!

Sunday, 15 December 2002, 3:47 pm

Terror as Brisbane is rocked by tremor

At least, that’s what the Sunday Mail says on the front page this morning. I think that the sub-editors need a cup of tea and a good lie down, as they may be a little overwrought.

We were rudely woken last night at about 11:40 by a very loud bang that rocked the house that turns out to have been what is variously reported as a 2.4, 2.8 and 3.0 on the Richter scale earthquake whose epicenter was 6 km in a direct line beneath our bath tub. Robyn’s first thought was that a very fat man had jumped on to our roof — remember, we were asleep at the time — but quickly realised that, apart from a reindeer-drawn sleigh, there was nowhere for someone to jump from. I went back to sleep surmising that it may have been a meteor breaking up high in the atmosphere.

A quick poke around the internet showed that the world has kept on spinning, and the dozen or so earthquakes of magnitude 4 and above that have happened in the past 24 hours are much more interesting than our little belch. Still, it’s fun to see how many different things people thought they experienced. We have a report of a loud whooshing sound like a train preceding the bang (from someone near the rail line), to a rumbling shake that went on for at least 10 seconds (from someone without a watch and a poor idea of how long 10 seconds is). For the record: a big bang that woke me up with the unimaginitive cry of “What the hell was that?”. Not even a Vogon Constructor fleet to account for the noise. How disappointing.

Robyn is convinced that the odd behaviour of Miss Kitty 10 days ago was a predictor of the earthquake. Now, there is a lot of anecdotal evidence that animals behave oddly just before an earthquake, so there’s probably something in her theory. I have suggested to the cat that next time, could she give us a warning a little closer to the time? When I went downstairs to check on her last night she was sprawled on the bonnet of the car, giving me a dirty look because I shone the torch in here eyes while she was trying to sleep.

Correction

Monday, 16 December 2002, 8:37 pm

The seismic record shows that the event did go for ten seconds — I must have slept through the first eight seconds. Also, a lot of people have reported hearing two bangs. Which suggests that my reflexes are glacial, or I slept through the first bang

The Seventh Son — Reay Tannahill

Sunday, 1 December 2002, 5:22 pm

It would be terribly easy, and not particularly fair, to lampoon Reay Tannahill’s fictionalised history of Richard III covering the years 1471 to 1485. It must be said at the outset that it is not a bad book. It is just not a very good book.

Setting aside its subject matter, taken on its own, The Seventh Son would be a fairly inoffensive romantic fantasy. Not particularly interesting, and not presenting any particularly interesting character studies. Considering the subject, the implied historical veracity of the piece exposes it to more serious criticism, although poor editing and a markedly uneven pace are independent of its historicity.

Reay Tannahill explicitly states in her foreword and appended notes that she was attempting to construct a viable portrait of “Richard the man” from relatively dry materials, and from a sort of negative imprint left in the revisionist documents of the Tudor period authors. Since it is difficult to present a character on his own, without a supporting cast to interact with, she has also painted in a sketch of Ann Nevill and Francis Lovell. Other characters are more caricature than sketch.

The story moves through the key points of Ricardian history that are so familiar after the reclamation of the crown by Edward IV up to Bosworth. The author has attempted to paint Richard for the reader by showing his reaction to and actions within these events, along with a handful of stock vignettes — Richard at play, Richard in bed, Richard eating, Richard going to church. At no point does she succeed in presenting a fully rounded character. Given that she was in essence taking us behind the curtain, Tannahill has missed the opportunity to explore motive or conflict around such possible points of high psychological drama as the execution of Hastings, the trial of Clarence, or even the death of Richard’s son.

The flat and uninspiring presentation of the narrative, and the flat and uninteresting character portrayals, are not the book’s worst problems. Fictional portrayal of historical characters of the medieval or late medieval periods is extraordinarily difficult. It is quite difficult to come to grips with the medieval mind, but one thing that is obvious is that most people five or six centuries ago really did think quite differently to people today. Indeed one of the more interesting things about the fifteenth century for students of humanity is that from the explosion of autobiographical and other secular writing a change from a medieval mindset to a more-or-less recognisably modern mindset was in progress. Unfortunately the characters in The Seventh Son generally sound, act, and think like the characters in a soap opera. The Wars Of The Rose resemble a season of The Bold and The Beautiful.

Generally the history and descriptions of costume, food, housing, harness and daily life are reasonably accurate, although where errors occur they are rather severe. Coming across Alexander Stuart, sometime pretender to the Scottish thrown, speaking in what is apparently supposed to be a broad Edinburgh brogue evinced a physical wince. At the very least, if the author insists on writing regional accents for characters, she could have given Stuart a French accent.

Tannahill proposes the death of the princes in the Tower to have been at the hand of Reginald Bray, sometime henchman to Margaret Beaufort, without fully explaining what Margaret would have gained from this apart from a vague plot to improve Henry Tudor’s claim. The subsequent vilification of Richard is seen as something of an afterthought. Similarly, and for no readily apparent reason, the author has chosen to imagine some vague plot more-or-less instigated by Margaret to convince Hastings to rebel against Richard.

I was left with the feeling that Reay Tannahill could have written a better book had she not set her sights so high, and had much more editorial assistance. Had she chosen to write a romantic portrayal of some minor noble or merchant or scullery maid on the periphery of and witness to great events, a more satisfying result may have been obtained. In collections of documents such as the Paston letters are a wealth of materials that give a fairly clear idea of the mindset and motivations of individuals of at least one strata of the society of late fifteenth century England. Getting inside the mind of people we have virtually no personal information about is close to impossible.

I certainly do not discourage anyone interested in this period from reading The Seventh Son — it may prove mildly amusing, if ultimately unsatisfying.

The Seventh Son, Reay Tannahill, Headline Book Publishing, London, 2001

OS X Scanner Support — Sort of

Thursday, 14 November 2002, 5:33 pm

In a wonderful display of good customer relations, HP have quietly released a driver for the HP 5370C (and others) under OS X. The download — all 55Mb of it — is listed as being for 10.1.4 and 10.1.5 (go figure that one out), but so far it is working OK for me under 10.2.2. Let’s ignore the fact that it’s something like 18 months since they first said they would release the driver real soon now, and the fact that I filled in the web forms to be notified when this was released (the support site indicates it was released October 25). It seems to be working, and that’s what matters.

Well, when I say it’s working, I mean that it’s “working”. First of all, the installer is awful. There’s no real indication of what the different install options will do, and no way of controlling it easily. Oh, and you need to reboot when it has finished. The installer drops OS X versions of the old OS 9 scanner programs in, and ReadIris 6.x, some kernel extensions and other system bits, and a stack of fonts you don’t want or need if you don’t want to use ReadIris (I don’t have any real need for OCR). If you have a font with same name, or installed somewhere other than /Library/Fonts — too bad, the fonts get installed anyway. This is fundamentally a pile of fetid dingo kidneys.

The good news is that the buttons on the front of the scanner will, indeed, launch the scanner software. The scanner software will, indeed scan. That’s about the end of the good news. The “Preferences…” menu option does nothing. The separate HP ScanJet Controls program does not remember it’s preferences. You cannot run two of the HP scanner programs at once, not even this preference program. You cannot specify additional destinations for the “scan to” operation — for heaven’s sake, you can’t even scan direct to Mail.app! No plugin has been included for Photoshop, and no TWAIN plugin either. Oh, and the Apple Image Capture.app still doesn’t see the scanner. This is fundamentally a pile of fetid dingo kidneys.

Despite installing help files, the Help command from within the scanning software does nothing. The web link goes to an obsolete page. The help menu allows you to turn on and off “Smart Friends”, without any sort of feedback on the effects of this. What is a Smart Friend? I have lots of those, and I’m not sure I want to turn them off.

As far as I can see, HP have done the barest minimum required to get an OS X scanner out the door. It works, and that’s about all you can say about it. They didn’t even bother to include any icons other than the blocky OS 9 ones. Alright, so this was pretty well the last thing that I needed before I could be completely classic free. Nevertheless, this package is pretty well a pile of fetid dingo kidneys.

Rant Of The Day V — What are these guys smoking?

Thursday, 14 November 2002, 3:49 pm

The industry we’ve come to know and love, represented by such community-minded companies as Sony, Universal, Paramount, MGM and Time Warner have launched Movielink. For those of you who haven’t heard about it — in other words pretty well everyone — this is a scheme whereby you can download, legally, digital versions of movies for anywhere between about $4 and $10 (Australian). The movies will come in at about 500mb, take about an hour to download over a broadband link, and display in a window on your computer roughly the same size as a playing card. Now, I don’t know what the costs of broadband are in the US, the only region which currently has access to this service, but in Australia downloading that amount of data will come in at around $15 Australian. So for between $19 and $25 Australian you can watch a tiny copy of a movie — within 24 hours — that you could walk down the street and rent the tape of for a week for about $3.

I look forward to seeing our own telco monopoly launching it’s version of this. I’d expect, based on past practices, that the rental cost will come in at around $10-$15, which is to say about $30 for the film. Then, when nobody takes up the service, Senator Luddite can once again issue a press release saying this proves that this new-fangled internet thing will never catch on.

Here endeth the rant.

Colophon

FAQ

Contact

Archive

Return to top