Category: Random

Caption: Helsinki at midnight. Currently: Nervous about Aula Meeting of Minds 2003.

Being a feeble transcription of some things that seemed really funny once over lunch with Cal, and which we tried – and failed – to get Webb interested in.

The Ten Commandments of Weblogging

1. I am the log of the web. You shall have no other blogs but me.
2. You shall not make for yourself other weblogs on other content management systems and look at them and get all wistful and think about changing to them instead.
3. You shall not mention dodgy weblog CMSs in the same breath as proper ones like Blogger and Moveable Type. Bloxsom is not a proper weblogging system. It’s a potato.
4. Remember the Bloggie nomination day. For it is truly a holy day and if you don’t remember and self-nominate and vote for yourself lots of times and get your friends to do so too, then you’re probably screwed. But be careful, ‘cos if Choire finds out you’re in serious shit.
5. Honor your blog-father and your blog-mother at blogtree.com – or get blog-smacked-around-the-head by Dave Winer.
6. You shall not murder the English language (or whatever language it is you speak) just because you’re l33t. Particularly not if you’re a teenager. Especially not if you like Linkin Park.
7. Thou shalt not commit weblog-adultery with other people’s hard-earned links unless you carefully mark them with a “via” credit. The same applies to their girlfriends, boyfriends and members of their immediate family.
8. Thou shalt not steal your design (except from Kottke).
9. Thou shalt not lie on your weblog (seriously, that’s bad).
10. You shall not covet your neighbour’s domain; you shall not covet your neighbour’s html, nor his homemade CMS, nor his hosting arrangement, nor anything that is your neighbour’s. Except maybe his traffic.

So there’s a guy outside the back of my flat who has lit a bonfire against the back wall of my building. The flames are licking up the wall. There is a large empty courtyard behind him. But no – the bonfire obviously has to be lit on the building. I asked him what he was doing with the whole “lighting a big fire against my building” thing. He evidently thought I was reacting entirely strangely about his completely legitimate arson attempts because he looked quite surprised by my question. Maybe he’s been setting fire to things for about ten years and no one in England has felt able to comment before. “I’m sure he’ll go away eventually dear… Just grin and bear it, eh?”

So anyway, it turns out he’s trying to getting rid of paper “with the name of god on it” and didn’t want to be disrespectful by putting it in the bin. He thought he’d best light the bonfire against my building (flames licking up the wall) during the day, “because [he] didn’t think people would be at home”, so clearly it would be less inconvenient for them. Unless of course they got home and they didn’t – you know – have a flat any more. I was terribly polite. I asked him if he knew what he was doing, he asserted he did. I looked a bit uncomfortable, but I didn’t want to be rude. So I came back inside and left him to it. Funny old world.

A few interesting links about weblogs that have emerged recently (including a few about new-favourite-subject: permalinks) – many of these links taken from Many to Many:

• Permalinks considered harmful
  “So basically, we have a nice concept of weblogs, but one of the key elements, permalinks, is being treated like a necessary evil, and hidden away. Some companies even break the permalinks on occasion; not even providing proper redirection. Clearly, some better solution is needed.”
• Permalinks considered harmful discussion
  “Best thing I can come up with is a replacement of the permalink with an immediate ‘blog this’ embedded piece of javascript or something that rather than linking through to the post in question, triggers a posting window with the correct permanent link already filled in. But that doesn’t solve the problem of people wanting to throw entries around between themselves and their friends by e-mail…”
• Blogs are not democratic
  “Blogs are therefore something which empowers the individual, the blogger, regardless of the wishes, and therefore the votes, of a collective who might wish to have a say in what a blogger writes. The correct analogy is therefore the market place..”
• Blog Post Analysis
  “Blogs are different. They are made of blog-posts and not web-pages. So they have to be treated differently. The correct units when dealing with blogs are the blog-posts and their permalinks. Blog Post Analysis (BPA) is an attempt in building a platform for blog analytics by identifying and presenting the fundamental units of blogs, the blog-post.”

I’m not sure why I’m bothering collating this set of links, because you’ll all flick through the first article, click on the realplayer movie of rectal endoscopy, watch in awed silence, howl in terror and grossed-out intrigue at the end and then leave and never come back to my site. Nonetheless:

• Is the rectum a cinema? [real]
• Learn to play Blackjack
• Could this be the digital radio for me?
• Gizmodo gadgets from 1983
• A Guide to A-list Webloggers [via Hammersley]

Five asides:

• Matt Jones on living in space
  “How many of you, like me, had shelves full of books full of images of suburban life being enjoyed on the edge of plexiglass toroid in geostationery orbit?” I did! In fact I had the very book that his featured photo comes from.
• Technorati Search
  Nearly three years after Blogger’s internal search facility keeled over, we finally have a replacement – and one that will help you search 369,481 active sites.
• Dark Side of the 80s
  I want this album. I want this album lots. It’s got Eloise by The Damned on it. That’s got to rock. I think it’s probably time for someone to buy it for me.
• Danny sucks at DUX 2003
  In one of the funniest pieces of writing about professional life that I’ve read recently, Danny reveals precisely how badly he sucked on a panel discussion. Well worth a read.
• Bumplist
  An interesting model this – a mailing list that can only have fifty people on it at any one time. As someone signs up, someone else is booted off. I lasted about ten hours on the list before I was ejected. In that time I sent one message and received one in return. I wasn’t overly impressed. More interesting, perhaps, would have been a model where if someone doesn’t post for four days (long weekend), they get booted off, freeing up a space for someone new. Otherwise, it’s more of a thought-experiment than a useful project.

Bugger it, I’m adding another couple because they’re just too damn good:

• The Guy in Memento Should Have Had a Blog
• Boiling water in space!

Celebrating the 30,000 word point, Cory posts a 2,000 excerpt from his upcoming book /usr/bin/god (thanks to The Link Machine]:

“You’re the kind of sneering, creative, self-important ‘consultant’ that sucked the economy dry. You’re a carpetbagger, Mason. You’re a phony. You have a Humanities degree. You know the gag-lines from last night’s South Park, but you can’t write code from stubs. Wherever there’s an entrepreneur with a great idea and a little money, there you are, like a tapeworm, eating the company out from the inside. I’ve seen a thousand of you, Mason, and there’s no more place for you in the Valley. Go find another industry to pick on, and get the fuck out of mine.” He delivered this all with a wet smile and a charming crinkle in his eye and only the veins standing out in his neck mirrored the hostility of his words.

Having been woken up from my post-unblocking-drains late-Friday-night sofa-doze by a bored Los Angelene, I shall pass time by casting a few web-pebbles into the memetic voting urn. I will make the links fun and not all about work stuff. I promise.

• Stewart Butterfield as a South Park Character
• Fun-looking trailer for Pixar/Disney’s The Incredibles
• Folkways Love / Folkways Hate [via boingboing]
• Quicktime movie of the ‘Six Feet Under’ Credits [via Jason]

I don’t know whether it’s because I spend time working on user interfaces or whether it’s because I’m profoundly anal, but the smallest imperfections in consistency in a UI can drive me mad. Weirdly, the large ones don’t affect me so much – I suppose because large UI problems make applications essentially unusable. But those small ones… Nnngh… They’re like specks of dust in your eyes that makes you weep with frustration, or the solitary grain of sand in your sandwich that sets your teeth on edge…

So while the debate rages around the internet about failings of iSync 1.1 – with people complaining about bugs, problems with firewalls, lost data – I’m secretly delighted. One of the most profoundly annoying (and infinitesimally tiny) design inconsistencies in the application has finally been removed. I can sleep again at last!

In Mac OSX, you can choose to have shortcuts or indicators for a variety of applications sit in your Finder menu bar. Next to the system clock you can have battery power indicators, volume indicators, iChat status indicators, Airport reception indicators… The list goes on. Each one of these indicators is (by default) a black symbol placed onto the aqua-style textured background of the bar. When you select one of them, a menu drops down from it, the background for the icon turns blue, and the icon itself turns white. Except for iSync! This one remained black – with a small aura of white around it. It drove me insane.

Now though – today – with iSync 1.1 slowly sputtering and crashing over the sheer weight of my Safari bookmarks, I’m at peace at last. They’ve fixed it! The rollover is clean and simple. It looks right! It fits! Now all I have to do is find a way of sanding off the tiny imperfection in my iBook trackpad.

Which tiny imperfections drive you insane?

For some unknown reason I spent much of yesterday evening cooking a Cherry & Almond Cake. The finished product is a little burnt around the edges, but is extremely nice. Maybe a little too sweet…