Category: Random

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…

I can very much recommend Clay’s latest piece: FCC, Weblogs and Inequality to anyone who’s even vaguely interested in either FCC regulation of the airwaves or the nature of inequalities in webloggia. I’m afraid I’m going to spoil the ending for you, because I think it’s particularly pertinent to some of the recent discussions we’ve been having:

The one incoherent view is the belief that a free and diverse media will naturally tend towards equality. The development of weblogs in their first five years demonstrates that is not always true, and gives us reason to suspect it may never be true. Equality can only be guaranteed by limiting either diversity or freedom. The best thing that could come from the lesson of weblog popularity would be an abandoning of the idea that there will ever be an unconstrained but egalitarian media utopia, a realization ideally followed by a more pragmatic discussion between the “diverse and free” and “diverse and equal” camps.

My only issue with the piece is that the concept of equality is reduced to equality of audience/readership/influence and only briefly alludes to equality of opportunity.

A few things that I’m taking the time to place inside my mind palace – as ever mostly culled from my favourite weblogs and news sources (see the Weblogs panel on the right):

• Credit Card Signature Prank;
• Lunch with Steve then Dinner with Bill;
• B3ta to calm down on the gay stuff;
• Rob’s Top Mac OS X Hints;
• Gecko tape will stick you to ceiling;
• Dictionary definition of the word bletcherous;
• Richard Chamberlain opens up about being gay;
• Stunningly misogynist piece by Andrew Orlowski;
• Bishops eye pastors to fight gay marriage ;
• The FBI has been reading my diary;
• Where next for Warblogging?

Jesus! What’s wrong with you people at the moment? I don’t have time to talk about all the cool things out there, let alone all the things that just tweak my interest. Damn you for making me linklog. Damn you to hell and back…

Blogs-Clogging the net?

• Snowdeal on the Blog Clog
• Phil Ringnalda’s response
• Snowdeal responds again
• The Guardian on the “Blog Clog”
• Some Google Search “Non-Issues”

Entertainment

• Joss Whedon on what happens next
• Pictures of kittens!
• Vincent Gallo Quits
• Chris Bachalo on New X-men

Geek Stuff

• Google celebrates the genius of their staff
• More news about Dark Matter
• Towards Next-generation URLs

Design Stuff

• The Quiet Death of the Relaunch
• Stunning pictures of New York Gargoyles
• The future of beard-design
• A stylish redesign from Ernie
• PowerPoint style outline of Tufte on Powerpoint

There are too many sources for this stuff than I can actually count – but almost all of them will be on my list of weblogs on the right. If you liked this stuff, I’d very much recommend you wander through them at later leisure…

The last week and a half or so has seen me in fairly odd headspace – I’ve been pursuing a number of work-related leads, talking to substantial numbers of intriguing people and helping out friends with projects large and small. I have a number of forms I have to fill in and a number of phone calls I should be making. I have – of course – a number of bills to pay.

All this being the case, I’ve not had a chance to post as much as I would normally like. I’ve got a piece on the boil that I want to try and get out over the weekend if possible, but in the meantime you’re going to have to make-do with scraps.

• Interview with Brent Simmons
  Among other really interesting insights comes a surprising and plausible statement: “I probably wouldn’t hire anybody for anything unless they had a weblog.”
• Bucket ‘O’ iPods
  “At that price,” an Apple source said, “we’re actually losing money on each iPod. “But we make it up in volume,” he claimed.
• Scott Mills’ Gay Bar
  What total unmitigated wanker thought this was a non-insulting, non-degrading, non-offensive idea? No, really. I want to know…
• Aaron Swartz’ Buffy Epiphany
  “On February 21, 2003 on watched my first episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Since then, I have watched every aired episode of Buffy, spinoff Angel, and creator Joss Whedon?s other show, Firefly, from the beginning, in order…”
• Making Water Go Uphill
  This year’s Chelsea Flower Show includes an Escher-esque fountain in which water travels uphill. My mother is at the show this year, with a floral arrangement from Wroxham Flower Club.

After a large number of protests from users of this site, I’m going to have to open up my comments-related problems to the floor. But first things first, I want to talk really briefly about pair.com – a hosting organisation that I honestly can’t say enough nice things about. They’re reasonably priced, helpful and have been genuinely reliable over the last few years. I’ve still got the Barbelith Underground running on a pair server, and with remarkably few problems… But there has been one thing that they haven’t been particularly ideal for: hosting Movable Type based sites.

In fact, my problems with running Movable Type on Pair kept me using Blogger for about a year longer than I’d expected. Pair have this kind of time-out running on cgi-processes that effectively means that (unless you know to run everything through cgiwrap) any decent-sized MT operation (say saving a new post) may cause the system to throw a wobbly. And you can forget importing large number of posts from other systems. I had months of trouble with that.

I want to make it clear that once I did install the site through cgiwrap, I didn’t have any trouble – so in a sense my only gripe is that Pair are different enough from other hosts in the world to require you to go through a different installation process. I can’t exactly blame them for that. And other people’s experience of their hosting may vary from mine, of course…

Anyway – back to my problem. I’ve got MT running cheerfully on Pair’s servers now. It’s all very smooth – except in one particularly difficult area. Everyone who uses my site realises quite quickly that I’ve got a problem with comments. In fact, often when someone attempts to post a comment to the site, they get returned a Server 500 error. In fact normally the comments have been saved and it’s just the weblog page that isn’t rebuilt. But people don’t tend to realise this, so there’s routine multiple-posting. It’s profoundly annoying. Does anyone have any brilliant ideas about how I could fix this problem. Is it something that I can do to make it less likely to happen? Or do I need to go and attack Pair with pinking shears?

I’ve just seen the final episode of Buffy. Here is my initial response:

I don’t really know what to say, because I’ve kind of been excited
about the whole thing but also kind of dreading it, because it would
have to be good, really – it would have to be good *enough* to be
a fitting end to all that had gone before, and I think it was. I really
think it was…

I’m delighted Angel came in and got out of it so soon. I’m delighted
that they didn’t push the Angel / Spike conflict and I’m really glad
that finally, at the end of days, they let things lighten up – to return
to the simplest elements.

Buffy’s realisation is interesting and unexpected. You get so used to
these bits of lore that you forget that someone had to think of them
eventually – be they man or god – and that things can can be remade
differently…

There were a lot of people they could have killed for cheap effect, but they
didn’t. The deaths were gruesome but valiant. Anya has never
been more glorious. Almost unmourned though, which was a bit creepy…

Andrew survived. He should and he did. He’s there to show that there’s
nothing simple about redemption. It’s not just throwing yourself in a pit.
Buffy’s always been better than that. And the little girls all around the
world… Awesome touch. Really nice.

Spike. Spike. Spike. They needed more Buffy subtext and explanation of this
stuff, but he was still pretty awesome. And I don’t know as yet whether
that means the move to Angel is a con or not. Certainly he’s never been
more glorious. It makes me wonder about the vampire with a soul
thing from Angel. Is his story over?

Willow the White, Xander and Dawn in the corridors. Shopping. Malls. School Buses and Slayers. It might not have been the ending that we dreamed of, but only because some parts (small parts maybe) weren’t dreamable about. And if you were worried about the scale of Willo’s tiny evil temple last year – then you’re not going to be let-down this year. This is pretty damn huge…

This is essentially a vague attempt to make it look like I’m not the most boring person in the world who only ever writes or thinks about weblogs, social software and work.

While I have the opportunity, I’m trying to get a few things done around the site. I’ve removed the files section of the site (which is where I used to put all my longer pieces) and I’ve put those posts back into the rest of the site. And to make it easier to find them (and some other stuff from around the weblog that’s worth preserving), I’ve created a best of… section that is essentially a categorised guide to stuff that other people might actually find useful.

I still think there’s some woolliness around the edges, and please god don’t read the introductory copy on some of the category pages – it’s bloody terrible. But at least this now does mean (for example) that I can start pointing towards the social software or the personal publishing parts of the site… And no – I’ve not planned for separate RSS feeds yet, so don’t even ask…