Reese Witherspoon
Sad to see that Reese Witherspoon has broken up with her husband of seven years. However, Reese is on my short list of ladies who I would possibly leave my wife for. Kylie and Minnie Driver are also on the list.
So perhaps the split puts into jeopardy my own relationship. The closest I came to this happening was when I happened upon Minnie in a deli on Broadway last October. We didn’t speak; she didn’t even look at me. But that’s the closest I’ve come. Oh, and I touched Kylie’s sister’s arm in HMV Newcastle once.
Thanks for all the feedback
A little under a week ago, I requested some feedback on the old look-and-feel. I was delighted by the amount of feedback that came back. So after some half-assed futzing mid-week, I sat down in earnest (and indeed in the living room) last night to try to introduce a new look-and-feel. Around you are the results of a full battery-life’s worth of CSS work.
The graphic design for the new look is courtesy of Elise. Thanks! The coding has all been done by myself, which is a miracle, as it’s more a case of trial and error than anything more scientific. Padding and margins have been confusing, and I’ve little idea why some of the things work, but they seem to. The stylesheet feels to me a little like a house of cards, ready to collapse with the slightest breath of wind.
All of the futzing was done in Production (1. Make change, 2. Refresh homepage, 3. See what’s broken, 4. Go to 1.), mainly because I didn’t really listen when Rob told me how to access Dev. After all, it’s hardly a mission-critical site.
Anyway, there’s still some stuff to be done, but here are the main changes to date, in light of the feedback.
- First of all, I’ve gone for an 800 pixel width. Francis complained that on his super-duper 20" widescreen monitor, the full-width layout meant crazy line-lengths. I’ve kept with 800 as 17% of people are still using an 800×600 resolution
- The search box was deemed too big. I’ve made it such that on regular settings, the button (which now reads Go rather than Search) sits alongside the text-box, saving some real estate
- Meebo Me’s gone. People (Rob) were complaining that it took a while to load, and it was frustrating that a new one had to load each time users navigated around the site. (My Web 2.0 skills are not up to dealing with the latter issue.) I love Meebo, but it’s staying off for the time being
- Rob (a different one) liked the big font size. I’ve kept that. I’ve also got rid of the tacky page fold (top right) taking the advice of both Rob and Francis. (That took me ages to create! Harumph.)
- There’s a new colour scheme. Francis had a dig at the old one, but gave no recommendations for improvement. Hopefully this will make him happy. The header even incorporates some of my life loves: pi, primes and sushi
- I’ve ignored the advice of Rob A. to include more porn, and indeed that of Andy Pandy to "Shut the f**kin’ thing down"
- Oh, and I’ve started (with this one) to tag posts with more than one tag. The functionality was always there, I just chose not to use it.
There are still a few things to do. Firstly, I need to talk to Elise about the possibility of her making a few tweaks to the look-and-feel. For instance, I want the Posted by bar to have a light-blue background, but when I try to do that myself in the stylesheet, loads of other stuff inherits the same background. Also, some of the spacing and sizing needs a GD’s eye, I feel.
Also, I need to work on the comment form, as per Rob’s advice. Rob: if you’re reading, it would be good to get some more input on how it could best be changed.
I need to figure out how not to repeat the date line for posts created on the same date. Some reading about the Smarty template engine needed for that.
And finally, I need to work on some new, more appealing left-hand modules. I can’t guarantee satisfying Dominic’s yearning for numbers, but I’m hoping to make a more useful sidebar. Again, this needs some template changes, which I find more difficult than the CSS stuff. If you make an error in CSS, it looks funny; mistakes in the templates and the site doesn’t work.
Your feedback (constructive) on the new look would be gratefully received.
Odd accessibility test
It’s good that accessibility is getting some press on the BBC’s website. I watched Click, the TV equivalent.
It was slightly odd that the challenge set for Emma Tracey, a blind journalist for the BBC’s Ouch magazine, was to buy a book from Amazon. Not sure how useful the book will be when it arrives.
I would have thought that Amazon were leading the way on accesibility, but it appears not, and it proved a frustrating experience.
Abusive commenter: found
The latest comment I received on the current look-and-feel is nothing if not offensive. I had a strong inkling as to who had written it, someone who I would strangely classify as a friend (strange, given the comment), an ex-client indeed.
He denied the comment by IM ("i didn’t comment…"), so I investigated further. I found the source IP address and ran it through GeoBytes’ IP locator. It found that it came from America, New York, Brooklyn. It estimated that it might be from Ocean Avenue, a mere 2.1 miles from the workplace of the person who formed my original inkling.
The chances of two randomly chosen American points being within 2.1 miles of one another is around 0.00025% (1 in 400,000). Too much of a coincidence in my book.
Firefox 2.0: schweet
I downloaded it at 11:30pm BST yesterday, an hour before its advertised 16:30pm PDT launch.
So far, I like it. I like it a lot. The menus seem more logical, the look-and-feel more professional and clean, and it has some nice new features, including remembering form completion, useful for my site users (who used to lose a comment entirely if they didn’t pass my captcha).
There are quite a few important extensions (and less important, but nice-to-have themes) that don’t yet work on 2.0. (I particularly miss the TinyUrl Creator and Fasterfox.) Hopefully they’ll be upgraded soon.
I have one gripe. In 1.5, if I typed a keyword or two in the address bar (multiple words separated by spaces), it automatically looked it up in Google and loaded the first result returned. Very useful if you’re confident that your keyword(s) will bring your desired site to the top of Google’s listings. Not sure whether it was an extension that I’d activated, or whether it was a feature that has since deemed unnecessary. Either way, a little annoying.
Nonetheless, if you’re on 1.5, I urge you to upgrade. If you’re on Internet Explorer, I implore you to make the switch.
Latte has a hard a
Please don’t lengthen the a of latte. Ever. It’s Italian for milk, and should be pronounced as such, even if you’re a tw*t from Fulham.
Thank you.
What gender are you?
Based on my last 15 posts, I’m deemed to be male. You?
Invention: Sellotape with a coloured tear
So, ask anyone whether Sellotape (Scotch tape to my American fan-base) is any good, and they’ll respond: you betcha!
Ask them whether they find it frustrating, and they’ll echo their first response. Why? Because they can never find the end.
Sellotape/Scotch: if you’re reading, here’s the solution. Invent a tape with three thin layers. The bottom layer is the sticky stuff; the top layer is the smooth bit; the newly introduced technologically-advanced layer sits in the middle.
This middle layer would react to air, turning a lovely magenta colour on exposure. (The colour could be a user preference; I’ve used magenta for illustrative purposes, mainly because it’s quite a nice word.)
When the user severs the tape, either with teeth or scissors, a tiny cross-section of the tape is exposed to the air, and changes colour within a few seconds. The next person who comes along wanting to wrap presents can find the end of the roll by simply finding the magenta stripe across the width of the roll.
Marvellous idea!
Site re-design: your feedback needed
If you’re reading this post, then I would love it if you could comment on it.
I’m currently going through a site re-design (with the help of my infinitely better-qualified friend Elise). This is in part because it’s long overdue, and in part because the current design was a tactical change to the one I used when Stateside: its reference to New York’s subway line numbering was no longer relevant now I’m living in London town, so the header has become somewhat bare.
So, I’d like to know:
- What you like about the current site
- What you don’t like about the current site
- What you’d like to be changed/moved/removed
- What you’d like to see that’s not there right now.
I’m afraid that I won’t be able to address the drivel that appears in the posts, but hopefully I’ll be able to address some of the looky and feely and positioningy issues.
Obviously, once the changes take effect, this post will be out of place, as the answers to 2, 3 and 4 will be null.
Please, comment away!
A generic loyalty card
Caffè Nero runs a loyalty scheme such that every tenth cup of coffee is free. They do this through a card that they keep stamping on each visit. Today, I received my ninth stamp, making tomorrow morning cheaper than it otherwise might be.
Many organisations, or groups of organisations, use loyalty schemes in which you carry a personalised card around with you to swipe whenever you happen upon their store. I carry cards for Boots and Sainsbury’s. (My thoughts on such schemes can be found here.)
What if there were a scheme with a card that was brand agnostic, but which simply identified you as an individual? It would not store any data (except the unique identity of the card), but would allow stores to identify your uniqueness and act accordingly. Caffè Nero would not know who I was, merely that my next latte should be free. Meanwhile, other companies could buy into the card by offering its own small-scale loyalty rewards. I would have thought that the concept would appeal to smaller-scale retailers keen to join the loyalty world without the expense of introducing its own scheme.
I’ve not thought through a cost model yet. It was dreamt up on tonight’s journey home.
Grapes vs. raisins
Grapes and raisins are up there with the best of the fruit. They didn’t make the top five, but they’d certainly be in the top ten. But here’s my question: why are raisins so much cheaper than grapes?
Ocado has 500g of raisins (made from Californian seedless grapes) available for £0.75. 500g of green, seedless grapes (a juicy and flavoursome grape) cost £1.99.
The bag of raisins will contain way more raisins than the bunch of grapes will grapes—I’d suggest that five times as many would be a conservative estimate. That would make the relative cost of a raisin 7.5% of that of your grape, and it has to go through a longer lifecycle before arriving in your kitchen.
The only two explanations I can think of for the price differential are:
- The time criticality of the grape’s sale
- The grape’s increased storage requirements.
Both of these suggest that the premium is for the circumstances surrounding their transport, rather than the product itself.
Problems solving my taxi problem
I’m having some difficulty solving my own taxi problem. Thomas Viner has commented with a generic solution, suggesting that the driver’s expected distance from home is (100n)^0.5, after n 10km journeys.
Currently, I’m simply trying to figure out the expected distance after journey 2. Here’s where I’ve got.
After the first journey, she is 10km from home, by definition. As such, it’s immaterial to the puzzle which direction she took in this first journey. After journey 2, she lies on a circle with a radius of 10km and with a centre 10km from home. This circle passes through her home, and at its furthest, through a point 20km from her home.
I’ve adopted two scenarios: one in which her second journey results in her being in the semicircle nearest home (not necessarily meaning she ends up nearer home, however); another in which she ends up in the more distant semicircle.
Let’s take the first of these.
Going through the trig., assuming a is the angle between the direction of her next journey and that of her home (less than 90° in this semicircle), I think that her distance from home after the second journey will be 10*((2−2cos(a))^0.5). If a = 0°, then this is 0km (i.e. at home); if a is 90°, then it’s 14.14km. Pythagoras would support this if he were alive: root of 200.
In the farther semicircle (where a is now between 90° and 180°), the equivalent formula is 10*((2+2cos(180-a))^0.5). Again, this equates to 14.14km at 90°, and goes up to 20km at the 180° point. Things seem to be working.
Here’s the problem: I don’t know how to convert this into an expected value. (Maybe I did once, during my 17 years of maths schooling, but if I did, I don’t now.)
What I have done is calculate the average distance from each of the 3,600 0.1° intervals around the circle. This is coming out at 12.73km. Thomas’ formula calculates the expected distance as 14.14km. The discrepancy between the two suggests that one of us is most definitely wrong. Currently, I don’t know who, but 14.14km certainly seems high.
From photo to 3D, automatically
An absolutely stunning piece of technology from those clever folks as CMU. Thanks to Elise for pointing this out.
“Rank after” dates
All food in the UK comes with a best before date, which I believe is defined by the manufacturer.
First of all, this date should be defined by an independent body. This would save the likes of Jif Lemon would likely be given a longer shelf-life than the ten months which they currently get (a cunning pancake day-related marketing ploy).
In addition to the best before date, food should be given two additional dates:
- A still OK before date; and
- A rank after date
The superlative nature of the phrase best before suggests that the quality of the product is still above par after that date.
Depending on the day of opening, milk is generally good for a full day, possibly two, after the best before date. While dried and tinned goods don’t have a genuine expiry date, as far as I can tell.
Fed up of page load times
I’m fed up of ever-increasing page load times. Often the site itself can load quickly, but fails to do so because it’s waiting for technorati widgets, ads coming in from sites all and sundry, flickr feeds, you name it.
Please put all of these at the end of your html, so that the stuff that I care about loads before the interminable delays kick in. Thanks.
Whatever happened to the simple ol’ internet?
Cute Excel conditional formatting quirk
I conditionally format cell A10 based on the contents of cell A1, using the formula bit of the conditional formatting feature and leaving A1 undollared. I then copy A10 in its entirety to A9. Because Excel can’t base its formatting on A0 (as such a cell doesn’t exist), it instead bases it on A65536.
Quite cute really.
Doorjamb
Lovely word, meaning the surround of a door. Worthy for both its combination of letters and its beautiful pronunciation.
Extras: season 2
I’ve watched all five episodes to date, many of them online, as I’ve often forgotten that they’ve been on.
I have to say, I’m thoroughly disappointed. Apart from the awards episode two weeks ago (rightly pointed out by Nicola), it’s been mediocre comedy at best, living off the success and genius of the first season.
Last week’s episode (Sir Ian McKellen) was purely shameful. Cringeworthy excuse for comedy that didn’t warrant BBC’s airtime. I’ve filed this under BBC blunders,as I feel it is one.
My simplified taxi problem
Let’s assume that taxi journeys are all of an equal distance (10km, say), and that they go straight in a random direction. At the end of one journey, the driver picks up another passenger at that very drop-off spot.
After her first journey, the taxi driver is ten kilometres from her start point. But what is her expected distance from her original start point after a second journey? And is there a generic formula that tells us how far she is from his origin after n journeys?
With regard to the second journey, there is a tiny chance (infinitely small) that she will end up exactly at the start point; and there is an equally miniscule possibility that she’ll be 20km from home. But I want the average distance (i.e. the expected distance, given that the angle of journey 2 is random). I have worked out that after the second journey, she has a 35% 33% chance of being closer to home than she was after the first journey.
A nice doneness matrix
I created a lovely Excel doneness matrix a while ago, and Vivek has kindly rooted it out for me. (I’d lost it between laptops.) Here it is.
It basically tracks the doneness of various deliverables through various stages. It warns of impending deadlines and tells you how early or late things were done. Quite beautiful and very useful.
Thanks for digging it out, Vivek.