Time is relative
I find long periods of time quite difficult to visualise. Anything more than about six weeks, and it becomes "a long time", but without a comparator, it’s difficult to give it a frame of reference.
I’m looking forward to a big event due in about 75 days’ time. A little under eleven weeks. In order to picture this, I work back from today by the same amount of time and imagine a relatively memorable event that took place that many days ago. 67 days ago today, I took a trip to Newcastle on business. I can vividly remember that event, and it doesn’t seem that long ago at all, and that’s roughly how long I have to wait until the big event.
It would be good if I had a little app. that plucked the nearest such event from my Google Calendar to give me a comparator for any given date I’m eagerly awaiting.
Quote of Celebrity Big Brother 2007
Shilpa Shetty: "This is what today’s UK is? It’s scary."
Thanks, Jo. Thanks, Jade. Thanks, Danielle. Thanks, Jackiey. What a dreadful indictment of modern Britain.
Steaming crap and Paddington bare
A few shots from the last couple of days.
First, a sign embedded in the pavement on the eastern junction of Chenies Street and North Crescent, just off Tottenham Court Road.
Next, a couple of shots of Paddington Station taken at 5.44am this morning, before boarding the 5.55am Heathrow Express. You rarely see it quite like this, given that over 25m people go through Paddington each year.
New static copy on the BBC website
I think that the BBC has introduced some new static copy on its News homepage. Just under the Sport Headlines title on the right-hand side, it reads:
Cricket: Dismal England collapse
I’m pretty sure it’s static. I think it’s been there ever since the Australia tour began on 10 November. I can’t imagine there’s a need for it to be content manageable.
Inconsistent user experience
I’m annoyed. Very annoyed. Here’s why.
In Internet Explorer 6, CTRL + central mouse wheel used to change the font size. It used to drag the fonts from smallest to smaller to medium to large to largest. As far as I can recollect, wheel towards you increased the font sizes; wheel away from you reduced them.
In IE7, two changes have occurred:
- Instead of changing the font sizes, CTRL + central mouse wheel now zooms in and out of the page
- The scroll wheel has reversed its behaviour. Towards you now makes things smaller
The first of these issues doesn’t seem to take into account stylesheets particularly well. For the BBC News website, things look fine. For this site, the different components drift towards or away from one another, as you zoom out and zoom in respectively.
The latter is annoying not because of its inconsistency with IE6, but because of that with Firefox 2.0.
Now I’m not saying Microsoft is wrong. There are certainly arguments for zoom rather than font scaling from an accessibility perspective. And as for the zoom direction, you could argue that either Mozilla or Microsoft is right:
- Mozilla: dragging the wheel towards you brings the content closer
- Microsoft: dragging the wheel up has a notion of increasing things
My issue is with the inconsistency this causes in people’s user experiences. While Microsoft may have had some logical explanation for changing the behaviour of the scroll-wheel, the fact that people had got used to its old behaviour meant that (in my view) it was too deep-rooted to change.
So, now we have two products, both of which I use to do the same thing (in different contexts—sometimes things don’t work properly in Firefox, and other times I want to do a spot of IE testing), the two of which react in diametrically opposite ways when I perform the same function.
I’m annoyed
Where grammar and geekery collide
It seems that these two ‘qualities’ are mutually exclusive: a healthy understanding of grammar and an above average appetite for all things technical.
While I’ve already referred to the sliding standards of people at large, it seems this trend is particularly prevalent among techies.
To prove this point, simply scroll down the titles and short summaries of articles on digg, and cringe away. Inconsistent mixed-casing, heinous apostrophe crimes and overall grammatical disappointment abound. It’s not as if they have to write long essays; digg summaries are really short.
I’m not sure whether it’s an education issue or one of attention to detail. Either way, it’s distressing, and one of the reasons you rarely get well-rounded techies.
DotP t-shirt
Today I’m wearing my DotP t-shirt, under the assumption that it will be replaced as the platform for Directgov this weekend. Fingers crossed.
It will still exist, supporting DH, for the time being. But I don’t think it will reach its fourth birthday, which is 94 days away.
For the record, you’ll be pleased to know that the t-shirt is covered with a jumper.
More intelligent handwriting font systems
I came across this site recently via digg. It’s a collection of handwriting fonts that can be downloaded directly from the page. Some of them are quite neat, but it reminded me of a problem with these fonts, and a possible solution.
The very nature of handwriting (mine in particular) is that we rarely write a particular letter the same way twice. Furthermore, the letters that we form are often dependent on the preceding letter. In the word letter, for instance, the first e is affected by it appearing after an l, the t is affected by the preceding e and so on. As far as I’m aware, these two characteristics are never addressed in fonts, as each character is treated as an independent entity, and every instance of a particular letter is technically equal.
I’m proposing a twofold solution:
- Firstly, introduce a character-set of 676 letter characters. These represent a different form of each character when preceded by each of the letters of the alphabet. So there will be 26 lowercase As: one for aa, one for ba, one for ca etc. The same goes for Bs, Cs etc.
- Secondly, introduce, say, five or so subtly different versions of each letter
For the former, the character would only be displayed to its half-way point. The latter half of a character would be displayed as part of the next character. So you’d also need 26 space characters (one to succeed each letter) and 26 of each punctuation mark.
It would be a complex font system (the two requirements requiring upwards of 3,500 characters), but it would much closer mimic real handwriting than do the current offerings, which limit themselves to work within our current understanding of character sets.
It’s interesting how the Luna Bar font on the page linked to above uses horizontal overlaps between the characters. Maybe there is something there that could be used.
Thoughts?
Self-referential formula
Thanks to Francis for pointing to this ridiculous stroke of luck/ridiculously contrived inequality.
In the 1,802-byte range where 0 <= x <= 105 and some ridiculously high 17-integer range for y, the formula plots itself. Absolutely phenomenal.
The formula:
1/2 < [mod([y/17]*2^(-17[x]-mod([y],17)),2)]
Big Brother
Steve has accurately summed up the Goody family in his recent post, Sterilise the Goodys for the future of mankind. However, I feel that he’s missed out on fully evaluating the full extent of the backwardness of the Celebrity Big Brother housemates, in two notable omissions:
- Jo O’Meara
- Danielle Lloyd
The two of them are vindictive racists. They are horrible people. Their respective bungs for going into the house should be withheld when they leave, and their careers should fall into nothingness.
Google’s growing chaos
I’m confused. Google has a lot of products nowadays. A non-exhaustive list of its biggest ones would include Search (along with its various nuances—Image Search, Blog Search, Book Search etc.), Mail, Maps, News, Froogle, Calendar, Documents & Spreadsheets, Photos (Picasa), Groups, Reader, Video and that’s by no means comprehensive.
Some of them are marketed on the various country homepages (Google US, Google UK etc.) just above the search bar. And some stuff is surfaced on top of some of its personalised services. But it’s not consistent. Here’s how it looks.
- Google US: Images, Video, News, Maps
- Google UK: Images, Groups, News, Froogle
- Google Mail: Search, Calendar, Photos, Docs & Spreadsheets, Groups
- Google Calendar: Search, Mail
- Google Reader: nothing
- Google Photos: nothing
- Froogle UK: Search, Images, Groups, News
- News UK: Search, Images, Groups, Froogle
There just doesn’t seem to be a consistent aproach to this. Overall, it’s a mess. Google has got away with a shoddy user-experience for too long. It’s time to rationalise.
Best death scenes ever
I’m currently watching Final Destination 2 on Channel 4. It is a mediocre movie. But it has some phenomenally good death scenes, some notable ones (by no means all of them) detailed below.
- Guy falls off an American-style fire escape and is lying face up on the ground. The ladder sheers off its hinges and skewers his face
- Log falls off truck and skewers a car from front to back, along with the occupying police officer
- Guy gets cut into three (horizontally) by a wire fence flying through the air due to an explosion. The three body bits slide off each other to the ground
- Girl almost dies in a car crash when a pole pierces the back window and ends up through her headrest. Her momentum means that she’s OK. When the fireman tries to cut her out, the airbag goes off, forcing her head back on to the pole. Another skewering
- A guy’s head gets chopped off by some elevator doors
- A guy exploding (last scene of the film)
Genius.
The darts final
I’ve not watched any of this year’s darts for a bunch of reasons. But I did catch the last half of the final, which I was surprised about, tuning into a match at 6–0, first to seven.
Martin Adams had won the first six sets before the interval. He and a seemingly dejected Phil Nixon walked out for what looked like a formality.
One by one, Nixon clawed his way back into the match. After winning the seventh, and even the eighth, you didn’t think much of it. When he got to 6–4, alarm bells started ringing, both for Mr. and Mrs. Adams, the latter leaving the arena as the pressure became too much. Her husband had no such option.
And Nixon continued his remarkable comeback, taking sets eleven and twelve, tying the match at 6–6 to set up a final, deciding set.
Unfortunately, Nixon crumbled, wayward darts spattering the 5 and 1 beds to allow Adams to hold his nerve for a double-top finish. 7–6 to Adams.
Fantastic TV.
Great high-res. picture of Manhattan
A great, very high-res. shot of Manhattan from Jersey City, showing our old home, where I used to work and the venue for weekly Sunday-night football.
Worth a look.
The futility of the cricket
My wife keeps seeing the results from England’s 20Twenty matches against Australia on the news. This after our 5–0 drubbing in the Test.
Each time, she implores them (via the interactive medium of shouting at the TV) to "just come home", given the futile plight that they are engaged in.
I have to say that I agree. They should really have come home for Christmas to save some despair and eat some turkey
Email merge?
I’ve often thought it would be useful to have an email merge facility in Outlook, similar to Mail Merge in Word. And I’ve often looked for this feature, to no avail.
But finally I’ve found it. Instead of being in Outlook, where you might expect it, it’s hidden within the Mail Merge feature of Word. Strikes me as bizarre, but there you go!
Worst moments in songs
I don’t think we’ve had this one. But possibly the worst moment in any song is Paul McCartney’s vocal noodling in Hey Jude.
Any other contenders?
Quote of the night
Quote of the night’s TV, from Keith Allen’s Tourette de France:
"You don’t have to have Tourette’s in a Little Chef to stand up and shout out ‘This f*cking food is f*cking shit’".
Genius!
At last: a reduction in .gov.uk sites
The report by Sir David Varney last month prescribed a reduction in the number of departmental websites, instead using Directgov and Businesslink as the primary information and transactional channels for citizens and businesses respectively.
Finally!
And it seems the report has developed an impetus, the BBC today reporting the Cabinet Office’s decision to close down 551 sites, with "hundreds more … expected to follow". They estimate the total number of sites currently out there at 991, although this seems woefully low, especially if you bring in local government.
This makes me happy because (a) the government web-presence is currently chaotic and (b) I project managed the implementation of Directgov. So it’s nice to see its ever-increasing profile. However this news has been a long time coming.
The new iPhone
The iPhone has just been unveiled at Macworld in San Francisco. According to Steve Jobs its screen is 3.5" across its diagonal (with a resolution of 160 pixels per inch), and it’s only 11.6mm deep. Funny how he mixes his imperial and metric lengths.
He could have gone for 88.9mm across (with 6.3 pixels per mm), or else gone for 0.45" depth.
Incidentally, the iPhone itself looks sweet.
Update: Nasa’s going metric, as of today, for moon activity.
Further update: more detail on the iPhone. The phone itself is fricking unbelievable. I love it. The interface is poetry, and 95% of the functionality is beautiful, both in its simplicity and its offering.
The iPod part of the phone has advanced in leaps and bounds. Most of these advances relate to the fact that the whole thing is running OS(X), but I also love its "accelerometer", which is essentially a gravity-detector, orienting your screen according to the way you hold it. That’s particularly neat, although I have no idea why they chose that name.
The traditional phone bit is also great. They’ve taken all of the annoyances with regular phones, and simply addressed them all—switching between calls, accessing contacts and a particularly snazzy visual voicemail, allowing you to listen to specific voicemails rather than trawl through a plethora to listen to the one that you want.
However, there is one area that is dreadful, but which is a symptom of keyless devices: typing. SMS texting and writing emails is cumbersome to say the least. Jobs says "I’ve got this little keyboard which is phenomenal. [...] It’s actually really fast to type on".
He’s lying. It took a long time for him to type a one-line text message, which was no doubt rehearsed many times over. With traditional mobile phones, there used to be a comfort factor. The feedback that the keys gave me (a little click with a tangible pressed/released state) confirmed that my press had been recognised, and I could move on to the next letter. Intelligent texting allowed 90% of the QWERTY user experience, without needing the space for all those keys. (When I typed QWERTY just then, I actually touch-typed it, instead of swiping my finger across the top row. Weird.)
My current phone (T-Mobile’s MDA) has a slide-out keyboard, which offers similar, vital feedback, although the QWERTY keyboard is a little cumbersome for the two thumbs that remain free (hooray for opposable thumbs!) while my fingers cradle the unit.
The touch-screen for typing doesn’t work for me—nor, it seems for Steve, who undeniably had trouble. (This in spite of the whoopings of the notoriously "Apple did it so it must be good" crowd.) It’s not as if it’s the lack of SMS take-up in the US that has driven the weakness, as the "keyboard" is similarly important for web browsing and email, fundamental offerings of the iPhone, what with its Google and Yahoo! partnerships.
Lastly, Apple’s introduction of Safari onto the phone doesn’t work too well for me either. It displays the full webpage as it would appear on my 15.4" laptop monitor. It’s illegible, but you can zoom in easily. But how do I know what to zoom into? I don’t. But I can zip around the screen to try and find what I’m looking for, as long as I know where to zip. I’d prefer a linear view on such a relatively small screen. The whole idea of graceful degradation and the beauty of stylesheets goes out of the window.
But neat nonetheless…