wheresrhys

One of the perks of working from home is that if for whatever reason (and, let’s face it, if you’re in a procrastinative mood, any reason is good enough) you feel like a break you can take one. I don’t mean playing facebook scrabble, or checking the definition of a drupe on wikipedia, all the while trying to look busy and keeping a watchful eye out for your manager; I mean a proper break, maybe away from your desk or doing something not usually allowed in an office.

I’ve recently turned to the latter. Long-term readers (all 8 of you) will know that I have been accompanying an Irish fiddler on the guitar for about a year. Just before Christmas I got the urge to have a go at an instrument more traditionally associated with carrying the melody, so I got a tin whistle.

I can’t stress enough how important it is for every parent to campaign for their schools to teach the tin whistle instead of the recorder.

1. It has a much nicer sound, particularly when placed in unskilled sounds
2. It’s got a much more fun, unstuffy repertoire
3. Last, but definitely not least, a tin whistle has no wrong notes on it! It has all the notes of the D or C scale on it (typically) and though you still have to hit the right ones to play a tune it’s much harder to sound as disastrously wrong as you can on a chromatic instrument.

But back to the point. My current preferred displacement activity from work is playing the tin whistle, and I reccommend any home-workers who read this to try it out. Just get yourself a whistle for a tenner or so, read brother steve’s website to understand tin whistle technique, listen to some tunes on youtube (Planxty are a good place to start as a lot of the pipe songs are in the same key as a standard whistle and not too fast to hear the notes), and try and copy them (or if you read music find the score on the session).

As a warning though, it does become addictive. For instance, during the writing of this post I’ve played two reels and a hornpipe.

And I’m about to have a crack at a jig.

A very short post to announce my third  jQuery plugin: listSplitter, which takes a long list of categorised items (where the categories can overlap) and creates a tabbed interface to show only one category at once. I haven’t done a demo yet (well, I have, buthaving teh same old problem transferring to the server as the server runs on UNIX while my laptop is Windows. I recently found out why this causes a problem, but no easy fix has presented itself) so you’ll just half to take my word for it, though before too many months have gone by I will use it as the basis for a new portfolio.

*edit: Here is a demo

And it can be used with jQuery themeroller, i.e. use the tool at jqueryui.com/themeroller, to design how it shoudl look, then after clicking “download theme” make sure you have ‘tabs’ ticked underneath widgets.

I don’t think I’ve mentioned it before, but for the past half year or so I’ve been living as the lodger in the basement of a big family home. The patriarch is a psychologist, and on the ground floor his surgery is located. Sometimes patients come down to the basement to use my toilet.

Today I noticed (possibly influenced by the marvellous film Kenny) that in the space of a few minutes (while I was making coffee) a patient managed to use an entire roll of toilet paper. I don’t mean that a toilet roll was gone, but that one had been completely unravelled, leaving only the cardboard tube behind.

Which leaves me unsure as to whether he should be seeing a psychologist or booking himself in for an endoscopy.

This blog is meant to do two things:

1. Let the world know that I’m a decent front-end web developer
2. Be the focus for a new doomsday cult

Number two is progressing nicely as no-one has gotten wise to my subliminal messages yet, but what of number one?

Let’s evaluate:

• Design – it’s not finished yet (and never will be as I will hopefully do a redesign next month when I have a bit more time), which doesn’t look so good
• Javascript, CSS, HTML – apart from mentioning the odd bug/annoyance there’s very little to show what I can do with these… aside from my jQuery plugins which hardly have pride of place either

Over the last few months I’ve come across a few blogs which, unlike mine, really cut the mustard when it comes to being an extended portfolio, putting mine to shame.

jasonsantamaria.com and dustincurtis.com are a little bit twitter generation for my liking, but one can’t deny that their blogs, where every article has a different design, are great examples of showing off on your blog.

But my favourite, which I came across today, has got to be www.romancortes.com. Most of his most recent posts feature him achieving visual effects which simply have to involve Flash… only they don’t, and in many cases achieve quite striking results without even using javascript; just pure CSS/HTML. As he himself admits, most of the demos aren’t much use in a practical website, but they’re still pretty impressive in showing what surprising visual effects can be achieved, and figuring out how he did them is quite a good test of your understanding of CSS. My favourites are the coke can and the old master.

Obviously, when you see that someone has managed to animate a rolling coke can using just one static image of a coke can label and some CSS, and after the initial wow has subsided, a Peep Show quote springs to mind:

Super Hans: I think this is probably the best example of the sort of stuff we’d do we’ve ever had.
Jez: Oh yeah. ’cause sometimes it’s really hard actually to do your own ideas

Do I have it in me to produce a more stunning showcase of what I can do? Who knows, but having just learned The Mason’s Apron on guitar I feel invincible!!!

I just solved  a bug which stemmed from the fact I forgot that javascript is a referential language, i.e. if you have a variable and you set another variable equal to it then it doesn’t in general clone the original variable, but merely just points both variables towards the same underlying object. This only applies to Arrays and Objects though, and to prove it here is a little demo (it turns out you can embed javascript straight into wordpress posts now!)

Irritatingly, if you have a bug which is caused by forgetting this principle then this will also make it hard to debug because it also affects how firebug reports information to you. When you console.log() an object or an array, firebug does the same as javascript – it creates a reference to an underlying object in the DOM. So, if you’ve been logging an object repeatedly in order to pinpoint when a rogue change takes place firebug will consistently provide you with references to the object as it is after your script’s finished running – not much use.

However, there is an easy way out*. console has methods other than .log(), and possibly the most useful is console.dir(). console.dir() takes a snapshot of any object or array, printing out each of its properties without maintaining a reference to the underlying object, and therefore giving a you a snapshot of an object as it is at the time.

*And a hard way (console.log() the properties of an object individually), which is how I resolved my bug, before  looked into what other methods console had

You know the sort of book I mean: Listography, Wreck this journal, This diary will change your life, This is not a book, How to Make a Journal of Your Life, The Guerilla Art Kit, Your love life in lists, … How to be an explorer of the world: Portable life museum …. Tear Up This Book!: The Sticker, Stencil, Stationery, Games, Crafts, Doodle, and Journal Book for Girls!

Those books that have a fun, wacky but cheap, activity for you to do every day in order to cure your life from the malaise of materialism, work and apathy that has engulfed it.

But, I wonder, how well do the writers of these books live up to the image.

Lisa Nola (Listography)

You can tell Lisa’s a hipster intellectual sort because… well, just look at her! And him. He’s Adam.

Another big giveaway that they’re that way inclined is that they have built up a not insubstantial body of work, or ‘project’, including several books, calendars and, oh yes, the website, around this listography concept of theirs:

Through list making, you can shape an autobiography. Therefore, your listography is a perpetual work in progress, a time capsule you can share, and a map of your life for friends and family.

Or you can never ever look at it again.

I list. I love to list, but if there is any joy in looking at an old list (and, to be fair, there can be) it will be because it was not intended to be looked at so far in the future. You’ll surprise yourself by finding that back in 1996 you rated Aswad as your favourite band. But devoting hours of your younger years to making hundreds of lists for the express purpose of looking back at them in years to come is just depressing. Evidence of how stultifying an activity this must be is indicated by the following helpful text from the website:

Try our list topic generator for further inspiration and reflection.

But the idea does however seem to have taken off, to the point where a chain reaction is starting to occur, and a listographer, Nola Russell, has published a book of her own lists. Call me cynical, but I reckon ‘Russell’ is a bit to similar to ‘Lisa’ backwards, and ‘Nola’ is a bit too similar to ‘Nola’ to completely rule out them being the same person.

So, what have we learned about Lisa and Adam? That when they grow up and their rebellious teenage son screams at them “I don’t want to make a list, Dad – I can remember this one thing without having to make another bloody list,” the reply comes swift and fast, “‘Eh oop son, thy’s talking gibberish. It’s lists that built this ‘owse, and don’t you forget it.”

Think before you list.

Dan Price (How to make a journal of your life)

It turns out hat Lisa Nola is not the only how-to-release-your-creativity-in-a-lo-fi-way author with a coherent multimedia vision. Other mainstay of the genre, Dan Price, has hismoonlight chronicles website to espouse the same philosophy as his book.

Dan seems a bit more for real than Lisa; again, the photo helps to illustrate this. He also lives in a hole, and lives life a bit like Thoreaux in Walden. I imagine he does spend lots of time creating things out of very little at all, and that he keeps a fascinating journal and finds beauty and intrigue in little things (sample). Thank God he’s published a little book teaching us how to see the world just like he does and release our frustrated inner artist.

Keri Smith (Wreck this journal, This is not a book, etc…)

The doyenne of getting adults to scribble in books that cost more than a tenner; she has published six books of this ilk. And, what is more:

Keri Smith is an author/illustrator turned guerilla artist

… according to her website, at least. Her books are more playful and destructive (childish?) than the other authors’, at least judging by their cover (and from flicking through). The byword here is ‘tearing’. Guerrilla whimsy indeed.

She’s published a blog for many years so I’ve tried to get a picture of whether she lives up to the ideals of her books.

i have actively entered into a period of not thinking.

My guess is that she does, although the rate at which she churns out these DIY artist books would suggest that she is, like some people I’ve met over the years, more interested in the idea of having an idea, than an idea itself.

At the end of this review, I should own up and say I agree wholeheartedly with the sentiment of these books (that creating your own fun is easy and why doesn’t everyone do it?) and I reckon the authors are probably fairly well-meaning. But the trouble is that a) being instructed to do something silly or creative is nowhere near as fun as thinking of it yourself, so b) nearly every page of every copy of these books won’t be read, and so c) these books in fact contribute to the problem they’re purporting to try and solve – people buying mindless tatt to entertain themselves with.

Still, they’re a pretty good get-out as a present for a difficult to buy for friend.

My attitude to Facebook has always been that it is a useful address book of sorts (with built in slideshows), and that all these scandals where people get fired from their jobs for posting on facebook pictures of themselves disfiguring a company business card with a nail file are their own fault for showing a lack of discretion.

That said, though, Facebook do have a reputation (fairly well-earned if you ask me) for not making it clear to people who they will share things with, but now they’re putting it right as when you login you are nagged to confirm you old privacy settings or change them to new ones, just so everybody’s clear what to expect.

Heres’ the form you fill in, which looks pretty simple – radio buttons to indicate yes or no… or so you would think. But regretably facebook have ballsed up their privacy issues again.

For each element of facebook you can set it’s visibility level to either what you’ve already got it set to, or one of Everyone, Friends of friends or Friends… but for each bit of Facebook you don’t get to choose from that list; you are presented with one of them as an alternative to your current settings (picture).  Now, that’s a pretty confusing start, because

1. It makes the layout of the form all weird: the radio box in the first column doesn’t always mean the same thing, which users come to expect from columns of radio buttons.
2. Some elements have “Old settings” checked, and others have the other radio button checked, which confuses the whole idea of you changing your own settings
3. When you arrive at the page there is nothing to tell you what your old settings are. I’m sure many users will go straight from here to check in their account what their settings are.

But on hovering over an old settings checkbox it displays a tooltip to tell you what those settings are, which si helpful , yes, but nowhere near as helpful as just including it in the original page’s text. Horrible overuse of technology.

So does the confusion end there?

Of course not.

Below are three examples where it doesn’t allow you to do what you want, or just gets more confusing

1. I can choose to allow everyone to read About me or just friends. It doesn’t allow me to let Friends of friends see this
2. At the moment ‘Only Friends; Except: Limited Profile” can see photos and videos of me, but it’s taken me a while to remember what “Limited Profile” means, and now that I do remember, why is this not an option for …
3. … sharing my email address, which I’m more likely to be cagey about. And it would also be nice to have radio buttons which allow me a wider choice than sharing my email address with “Friends” or “Only Friends”

It amazes me how sloppy supposed beacons of the internet can be sometimes.

It’s become de-rigeur these days to trundle out the fact that the UK has the highest density of CCTV cameras in the world, and then to follow it with the opinion that it’s all some sort of sinister creep towards a police state. I’m not going to do that, but I did however read today about something similar, particularly close to my heart as if it had been the case a couple of years ago I probably would have found myself repeatedly stopped by the police.

Apparently police have been misusing the new anti-terrorism laws to stop people taking photos of buildings in sensitive areas, eg. ‘Alex Turner, an amateur photographer, was arrested under section 44 after taking images of a fish and chip shop in Kent’. Now, I know that the jihadists are eager to preserve cod stocks, and the IRA want to keep all those lovely potatoes for themselves (just in case), but I can’t help thinking that it may have been an over-reaction.

More usual than that bizarre police intervention is that photographers – tourists, amateurs and journalists (presumably with press passes) – are being stopped from taking photos in the City of London. So if I was still writing my London skyline blog I would have either had to stop or accept being hassled by the police as routine. This is the first time* the police’s sinister side has crossed my path (albeit 2 years too late). I don’t like that they can infringe on my ability to carry out my innocent daily business.

I expect a lot of people in other perfectly innocent walks of life have had far more vivid encounters than this to teach them to be wary of the British police, so I suppose I should count myself lucky.

*Aside from busking, student protests, and a horrible incident where a brute of a copper looked like he was going to arrest an acquaintance for accidentally kicking a football at someone who had foolishly decided to have a picnic behind our goals.