wheresrhys

As well as web development I also play guitar for a living in a two piece irish band. As well as a few regular and irregular gigs in pubs and cafes we play a lot on the street. If you want to understand world politics try busking; it’s world of bullying capoeira gangs and nervous conservatoire students is as great a microcosm of power struggles and injustices as you could get.

But I digress.

The crime that has no name of the title of this post is the act of videoing a busker/street performer, but not putting any money in. (You know who you are. You can tell when you’re one of them because nobody likes you). Walking past and dancing a bit and not putting any money in is borderline cheeky, but taping it for extended enjoyment and not thinking it’s worth paying for is beyond belief. I can just imagine them sharing the holiday videos with bored relatives, and when they get to the musical highlight the proud projectionist delivers the voice-over: “Oh yes – these guys were great. Really enjoyed them. I would’ve given them some money but, you know my policy: When it’s at all possible to be a bastard… Be a bastard!”

Well, the next one of you who comes along, I’m giving you the finger.

Let’s see how that looks on your family holiday video.

And yes – that is a picture of an amoeba.

‘No parking’, it said.
Putting the van in reverse
soon put paid to that.

Piclens used to be a phenomenon. A minor phenomenon, but a phenomenon nonetheless.

I first realised this was the case when my telling one person in the office about it resulted in it spreading round the office like wildfire, until recommendations for me to try it out were coming at least thrice a day.

So what is (or was) Piclens.

In a nutshell, a Firefox extension that took any photo from a photostream/album on any of a number of popular sites (Flickr, Facebook, Google Images …), and added a hover-over link to it  which, when clicked, blew the photo (and its accompanying album) up into a full-screen slideshow and whizzy browsing tool. Brilliant! Browsing through a large selection of photos was no longer a chore.

But these days a lot has changed.

Firstly, the name has changed to Cooliris. The basic functionality is still there, and you can still get to it after each install of an update by going to the options and changing a few settings, but the default view on clicking on a link on a photo you want to see is the picture on the right.

Not only does it not show you the photo you chose or the album it’s in, it shows you some random photos from the web in its new Discover mode. You think “How the hell do I see those photos I wanted”, so you try Favourites, but this just asks you to set up a user account, then you try clicking the welcome message, and eventually, in a desperate bid to get what you wanted in the first place, you click Shopping. But none of these result in anything remotely related to what you asked for,

Imagine if a website habitually sent you to completely the wrong place, pushing stuff you didn’t want at you every time you click a link. This is how I feel using Cooliris, and I’m probably going to uninstall it.

I think the moral of the story is that all web services eventually have to make a profit, and with all the free stuff floating around it’s easy to take for granted their unadulterated, not just user-friendly but money-unfriendly interfaces. But trying to boost your profits too aggressively, with too abrupt and too unsubtle a change to how  the software works will just lead to people dumping you.

For something newer, that still doesn’t have to make a profit.

Adam Curtis is undoubtedly something to be cherished. Or, rather, his films are.

The Power of Nightmares is possibly the best documentary series I’ve ever seen. It’s all about how the American neo-conservatives and radical islamic terrorists need each other to exist, in order to have a symbolic enemy to rally the troops against, though the documentary delves far deeper into the origins of the dichotomy.

Power of Nightmares has, I think, the most cohesive narrative of any of the films of his I’ve seen, though his others are good too. They feature a very distinctive style – warped (in the original, literal sense of the word)  obscure archive footage, often seemingly way off the point, is cut together with other random clips to form a very impressionistic picture of what sort of thing the documentary is about, and makes the films interesting to watch without resorting to wham bam computer effects, and in fact fare better when it comes to abstractly establishing an mood and purpose than a lot of video art I’ve seen. These little segments have voice-overs, so are not completely off topic, and are mixed with more traditional documentary footage… interviews and the like, so it ticks the informative side of documentary making too.

He’s made at least two mini documentaries for Charlie Brooker‘s Screenwipe/Newswipe, and watching one of them this afternoon made me realise how utterly formulaic his documentaries’ main point is. Summed up:

There was a way things were, then something big happened, then there was a backlash against the way things were, led by people whose ideas formed in the sixties, who presented a grand vision of how things should be. Then something else big happened, and there’s another backlash we’re living through at the moment.

And it strikes me that, though his documentaries rail so often against the ideologues who push unachievable schemes for making the world better and mastering our destiny and wotnot, he too is victim to having a grand narrative of his own. Stylish though his films are, he risks edging over into just-another-liberal territory.

Sudoku absorbed
The signpost malfunctions.
Manicures on bus?!

A visual gaffe -
Our heroic airborne troops
Look like fey models

Essential Readings for the Non-Believer

Sounds a bit like an atheist’s bible to me.

I bet Hitchens doesn’t see the irony.

Oh, for a language
Where reversed words abounded -
Half as much to learn

I’ve just written it, and have to provide a homepage for it. will add more details later.

Demo: fulltextarea.html

Current release

jqueryfulltextarea031

Release details:

• Tidied up and optimised code

Previous versions

• fullTextArea v0.3 (zip)
  Disabled web page while textarea is active
• fullTextArea v0.2 (zip)
  Fixed problems with focus not switching to new text area
  Enabled preselection of default text

• fullTextArea v0.1(zip)

A few months ago a blogger posted a now infamous post on the falilings of CSS as a design tool, and advocating tables be used instead (if you want to read why he’s wrong, this is probably the best riposte, quite rightly pointing out that he thinks because he is bad at CSS then CSS must be too hard to do design with, and you can justify using tables instead).

But what I found most notable about the whole debate was how he throws meaningless phrases around and no-one seems to pick him up on it.

For instance

tables have the correct semantics for doing layout

What on earth does this mean? From dictionary.com:

Semantics: the meaning, or an interpretation of the meaning, of a word, sign, sentence, etc.

Well, what he seems to be saying is that tables’ meaning is “used for layout”, but the whole point is that they don’t!

In another article I think he reveals his not particularly investigative side.  In response to a comment:

> put your content inside a table, lose most users with disabilities

That is far from clear. I just did a Google search on “html accessibility tables” and got a zillion pages on how to make tables accessible. Even the W3C’s own web site says you can make accessible web sites using tables as long as you adhere to certain constraints.

Well, I did that search for html accessibility tables, and most, if not all, of those zillions of pages are about making html data tables more accessible. If you search for html accessibility tables layout you will find a lot of pages explaining why you shouldn’t use tables for layout as it’s inaccessible. The only article I could find condoning table use dated from 2002, in a time when dreamweaver still largely used tables, and the condoning was merely an acknowledgement that while the standard tools in the industry still used tables you couldn’t expect everyone to switch over overnight. In fact the article opens with a pretty good summing up of what’s wrong with tables.

So, why have I written this article, responding to something from a few months ago? Simply to illustrate that there is still so much junk been pumped out onto the internet on designing using tables that it is as hard as ever to find information on designing tables.