wheresrhys

Just been for a walk in the slightly snow-drenched North Downs woods (which, confusingly, are south of London). Lots of wildlife not around:

Badger

Woodcock

Grey Squirrel (which I thought was a weasel till I got home and checked on internet)

Roe Deer

Rabbit

Pheasant

Fox

One upshot of the Delicious garbage collection utility I’ve just built is it highlights gems I’d bookmarked years ago but forgotten. Some are useful, but most are rip-roaringly funny or entertaining. Here are two of the best… so far

1. Copter – a simple, single mouse button game which kept me entertained through a very dull summer at work once. I’m yet to regain my previous form, but it’s so addictive I believe I will. (*edit: top score now at 1026)
2. A cartoon to illustrate what happens when too many summers build up, one of the milder frames of which is below:

For a long time I’ve wanted to work with the Delicious API. Initially it was because the Delicious website not only had the difficult to remember del.icio.us url, but was also very badly designed. If you compared its progress – addition of new features, cleaning up of design, making use of new techniques suchas AJAX – with its web2.0 compatriots (Flickr, Digg, boris-johnson.com) it lagged way behind.

So I initially planned to build a new front-end for it, making it easier to work with your bookmarks, but before I could progress far enough in my coding abilities they completely redesigned the site; a vast improvement.

Though still not perfect. For a while I’ve found it frustrating that there is no easy way to simultaneously see the content of a bookmarked page and delete the bookmark if you deem it no longer useful, so my delicious account gradually got more and more cluttered. Well, this afternoon I decided to do something about it (and not just because I’m avoiding doing more important stuff).

But I was foiled for a long time by the laziness of the Delicious developers. My initial plan was to use javascript to get a JSON of all my bookmarks (or alternatively request one at a time) and go through them one by one, displaying the webpage in an iframe, and offering the option to discard or keep the bookmark. However, delicious only publish this data as XML which means, due to cross-domain restrictions on AJAX, you can’t just use javascript. I may be a bit hasty in pinning this on developer laziness, but I imagine creating alternate templates (because that’s all the difference between JSON and XML really) wouldn’t be too time consuming, and would greatly enhance the versatility of the API.

Anyway, I realised I would have to use a bit of PHP to get the XML and create pages from which my javascript would be able to access the data. Luckily, before I dived straight in I came across phpdelicious (which, appropriately, I have now bookmarked in Delicious) , a very easy to use php class for wrapping the Delicious API, which is very handy indeed. Less than an hour later I had built exactly what I wanted.

I reckon a few more hours development and I can make it a publicly available service.  All I need to do is include a form for other users to be able to login, and (ideally) preload websites in the iframe to speed things up (though this is problematic as some sites force the whole web page to be redirect if you try and put them in an iframe).

A friend of mine (whom I’ll be doing a website for shortly) mentioned last night that  she was impressed that I was able to learn all I know about web development from the internet (more or less)… and, come to think of it, so am I. There can’t be many careers where the internet enables you to become fully trained and, arguably, more informed than people who learn their craft just from courses and books.

But it got me thinking about how gradual a process it’s been, picking up all these skills. Starting with html, then on to CSS, then a little functional php and javascript, a slight detour into google maps, then on to fully OOP programming using jQuery and Zend framework. And I came to realise that for many of these, especially the early ones, the reason I’d started to look into them was because I worked with an idiot that didn’t understand what they were doing.

Indeed, there’s nothing like incompetence in somebody who should know what they’re doing to spur you on to learn how to do it yourself. If you’re dealing with an expert there’s very little chance your embryonic efforts will outshine theirs, and you’ll probably have little reason to want to bypass them anyway. But if you’re stuck with an idiot that constantly frustrates you with their incompetence and inability to do the simplest things, then it’s easy to convince yourself that you could do better, so you start to learn the basics, pretty confident in the knowledge that if you master these you’ll already be light years ahead of your resident idiot. Maybe all companies should have an official idiot hiring quota as part of their professional development strategy.

So here’s to you, idiots, for leading me, and probably many others, to a decent career.

I wrote this:

http://www.newsbiscuit.com/2010/02/01/giant-james-may-terrorises-kent-after-being-given-wrong-kind-of-growth-hormones/

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.

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!!!

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.