Kludsky
Isn’t this grand? If I had $400 spare I’d buy the entire Archive Type collection.
TED talks
Some good Ted talks …
maths + magic, dance, wefeelfine, stewart brand, google, bezos, software as art, choice, will wright, schools / creativity, gehry, ants.
Poe at the BAC
Things I saw at the Masque of the Red Death at Battersea Arts Centre. It was exilherating but the narrative was completely fragmented, just a series of sensations really, a bit like reading compendium of unconnected poems. Well worth it though.
Man sat on bed, beats, then hangs his wife on the washing line - 1st floor
Man giving woman wine in a bar with wine bottles & telling story of black cat, also talked about the Ball towards the end - 1st floor
Bits of the House of Usher (?) in a dining room and on the stairs - ground/1st floor
Took part in a seance - 1st floor
Had the Philosphy of Furniture (?) read to us in a small room - 1st floor
Sat in the Caberet bar & heard a song - up some stairs then down (1st floor)
Saw the feast/orgy in the dining room - ground floor
Saw the party & arrival of Death at the end of the evening - ground floor
Trip to Dublin
Chronologically and incompletely …
Saw the brooding North Welsh mountains as they poked out of the cloud and mist from 30,000 feet above.
Ate some sandwiches at The Cobalt Café whilst waiting for the apartments to be ready.
Ate some delicious vegetarian canteen food at Govindas.
Put on several pounds by eating lemon meringue and blackberry crumble at the Queen of Tarts.
Saw Tsukioka Yoshitoshi’s “One Hundred Aspects of the Moon” woodblock paintings at the Chester Beatty Library.
Squeezed in to the Hairy Lemon to drink Guinness and watch the tragic Arsenal FA Cup display.
Drank and ate Tapas in the Market Bar while trying to forget it was an abbatoir not far back, although the deep red Victorian brickwork did give the place a Mediterranean feel.
Saw a 2,000 year-old bog man at the National Museum.
Saw a Bruegel in the stark Millenium Wing of the National Gallery of Ireland.
Pottered around the new, futuristic Pier D at Dublin airport.
Stretched our legs by the emergency exit above the right-hand wing of the RyanAir plane on the flight back.
Solzhenitsyn on Data Privacy
As every man goes through life he fills in a number of forms for the record, each containing a number of questions . .. There are thus hundreds of little threads radiating from every man, millions of threads in all. If these threads were suddenly to become visible, the whole sky would look like a spider’s web, and if they materialized as rubber bands, buses; trams and even people would all lose the ability to move, and the wind would be unable to carry torn-up newspapers or autumn leaves along the streets of the city. They are not visible, they are not material, but every man is constantly aware of their existence…. Each man, permanently aware of his own invisible threads, naturally develops a respect for the people who manipulate the threads.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Cancer Ward, 1968.
If I asked you to build White City
Clearing out my desk prior to moving up to the 3rd floor. Finding odd bits of paper I’ve collected over the last 3 years.
Here’s a poem taken from a poetry workshop in White City, I think, prior to the BBC building two giant buildings (the Media Center & Broadcast Center) amidst their community in W12. I thought it, albeit unknowingly, chimed well with the user-centred design process.
If it had been straight they'd have wanted it curved If it had been rounded they'd have longed for awkward angles If it had been left to them there might not have been anything... but maybe that's what they might have wanted
The author was Christina Gestra, 2006
Validate a folder of xml files
find . -name *.xml -exec xmllint --noout {} \; 2> foo.txtValidate a folder of xml files, write errors to foo.txt
Limeade
Just so we don’t forget.
- juice of 12 limes (about 400ml if you squeeze 'em hard) - 1.4 litres water - 170g caster sugar
Bubble & Squeak
Served with two poached eggs & Parmigiano-Reggiano.
Yorkstone
We needed a few flagstones to lead across the border to the food composter.
I never really noticed the Woodlands Farm Reclaimation Yard when living in Guildford, but it seemed worth a trip. It’s huge, full of 100’s of crates of second-hand stones, edging, rockery, lumps of concrete all precariously balanced, waiting for your tremors to gently nudge 1/2 a tonne of granite on to your flip-flop protected foot. We spent a happy couple of hours wandering around, dusting off old stones, inhaling the dust etc.
Having realised our favourite was far to expensive for something that’s just going to be stuck in the ground and be mostly covered by foliage for most of the year the guy in the hut pointed us at a small batch of 30cm x 30cm Yorkstone flags.The sand-coloured streaks look great in direct sunlight and even better when wet, like high-resolution photo’s of Saturn’s rings.
Embers
The remnants of an early August BBQ in Meads Village, Eastbourne.
Tuna, Caper, Fried Egg sandwich
9pm, Friday night, long week at work, not much in the fridge, grumpy, need food …
- 2 tins of tuna - 1/4 finely chopped onion - capers - spoon of mayo - lots of pepper - 2 eggs - 4 slices of whatever bread you've got lying around ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ - mix everything apart from the egg in a bowl - fry the eggs, leaving the yolk sticky - butter the bread, spread the tuna mix, put the fried eggs on top, and slice.
Blackberry Crumble
We went for a lazy walk around town and ended up at The Nower.
A lady ahead was foraging for blackberries in the bushes. We had a spare plastic bag so decided to collect a few, or 650g as it turned out, which was far too many.
With legs and arms covered in nettle stings and bramble scratches we returned home, soaked the berries (in cold water for an hour, so the detritus and bugs float to the top) and cooked up a tasty apple and blackberry crumble.
Hampered by a critical shortage of demarara we created a sugar mix of molasses, caster and the small amount of remaining demerara, which added a deep, syrupy dimension to the dish.
Here’s the crumble, post bake.
SVN - tracking down removed files
I’m looking for a file in the repository that I know was there at some point in the last 6 months but it got deleted or moved somewhere or other and I can’t remember where. I can remember a bit of the file name.
One method that worked for me was trawling through the SVN logs.svn -v log ./trunk/path/to/dir | grep -C 3 "text to look for"
Turning on verbose mode ( -v ) prints the commit message as well as details about the files. Grepping this with about 3 lines of context (or more if you want) seems to find me my file.
I don’t know if it’s possible to grep through the contents of delete SVN files without writing a shell script.
HTML
Trying to fix HTML is like trying to graft arms and legs onto hamburger. There’s got to be something better …
Ted Nelson, attributed on http://xanadu.com.au/ - see also Embedded Markup Considered Harmful (xml.com).
Putrified Squirrel
This morning we took down the foul orange fence at the back of the garden, prepared the ground for the wild flower area and approached our neighbour once again to broach the subject of chopping down their unneighbourly leylandii.
Best of all we found a decomposing squirrel carcass. It would make a good mascot for a theatrically villainous sports team, perhaps Sunderland under Roy Keane’s stewardship or maybe the Iranian national team. After posing for photo’s it went in our vegetable bin.
Isles of Skye & Harris
Roughly in chronological order, a few favourite photo’s from our plane/road/ferry trip around the Scottish Highlands.
Along the A87 between Loch Ness and Kyle of Lochalsh.
A day trip to the Trotternish area of Skye. The first test of our new walking boots. They performed well until Poppy fell in a bog on the way down.
The sheep littered more or less every road on the island. In general they ignored the passing traffic, though occassionally they would become unnerved, turn and run. Here’s two sheep running.
An (unsuccessful) whale watching trip. Saw lots of seals, puffins and rocks though. Generally felt much fitter after spending three hours clenching our stomach muscles each time the boat hopped over the peak of a large wave and landed at an awkward angle. Speedboats don’t have suspension, it’s like hitting concrete.
The Loch Snizort on which our Hotel sat, taken at about 6am. We were killing time after spending the night sleeping in the hire car having return from a delicious 3 hour feast at Three Chimneys and realising that the hotel didn’t have a night porter.
On Harris, after a short ferry trip from Uig to Tarbert, the stunning Sound of Taransay and Luskentyre beach.
And a little down the road, the beach around Buirgh.
Stornoway wasn’t picturesque. The guide book said ‘lunar landscape’, ie. lumpy and ugly, but East of the town there’s a few pockets of greenery. Port Mholair is the most Easterly point in the Outer Herbides.
Adaptability = Longevity
An interesting conversation from this week’s Bottom Line on Radio 4.
On the theme of longevity in design Evan Davis paraphrases one of his guests, Keith Clarke, Chief Executive of the engineering consultancy WS Atkins :-
Clarke: Usually the way you think you will expand is wrong…
Davis: What you are saying [on designing for the future] is it’s not about how long you plan for it’s about how much flexibility you build in to what you design, and obviously it will last longer if it’s more flexible.
Hackday 2007 Entry
Although I was unable to turn up on the Sunday, I thought I would tidy up a couple of hours worth of Saturday’s hacking effort in to something functional.
The idea, entitled A Cloud of Teenage Angst, experiments with a way of nesting tag clouds (aka. weighted lists) inside each other to clarify the meaning of the terms.
It uses the data from the weekly BBC Slink agony aunt column.
The main cloud is formed from the keywords that the BBC editorial team have associated with each column. Selecting a term in this cloud will result in a mini-cloud being inserted in to the document comprising of a frequency analysis of words in all agony columns containing the parent term.
Because the words most often used in free text tend to be the canonical ones (rather than slang, abbreviations etc.) we can create a fairly accurate nested cloud that better describes unfamiliar, abstract, or duplicte entries in the main cloud.
Would be interested in trying this on bigger sets of data.
Babbage on (badly taken) Criticism
Propose to any Englishman any principal, or any instrument, however admirable, and you will observe that the whole effort of the English mind is directed to find a difficulty, a defect, or an impossibility in it. If you speak to him of a machine for peeling a potato, he will pronounce it impossible: if you peel a potato before his eyes, he will declare it useless, because it will not slice a pineapple.
Charles Babbage, quoted in The Code Book by Simon Singh.
Singh paints Babbage out to be an perennial starter-but-unfinisher of things, which I find quite encouraging.
