but she's a girl...

Updated Moveableype

Thanks to a comment by dvd yesterday, I found out that Movabletype had been updated to 2.6. I backed up my entries (just in case), installed, ran the update script, and all went sweetly. There are some nice improvements, most notably support for text formatting plugins. Brad Choate has already produced one called MT-Textile, which is inspired by an online text processing service written by Dean Allen. It formats block text into paragraphs, headings and lists, does inline text formatting such as emphasis and strong, and converts difficult characters to proper HTML entities. It seems to work very nicely, barring a few minor bugs.

{Read more...}

New version of Tinderbox

There's a new version of Tinderbox out---get it while it's hot! I couldn't find the change notes on Eastgate's page, but on VersionTracker, the following improvements are listed:

Better support for languages with non-Roman scripts. Mouse wheel support. Quick-stamps and actions let you set prototypes even faster. New markup makes it easier to export outlines and to simplify complex families of export templates.

And now, for something completely different…

Slipping smoothly from something very serious to something utterly trivial, I've been tinkering with my templates again. First, I've SmartyPant-ized the comments and trackback listings, so quotes (double and single), apostrophes, ellipses, en-dashes and em-dashes should all be properly encoded for your commenting pleasure. Second, I've reversed the display order of comments, so that they appear with the oldest first. This is much more logical to read if people are following a thread of a discussion down the page. Actually, this is the default in a new installation of Moveabletype, and I can't for the life of me remember what possessed me to change it.

Blair states the obvious

It's not often---or ever---that I post about political matters here. This is partly because I know that I wouldn't do it justice, but also because I think that political/moral issues are just too complicated to discuss in a short piece of writing. But this statement by Tony Blair really made me go, ``What!":

{Read more...}

Trees, trunks and metadata

Dan Hon has written a very interesting article about the limitations of the filing cabinet metaphor of computer filesystems, and the about the finality of saving a document.

{Read more...}

Kate Bush - All albums

I've been listening a lot to Kate Bush this week. This isn't in itself very unusual---I've been listening to her music for as long as I've been interested in music at all---but this past week my iPod finger has been dialling up 'Artists > Kate Bush > All' regularly.

{Read more...}

Smarten up your quotes

John Gruber of Daring Fireball has just released a new version of his excellent Moveabletype plugin, SmartyPants. It's a clever little utility which 'educates' your quotes, en-dashes, em-dashes and elipses, and encodes them as proper HTML entities. I'm using them here, if anyone has noticed...

Give us a push

Sometimes it takes the threat of missing out on something to force you take the plunge and buy some piece of technology. In our case, it was a documentary about Richard Thompson (to all intents and purposes the originator of folk rock) on BBC4 that made us get off our backsides and buy a digibox. We'd been thinking of getting one for a while (mainly to hear Radio 7---The Goons on broadcast radio again---yay!). We thought that if we were going to get one anyway, we might just as well get one now and see the programme.

The documentary was excellent. Richard Thompson is a fantastic song-writer, and an all-round nice, modest bloke. There was some classic footage of him in his Fairport Convention days, playing up a storm on the guitar, but with with the sort of blank expression one might wear when peeling potatoes. While he treats the music business as just another job, and yet his songs are dark, bitter little things that make you look into the abyss.

His whole demeanour was summed up by Billy Connolly---``He looks like a big English wally". Yes, but a big English wally who writes cracking songs.

He’s a brave man

In a rash fit of openness, Dave Hyatt has encouraged people to comment or trackback to his blog to suggest what the GUI of Safari should be like. There are 231 comments and 12 trackbacks as I post this. That’ll keep him occupied.

My tuppence on the matter:

• As many others have suggested, some form of tabs would be great. As many have observed, tabs themselves aren’t ideal, as they take up too much vertical browser space and the names get truncated if there are a number of tabs. Dave’s probably already seen this, but I think that some form of interface like this one—developed by Look Designs—would be a great solution. And of course, you should also be able to turn it off: people either love or hate tabs, and we should have a choice.
• Support for alt tags as soon as possible (I find this rather irritating, as I use alt tags quite a lot when browsing). I know this isn’t a GUI suggestion, but he did say we could comment on priority CSS matters.
• I haven’t yet found a way to directly add a new bookmark by typing it in rather than visiting the site and choosing “add bookmark”.
• More integration with the keychain – it seems a bit patchy at the moment.

Keep up the good work! Safari is already a great browser, and eminently useable. It just needs a few rough edges smoothed off to be the best browser on MacOSX.

The Last of Mammals

I watched the last in the series of the Life of Mammals yesterday. Regular readers will know that I’ve watched this series avidly. Despite the impression given by the utter tat that makes up the majority of the output on BBC1, they can still make a mean wildlife program. The quality of the photography has been superb, and they managed to capture some genuinely astounding behaviour (I speak as a biologist who has seen her fair share of Amazing Things).

{Read more...}

Hacking the circadian clock

And I thought I was a geek… This guy has hacked ‘floatbg’, a background changer for X, so that the colour gives some cues to the time of day. This was because he was spending so much time in his windowless loft that his circadian clock got completely randomised. He puts it much better than I could:

”It was easier than hacking my medulla oblongata. I hate hardware.”

You know, sometimes I look at the weather on my menubar and think, “It’s snowing? [actually looks out window] Oh. So it is.” But hey, I know what time it is. I have a clock on my menubar too.

[via BoingBoing]

Monkey magic

Born from an egg on a mountain top, Funkiest Monkey that ever popped, He knew every magic trick under the sun, Tease the Gods and everyone can have some fun. Monkey magic, Monkey magic, Monkey magic, Monkey magic, Monkey magic, Monkey magic ooh!

[From Monkey (Magic)]

Sorry about that—I feel better now. Ah, life is good with Monkey back on the telly. I remember watching it as a kid and understanding very little of what went on, but finding the bad dubbing and hopeless special effects highly amusing. Very little has changed, except that I now have situations in which I could actually use some of the cool Buddhist sayings. Only the other week, I had a perfect opportunity to reprove someone with: “The eunuch should not take pride in his chastity”, but I hadn’t watched the video yet so missed my chance.

Update: Since I wrote this, I haven’t been able to get that theme song out of my head. Whenever my brain is even vaguely unoccupied, “Monkey Magic, Monkey Magic” creeps in.

Two useful utilities

I’ve been using a couple of terribly handy wee apps recently.

• Virtual Desktop. When I used Linux extensively, one of the things I most loved about the window managers was the virtual desktops. Enlightenment had a particularly beautiful one (though a bit memory hungry), which rendered the windows in the pager. When I moved to MacOS X, I missed using a hotkey to flip to my terminals or email window. So when I saw Virtual Desktop in beta, I applied to become a beta tester. I liked it, but the first release still had a few rough edges, so I didn’t get it. Browsing around recently, I had a look at the most recent version and found that they had improved it immensely. I’m not sure I could be without it now. I have 9 virtual desktops to flip between, and I’ve set up certain apps to open their windows on a particular desktop. There are multiple ways to change desktops or get to certain windows; by clicking on the window in the pager, using a hotkey (I have mine tied to the function keys), or by using the menubar. It’s much tidier and easier than selectively hiding windows, and I find that by grouping things by function (web, office, email, documents, pim etc.) I can focus on the task I’m doing better.
• Pith. As in ‘helmet’, not ‘taking the’. I’m a convert to Safari, but like legions of others, I miss Chimera’s/Mozilla’s tabs. While Apple decides whether or not tabbed interfaces contravene their HID guidlines, I’m using Pith. It isn’t a perfect replacement for tabs, but it works very well. There was hint on MacOSXHints about using Pith in conjunction with FullScreenSafari.ape which stops Safari from splurging new windows all over the screen. I like my windows to be all tidily lined up at the screen edge. And, no, I don’t iron my socks.

A bad weekend for life

Seven die when the Space Shuttle Columbia breaks up on re-entry, 40 die in a train crash in Zimbabwe, at least 20 die in an explosion in Lagos, and seven children die in an avalanche in British Columbia. And those are just the spectuacular deaths. Hundreds of thousands will have died unspectacularly from disease, war or famine.

Life is fragile.

Walking

Mr. Butshesagirl and I went for a walk this morning to get some fresh air and some perspective. We chose a circular walk taking in Muswell Hill (no, not the one in London)—from the top you have a view over two counties; Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire.

It turned out to be much muddier underfoot than we’d anticipated. Every step was accompanied by the schplock of mud reluctantly releasing wellington boot. I’m fond of woods in winter—their starkness has a beauty of its own. In the woods, clumps of grass seemed supernaturally green. I wasn’t sure if they were really that colour, or if my eyes were seeking out and accentuating colour in the drab of winter. There were also surprising pockets of snow still persisting in places, nestling in hollows like sheep.

{Read more...}