I recently read Unspeak, a book which examines the use of language in politics and the media. A large section is devoted to discussing the word ‘genocide’, which apparently used to be a tremendously powerful word. Genocide should, under the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, demand international intervention. For a while, all this meant was that phrases like ‘ethnic cleansing’ were used instead, so that countries with power to change things could sit by and look solemn. Recently all pretense seems to have been dropped, and Darfur has been branded a genocide without any action being taken. Go figure.

Although standards may have slipped, you’d think genocide would still be a strong word. According to mediawatchwatch, the Russian Central Spiritual Directorate of Muslims recently used it in a press statement. Wow. Clearly, something big must be going on if the word ‘genocide’ is being used. What is this terrible event?

The Da Vinci Code.

The release of this film is:

an highly sophisticated form of spiritual genocide against the peoples of Russia.

Utter insanity. Here’s the definition of ‘genocide’:

genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

Obviously this is a group of crazies, and aren’t really worth the attention, but that phrase annoyed the hell out of me. Now I’m going to go think about cheerier subjects

Let me see what I have planned for today…

Wheeeeeeeeeeeee!

A couple of weeks ago I decided to shaving, just to see what happened. I have grown a beard before, but I kept it vaguely neat and didn’t go for the moustache. This time I just left it to its own devices.

It grew for about 10 days, then stopped. The moustache and beard never joined up. I’m not a very manly man, am I.

I didn’t think it looked too bad until yesterday. Then I had a haircut, and suddenly turned into a B-movie villain. It’s bad. It’s going this evening, but I thought I’d record it for posterity, since it’s unlikely to happen again. Click below if you really want to see.

Continue reading ‘B-Movie Villain’

Wrote a story.

When I looked down and saw the stake through my chest, I knew my troubles were only just beginning.

Everything went red, and I prepared for the interview to come. I’d have to explain to some sanctimonious mid-level Cretin exactly how I’d ended up dead, and what I planned to do differently next time. For somebody in my position this was bound to be a humiliating experience. Death is so very inconvenient these days. Hell, unsurprisingly, is full of bureaucrats, and they do so enjoy stretching out the paperwork while you’re lying in some pit with your entrails wrapped around your throat.

That was why I was surprised to hear the harps.

If you fancy reading it and have a spare five minutes, it’s here.

Flickr’s new interface didn’t work with Opera, and this was the prod I needed to take another look at Firefox. In the past I’d always found it to be slow, clunky and ugly. Its saving grace was the excellent rendering engine, plus possibly extensions. Apparently new versions have brought improvements, but I’d never played with them much.

I fired up 1.5.0.3, and it immediately seemed faster. Double-clicking to create a new tab worked without flashing the screen and pausing for half a second, for example. I don’t find it so snappy as Opera, but it’s fast enough not to be annoying. So that was a good start. However, it was still ugly as hell. Toolbars took up way too much of the screen; the tabs were far wider than was necessary; the browny background peeked through at every opportunity…It needed fixing.

A day later, and I’m pretty much happy with it:

Many of my alterations were to add features found in Opera, purely because I’m used to them and too lazy to re-learn anything. I thought I’d go through the steps I took in case anybody else is thinking of switching over.

Fixing the toolbars: The topmost ‘File’, ‘Edit’ etc. menu bar can’t be turned off, but there’s a way around it. I dragged the contents of the navigation toolbar into said menu bar, then disabled the navigation toolbar. I ditched a few of the icons - how often do I actually click ‘forward’ and ‘back’ anyway? - and set the ’small icons’ option, which saved a fair bit of space. The clever Compact Menu extension then replaced ‘File’, ‘Edit’ etc. with a single drop down button, which I placed next to the address bar. It was a little crowded by this point, so I removed the search box and installed Google’s Firefox toolbar, which is useful enough to be worth the extra space.

Tabs: For a tabbed browser, I thought the built-in tab support was lacking. The tabs themselves are huge, and the first time I closed the browser and re-opened it to find all my tabs gone was something of a surprise! Also, it seemed to open new windows at the drop of a hat. Happily, the Tab Mix Plus extension fixed most of that. The ’single window mode’ does its best to keep everything in tabs. There’s a built-in Session Saver, so you can re-open Firefox and be in exactly the same state as before. Also, it has the option to shrink the sizes of tabs to the width of the website title, but with a maximum width - this saves vast amounts of space, and you can see many more tabs on one screen than was possible before. The default ‘unread tab’ font was red italic, but happily that was changeable too. It’s endlessly configurable, and I’m still tweaking the options.

Theme: I tried a couple of the most popular themes, but they didn’t do much for me. Eventually I found an Opera theme which worked very well. I prefer the curved tabs, and the light blue background beats muddy brown any day I do have a slight problem with this theme, which I’ll detailbelow.

Features:

• Quicksearches - In Opera you can configure address bar shortcuts, so that typing ‘g monkeys’ will search google for monkeys, ‘az pullman’ will search amazon etc. This doesn’t sound like a big deal, but I’ve got used to hitting CTRL-T for a new tab, then quickly entering whatever search I was after. It’s faster than navigating to the google search bar, and offers a wider range of searches. I had some trouble finding out whether this was possible as I didn’t know what to search for, but it turns out that Firefox also has this built-in. Right-click on any search box and select ‘add a keyword for this search’, enter the equivalent of ‘g’, and you’re done.
• Mouse gestures - The All-in-One Gestures extension handled this perfectly. Showing the mouse ‘trails’ on screen is very helpful.
• Paste and go - A surprisingly useful little feature of Opera is being able to press ctrl-shift-v to open whatever URL is in the clipboard. It only saves one keypress, but I missed it within a couple of minutes. The paste and go extension solved that.
• Bookmarklets - I used to have FeedLounge and del.icio.us bookmarklets sitting in a toolbar, but Firefox doesn’t seem to allow URL shortcuts on anything other than the annoying bookmarks toolbar. I couldn’t solve this problem, but there are other methods. The del.icio.us firefox extension added a ‘tag this’ button to the address bar, and it’s superior to the bookmarklet in a few ways. The LiveLines extension alters the behaviour of the address bar’s RSS logo so you can specifiy an RSS reader instead of Firefox’s built-in system. Now, clicking the logo adds the feed to my FeedLounge account. I like that.
• Sidebar - I never used Opera’s sidebar all that much, but it did come in handy occasionally. FF’s built in sidebar was kinda lackluster, but the All-in-One Sidebar is far better, letting you manage bookmarks, themes, extensions, history and downloads from the same place.

Issues:

I have various extensions that place icons on the status bar. The Opera theme doesn’t seem to separate them and they’re all bunched together. Most other themes use a separator of some kind. Presumably I can edit the theme to do this, but I had a quick look and became terribly confused. Does anybody have any experience of this?

Opera has pre-defined text fields, so that when you started typing your address, for example, it would display a dropdown box letting you enter it automatically. I found InFormEnter, but that adds a large icon next to every field. Is there any equivalent for FF?

I used to have a sidebar with favicon links to my favourite sites. FF’s sidebar is too large for this, and you can’t set it to display the icons only. It’s not a big deal, but did some in handy occasionally.

Firefox suffers from the same problem as Opera in that if you submit a form and there’s a problem with the next page, when you hit back the forms are empty, or in the same state as when the page was loaded. I had a database connection problem and lost a post because of this.

Conclusion:

Although it took a fair amount of work, there doesn’t seem to be that I use in Opera that Firefox can’t emulate. Being able to use Google Calendar, Flickr etc. outweighs any disadvantages, so I’ll stick with it for the time being.

Flickr upgraded from ‘beta’ to ‘gamma’ status on Tuesday. As well as a new search system and a new Organizr, the largest change was a revamp of the interface.

The top-of-page options have been grouped into ‘You’, ‘Organize’, ‘Contacts’, ‘Groups’ and ‘Explore’, with drop-down menus for quick access. I’m not generally a fan of drop-downs, but these aren’t too bad. The section links themselves send you to the most important pages, so navigation is still generally a one-click process.

Group pools are much better. The Flickr Elves have managed to create a layout that looks neat, without vast amounts of whitespace. That’s quite the feat, actually. I’ve tried creating photo layouts on websites, and different orientations and picture sizes play havoc with any kind of aesthetics. See the FlickrCentral pool for an example.

Individual users’ photostreams now have two columns of photos, the space for which was found by emptying the sidebar of all links and grouping them under the username. This is undeniably neater. ‘Interestingness’ has been renamed ‘Popular’, which, although understandable, is a shame.

The Organizr seems to have been re-written from the ground up. The flash-based interface is gone, replaced by a clever AJAXy system. I haven’t had time to play with it properly, but immediate impressions are that it’s an improvement. It’s way faster, with no annoying delays on adding photos to sets. It also takes up the entire window, which definitely helps! Deleting a photo from a set is also an spectacular experience
They must be saving substantially on bandwidth with the new layout, and the whole site does feel more responsive.

The only real quibble I have with the revamp is that on Tuesday I wrote and distributed instructions on how to use Flickr, and got home to find various parts were wrong! They had given some warning, to be fair, so it was my own fault

The television picture fades. President Bush appears on screen. He has grave news. He has just read on the Internets…Well, see for yourself.

I haven’t laughed so hard all week.

Directly copying Binary Bonsai here, but it has to be done:

I so want this poster

This September, new safety regulations will require children below 135cm¹, and the age of 11, to use a child seat. It is the driver’s responsibility to ensure that this is the case, and fines of up to £500 can be imposed if it goes to court. A quick google search suggests that the average child hits 135cm at age nine. When I was eight, I sure as hell wouldn’t have wanted to be put into a car seat. There seems to be evidence that seat belts provide the most protection for those over 135cm², but whether it’s enough to make any real difference is an interesting question. Available data don’t seem to support the regulations.

Economist and Freakonomics author Steven Levitt examined data from the US Government’s “Fatality Analysis Reporting System”, which has collected police data on accidents since 1975, including details of whether and how restraints were used. Levitt concludes that:

among children 2 and older, the death rate is no lower for those traveling in any kind of car seat than for those wearing seat belts

Controlling for vehicle size, year of accident (are newer car seats better?) and severity of accident makes no difference.

This data is based on fatalities. What about injuries? That’s harder to analyse. Levitt and co-author Dubner commisioned various crash-tests using dummies based on children of various ages and with sensors to measure the force suffered. Although the force was greater with seat belts, due to their being designed for people over 135cm, it was below that considered likely to cause injury. The authors admit that this is by no means comprehensive, and say that different analyses of real-world data have produced conflicting results. It’s just not known whether car seats reduce injuries, at this point.

Parents go mental over car seats. They have to be installed by qualified technicians, often at considerable expense. Not that there’s anything wrong with this, of course - I’d probably be exactly the same: here’s something I can control relating to my kid’s safety, and I’m damn well going to do everything I can to comply with regulations. But if the effort put into car seat publicity were instead turned onto car manufacturers, to get them to design better seat belts, wouldn’t it save a large amount of needless expense, annoyance and worry?

Safety groups estimate that up to 60% of children don’t wear seat belts at all, and the adults aren’t much better, particularly if they’re in the back seat. Excuses, incidentally, range from “it’s just a short journey” to “it creases my clothes”. If people are happy to break the law currently, are child seat laws for children up to 11 going to make any difference?

Levitt and Dubner’s New York Times article is here, with more detail here. The preliminary academic report is here.

1. 4 feet 5 inches [↩]
2. why the age of 11 is specified, I don’t know [↩]

Flickr launched a major revamp earlier today. I haven’t had a chance to check it out yet, but naturally it doesn’t work properly with Opera. Google Notebook also launched today, with no Opera support. This is getting a little silly. Gmail, Google Calendar, Flickr, del.icio.us…Opera has problems with all of them. I still think it’s the most well-designed browser around, with by far the best interface, but if the rendering engine doesn’t improve dramatically then there’s going to be no choice but to switch to Firefox. Judging by the weeklies, Opera 9 has a long way to go if it’s to catch up.

Speaking of which, is there some build of Firefox that comes with the most useful extensions? I can’t believe I still have to trawl through the archive to get mouse-gestures and proper tab support, not to mention greasemonkey etc…

Comments aren’t working…Not entirely sure why. I haven’t changed any code today. Maybe it’s Akismet.

Update: So that’s weird. Turned out that the comments weren’t down, it was that mine was getting rejected. A bit of trial and error showed that the word ‘incest’ was causing all the trouble. It wasn’t going into spam or moderation, the comment just disappeared. This happened with Akismet turned off, so looks like a wordpress thing? I’ll see if I can test on somebody else’s blog, although it’s not a word that I use in conversation all that much It was in reference to The Aristocrats, in case you’re wondering.

The Da Vinci Code is released this weekend (my birthday, actually, but pointing that out would be transparent). Here’s what I’m meant to say:

Of course, the book was complete crap. It’s badly written and has a ridiculous story. Dan Brown is a hack who just rips off other people’s ideas. The film will be the worst kind of mainstream commercialist nonsense, directed by the king of all sentimental toss, Ron Howard. I shall be staying away, and I will laugh at anybody who doesn’t.

Except, I don’t think any of that.

I rather enjoyed The Da Vinci Code. I did, and still do, think it’s a great adventure story. People can and do slag off the writing style, while failing to mention that the level of tension created was really quite impressive (tension’s probably manipulative, or something). The way in which the plot unfolded made me feel intelligent. I cared about the characters. I didn’t see where the story was going. I liked the breakneck pace. Is it all based on truth? Who cares! Is it startlingly original? Who cares! It was, quite simply, great fun to read.

I like Ron Howard, too. He has a way of drawing me into his films, and I invariably become completely engrossed. I liked Apollo 13, A Beautiful Mind, Ransom, The Missing, EdTV, Parenthood, Willow and Splash. I was amazed to discover how much people like to criticise him.

The religious backlash to the film is nothing compared to the snide comments I’ve seen all over the net for the past six months, and it’s all a bit unnecessary. Maybe I don’t think on the same plane as everybody else, but chances are I’ll be in the cinema this weekend. Hopefully I’ll be having a good time.

Two weeks ago my boiler started making an awful grinding noise if left on for more than five minutes. It had also stopped providing hot water unless the central heating was on. I was worried. The man who serviced it at christmas said it hadn’t been the best boiler when it was installed 13 years ago, and it had an extensive callout history just with British Gas. They gave me a proper quote for a replacement, but at £2000 it was way more than I could afford, and it still is.

This lunchtime I finally called BG - I’m on one of their service plans - and they said somebody would be with me this afternoon. Ten minutes ago they turned up, turned a screw to increase the water pressure, which was apparently non-existent - and now everything works again! They were here for five minutes, and it didn’t cost me a thing.

Phew.

BBC News says:

The bassist from Bob Marley’s band The Wailers has lost his court battle for £60m in unpaid royalties.

The bassist’s name is Aston Barrett, but he’s known as ‘Familyman’. You know why? Because he’s fathered over 50 children. Other nicknames spring to mind.

Ben Goldacre writes the excellent ‘Bad Science’ column in the Guardian. From his blog:

Dr Chris Malyszewicz PhD, disgraced MRSA “expert” who got false positive results from his garden shed laboratory with his non-accredited correspondence course PhD from America and his lack of microbiology training, and demonstrable (and demonstrated, and admitted) lack of microbiology knowledge, fountain of every single MRSA “undercover swab” scare in every single tabloid, who had never previously made it into a broadsheet newspaper, who I roundly trounced in five consecutive Bad Science columns, and various Radio 4 shows, and who has not appeared in a single newspaper since then, is quoted at length and trumpeted as a major scientific expert today in no lesser paper than…. The Observer!!!

That is pretty much a perfect sentence.