Solitude 

I’ve not really posted much in the last day or two, and won’t for another day or two. This week is class test week: a whole lot of testing and not a whole lot of time for studying.

Other than working hard, I’ve started to prepare the next major overhaul of Finetto, the CMS I’ve been developing (and that runs this site). There’s a lot of stuff going in that I’ve wanted to do for ages (Comments, an event-based model for dealing with changes etc) and some new ideas (those can remain private until they’re implemented).

I’m surprised at the amount of redundancy I’m going to be able to remove: there’s lots of similar code in there just waiting to be made more generic, lots of tweaking waiting to be done.

Anyway, there will be a return to normal service on Thursday, if all goes well.

I’ve been messing around with RSS 2.0 feeds a bit lately. I thought it was about time I added one myself. So, I had a look at the feed Sam Ruby has and took what I needed.

Then I got to thinking: we have an XHTML body for content in the feed, so why not use it as we would in any other web page? After a little messing around, I added some CSS rules and now have a feed that’s smarter (looking) than your average feed.

I give you my RSS 2.0 feed.

The internet quiz: the most pointless waste of time we’ve come up with on the net. You know the sort I mean: “What kind of (blogger/thinker/zombie etc) are you?”. Answer 30 question and you’ll reveal everything about yourself. Or will you?

The problem with these quizzes is that they don’t tell you anything new; you only ever get what you want to hear out. Anyone with a reasonable amount of intelligence can see the result answering a certain question will give you. For example, “Do you like listening to music: a) a lot, b) a little, or c) not at all?”. What a shocker it is when, after answering “a lot”, that you’re a musical person.

Now, whether we do it consciously or not, we always answer these questions the way we think of ourselves, rather than the way we actually are. This is the only insight into our own nature we get: that we’d rather live in our own private little fantasy than see ourselves for how we are (assuming a quiz could accurately profile a person in the first place).

What prompted this ? The BBC Thinker Quiz. Was I surprised when it profiled me as both a “logical-mathematical thinker” and “a musical thinker”? No. I do maths and computing, and I’m passionate about music. This is how I see myself. No great revelations, no big surprise, no wizard behind the curtain.

So, if you want an ego boost (”wow, I’m really as [insert quiz variable here] as I thought I was”), keep trying those quizzes. Me? I’m going back to the roots of quiset; literally “to question” - Question the point of these quizzes.

Given a primary location that is roughly the size of a portaloo, you wouldn’t think “Phone Booth” could be very interesting. Of course, throw in the other key ingredient of the film, a sniper aiming at the occupant of the phone booth who starts picking off nearby people, and you’ve got a considerably more interesting prospect.

The small location doesn’t detract from tension, drama, or even characterisation. We get to see the inner workings of Stu (Colin Farrell), and the mysterious sniper (Keifer Sutherland). Although Stu isn’t the best of people (he’s an asshole), we can still feel for him; trapped in a claustrophobic nightmare, being instructed by a madman who can play God with his life.

I don’t want to say too much more (I try not to ruin films for others), but it’s definitely worth seeing.

Honestly, this’ll be the last “links only” post, I’ll make for a while. I want to get rid of the rest of these before they get too stale (some of them already had to be thrown out because they were getting a bit whiffy).

• WTheRemix Winners - The winning entries have been announced in the competition to re-design the W3C Homepage. This is badly needed, since the current page isn’t exactly a shining example of what standards can do,
• Web Buttons - Buttons for possibly every conceivable occassion. When I get time, I might contribute a kitchen sink button for completeness,
• Confirmation Bias - This idea occured to me not too long ago: people believe whatever they want to believe, regardless of evidence. The smarter they are, the better they are at defending their own position rather than using their intelligence to be more open-minded. The article does a much more thorough job of explaining it,
• Better URI links - Just what it says on the tin: links to articles about using better URIs. I’ve also been meaning to start using proper URIs for permalinks on this site, but can’t seem to bring myself to implement it. It’s near the top of my to-do list for the site,
• Irate Scotsman and Bug’s Blog - While playing around with GeoURL, I decided to see who lived within 10 miles of me. I was surprised to find these two: they both go to my university and are in my course. Finding someone I knew (or rather knew of) offline while online was a little disconcerting. I later tried to find more people from my course, but gave up after a grand total of 0 finds. Oh well.

Like I said, that’s it for link-only posts for at least, oh, another week.

Don Park is working on a newspaper UI for RSS feeds.

While this is a powerful interface in terms of familiarity and makes an excellent metaphor in terms of gathering news from a global source, perhaps it’s too stylised.

Newspapers cram a lot of information (most of which is filler) into a very small space. The amount of actual amount of raw wanted content by any given reader is minimal (put your hand up if you only read the cartoon strips). The same can’t be said of custom RSS feed generated newspapers. People would only choose to include the content they wanted, so the crowded “interface” becomes slightly redundant.

What might be better is to generate custom web pages based on user templates. I’d rather read content in a web interface that I’ve tweaked for myself than in a automatically generated paper. I know that I’m probably in the minority on that point though, being a web designer does that, but given a reasonable bunch of pre-built templates I can see more users wanting to do this.

Besides, newspaper type-setting (and layout)is an enormously difficult job. People get paid huge sums of money to do it and I don’t think anyone could create an RSS aggregator front-end sophisticated enough to replicate the effect.

But please, Don, prove me wrong. I’d love to see it anyway.

While I’m on the subject, my current RSS aggregator is the wonderful NNTPRSS which hooks into newsgroup readers. This might not be the best interface for normal web users, but for people who are constantly on usenet then it’s fantastic.

Original article Via Stuart Langridge

One of the best ideas I’ve seen implemented in a long time: take the GeoURL tags and the update list from weblogs.com, roll them together in a beautiful flash map, and watch the world update their sites in real-time. This is the world as a blog.

Since I ping weblogs.com and have geoURL tags, I’m going to sit watching the map for the next few minutes waiting for me to appear.

Apparently, I’ve been using acronyms and abbreviations incorrectly, according to Accessify’s guide to using acronyms and abbreviations. Before now, I’ve been using acronyms for everything (thinking abbreviations were for thinks like abbr.

Met up with an old friend for lunch today. He’s been away training for the army. Apparently, they’re quite sadistic about punishing people: “Everyone, 20 push-ups! Lipowski’s got his hand on his hip!”. Fun.

I haven’t really been sleeping well for the last 3 weeks. It’s really starting to get to me. Everything is getting harder to remember, details are harder to retain, more difficult to keep thought strands separate, damn near impossible to write anything decent here, emotions are more easily set off. Basically, the works. So if I’m asshole to you or anyone else, I apologise in advance.

And I’ll end with a joke: What’s big, grey and can’t climb trees?
A car park.

In addition to menus that don’t work as well as they should, I would suggest that Macs have one more fatal flaw in terms of ease of use; although this is one that every Mac user will claim is a feature, rather than a bug.

One-button mice, oh how I hate you. Now, I understand the thinking behind only having one button: consistency. No matter where you are on the screen or what you’re doing, clicking will “activate” the object or menu you’re on. Very nice and simple.

The problem is that I like my right-mouse button; context-sensitivity is very helpful. It works in a generally consistent way. I can largely predict what options I’ll have quick access to from my mouse when I use it. If a program is unpredictable, then it’s the programs fault, not the hardware. This is also a very rare case these days. I can’t remember the last time I was surprised when a right-click didn’t do exactly what I expected it to do. I have, however, been very annoyed by websites which disable my ability to right-click, and by operating systems which assume that I’m too dumb to be able to remember a simple menu system.

As long as alternatives remain in menus, then how does offering a second mouse button hinder anyone? Not offering it is hindering at least one person.

After the recent fighting between Dave Winer and a few others over CSS, Mark Pilgrim has created the Winer Number.

In an effort to spread around this joyous new number to those who have a FOAF profile, I’ve created the Winer Number And Extended Winer Number namespace document.

My own FOAF file has been updated accordingly.