Relatively Ignorant Blog

Finally I have done a very small amount to relieve the boring, out-of-the-box look of this blog by replacing the default WordPress theme with a different one.

I am tweaking it a bit: I have changed to feed link from RSS (old hat!) to Atom (new, fancy and valid) and removed a repeated date field.

Some day I might actually have something original…

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I’m sorry Cameron had trouble finding Internet cafes in Tasmania. I should have revealed sooner that we found the Internet in Tasmania at the end of last year.

Yes, the Internet! Here’s the documentary proof:

It’s in Geeveston, southern Tasmania.

You always wanted to know where the Internet is, didn’t you?

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I get annoyed by tech articles with code examples that contain basic errors. The latest I read is Kurt Cagle’s recent instalment on understanding XForms.

He has two examples of XML documents that are not well-formed: a cardinal sin for a tech article about XML. He and the O’Reilly editors must at least test all XML examples in an XML editor to check well-formedness.

One of the examples also has a namespace prefix misspelt. Then Kurt describes how many people find XML namespaces difficult to read and understand. No wonder!

Correcting errors should not be left as an exercise for the reader.

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The other day I had my first digital in-cinema experience. I saw In Search of Mozart at the Schonell Cinema and, shortly after it started, noticed that it looked different.

There were no scratches or specks that flash by. Next I noticed the fine horizontal lines that were always present in the image. I turned around and saw that the projector was digital. Cool!

Then I started noticing digital artifacts that were occasionally annoying:

• jagged diagonal lines with high contrast (e.g. the keys of a piano)
• somewhat flat and ‘washed out’ colours in some scenes
• ‘halos’ on some high-contrast edges of objects

These are all symptoms of low-quality digital images: no anti-aliasing, poor colour management and crude digital sharpening. Overall these artifacts reminded me of early, inexpensive digital camera images. No doubt we will see improvements in digital cinema images as we have seen them in still photography.

I did enjoy the movie because of the subject matter and because the digital artifacts were not always obvious. My wife did not notice that the movie looked any different to a projected film.

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Anyone who has seriously wrangled web content and especially XML will have encountered headaches with encoding. You see junk characters or little rectangles (signifying unknown characters) in your browser instead of the correct ones.

In general, they happen when the rendering component is expecting one encoding but the stream it receives is encoded with another. One common case is when a web page purports to be encoded in UTF-8 (via an HTTP header and/or a meta tag) but actually contains Windows-1252 encoding because its contents were pasted directly in from a Word document (for example).

These kinds of mistakes are to be expected from web amateurs but even pure web companies can make a hash of it. This recent example is from Bloglines:

My exploration yielded the following information.

• I saw the same problem in Firefox, Camino and Safari.
• There is no encoding problem with the article itself on oreillynet.com.
• The Atom feed appears to be encoded properly.
• The Bloglines frame source shows that this HTML is written using JavaScript and that the JS strings have junk in them.

An extract from the source is here:

Is it hard wrangling encoding in JavaScript? Do you need to be careful with string constants in JavaScript? I haven’t used JavaScript with non-ASCII characters so I am not sure.

(Oh yes, the French is wrong, too. The word is égalité, not equalité.)

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Aristotle Pagaltzis misses a feature from Firefox 1.0 that was removed from Firefox 1.5: the ability to right-click on a bookmarks folder and select Manage Folder to manage only that folder. I used to use it a lot, and also miss it.

Why did they take it away? It was buggy. Someone has written an extension to provide that functionality but I haven’t tried it.

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So, a new use for Brasso: Remove iPod Nano Scratches for $4

The author didn’t understand how Brasso worked. It works because it is a fine abrasive. As is toothpaste. (Brasso also contains ammonium, which might damage the iPod plastic, but appears not to have done so in this case.)

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Reading Jakob Nielsen’s top ten mistakes by webloggers, it’s clear I am a failure as a blogger, on most counts.

• I’m too lazy to write a biographical page (mistake #1). My readers (both of them!) know me already.
• Nor have I a photo (#2). Ditto.
• I try to invent slightly curious titles, with a whiff of pun about them (#3).
• My blog motions are quite irregular (#7).
• And I spread them thinly (#8).
• Doh! How could I keep forgetting that I’m writing for my future boss(es) (#9).

I do OK on the other points, so I get 4 out of 10.

What is my blog about? I have some whimsical notion of it as a multi-faceted portrait of myself that reveals itself (and thus me) piece by piece.

Sorry to disappoint you, Jakob.

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This riff on the current world political climate as seen from the Bourne shell made me laugh out loud.

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I have created a GreaseMonkey user script specifically for cyclingnews.com results pages from the 2005 Tour de France.

It highlights riders’ teams in something approximating the team colours. This is trickier than it might seem because many teams have similar or same colours, with different patterns. It also highlights Aussie riders in a different way to the other scripts.

So, grab it and have a look. If you are using one of the other scripts you’ll need to disable it or configure it to skip TdF 2005 results pages (http://www.cyclingnews.com/road/2005/tour05/*). Please give me feedback or suggested changes on colours etc.

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