Year: 2006

Urgent action against the death penalty in Pakistan

From the Amnesty UK web site:

Mirza Tahir Hussain is due to be executed on 3 August. Mirza was tried and convicted of murdering a taxi driver while travelling to the village of Bhubar from Rawalpindi, Punjab Province, on 17 December 1988. The taxi driver reportedly stopped the car and produced a gun, and Mirza Tahir Hussain, who was 18 years old at the time, was reportedly physically and sexually assaulted by the taxi driver. In the scuffle that followed, the gun went off, and the taxi driver was fatally injured.

Time is short for this action but you can send an appeal on Mirza Tahir Hussain’s behalf via this handy contact form for General Musharraf. There’s even a suggested letter that you can use on Amnesty’s action page.

Good feeling

Finding a brand new, as-yet-unpublished-in-the-UK book at the Amnesty book sale for £1.50, looking it up on amazon.co.uk and discovering that the retail price is ten times that. Go me! I am the king of bargain hunting.

So I’ve been reading Persepolis, Marjane Satrapi’s thoughtful and touching comic book account of growing up in Iran during the Islamic Revolution. This edition goes on to cover her life in Austria as a teenager and her return to Tehran before the Gulf War in 1991. It’s well worth reading and quite enlightening about Persian culture and the Islamic state in Iran.

“I must look like a dork”

So young gribley, inspired by my good self, posted something a while back about youtube as “the neutron bomb of copyright violations.” Then I came across this link to somewhere in the region of 1,500 music videos from twenty years ago.

Looking through that list, I realised youtube isn’t just an archive of hair metal and androgynous new romantics – there’s a whole bunch of eighties hardcore and punk on there too. So I’ve been wasting time this evening finding ropey old videos of Husker Du, the Dead Boys, Dead Kennedys and, of course, the Minutemen. Here’s ‘A Political Song For Michael Jackson To Sing’:

Impressions of @media 2006

  • Jeffrey Veen is somewhere in the region of 8345 ft tall, striding the world like a laid-back, rather casual colossus. Despite this, his publicity photo was taken from a vantage point somewhere above his head. Either a) the photo was snapped from a passing aircraft or b) somewhere out there is a photographer who is taller than Jeff Veen. Think about it.
  • Molly Holzschlag moves constantly. She’s some kind of living embodiment of Heisenberg’s principle that position and velocity cannot be determined simultaneously.
  • Every web design course should have at least one class where students have to watch videos of disabled people using the web. Hell, I’d like to see some education on how disabled people use e-mail, write HTML or compose Word documents.
  • Jeremy Keith makes the sort of insights that, when you hear them, you think “that’s so perfectly sensible, it seems almost obvious.” Eg. Don’t use mysterious Javascript pixie magic to provide an essential function on your web page. Yet noone thinks of these things until Jeremy points them out. I really, really need to read his book.
  • Eric Meyer liked my Mission of Burma shirt. Woo!
  • Did you like my semantically correct use of the cite tag in the previous item?
  • Lots of people made notes by typing (live-blogging, I believe it’s called by the cool kids) on expensive looking Mac laptops. How do they draw diagrams, or doodle?
  • Mac laptops are shiny and desirable. Mmmmm, my precious…
  • The web dev community are some of the most open, friendly and approachable people in the world. I wish I’d had the chance to speak to more people.
  • Some of the accessify folks came down to Greenwich on Saturday, which gave me a chance to play with the 28-inch telescope. Photos are up on Flickr from Dan Champion and Karl Dawson.

32nd annual Amnesty book sale – 17th June 2006

We’ve set a date for this year’s book sale – Saturday 17th June (the day after @media). The venue, as usual, is the Church of the Ascension on Dartmouth Row, just up the hill from Lewisham Station.

There’ll be 20,000(ish) books, as per usual, many new or nearly new and all very, very cheap. Come along and help us out by buying something to read for the summer. Last June we raised around £7,700 for Amnesty International, and a further £3,400 selling the leftovers in November.

Update: We’re now collecting, sorting and pricing books for the sale. If you have books to donate, or have some time to spare to help us sort and price books, please come along to Dartmouth Row to help out. We’re in a garage just down the hill from the Church of the Ascension. Times are:

  • Monday – Friday (not Bank Holiday Monday): 7pm to 9pm.
  • Saturday/Sunday (and Bank Holiday Monday): 2pm to 4pm.

Post-sale update: £6,814, all told! Our second highest take, I think. I’ve posted a few photos on Flickr.

Hunted by a freak

This song’s been going round and round in my head all weekend. I was humming it as I wandered round the funfair in Blackheath on Saturday. Eery shoegazer music, with a suitably disturbing video, that reminds me a little bit of My Bloody Valentine. You can get the song as an mp3 from Mogwai’s free podcast.

The world according to nouns

WCAG 2.0 – when I want beer, don’t give me shandy. Excellent write-up of the new web accessibility guidelines by Bruce Lawson, prompting me to write:

I had some thoughts on semantic HTML and Ajax (basically – HTML is a markup language for text documents. Does it have any semantic meaning when you start using it to mark up application user interfaces?)

Patrick Lauke pointed out, quite rightly, that HTML is the only language understood by existing user agents, so we’re stuck with it anyway. He started a discussion on accessify forum but I thought it might be helpful (for me at least) if I expanded on what my original thoughts were.

Continue reading The world according to nouns