This is geeky navel gazing, but, courtesy of flickr stats, here's what people have typed into google in order to find my flickr photos, by order of popularity. Note that Daisy is more popular than tits!
Does this mean more people are searching for pictures of Patrick Lauke than pictures of ladies' breasts?
Linda Ellis gave an excellent talk at the Museums Computer Group spring meeting about using handheld video players to improve access for Deaf visitors. You can read her slides on slideshare, and Mia Ridge has a write-up of the talk itself. The videos are available on youtube.
BHC2492 The Passenger Liner 'Queen Mary' Arriving at Southampton, 27 March 1936
(Repro ID: BHC2492 © National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London)
Last week, Mike Ellis posted about RSS feeds in museums. Specifically, how useful it would be if search results were available as newsfeeds. After a bit of tinkering around, and a fair amount of swearing at catalogue descriptions written in the Windows extended character set, I've now set up feeds for the National Maritime Museum collections. If your web browser supports RSS, then you should be able to find a feed on almost any page that generates a list of catalogue records. Here are some examples – a search for 'tower bridge'; objects from the Atlantic Worlds galleries; paintings and drawings by Charles Pears; photographs of the Aquitania; relics found at Erebus Bay. The collections search is also available via OpenSearch, which I've tested in Firefox and IE7. If your browser supports OpenSearch, then 'NMM Collections' should be available as a search engine from any page under http://www.nmm.ac.uk/collections/. This is really cool, as it opens up our collections to be used by any application that can consume RSS. I've also extended the news feed items with catalogue metadata using dc:coverage (publication info), dcterms:spatial (geographical coverage) and dcterms:temporal (date made), which opens up the possibility of plotting the objects on maps or timelines.
Several years ago, we digitised some papers relating to the explorer Matthew Flinders and put them online as the Flinders archive. I've been looking at that site with an eye to redeveloping it. Firstly, the markup needs overhauling to bring it up to the same standard as sites like the prints and drawings catalogue. Secondly, it'd be nice to come up with a good model for publishing written papers online. Most of the two million or so objects in the Maritime Museum's collections are bits of paper; log books, letters, diaries, crew lists and who knows what else. There's a copy of the Declaration of Independence, letters from Napoleon and Nelson's last letter to his daughter. You can see photos of these documents online, but the original text isn't available.
Tom Morris announced SemanticCamp this week. It's a two day thing (Sat 16th – Sun 17th Feb) centred around discussions of meaning and Kenneth Williams. No wait, it's a two day thing centred around discussions of a practical semantic web. Something that I'm very interested in, so I signed up.
Then I read the rules:
Attendees must give a demo, a session, or help with one, or otherwise volunteer / contribute in some way to support the event. All presentations are scheduled the day they happen. Prepare in advance, but come early to get a slot on the wall. The people present at the event will select the demos or presentations they want to see.
Ok, the last time I gave a presentation was an Open Museum lecture at the Maritime Museum in 2003. It was an overview of our Solar System, as an introduction to two days of talks about current Solar System research in the UK. Prior to that, I've also given lectures to the Flamsteed Astronomy Society. About comets – what they are, how they might have formed, why the Stardust mission was so interesting, that sort of thing.
All fascinating stuff, and well worth talking about, but what on earth would I present at a semantic web workshop? Answers on a postcard please!
Really handy overview from Simon Willison - 130 slides about Ajax. Around about slide 58 he talks about the magical power of JSON. If you're still using XML to pass objects and data around, have a look at this.
I've been using JSON at work to open up our collections databases. The Collections Online search results pages are seperated into a controller script, which parses the URL for search query parameters and pass them off to the backend data model; a set of backend classes which run SQL and generate result sets containing the results; and a HTML view page which takes a search results object, loops through and displays the list of records. Fairly straightforward Model-View-Controller design. This gives me the flexibility to write new views of the data without having to muck about writing new SQL and data-processing code.
So I've experimented with writing a new view page (less than 10 lines of coldfusion code) which encodes the search results object as a JSON string. I've then added a module to our content management system which can read the JSON object and display it as a photo gallery. Kind of cool really - an object is instantiated in Coldfusion MX on one server, but then processed and presented by PHP running on a second server. JSON is very handy for these situations where you need to pass complex data structures between systems running on different application servers.
The next step, I think, would be to come up with some reasonable, standardised representation of collections records then open up our data with a standard JSON API that can be used by anyone.
Work have bought me a ticket to @media Ajax so I'll be hanging around in Westminster on the Monday and Tuesday after the Amnesty book sale.
A couple of people have asked about the CSS magnifier that I wrote for the National Maritime Museum web site, so this is a test to see if I can easily embed a magnified image in a blog post.
Continue reading "Adding a magnifier to images with CSS and JavaScript" »
We've launched an astronomy blog at work. Astronomy news posted by yours truly, among others. Hopefully it will grow into an interesting and informative read.
Having posted previously that all the excitement in the microformats world seems to be around publishing them, it was exciting to read that getsatisfaction.com uses microformats on its registration page. Pick a service that you've previously registered for, and the magic of microformats will copy your personal details across for you. So I wandered over to try it out.
I couldn't seem to find this in the Movable Type manual, but here's the code that produces a Recent Comments list in the blog sidebar:
<div class="module">
<h2 class="module-header">Recent Comments</h2>
<div class="module-content">
<ul class="module-list">
<MTComments lastn="6" sort_order="descend">
<MTCommentEntry>
<li>
<a href="<MTEntryPermalink>#c<$MTCommentID
pad="1"$>"><$MTCommentAuthor$></a>
said “<$MTCommentBody remove_html="1"
trim_to="100"$>…”
</li>
</MTCommentEntry>
</MTComments>
</ul>
</div>
</div>
A while back, Bruce Lawson and James Craig wrote hAccessibility, about the abbr design pattern and potential problems that it raises for people who browse the web with screen readers. Since then, there has been some useful discussion on how to make microformats more friendly to screen readers, which is great.
I've been meaning to post this for a while - revish, a social networking site for book lovers, has been launched by the very excellent Dan Champion. You should all go and sign up and talk about books that you're reading.
Oh and come to the 33rd Amnesty book sale, Saturday 16th June 2007, Church of the Ascension, Dartmouth Row, Blackheath SE10, and buy some more books to read.
Ever wondered how to draw a Fibonacci spiral using only CSS and JavaScript? Well, wonder no more. If you want to change the amount of the spiral that's visible, add a parameter 'scale' to the URL. Well, it's actually an approximation to a spiral made by drawing sections of circles, but who's going to notice? (Fibonacci number generator found at LiteratePrograms.)
Here's a simple logarithmic spiral. Change a and b in the URL to alter its appearance. It becomes quite dull as b approaches 0. Update: try pressing the cursor keys while looking at the spiral. Negative values of b are kind of fun.
Judge for yourself which of these spirals best represents a nautilus shell.
We've now rolled this out across the National Maritime Museum's collections pages. I think it looks rather nice.
There's an example page on this site, using one of my photos from Flickr. It fixes an annoying bug in Opera, which doesn't fire onload events for images loaded from the cache. Consequently, the setup code never ran in Opera, meaning the 'zoom on/off' link never did anything. Until I discovered the magical img.complete property. I'm not sure it's a standard DOM property for images, but it does the job. Opera users can now enjoy the rich JavaScript goodness, rather than looking enviously at the users of web browsers which actually work.
I've added keyboard support, since device-independent control is a AA accessibility requirement*. You can focus the control with the tab key. While it has focus, the cursor keys move the magnifier, not the browser window. Shift+cursor keys move it around faster (thanks to Dan Champion for suggesting that improvement).
It supports simple, inline HTML in the popup notes now too – basically, embedded images, links and simple text formatting. I can't decide if it would be neat, or just plain annoying, to have a note that played an embedded audio clip when it appeared.
The Museum's trustees are very impressed by it – go me!
*Wouldn't voice control be cool? Like that bit in Bladerunner where he examines the photo of the bathroom – “Pan left. Stop. Enhance.”
Had a chat at the War Museum last week, in which we talked (among other things) about the difficulty of making large paintings available in detail over the web. This afternoon I knocked together a quick magnifying glass, using CSS and the DOM-Drag javascript library. The code behind it is pretty crappy at the moment (it's a rehash of the magnifier I wrote about 4 years ago) but I think it looks promising: The British Power Boat Company.
This week, I've been mostly grooving to Stevie Wonder…
I had the good fortune to hang out, briefly, with Chris Heilmann after the London Web Standards Group meet-up this week.
As we stood outside the pub, a very nice, but rather inebriated, young lady staggered past with her friends, looked at Chris and went, “It's Simply Red! I want my photo with Simply Red!”. I laughed at ‘Mick Hucknall’ until she turned, stared hard at me and said, “You. You're that guy. You know the one. That one. The lady in red.” I stopped laughing, but I let her take her photo with me. A gentleman always accedes to a lady's requests.
Chr*s de f*cking B*rgh my arse!
The new Maritime Museum prints catalogue is now live. I'm quite proud of this - all of the HTML, CSS, SQL and backend coldfusion code was written by me. Except for the layout, where I used a modified version of Yahoo grids. I also built the SQL server 2000 database which lies behind the site, and is populated by legacy data from some rather large structured text files. The site uses a strict doctype, valid HTML, CSS for layout as well as looks and all of our prints records are now open to Google, via the magic of Google Sitemaps. I've also thrown in a little bit of unobtrusive JavaScript, courtesy of a free copy of Jeremy Keith's DOM scripting book, which I blagged at Geek in the Park.
Oh and did I mention that the 20,000 images are served from our internal image server, again with a bit of coldfusion/Samba magic that I set up? I love getting a chance to do this sort of stuff.
The item level catalogue template uses a table to hold the actual catalogue record. “That's funny”, I hear you say, “surely a record like that is actually a definition list?” Indeed, I thought that too, and you can see an early version of the catalogue record page in which I did use a definition list, styled with CSS to look like a table.
However, I sent that round a few friends for comment, and pretty much the first response I got was “Why on earth are you using a definition list?” Screenreaders, you see, don't handle definition lists very well. Consequently, screenreader users find them very frustrating as they have to sit through the reader announcing the whole list, along with guff about whether it's reading a term or definition. With a properly marked-up table, on the other hand, a screenreader user should be able to jump from one record heading to the next, without listening to the table data unless they want to. So the live site has a table.
Things I learnt from this:
This is tiresome. I hate flamewars. Here's a fragment of Chris Beasley's blog comments, as it appears to me. Quite different from comments 17 and onwards on Chris' blog. What I can't figure out is, why aren't my comments showing up?
Assuming the US and Australian court systems are not that different:
1 Most the damages will go in legal fees;
2 If things go pear shaped Bruce Sexton can lose everything
3 If it is so easy, why does not every shyster lawyer get every disabled person they can sue every commercial website in the US and make huge fortunes and retire to the Bahamas?
“So unless you have something new to add why not stop being antagonistic and just put me on your list of people to hate and leave it at that?”
Mate, I don’t have a list of people to hate. Even if I did, you wouldn’t be on it, okay? I think you’re the one that ’sees enemies where there are none’ here.
By the way, I’m not a Socialist either. I voted Liberal Democrat in the last election.
Re. quotes taken out of context, you really should provide a link so that people can make their own minds up. Here’s the URL of the post that started all this fuss in the first place. I believe the comment in question was number 59:
http://www.sitepoint.com/forums/showthread.php?t=346162&page=3&pp=25
Cheerio 
1. About 30%, to these predatory lawyers.
2. No, unfortunately in US courts the plaintiff doesn’t lose everything if their lawsuit is found to be without merit.
3. They do, not everyone because some people atleast have ethics. Predatory personal injury lawyers go out seeking any possible client, and many so called professional-plaintiffs engineer repeated injuries or injustices for themselves that their job is literally suing people for money. They have no other employment.
Here are some links: 1 2 3 4 5 6
This legal climate is directly responsible for shaping my opinion on the matter. The US is such a litigious society at the moment and it really irks myself and many others.
Hmmm, I see my most recent comment (after Nick Cowie’s, before yours) is “awaiting moderation.”
Oh well, I posted my response on my blog. Comments are welcome (and uncensored)
http://eatyourgreens.org.uk/archives/2006/09/alone_and_easy.html
Welcome, comrade, to a new post from the glittering proletarian utopia that is the People's Republic of Jimbo. Yes, that's right folks, all of a sudden I'm a socialist. Or so says avowed capitalist, libertarian (and, thus, Enemy of the People) Chris Beasley. He also states on his blog:
“…why not stop being antagonistic and just put me on your list of people to hate and leave it at that?”
My list of people to hate? I don't have one. But I suppose my shiny new Socialist Republic needs one, if only to deal with counter-revolutionaries and other malcontents. I don't know, precisely, what I'll do to them but it'll be something pretty darn nasty. Oh yes indeedy.
Chris is angry because of a lawsuit brought against the retail store Target on behalf of a blind customer, Bruce Sexton. Mr Sexton, a student at Berkeley, cannot shop online at Target because their website will not work with the screenreading software he uses to browse the web. He approached the National Federation of the Blind (NFB), who then approached Target on his behalf. The NFB negotiated with Target about making their online store accessible to blind people. Those negotiations broke down and the NFB took Target to court in California.
Under Californian State Law, a bricks-and-mortar business is required to make their place of business physically accessible to handicapped people. It is unclear whether the same law extends to online businesses. Under the Golden Rule, however, it's possible that a court may decide that the intention, rather than literal meaning, of the law may be that businesses in California should not discriminate against whom they do business, on the basis of disability, regardless of the physical circumstance. It will be interesting to see how it turns out.
Chris Beasley argues that the NFB's motive in this case is greed, not accessibility for blind people. They have brought the case to reap huge damages and live off the profits. To my mind, only one type of person gets rich off of legal action - lawyers. If this case is resolved on behalf of the NFB, I'll bet the majority of the damages will go to covering their legal costs. Samuel Johnson, I think, said it best:
“There ambush here relentless ruffians lay,
And here the fell attorney prowls for prey.”
It's unfortunate that this has gone as far as a legal action. I don't believe that suing companies under existing disability legislation is the best way to promote web accessibility. The business case for accessibility alone should be enough to convince any rational capitalist. An accessible website lowers your costs and wins you extra customers. In this case, Target were approached out-of-court about the inaccessibility of their website. When that approach failed, the next step was, unfortunately, legal action.
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’:
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.
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.
…we're too dumb to make believe this is all we want from life.”
A little bit of Jawbreaker there, to raise my spirits after last.fm's magic internet brain kindly recommended that, of all the bands on the planet, I should listen to Coldplay. Christ, shoot me now.
By the way, what exactly is a superstitious hyperrealist?
This American bloke has never seen a Dalek before. However, he says he will watch any TV programme which the wise (and beautiful) people of the internet ask him to watch by voting on his website. So vote for him to watch Dr. Who (8pm on Fridays).
On the subject of Daleks – I watched Face again last week. A decent gangster film, but not as good as I remembered it being the first time I saw it. That said, it does have Ray Winstone, Robert Carlyle and Phil Davis all playing villains and Ray Winstone gets to be Very Hard Indeed, running up and down a street in Haringey, shooting at coppers, all the while wearing a t-shirt bearing a big picture of a Dalek and the slogan ‘Exterminate!’ Nice one.
…but this is reality so give us some room.”
Switching from dialup to broadband meant losing access to Usenet, via news.demon.co.uk. Which means no late night lyrics posting sprees on alt.punk.
They were pointless, childish and pretty stupid. I kind of miss them. Google groups just ain't the same, somehow. Anyone know a good NNTP server?
Only discovered this recently - last.fm user profiles include a page that lists your favourite albums by showing the covers. I like this. I like it a lot. Records are about the cover art as much as the music. Ask me if I've got a certain album by mentioning the name and I'll have to think about it. Show me the cover and I'll know instantly, yes or no, because I'll more likely remember what they look like than what they're called.
Anyway, by mysterious digital interweb magic, here are pictures of a large chunk of my album collection. The only disappointing thing about the internet is how small the pictures are. No wonderful 12-inch LP sleeves.
Stuff that's proved handy/fun/vaguely interesting recently.
Much of the last couple of weeks at work has been spent migrating coldfusion from a single server, standard edition on Windows 2000 to the multiple server, enterprise edition on Redhat.
The following web pages were invaluable in getting it running properly.
Welcome to the 2005 edition of getting to know your friends. What you are supposed to do is copy this entire blog entry and paste it onto a new blog entry that you'll post. Change all the answers so they apply to you, and then publish! Leave a comment if you do this.The theory is that you will learn a lot of little (random) things about your friends, if you did not know them already.
I've revived this site, after almost a year. It started attracting an awful lot of comment spam, and trackback spam, so I turned off comments and stopped updating it until I'd figured out what to do about spam. Then MT 3.2 came along, with built-in filtering and I got broadband. So I thought, "Why not revive eat your greens?" Indeed. Just need to decide what to do with it now.
Useful stuff that's come up in the last 12 months:
Lots of people showed up at the Observatory this morning, and a good time was had by all. I even got a mention from the Beeb.
Charlie posted that youngpup's wonderful slide-out menus
aren't standards compliant. Being stuck in the flat with a cold, I thought I'd have a go at modifying it to work with unordered lists, rather than nested div's. Here are the first results...
A photojournal by a Russian woman of her rides through Chernobyl's irradiated 'dead zone'.
Matador Records | Mission Of Burma - mission of burma have made their first record in 20 years and it's coming out in May. Ace! Hopefully I'll be seeing them in London in early April.
The Russian Record: Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii - colour photography from prerevolutionary Russia. Very cool. Via charlie.
The Dante's Inferno Test has banished you to the Second Level of Hell!
Here is how you matched up against all the levels:
| Level | Score |
|---|---|
| Purgatory (Repenting Believers) | Very Low |
| Level 1 - Limbo (Virtuous Non-Believers) | Low |
| Level 2 (Lustful) | Very High |
| Level 3 (Gluttonous) | Low |
| Level 4 (Prodigal and Avaricious) | Low |
| Level 5 (Wrathful and Gloomy) | High |
| Level 6 - The City of Dis (Heretics) | Very High |
| Level 7 (Violent) | High |
| Level 8- the Malebolge (Fraudulent, Malicious, Panderers) | High |
| Level 9 - Cocytus (Treacherous) | Low |
Dreamless - Best Clients Quotes - 977design.com - makes me feel slightly better about some of the stupid things I have heard at work. Most of those involved words such as 'synergy' or 'findability', usually enclosed in quotes.
If you can see this, ImageMagick is working.
Browse the interactive galleries
My first CSS site (well, my second, but the first one doesn't exist any more).
