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.
Paul Eagle, from the Amnesty UK Business Team, kindly came down to Blackheath on Tuesday night and gave a talk about the Business & Human Rights campaign. Here are the notes from the evening, pasted straight from our newsletter.
I’ve been reading Amnesty’s new report on the internet and freedom of expression in China. The specific focus is the complicity of Yahoo!, Google and Microsoft in human rights abuses in China by facilitating and sanctioning government censorship.
The full report is available from the Amnesty UK website (you have to scroll down a bit to find a link to the PDF). It’s worth reading if you’re interested in business ethics and this whole Web 2.0 thing.
From the Royal Astronomical Society press list today:
On the evening of 3 March the Moon will move directly behind the Earth in a total lunar eclipse. This is the only eclipse visible from the UK this year.
The Moon will begin to move into the lighter part of the shadow of the Earth (the penumbra) at 2016 GMT and from that time it will take on a yellowish tint. It will enter the darker core of the shadow (the umbra) at 2130 GMT. The total eclipse starts at 2244 GMT when the Moon is completely immersed in the umbra. Totality will end at 2358 GMT, the Moon will move out from the umbra completely at 0111 GMT (on 4 March) and the eclipse will come to an end when the Moon leaves the penumbra at 0225 GMT.
Although fairly common, total lunar eclipses can be spectacular events. Normally the Moon does not disappear completely but is lit by sunlight scattered through the Earth’s atmosphere and takes on a beautiful brick-red hue. At the time of the eclipse, the Moon will be in front of the stars of the constellation of Leo and from the UK it will be high in the southern sky.
NASA/JPL released new pictures of Saturn from the Cassini mission today, including views from high above, and below, the ring system. See the full set on their web site.
The mpeg movie of a ring crossing is well worth watching, if you have the time to download it.
…cos she’s been down South and held peasants in her arms.
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.”
…passing out while you were passing out your rules.
“The board felt you could improve on your .NET experience and felt you could have been more inventive with your answers.”
Sigh. Anyone got any tips for inventive answers to interview questions?
