CSS magnifying glass

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.

No division

I haven’t posted a music video for a while, so here’s a rousing anthem from my current favourite band, Hot Water Music. Perhaps it’ll go some way towards cleansing my brain of Celine Dion’s truly awful cover of You Shook Me All Night Long. There are dark, nameless horrors lurking in the hidden corners of youtube, ready to catch the unwary.

Here’s some more HWM. I saw ’em live in Camden just after they released No division. They were ace.

November book sale 2006

November book sale

The November book sale is now behind us. Yay! I haven’t got the official total for the day, but it exceeded £5,000 (cf. £3,400 last year.) Many thanks to everyone who helped out, everyone who bought books and everyone who showed up at the end to take away unsold books for free. Last year we had to dispose of two tonnes of unsold books. This year, the church was picked clean by 6pm.

I’m now very tired and very hungover.

I’ve never seen you looking so lovely as you did tonight

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!

Amnesty letter writing, Greenwich Picturehouse, Tuesday 17 October

This month, the Blackheath & Greenwich Amnesty letter-writing evening is brought to you from the comfort of the first floor bar at the Greenwich Picturehouse. We’ll have blank letters, concerning a range of current actions and cases, ready for members of the public to sign. We even handle the postage – all we need is your signature. Please come down and join us.

If all goes well, this will become a regular event at the Picturehouse.

Loss of definition

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:

  • You can do some pretty powerful things with CSS.
  • Just because you can do something, doesn’t mean you should.
  • Semantic purity does not necessarily guarantee accessibility. In this case, accessibility wins and we use the solution that doesn’t raise barriers for assistive technologies.

Bewitched, bothered and bewildered

After one whole quart of brandy
Like a daisy, I’m awake
With no Bromo-Seltzer handy
I don’t even shake
Men are not a new sensation
I’ve done pretty well I think
But this half-pint imitation
Put me on the blink
I’m wild again, beguiled again
A simpering, whimpering child again
Bewitched, bothered and bewildered – am I
Couldn’t sleep and wouldn’t sleep
When love came and told me, I shouldn’t sleep
Bewitched, bothered and bewildered – am I
Lost my heart, but what of it
He is cold I agree
He can laugh, but I love it
Although the laugh’s on me
I’ll sing to him, each spring to him
And long, for the day when I’ll cling to him
Bewitched, bothered and bewildered – am I
He’s a fool and don’t I know it
But a fool can have his charms
I’m in love and don’t I show it
Like a babe in arms
Love’s the same old sad sensation
Lately I’ve not slept a wink
Since this half-pint imitation
Put me on the blink
I’ve sinned a lot, I’m mean a lot
But I’m like sweet seventeen a lot
Bewitched, bothered and bewildered – am I
I’ll sing to him, each spring to him
And worship the trousers that cling to him
Bewitched, bothered and bewildered – am I
When he talks, he is seeking
Words to get off his chest
Horizontally speaking, he’s at his very best
Vexed again, perplexed again
Thank God, I can be oversexed again
Bewitched, bothered and bewildered – am I
Wise at last, my eyes at last,
Are cutting you down to your size at last
Bewitched, bothered and bewildered – no more
Burned a lot, but learned a lot
And now

Our band could be your life

How do I love the Minutemen? Let me count the ways. Suffice it to say that on the insanely long train-and-night-bus journey home from Brighton yesterday, I listened to double nickels on the dime twice, all the way through.

So it was with some excitement that I greeted the discovery, on Friday night, of a fresh new copy of We Jam Econo (Disc 1), from Amazon rentals, on the welcome mat at O’Donnell Mansions. Tim Irwin’s documentary is a work of love about a great band – three blokes who formed a punk band out of a love of making music and because they had something they wanted to say. And yes, the Minutemen were a punk band, even if they did do Blue Oyster Cult and CCR covers. In fact, maybe because they did Blue Oyster Cult and CCR covers.

Anyway, my excitement was not unwarranted. This is a great music documentary, about a band that still sounds like nothing else I’ve ever heard. Live film of the band is interspersed with interviews – Greg Ginn, Henry Rollins, Chuck Dukowski, Kira, ed fROMOHIO and Mike Watt’s mum among others. Much of the story is told by Mike Watt, with occasional stories from George Hurley. The DVD includes 222 minutes of extras, on two discs. I may have to buy myself a copy.

Such a shame that they’ll be mostly remembered as the band that did the theme tune for Jackass.

History Lesson Part II

Our band could be your life real names’ll be proof. me and Mike Watt we played for years. punk rock changed our lives. We learned punk rock in Hollywood drove up from Pedro we were fucking corndogs we’d go drink and pogo. Mr. Narrator! This is Bob Dylan to me my story could be his songs I’m his soldier child our band is scientist rock. but I was E Bloom then Richard Hell Joe Strummer and John Doe. me and Mike Watt playing guitar.