Things magazine linked to an amazing series of photoshopped images of future airliners today. The secret of making the images convincing seems to be to add the grime, soot and scrapes that aircraft will still be getting ten years from now.
Also interesting is the article that goes along with the images, which is in the form of a debate between seven people who work in the aerospace industry. For example, one participant says that we won’t be flying as often in five year’s time because virtual reality will improve to the point that we will be able to feel and interact with distant surroundings; others think this is ‘culturally myopic’ because as the first world starts to enjoy such dubious pleasures, the second and third world will fill the empty seats on the plane, wanting to experience what it’s really like to be in Rome and go see the Colosseum, for example.
In the timeline at the end of the article, someone suggests that ‘by 2035 there will be widespread automated delivery of items by unmanned aircraft’ – no sign of when we can expect decent leg-room, however…
Hurried up by nice comments like Orbyn’s, things are slowly getting back to normal at iloyv towers. I am pleased to announce that the archives are now in the same format as the front page. Phew. As the hosting package I’m using doesn’t allow me to play with a .htaccess file, all the archive URLs have changed for good. Again.
My new ‘movable type does the backend and my control freakery does the front end’ ethos seems to work, but I’ve completely forgotten about the comments form. It will re-appear in the next few days. Also, I think I’m going to have a go at writing my own search page in php, instead of using the very slow MT one. It might be time to write a list of all the jobs that need doing…
A few weeks ago we had the chance to buy a quarter of a pig from the agricultural college where Laura studies floristry. Being the sort of people who like to mark the beginning of the week with a Sunday evening roast chicken or chunk of sheep/cow/pig, we said yes, without any idea how much porcine flesh a quarter of a pig actually is.
So on Sunday, before Laura went off to college, we got out every ex-town-dwelling person’s textbook, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s River Cottage Cookbook. He mentioned that a year-old pig weighed about 70 kilograms. At that rate (and our pig was slightly older), we’d have to find room for about eighteen kilograms of pig in our freezer. We had visions of air-drying hams under the stairs in the front room.
Last night I got the phone call from Laura: the meat had come back from the abbatoir, and we had 20kg of ex-happy pig to deal with. There were roasting cuts, chops, liver, and someone had already turned the offcuts into sausages. To get ready for the homecoming tomorrow, I’ve chucked out all the little bags of stock we had getting ever more frozen in the fridge, and even the rest of the pizza dough I had made by hand in the time-honoured way several hundred years ago.
And how much was 20kg of pork straight from the grower? Go and firebomb your supermarket, because the grand total for all this meaty goodness was just twenty-seven pounds.
More games freshly published from my copy of Flash MX for you today. This one is a memory game, where you match the hidden french word with its english equivalent. It comes in one player or a fiendish dooze player version.
Once you’ve clicked on either link, there’s some URL hacking you can do. Add ‘&stxt=1’ at the end to see all the words while you are trying to match them, if your french vocab (and memory) is as bad as mine. Or try some other vocab lists, by changing the value of vocab in the query string (don’t worry, the live version won’t be so agricultural). I suggest 79 for IT vocab, 49 for architecture vocab, and 59 for transport/holiday vocab. The game requires a reasonably up to date Flash player. If you’d like a look at the .fla, or something doesn’t work, please comment or e-mail.
Yes, this site is still a mess, nearly two weeks after starting to pull it to pieces. I apologise. There’s nearly two years of accumulated crud on the server, things that never worked very well, paths-to-folders that don’t lead anywhere – in short, a clean up job is required. But I’m not rushing myself, and here’s why:
If you could see the number of scribbles of the great-new-iloyv site design I’ve done on bits of A4, on Macromedia-branded pads, in Photoshop… It never quite looks the same on screen as it does in my head. I’ve thought about a be-drop-shadowed & bevelled CSS monster layout; about a stripped-down minimal bitmap-ped site; about giving up entirely and getting hours of my life back. It does seem that your own eyes can be the toughest client of all.
And then you find sites out there that make your attempts look decidedly amateurish: here’s an example. You can either go download their css, tweak it, and not know exactly what’s going on, or learn from others and try and put the ideas floating around out there together in your own way. This takes time, though. You need to take the techniques and learn how to assemble them in your own way.
The only thing I can be sure of (I hope) is that I will know what I’m after when I see it on my computer monitor.
(Yes, I’ve been reading The Top 10 Things They Never Taught Me in Design School today too).
Bit of a shock Monday morning – someone had tried to break in at work and steal some of our equipment, but not gotten very far. One of the things they had tried to lift was my Macintosh.
Luckily they were disturbed by security, and fled before they could carry off the machine (though they did break my monitor cable). Join with me in hoping they are caught (and forced to use a 286 PC for the rest of their lives) soon.
For the last few weeks, we’ve been keeping an eye out for one very obvious sign of spring. If you’re living in the city, you will have probably noticed that the days are getting longer, and you might even have seen daffodils in flower.
Out in the pasture around Hayfield, we are looking for white, fuzzy lambs as our sign that spring has truly arrived. Until yesterday, there’d been no lambs in the fields, no matter how hard we looked (which can be dangerous when you’re supposed to be driving). And then, last night, as the bus home turned a corner on the A6015, there they were. A field of sheep and lambs, dotted artfully over a bright green field. It’s spring! Spring!
In the continual struggle to try and remember where all the time went (how did I get to be 32 again?) I’ve been making a note of all the things I’ve been doing at work all day.
I got to my office just before 9, and by the time I’d booted up both machines, read my iloyv emails and RSS feeds, it was about 9:30.
The first part of my day was taken up with getting the ‘zebra stripes’ on this page working, and writing an e-mail about getting more webspace to play with at work.
Once I’d let the non-tech-y person who works on realfrench with me have a look at the zebra-striped page, and incorporated his suggestions, I went from PHP stuff, which is usually quite fun, as it involves thinking, to cleaning up a word document for posting on the web. This, as you might know, is not fun.
After running the Word output through textism’s cleaner a few days ago, I’d been leaving the hard stuff (tables, mostly) for ‘later’. It was fiddly and boring, but once you get into the flow of it, it takes much less time than you expect at the beginning. I learned a bit more about marking up tables properly, using captions and table headers, as well. The document’s now converted, and I’m going to add all the bookmarks (fiddly²) on Monday, using the ‘fresh pair of eyes’ excuse.
Time for lunch and a check of the RSS feeds again.
A print-person came in to talk to me about a postcard that I’m doing for a exhibition at the library here.
After lunch (late, finished about 2pm), and playing with some drop-shadowed css for this blog-thing, it was back onto the real french flash game. I got rid of the embedded univers typeface (pity, but it was a bit furry), fixed a problem with the game logic (much faster than I thought I would) and spent a frustrating half an hour editing a php file that wasn’t the one I thought it was (not for the thirty-seventh time). I then got (well, made) one of the other designers in the studio to test it for me. Which brings us up to now.
Total cups of tea consumed: 3
Total Mozilla windows opened: lots
Total IE windows opened: not as many as there used to be
Total number of times MS Word opened: Once, to check the spelling of ‘separate’
And yea, didst it come to pass that on the 18th of March, the year of our lord two thousand and four, I held an iPod in my hand for the first time.
It’s not my iPod, but it was a real, live, working 40GB example of Jonathan Ive’s product styling. This machine belongs to one of the designers in the studio here, who let me have a play. I’d say it took about one? two? minutes to get used to the way the scroll wheel system worked, and the weight was just right – it felt good and solid in my palm. I connected it to my G4 (first time I’ve ever plugged anything into an Apple firewire socket) and the pod was recognised by iTunes straight away.
I’d like one, of course. And having a trip to Australia looming, where I could retrieve the rest of my CD collection, having a mass-storage device like an iPod to bring them all home with me sounds like a good idea. At the moment.
Between myself and Laura, we seem to have a remarkable ability to develop intermittent failures in cars. Admittedly, the three cars we have owned have all been right bangers (Ford Fiesta Y reg, Volvo 340 E reg, Honda Civic H reg), but instead of dramatic failures, there’s niggling, silly things that go wrong.
The Fiesta started to leak oil onto the driver’ feet; the Volvo ate batteries, and had a recurring problem with the choke, causing spluttering stalls at the worst possible times (e.g. top of Holloway Road). Our current car, the Honda, is now sitting in the Glossop Kwik-Fit getting both brake discs replaced, at the cost of 1 (one) iPod.
Laura’s also managed to get three flat tyres in the few months we’ve had the Honda.
If you happen to know the deity responsible for this run of bad luck, could you please ask him/her to forget about us for a bit and go after someone who’s not used to bad luck with cars.
I’ve paid Movable Type their $20 for the use of their fine software, but I’ve never really been comfortable with the way the templates are managed in the application – all that rebuilding and waiting to check changes. I want to get at the code before my attention wanders (i.e. my NetNewsWire updates…).
So today, on the walk to work, I decided to get around the problem by removing all the html from my MT index.php template, renaming the MT file, and putting all the content I needed from MT into this file as php variables. My control freakery can then be indulged by including the MT file in my very own index.php, which I can change locally as many times as I want, each time FTP-ing and refreshing to see the changes (it works for me, anyway). Goodbye rebuilds, mostly: there’s still a smidgin of xhtml in the MT content. At the moment.
To do this, I did hit on one snag – unescaped quote marks from the MT output going into index.php. So I used the php ‘here document’ syntax for the first time in my coding life, which tells php not to worry about unescaped quotes. You can see how it works here (and on this website, thankfully).