The Lair

The promised swishy large fonts™ theme. I started redesigning the theme for the lair a couple of months ago but real life and work intervened several times inbetween. Rather than let it languish for a few more months, I sorta kicked it out the door. In designer speak, this is called a “live redesign”. I just call it “half baked”. Y’all can find out how much is broken for yourself.

I learnt a few layout tricks since I last had a shot at designing a theme so there may be slightly cleaner code. Although I doubt it – this theme sadly bears the duplicated code chunks and hacks of last-minuteitis. I also learnt a bit more about JavaScript in the interim so I did one of those little shelf/accordion/whatchamacallits to reduce visible page clutter. It’s not perfect, but I think it works across all the browsers that I care to support.

Perhaps most importantly from my perspective, the visible fancy enhancements (and some improvements under the hood) have come at the cost of very few excess kilobytes over the previous theme. My 100kb limit is a purely arbitrary number because most blog index pages are double or triple that size but I like to keep things as quick loading and lightweight as possible. If all that isn’t enough, I’m cautiously optimistic about this theme (specifically, the custom bits) being futureproof for the upcoming Wordpress 2.1 – fingers crossed.

Inspiration and the base for the theme provided by the extremely nice and very hackable plaintxtBlog. Although I lost the widget support, rewrote the layout from scratch using the marvellous Yahoo Grids, removed the theme options and did major surgery on the innards to build this so any breakage is all my fault.

And there it was, the much anticipated Christmas weekend. Where I could potter around yon olde residence, reduce the reading pile by a book or four, hack away at some stray bits of code I’d been meaning to work on, have the TV humming in the background and of course, perform some culinary experiments.

Yes, experiments. I never really know how the stuff I cook will turn out – but it’s almost always edible. And without experiments, how could I find out that drippy Marmite brew is a wonderful glazing to apply on bacon just before popping into the oven? Yup, the salt in the Marmite makes the outer skin crispy and crunchy. Just the way I like it.

On the subject of Marmite, the wikipedia entry has the following sentence:

In Sri Lanka it is dissolved in boiling water and some lime juice and a fried, sliced onion is added, allegedly an excellent pick-me-up drink for recovering from a hangover

I don’t know about a hangover cure, but I was definitely fed that brew when I was a kid… It was a flu remedy? Or maybe I’ve conveniently blotted out my childhood alcoholic binges. I do remember getting slightly tipsy on cough syrup when I was a kid, maybe that was where my decline into dipsomania started.

There has been a long (well, since the 19th century) tradition of turkey eating for Christmas … but pigeon? That sounds a bit less appetising, eh? Only, Salem the friendly neighbourhood cat decided (on Christmas Eve, no less) that both my landlord and myself really needed to eat pigeon on the morrow and deposited two very dead feathered rats outside our respective doors. Not being able to read cat minds just yet, the theory is that this is Salem’s attempt to share out his hunting bag amongst the residents of the household. Or maybe he just wanted all the turkey for himself and wanted us to make do with pigeon. I’d have been more interested if he figured out a way to bring down the wild (allegedly*) pheasants that lurk in the nearby fields though.

Oh and the smoked gammon turned out extremely well. I should try my hand at it more often.

And in other news, the long awaited Variable Star and Hannibal Rising were both on my reading pile for last weekend. Unfortunately, I was sidetracked by a massive collection of older Heinleins and the Dark Materials trilogy. Maybe this week then.

* allegedly wild because apparently these pheasants belong to the local nobility (aka Lord Deramore)’s estate. I don’t know if the official punishment for poaching his lordship’s game birds is still beheading. Given the number of local laws which haven’t been revised for centuries, it’s probably not safe to find out.

I’ve always been the one to discover a trend about two years after the cool kids have moved on. So, obviously enough, I only needed to download and save YouTube videos very recently (this means, yesterday).

Very simple two step procedure.

Go to the Youtube Downloader. Paste in the link to the video. You should get a link back which allows a direct download of the video file. (Ripz0r offers an equivalent service). I also used Youripper which did the job pretty well too. However, Youripper is a standalone application (therefore, only runs on Windows) and I’m not sure if I trust the author’s assurance that there is no spyware or other nasties. Another caveat, all youtube videos marked as “mature content” (for example, the Smack My Bitch Up video) seemed to choke Youripper. I’d probably stick to using the web services in either case. Your mileage may vary.

The video file is in FLV (ie: Flash Video) format. I use good old VLC to watch it. Win! Other FLV players also exist, allegedly but I’m lazy and haven’t explored my options beyond VLC. If you really don’t like FLV, you could use a FLV converter to make the video more generally usable (ie: encode into MPEG).

This is an arms race though… It’s quite possible (even likely) that the video services will make subtle changes to their site and break these tools at some point. But this Works For Me™ at the moment.

Ok, so the work I needed to do this month is mostly complete. Therefore, time for some entertainment. I pushed out a couple of improvements for Grapevine.

Added The Academic to the list of sites you can scan/read off the Grapevine. A couple more in testing, should be ready for deployment soonish. I’ll probably drop support for some of the clear duds (Newsvine Vine and LankaPapers don’t seem to be updated anymore, pointless keeping them on).

Also allowed changing display preferences without fiddling around with the URL. (Thanks to everyone who prodded me about it). Just click on the link and the Grapevine page will reload respecting chosen preferences. Remember though, that as with Ach; preferences set on the .com site will be ignored on the .org version of the site.

By the time I write this, the bride would have duly walked down the aisle and all that. Actually, I just got an IM from a person so I may have jumped the gun a wee bit, but no matter. Either that or the person attending is typing away at IM furiously while seated at the reception (Possible, but unlikely).

Muchos congratulations to K and R and best wishes. I’m terribly sorry I couldn’t make it, though.

Quite apart from the obvious reasons for the wedding being noteworthy, it is possibly the first blog related (or should that be blog inspired?) wedding in SL. I am a mere degree of separation away from geek history being made in SL. Not often that happens.

And I’m stuck in freezing fogland. Gah.

Trying to recover from a hangover, sorta. Clearly, this is the best possible time to blog. I may even string together a few coherent sentences on this entry as a result of the alcohol overdose, but don’t count on that. At least the hangover is mild and not of the “my-throat-wants-to-cut-itself” variety.

For anyone keeping score, that was way too much red wine. In hindsight, having several pints of cider on an empty stomach probably didn’t help me much either. My problem may well be that I live, but don’t learn. *grin*.

I’m figuring out a checklist of entertainment oriented geekery to do in the next few days, actually. But in the meantime, I am currently obsessing over the quite wonderful Take Me Back To Your House. I may even forgive Canada for Celine and Bryan Adams on account of Martina Sorbara.

From Claws of Steel over there, Wordy No, I meant : Wordy, ah for heaven’s sake Wordie. That’s right. I only fixed it at the third time of asking.

Which is rather nice, even if they don’t have any photos like Flickr. In my particular line of work, I’m always hunting for more language resources and this might actually help. Right now, it’s all about xWn and its forebears but who knows… a project like this might just be that viable replacement that we’re all looking for. It’s silly really, but linguistics (and I’m just confining myself to English) may be a field with rich resources but the computational branch is very much the red headed stepchild of the lot. Out of the estimated 600,000 words in the English language, a mere 150,000 have been catalogued and classified by Wordnet. And quite a few of those catalogued words are genus/species names of plants and animals. Useful, yes but not exactly the sort of thing that you’d encounter in the mundane workaday sentence.

And this leads me seamlessly to 33 names of things that you never knew had names. I tried chanking (spat out food) on Wordie and three people had listed the word already. Unfortunately, all the linked resources weren’t quite so helpful in figuring out the etymology of the word.

And not about linguistics per se, but lists of all sorts… Including one of my favourites, potato crisp flavours from around the world.

I don’t have a legit claim to fame whoredom at the best of times. I am also defiantly un-indie; not made of the stuff that the cool kids listen to. But even by my low low standards, this week’s last.fm artist breakdown is promising to be stellar.

Green Day’s Dookie, Mis-Teeq, REM, Blondie, Keane’s Hopes and Fears, a massive dose of KC and the Sunshine Band and random acoustic stuff on the same playlist.

Oh, and let’s not forget Lionel; who has some truly hilarious tags on his tracks at last.fm… For instance, try “quiplash” on “Three Times A Lady”. Or how about “awful awful awful” on “Hello”. Yeah.

And this inanity is all because I am busy with real life stuff this week and normal transmission is not expected to resume till middle next week. At least you are spared listening to my cuss words when the homebrew media player throws a hissy fit and decides to only play the movie trailer of Casino Royale on a day. Fun times, I tell ya. Bring on the holidays.

I’ve whittled down the list of jobs to do this month to a mere handful. Whee. Three more and I can break for the holidays.

Had news yesterday of a tornado in London. A brief questioning moment while I wondered which part of London this was, but it was apparently the north west. Well away from all the people I know in the city… I think. Then the further, disturbing discovery that the UK has a lot of tornadoes. Yes, really.

So should tornado warning systems be installed as a matter of course? Umm. Maybe. Two articles which say precisely the same thing seem relevant: Time and the ever pragmatic Schneier… The take-home message for tornadoes (as well as most other things) is that a conscious evaluation of the risks involved before acting seems wiser than making an emotive response.

The one thing I don’t buy in that is the avian flu virus analogy though. Just because it hasn’t doesn’t mean it won’t. Taking precautions isn’t the same thing as waiting till it becomes a huge threat. And my contradiction of ideas leads inevitably to the justification of prophylaxis.

I wake up this morning to find that England have lost the 2nd test by 6 wickets. Yes, it’s cricket. No, most of the world doesn’t care.

And apropos of nothing, I suddenly think a link to the Egyptian Plover is pertinent.