The Lair

I’ve been guzzling bitter lemon recently. The label proclaims in large lettering that the drink contains quinine. Yes, the product of the cinchona tree which has anti-malarial properties. A bit of investigation revealed that it is in fact a standard component in both bitter lemon and tonic water.

Slightly related, cannabis is banned in Indonesia. However, traditional use in cooking (ie:, sprinkling in a curry) is endorsed. This is inspite of the fact that TCHC is far more potent when ingested (while dissolved in butter or other lipids) than when it is smoked.

And since I couldn’t resist - foie gras poutine with horse fat fries. The picture looks marvellous. Deadly to arteries, of course - but still very tasty. But it’s horse. And eating horsemeat is a controversial practice, for reasons which elude me. Something about being companion animals or something. I suppose it helps that I’ve never actually owned a horse (although I have ridden them a few times). Now foie gras? I’m much less comfortable with eating it now that I’ve seen how it is umm.. prepared.

It’s a weird world of contradictions and I’m still trying to recouncile my positions on various foods and make it a touch more consistent. I’m mostly indifferent to the practice of battery farming (widely accepted as cruel). I’d certainly try horsemeat at least once. Yet once I saw how the geese cowered and ran away from the feeding tube; I felt a tad squeamish about the foie gras that I’d eaten. It honestly makes no sense, but there you are.

If I wanted more evidence of the conflicts and inconsistencies in food ingredients, I could point to the charming (and apparently nutritious) preparation of human breast milk cheese. Read the comments on that entry and you’ll understand.

My landlord recently revived his hobby of astronomy. To this end, he shopped around last year and bought one of the higher-end state of the art reflective telescopes around.

If anyone has seen the stereotypical long brass tube that comprises the Gallilean telescope - well, modern day astronomy, even amateur astronomy, is now far far removed from this hoary image. Telescopes can be (and are) controlled automatically. They have motorized controls, they make minute automatic adjustments to compensate for everything (including the rotation of earth) and they also include automatic tracking software which enables alignment and automatic seeking of celestial objects in the sky.

In short, they’re extremely sophisticated pieces of kit. They also need a fair bit of non-trivial setting up. This is probably why we’re still using fairly powerful binoculars instead of the proper telescope - it has so many components to set up that the whole job takes ages.

A couple of days ago, he yelled upstairs and said that Jupiter was visible. This seemed sort of odd to me; I thought that Mars and Venus were the only planets visible to the naked eye. So I went downstairs and we booted up the laptop containing the software (not the telescope, just the tracking software) and had a peek. It was almost a full moon; so the brilliance of the planet next to the moon’s silvery light seemed even more astonishing. Yup. The software said it was Jupiter alright.

Which brings me neatly to apparent magnitude - the apparent brightness of objects as seen from earth. Turns out that Jupiter is actually the third brightest object in the sky; even if it is quite far away.

Learn something new every day.

Desktop TD 1.5 was released a couple of days ago. I’ve been obsessed with that game for a while now - it’s taken the place of Tetris and a few other games that I play to switch jobs for short sharp spurts. A bit of background, the creator recently left his real job to focus on online games. As such, I realized that some degree of commercialization was inevitable - but I was optimistic about the gameplay being mostly unaffected.

I think I was wrong. There has been a mini-furore about the over-commercialization of the game. Personally, I don’t care about the tiny Ks floating around the screen or the rather ostentatious kongregate pass on the desktop background. What annoys me the most is that offline play (that is, downloading the swf and playing offline) has now been disabled. I’m going back to 1.2b.

In other news, I’ve written recently about downloading Safari - the browser formerly available only on Apple’s own Mac OSX. I have to say that my experience so far has been surprisingly positive. It’s quick to load and minimalistic; two useful traits for an application which would spend a lot of time on my desktop. Unfortunately, Safari 3.0.2 beta horribly mangles proxy support (again!). So I looked around a little bit and found this nifty Webkit Nightly Download site. Another great reason to run a nightly build instead of the beta - a new web inspector which looks very tasty indeed.

And completely randomly; it was Paul Gallico who spake thusly - “No one can be as calculatedly rude as the British, which amazes Americans, who do not understand studied insult and can only offer abuse as a substitute. (NY Times 14 Jan 1962)”. So why is the British government now deciding on the opposite? Quite apropos, last night’s Balderdash and Piffle featured the earliest sightings of some interesting putdowns and insults (plonker, wassock and tosser among them). This reminds me a bit of the fuss over the Seven Sins of England last month.

Yes, I recently hopped on yet another bandwagon as some of you may well know. I decided to check out what the huge fuss was all about - I started poking around the Facebook API and wrote an application.

Is it a big deal? I rather think it is . There are reports of teething troubles aplenty and I discovered some limitations in the documentation - but overall, I really like the concept of being able to wrestle with the innards of a social networking application. It was fairly frustrating to figure things out, but ultimately it is an interesting experience. I’m still coming to grips with the possibilities.

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I’ve been lurking around Facebook again. The fancy seems to strike me in fits and starts. I resisted for as long as I could but I am now gripped in the throes of addiction. Well, I still don’t know what people actually do there - but like the cat chasing the feebly squeaking mouse because it can - I too have launched myself head-first into the Facebook era.

Sans a picture, though. There are limits to my online perversions. There have been odd wall posts berating me for not including a photograph. It’s Facebook - because you’re supposed to have photographs. Of your face. Who knew? If my face were akin to an open book of any sort, it would most likely be illegal.

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A bit of a nothing post, really - but I thought it would be moderately useful to document the development tools for the three four major browsers that are available in the Windows world.

Firefox - use Firebug. Nuff said. Honestly, this is pretty much all you need. It allows pretty much everything that you’d need for JavaScript, CSS and general mucking around with pages. Perhaps Web Developer comes close; but nothing else does. There are lots more development extensions related extensions for Firefox; Google should reveal the more obvious candidates.

Internet Explorer - use the Developer Toolbar for Internet Explorer. It’s by Microsoft, it’s free. Not great, but it does the job. Non-free but closer to Firebug in functionality, IE Inspector offers a couple of tools which function as Internet Explorer addons. The debugger is sort of weird, but it works. IE is still inscrutable to me though. No browser gives me as many headaches with layouts.

Opera - there are plenty of tools for developers in the Tools Section - I actually like the DOM tool implemented by Opera more than I do the equivalents in other browsers. That’s purely a matter of personal taste, though.

Safari - just enable the debug menu. It is disabled and hidden by default, but enabling is just a matter of setting the right preference. On the Mac, however - you’d need to use the defaults utility - on Windows, you’d need to edit the Preferences.plist file as explained here. The debug menu on Windows contains a user agent switcher, a JavaScript console and couple of other features (Snippets? Site Specific Hacks?) that I haven’t quite worked out yet. The JS console is pretty much essential of course - the Webkit JavaScript implementation is somewhat strange (and has never worked for me, despite targetting KHTML/Konqui).

I still think Firefox edges it for sheer breadth of development tools available, but the more you know eh?

So, a couple of days ago - I decided that I would try out the day without Google. Well, the challenge was specifically a day without the 5 major search engines, but in my case - that means el Goog.

I don’t have any toolbars or home page settings to Google, in fact - I only use Google in one very simple, specific way. I have a Smart Bookmark which allows me to type something like this …

google alternate search engines

on my Firefox address bar - yielding the Google SERP for alternative search engines.

Clearly, I knew that muscle memory would win out if I left the smart bookmark unchanged, so at the start of the day - I edited the Google bookmark to search Clusty instead. To make the test complete; I also disabled my smartmark searches for Google Images, Google News and Google Groups. I also wired in additional smartmarks for Alltheweb and Hakia. I would have also loved to use Powerset, but alas - they don’t have a public search offering just yet.

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Go get it

Yeah, yeah, Firefox and Opera rule. I know it, so do you. But Safari uses a customized version of KHTML; the engine also used by Konqueror. More to the point, Safari also has quite a few quirks in how it seems to handle JS; at least the brand of JS that I write - so I’m looking forward to testing out some of my code on Safari.

And oh, they say it’s blazingly fast. [cue Slashdot response: but does it run on Linux?]

Update 1: Requires administrator privileges to install? A browser? Are you fucking kidding me? What the hell are you, Internet Explorer?

Update 2: Multiple vulnerabilities found. So, I shouldn’t be using Safari anymore, huh?

And surprise, surprise, I’m not talking about the weather. Yet.

Alt Search Engines wants everyone to stop using “the five major search engines”, just for tomorrow. Actually, I intend to follow that - I think my Google usage is fairly low and I’m looking forward to giving Clusty and a few other contenders a go.

This will also help me determine my stage of Google addiction. Place it accurately on a scale of coffee, watching pointless television, heroin, Warcraft 3 and mindless coding procrastination. I’ll be able to find out tomorrow. I’m not looking forward to a day of cold turkey though.

Vaguely Goog related, an interview with their search quality team.

Oh and I’m now wondering if the hype about that boy Hamilton is justified. Just a thought. Oh and mad mad props to CY for calling the result [ok, not too hard, but still a 50-50 chance] and predicting the number of sets to take the win in the French Open men’s singles. woo. I thought Feds would take Nads to 5 sets meself. And err. this is article gives the Nads butt grabbing wedgie theory a bum’s rush.

I was watching Eurovision a few weeks ago when Terry Wogan intro-ed the segment where the votes were presented.

He said - ok, now you can shout at your TV.

I was eating dinner at the time and I remember being amused at the very idea. Shout at the TV? What does this Wogan chap think I am, uncivilized?

So the vote for Scooch was less than great; I’m sure patriotic Brits would have been shouting at their TV. Me? I was unmoved. Ok, so I cheered a little bit when the hapless Maltese gifted us 12 points. But that’s it.

Fast forward a few weeks later and Beckham won a recall to play at the Brazil-England game at the Wembley. A bit of background, I am most emphatically not on the bring Becks back bandwagon. In fairness though, the guy has earned his place, he’s done the job better than most - recently against Estonia.

Be that as it may, the prematch conversation had started and then Alan Hansen produced this genius piece of fancy verbal footwork. Speaking of the McClaren decision to bring Becks back, he said (paraphrased roughly) “Well, we never said dropping Becks was a good decision, we just said it was a BIG decision“. Umm. Yeah. He never said anything like “Beckham has to go.“. No sir.

What did I do? I squawked in outrage at the TV. Poor innocent TV.

And then, that awesome Apprentice semi-final last night. Where the much despised Katie was told that she was in the final. What did I do?

I shouted at the TV. More like wailed in anguish actually.

Which goes to show that I’m completely unaccustomed to watching television in a family room now.

Ed, don’t read after this bit. It’s a spoiler. You have been warned.

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After the professionals have passed out, repeatedly *headdesk*-ing themselves into unconsciousness.

But more seriously, I saw an entertaining interview last night which featured Andrew Keen, the author of Cult of the Amateur. In summary, an influx of amateur video editors, bloggers, journalists and pretty much every other profession into the internet is causing a surfeit of mediocrity. And horrendously long sentences like that one. It’s too easy to dismiss this as just another rant by someone who resents the usurpation of his journalistic soapbox. Wait. Another horrendously long sentence. *sigh*. It’s all a bit shite, basically - and I’m not talking about my sentence structure either.

Actually, I read Andrew Keen’s blog regularly and he makes some excellent discussion points (I read it on the internet, blogs are boring [and he hasn’t even read mine, does he know what a massive datapoint he’s missing?] and McLuhan’s Revenge are particularly interesting).

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What is it about that South African pulling wool over all our eyes? Turns out he wasn’t killed after all. Yes, Woolmer. Remember him? That’s the guy that I thought (and made a bet, to boot) had been crisped by Aloo. The guy that was supposedly given snake venom. The guy who apparently had a towel wrapped around his throat and was strangled.

No wait. Turns out he may have died of … natural causes.

Ok. So did the Jamaican coroner suddenly stop handling the ball, stare off into the distance like Horatio Kane, take off his sunglasses and say …

“Someone wrapped a boundary rope round his neck, mon.”
[Yeah. I do a horrible Jamaican impersonation. Don’t carribbean it in.]

Talk about dropping a sitter, eh? (I really really wanted to work in a hit wicket reference but my pun-fu is weak today). As it is, will anyone believe what the coroner has to say on the matter? If someone did actually bounce Bob off the pitch, then it was the perfect murder. Pity the conspiracy theories and allegations will swirl forever, just like when Cronje died.

Then there was that 11 year old kid who heroically took on a hog the size of a mammoth with a pea shooter. Call it the modern day David versus a porcine Goliath. Of course, the kid won. And duly posed for photographs. Incidentally, hogzilla is a technical term. Think of it as the Mozilla of pigs; slow, bloated, consumes a lot (of food or RAM, depending on where you want this analogy to go). Oops. Sorry, I picked the wrong browser to hate on.

Anyway, about that boy and his wild pig. Turns out it was all … (wait for it )

(you can practically hear the crackling)

hogwash.

Porky Pig is not amused. And would like his nice snug farmyard and his massive trough of slops to be brought over, toot sweet. Oink.

And to descend further into the murk, that dutch reality show where people had to compete for a kidney was also a hoax. Fortunately for the people competing (who really needed it, and not just for a pleasant accompaniment to steak in a pie either), the kidney was real. It was just that everyone participating in the show knew who’d get the kidney beforehand.

And this is different from every other reality show because … there was a kidney involved. Reality shows have as much to do with reality as professional wrestling has a resemblance to wrestling. Allegedly, of course.