Thursday, April 12, 2001
Forty people a day will need to find new reading material. Well, it was a nice idea.
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Damn. Damn, damn, damn, damn, damn.
And to think I was about to send them a really solid book proposal. Working away at it all these months when they've had this one in the works the whole time. Given their lead-time to publication, it's probably been in the pipeline for twelve to eighteen months. (Further looking around reveals it's been in the offing since at least late 1999.)
Yeah, I know, there are other publishers. All of whom will be leaping at the chance to publish a second entry in this niche market in the space of a year.
Coming soon from Rory Ewins, travel writer extraordinaire: Round Ireland with a Freezer, A Walk in the Weeds, and Riding the Iron Duck.
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I've never paid much attention to English eccentric David Icke, but this perfect quote from a story on the man pulled me in. A beautiful tale of a man who dresses in turquoise and believes the world is beset by lizards, and suspicious Canadians who can't accept that not everyone speaks in metaphors.
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Woah! That was sudden. Owen's moved.
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More Melbourne Comedy Festival. Last night we went to see Tripod telling the tale of Tosswinkle the Pirate (Not Very Well). This trio have mastered the art of musical comedy interspersed with character-based tomfoolery perfectly, and reminds one of nothing so much as an Australian version of the Goodies. As a generation-X's-worth of Australians raised on the Goodies will tell you, that's high praise indeed. Like Tim, Bill and Graeme, Tripod features the pretty one (Gatesy), the brainy one (Scod), and the weird one (Yon), and their characters are now so well-formed that the laughs flow from their slightest interaction. They also play some damn fine and funny music along the way.
Their previous shows were collections of disparate songs linked together by random gags and larks, all amounting to nothing in particular but always fun. In 'Tosswinkle' Tripod experiment with narrative, but as the subtitle says, Not Very Well, and the results are hilarious. Tosswinkle the pirate comes face to face with a romantic Ghost Ship, a duck sailing a robot dog, a wooden Enid, and cutlass duels fought with wickets. Along the way we get songs about bubble helicopters and how everyone's a tosser, along with some rousing pirate fare and phat dance-floor beats. It's the English panto tradition subverted and twisted to Tripod's own nefarious ends, and it's great stuff.
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Wednesday, April 11, 2001
The 5k entries are now public. Here's mine.
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Tuesday, April 10, 2001
I had hoped that last post would get a rise out of someone, and my bro-in-law Kim came through with the goods, pointing out that we already have something of the sort: 'it's called Macromedia Flash, and Adobe acrobat to an extent, and it's bad.' (Various entirely valid points about not wanting pages to turn into a 'big, monolithing pile of binary' excluded.)
Well, sort of... actually, no, not really. I think I've put the wrong spin on it. My thinking was that while a standards-based web is a great goal, getting there is immensely complicated by all of the legacy browsers around the place. Once we have widespread use of 6.x browsers it won't be hard to write standards-compliant new pages that look the same across platforms, but it would be helpful to be able to send out modules attached to old pages to help browsers deal with rendering them, so that the 7.x or 8.x browsers don't have to beef up to 20-or-30-or-more Mb in size to handle old pages.
So the idea of a Dreamweaver to build new pages this way isn't really what I'd like (although I wouldn't be surprised if it eventuated, which is why I was presenting this as one way things could be headed), but it could be useful for retrofitting old pages. Otherwise the web is doomed to an endless cycle of pages breaking and needing updating, which is an enormous waste of effort.
What could be useful is some way of tagging pages to say specifically which legacy browser they target, eg <meta name="browser-target" content="Netscape 4.77 Macintosh">, and then having browsers smart enough to pull down the necessary rendering modules to optimize appearance for those pages. Adding such tags to a site full of old pages wouldn't be too hard, and new pages written in a standards-compliant way wouldn't need them anyway. So you could read new pages straight away, and you could read old ones properly with a quick download (assuming a broadband world) of the necessary rendering modules.
I suppose we're getting towards something like this already, though, with doctype-switching.
Ah, what the hell. No one's going to give a toss about old pages anyway. Must be my librarian genes showing through.
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Monday, April 09, 2001
Last week Charles at LGF wondered what would happen if someone came out with a browser that slipped through the CSS import hack net but didn't adequately support CSS in other ways. (A sobering thought. To some extent, we already have one—IE4.5 for Mac—as you'll know if you're using it to view this page.)
I flippantly replied:
Never fear. In Happy Magical Future Internet Land, we'll all have broadband, and every page will download with a complete font-set, DTD, colour profile, and fully-functioning browser capable of rendering it exactly as the author intended. Sure, we'll be downloading 20 meg a page instead of 20k, but we'll be preserving the right of browser makers to ignore standards, um, innovate.
But now I'm thinking: actually, that's probably true. If Moore's Law lasts for a few more years, we'll have machines that will make even Java run fast, and if we do all have broadband, we'll think nothing of downloading a few megabytes per page. So all we need then is a next-generation Dreamweaver that not only handles page markup but also bundles together predefined modules of Java code (or whatever) that handle the particular rendering requirements for that page, to be sent down the wire with the page itself. The user's browser then effectively becomes an any-other-browser emulator, displaying the page as it would look in IE3 for Mac, NS4.7 for Linux, or whatever the page's creator has specified.
And then I'm thinking: actually, this is the promise of XML and customisable DTDs. This is where everything's headed, more or less. In a few years, all of our current concerns about standards could be made irrelevant by the sheer brute force of increased processing power.
And hovercars. We'll all have hovercars.
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Well, that was an action-packed weekend, chock full of seeing-brother-in-lawy goodness (howdy, Kim), complete with long leisurely lunches in Collingwood cafes, multiple Comedy Festival shows, and staying up until 4 a.m. talking about our respective philosophies about copyright (which turns out to be an ideal way of sending other members of the house out of the room). I'd summarize the discussion here, but don't have another four hours to spare. Instead, since I reviewed last weekend's Comedy Festival shows, I'll do the same again.
Auto Boosh is the latest by last year's Barry Award/best-of-the-festival winners, the Boosh. Noel Fielding and Julian Barratt have developed a strong pair of characters—one the slightly dippy trippy-hippy Londoner, the other the bossy brainy Northerner—and set them in a world of weird, where dancers in parkas and cockney nutjobs run up against smoothie-making demonstrations and Russian theatre about pies. As a long-time fan of weird I loved it, and the scene with Big Leg gave me my first uncontrollable ouch-my-spleen-hurts laugh of the festival. Highly recommended.
Peter Helliar is a resident comic on Rove Live, which should be recommendation enough for his one-man stand-up show, 'Autumn Catalogue'. Should be, but isn't. Helliar turned out to be a touch too shambolic in his delivery, and there were one too many rabbit-caught-in-headlights moments as he searched desperately for his next joke. Which is a shame, because he'd sometimes latch onto a good one. His delivery was reminiscent of Eddie Izzard at times, but his humour was more conventional—and two days later I can't remember much of it. (Smoking animals. There were a lot of smoking animals.)
Greg Fleet gave us the tightly scripted 'I Wish You Were Dead', a frank and sometimes fierce account of his father, the Casanova of Geelong. As his previous routines about heroin addiction and encounters with Thai con-men have shown, Fleety does this stuff well, and this show was no exception. The tale of his Dad accidentally chopping a tomahawk into his calf muscle, the brief history of weaponry, and the insights into the motivations of sharks all made his show worthwhile.
Yesterday we also caught the second half of the Big Laugh Out, the free show staged at Southgate shopping centre—despite the rain washing out half of the half-open seating space. It was MC'd by Adam Hills, who had some great material for the links—better than some of the stuff in his show last week. Also appearing were Tripod, who go from strength to strength, and Dave Hughes, who's an absolute legend (and only recycled one joke from his 1999 show; but it was such a good one that I didn't mind). 'Bought a packet of Snakes Alive the other day,' he told us; 'Opened up the packet and they were all dead! Must have suffocated.' The only flat spot was the Compacts, four country-beauty-queen impersonators—a low-key style of humour that doesn't do a lot for me.
Still two weeks to go, and so many shows to see; we may yet succumb to further temptation.
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A link that deserves to be spread: the Internet as jellyfish [via Owen]. And another, which for some reason I've never stumbled across before: Bruce Sterling's Free as Air, Free As Water, Free As Knowledge speech to the Library Information Technology Association.
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©2001 Rory Ewins