Friday, May 11, 2001
Nick and Owen have sent along the appropriate furniture for a shipping container cabin. Wonderful. And speaking of Owen, his new piece on places is a terrific piece of writing and reminiscence.
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An anniversary of sorts. It's one year exactly since I joined MetaFilter. I didn't start posting, though, until a week later. And what was my Maiden Speech in this mighty Parliament of the Internet? I'm sorry to say, ladies and gentlemen of the House, that it was... a fart joke. Oh dear.
My first link on the front page remains strangely relevant, even if nowadays people would say 'take it to MetaTalk'. Yes, it's about the strange goings-on in thread number 1142, which is still going strong a year later—and has even spawned a spin-off thread and site.
For someone with a sub-1000 user number, I haven't posted at MeFi much... nowadays there are so many people trawling through its threads—and there are so many of those—that by the time I see them, any useful comments I could make have already been made by someone else. (Um, so why do I comment on them here? Oh dear. Again.)
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The 5k winners are up. I'm a little surprised that Pixxxelchix won; good gag and all, but it doesn't quite blow me away (ahem). Bartleby Snore wuz robbed. There were so many good entries, though; check out PIXEL | doodle 5120. A fully-functional paint program in 5k that only placed fifth under Function and Aesthetics, and didn't place at all in the top ten in its category? Man, that's some tough competition.
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Thursday, May 10, 2001
Hey! Yowsa! Hooley dooley! Streuth! I'm a 5k finalist! And I didn't even notice until today. Not that I expect to win, mind you, or even come close; it's just fun to enter these things. But still... a finalist. Sounds better than 'entrant'.
Entrant (n): A web post in which a sentient tree complains about the poor quality of fertiliser in Middle Earth these days.
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Thinking inside the box: yesterday's Age featured a story on an ingenious design for 'future shacks' made out of recycled shipping containers (sadly, the story isn't online). Sean Godsell's entry in the 2001 Royal Australian Institute of Architects awards has applications for developing countries, disaster areas, mining communities and holiday-makers. The interior is decked out in marine ply and stainless-steel accessories, has a fold-away bed and table, and has a kitchen and bathroom, while the whole thing is sheltered by a light-screening canopy and sits on four adjustable legs that avoid the need to prepare the site before installation. Brilliant.
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The latest thread on the browser upgrades campaign persists at MeFi. I've added three more comments. If you're reading this page in Times font on a white background and like it that way just fine, feel free to skip them.
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Wednesday, May 09, 2001
Yet another thread on the WaSP's browser upgrade campaign has surfaced at MetaFilter, prompted by someone-or-other's sniping. Somehow this inspired me to launch into Hans Christian Anderson mode; you can see the results in the thread itself or here at Grinding Noises.
But the thread won't die: one long-time critic has argued that 'WaSP didn't say [to] provide good pages for those with older browsers—that wasn't the point. It was [an] upgrade in coding style and providing no other option was the point. And that's why WaSP blows.'
I said it there, but I'll repeat it here: providing no other option certainly was the point. And that's why it was a brilliant tactic.
This is a political campaign. Not 'politics' as in left and right, but politics as the negotiation of change. Sure, the WaSP could recommend using combining the import hack with traditional style-sheet linking so that Netscape 4.x still has access to the CSS elements it can use, but that would do little good in raising public consciousness and effecting change (i.e., upgrades). Only by forcing Netscape 4.x to serve up plain-looking pages can WaSP supporters hope to send a strong message to lay-users that something is wrong with Netscape 4.x, and that message deserves to be sent.
Politics is an eternal struggle between forces for change and forces for conservatism. The browser upgrade campaign is political—we're just not used to thinking that there's a 'politics of web standards'. Because it's a political campaign, calling it 'right' or 'wrong' is not a statement of fact, even if some of the facts that have prompted the campaign (for example, the fact that Netscape 4.x's CSS support isn't too great) are widely accepted as true. Calling the campaign right or wrong simply shows what side of web-standards-politics you're on.
So, web designers, are you a browser-conservative, or are you an agent for change? Are you happy with the status quo—or at least resigned to it—or are you going to do something about it? Because if you don't, you're looking at Four More Years of single-pixel GIFs and web-design waste: design once, code twice, or four times, or more.
Sure, some users won't like your stance, whichever side you take. That's politics. But some users won't like you because your feet's too big. Personally, I'm happy to rally behind the orange flag.
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Damn. Another hilarious piece on a personal website—World Wide Jeb's I Can Count To Three, I Got Me A Government Job—which will probably mean yet another addition to my ever-growing list of weblogs to read. Trouble is, I just don't feel right taking any off the list to make room for new ones, for fear of causing the sort of offence that Graham took the other day. After all, I've felt that sting of rejection. So I end up with an ever-growing monster, full of sites I still admire but now only look at once a month, mixed in with my daily (if not thrice-daily) reads. Still, at least it's buried away on another page where no-one will notice my tinkering.
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Tuesday, May 08, 2001
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Owen points to a stunning Library of Congress exhibition of pre-revolutionary Russia photographs in full colour, which is also drawing oohs and ahs at MeFi—along with a few ridiculously cynical comments. One of them even questions whether the negatives are kosher, saying that 'the Soviets liked to "reauthor" photographs during the cold war to remove anything that didn't follow the party lines'.
Absolutely right. Those buildings look too much like stills from The Phantom Menace. Clearly what we're dealing with is digitally-faked images that have been split into colour separations, transferred to glass plates, scratched a bit to look old, and then smuggled into the Library of Congress collection, with the documentation faked to make it look as if they were purchased in 1948 from the heirs of a photographer who left Russia in 1918 before the Soviets had a chance to remove anything from his photos that didn't follow party lines, like, say, late 20th/early 21st century Kodak colours...
And while we're at it, those 'old' stereoscope images are simply faked-up holograms, Eadweard Muybridge was obviously shooting on DV, and Ansel Adams had to be using a Canon Elph. After all, no-one born before 1975 could ever achieve anything technically impressive.
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©2001 Rory Ewins