Life Less Literary |
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A small selection of the many things that have happened to Dan Sumption, his family, friends and colleagues
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Friday, September 12, 2003
I finally did something I've been meaning to do for ages - unzipped that Moveable Type installation and set it up on the server, fiddled around and got the FAD weblog working (minus templates, of course... have to wait until next week for that). I was surprised at how powerful and, erm, cool it is. Now I can't wait to move this blog over. Again, maybe next week. 1 comment Add comment | this item An interesting twist on The Mirror Project from today's Silicon.com weekly round-up ...there is a new craze doing the rounds on eBay currently, called rather imaginatively 'Reflectoporn'. The basic idea is that users put articles up for sale, such as chrome kettles, which have highly reflective surfaces. Alongside the article listing they include a picture which appears normal on first glance but on closer inspection reveals the naked seller, with nothing to protect their modesty than a camera to their face as they photograph their lot, complete with reflection of themselves in the buff. 1 comment Add comment | this item Thursday, September 11, 2003
I found the most amazing book in our local Oxfam shop the other week, Culinary Art and Traditions of Switzerland (and at £3 it was a hell of a lot cheaper than most books they sell, especially as a new copy seems to pass hands for around $60). It's full of 1970s-style food and costume photographs, only one stage evolved from the pictures highlighted in The Gallery of Regrettable Food but, beyond the somewhat laughable appearance, it actually contains some amazing recipes including many that remind me of our frequent family holidays in Switzerland when I was a child (which time period nicely coincides with the photography in this book). Yesterday I made myself an Appenzeller honey cake...mmm, the taste transports me back thirty years, we used to buy small packet-wrapped versions of these in the supermarkets and I would devour them with gusto. I'm supposed to be off flour and various other non-detox-friendly foods (have been living largely on fruit for the last week, and feelining infinitely better for it) and for that reason I may end up giving this book to my mum, who I'm sure will also appreciate the nostalgia, but for now I couldn't help breaking my wheat-fast with such a memory-filled treat from my childhood. Add comment | this item Fascinating. I was listening to The Salmon of Doubt recently and, several times in different articles, Douglas Adams mentions how proud he is of the fact that his initials are DNA and that he was born in Cambridge a few months before Crick and Watson discovered the structure of DNA in that city. When I heard it, it made me think - I realised a few years ago that my initials, DNS, are the same as that for the Domain Name System, and this is something which in my own way I've been kinda proud of since then. Well, after mentioning this in a post to Naomi's livejournal I decided to look into it a little more. And, OK, so I wasn't born in Stanford (I was born in Twickenham, Middlesex - but then, the Internet is everywhere and nowhere, right? Even in Twickenham) and I was around a long time before DNS came onto the scene, but my birthday (02/02/1969 - one of those handy ones that reads OK in both American and European format, and yes, I did have a rather special time on my birthday last year, when I was 33 on 02/02/02 [also I got married this year on 01/02/03 but that date only works for Europeans) was apparently five months plus one day after the first ARPANet node was installed, and eight months minus one day before the second node was installed and the first ARPANet message was sent. I reckon that's a meaningless coincidence which I can justly be proud of. Add comment | this item Interesting. Amazon, which must've been one of the first websites I ever registered for, has me down as "Daniel Sumption". I must've been excessively formal in those days, nowadays I'm Dan wherever I go. It makes me feel a little strange, whenever I visit, to see a little tab that reads "Daniel's page", like one of my relatives is talking to me. It's a little unnerving. Add comment | this item Hmmm, I just noticed that Blogger seems to have got the time wrong - dunno whether this is since they migrated to their new server, or something that's been going on for every and I just haven't noticed, but that last post was definitely at 4.19am and not 3.19 like it says. I checked my settings and changed my timezone from GMT to one of the millions of other GMT+0 time zones (I think they call it "GB-UK"), so hopefully this one will take account of British Summer Time. 2 comments Add comment | this item Woo-hoo! I've been experimenting with XML and XSLT - long story but, following a suggestion that I might want to try getting a job as an information architect, and bearing in mind the fscking pain-in-the-arsiness I've always had documenting site architecture (struggling with uncooperative versions of Visio, then copying and pasting the same information into Word or Excel to create page-by-page plans), while at the same time searching for a meaty XML/XSLT project to get my teeth into, I thought to myself "why the hell not create an XML schema for documenting website structure". Y'see, from this I could create a transformation into HTML which lists the page plan and detailed contents of each page, and another transformation into something like SVG (or maybe even Flash) which creates a basic site map (perhaps to a user-specified number of levels) - and once I have those down, who knows what other transformations I could come up with. I ought to even be able to come up with a transformation which creates a skeleton website from my one XML document. The world is my oyster. So, I'm a long way off, but I have a simple schema, a not-so-simple XSLT style transformation, and an increasingly complex XML real-world example (based on a site which caused me Visio-hell a couple of years ago). And it's all coming together. Rather peachily. If you have a browser that supports XSL transformations (such as IE6) then following this link should leave you looking at something that looks like a web page (albeit a rather ugly one) instead of something that looks like a bunch of <angle brackets>
Add comment | this item Wednesday, September 10, 2003
Gaaar! What is it with fonts? For some reason, every time I open a Photoshop file that I worked on more than a couple of weeks ago, it seems to contain a font that I don't have installed. Then I search through my extensive and reasonably well-catalogued pile of fonts, and it's not there either. I don't get it - where did these fonts come from in the first place? Where did they go to? Why did I ever decide to use them? Anyone with a copy of GloucesterMT ExtraCondensed, answers on a postcard please. Add comment | this item Tuesday, September 09, 2003
Two new sets of photos - a few from our campign holiday at Graig Wen in Wales, and a lot from my mad weekend in Antwerp back in June. 1 comment Add comment | this item Monday, September 08, 2003
Aargh! Bloody typical - that'll teach me to use multiple scripting languages. OK, I solved the PHP problem with listing comment IDs..., managed to get it to stop using the exponentials (I didn't manage to convert the exponential number into a non-exponential string, nothing as clever as that, I just, uhhh, put quotation marks around the number when calling that particular PHP function). Now for problem part two - the guestbook itself is written in Perl. Seems that Perl also has problems with numbers that long - so when I pass a number like 106262389915736793 to the Perl script, Perl then rounds it up to 106262389915736800. Aaargh! Curse you Blogger, I knew I should have switched to Moveable Type. Update: no, no, no, no, no, no, no! It's not even the Perl. It's that JavaScript that calls the Perl. Ohmigod, I'm drowning in a sea of programming languages. Update to the update: OK, it should now be fixed once and for all. Solved the JavaScript the same way as the PHP - by calling the function with quotes around the number, forcing it to a string. Moral: never treat numbers as numbers, at least not when they're likely to be verrrrry long numbers. Actually, it involved a lot more work that that implied, because I also had to go through renaming all of the comments files (they'd been named according to the JavaScript numbering) and editing each of them to remove the many instances of incorrect IDs and replacing it with the correct ID. Fortunately not many people comment on my blog :) 1 comment Add comment | this item Sunday, September 07, 2003
Thursday, September 04, 2003
On our recent return from Cornwall, I thought I was coming down with a cold/chest-infection. Started sneezing and getting very wheezy/breathless, having real problems breathing. I was sure that this was a typical "I'm back from my wonderful stress-free holiday and now have to return to the daily grind, so what better excuse for my body to get sick" illness. So I was surprised when over two days in London the apparently imminent sickness never emerged, in fact I felt fine despite all manner of (admittedly mild by my earlier standards) London-type bodily abuse. I was even more surprised when I came back from London and very quickly found myself severely deteriorating again. Until I realised that the cause was our own dear cat. I used to get severely allergic to cats when I was a kid, I'd spent sleepless nights trying to overcome my asthma-like inability to breathe, and so I've always been amazed that we've managed to own a cat for about 5 years without me suffering even a hint of allergy. But now it's back with a vengeance - I guess it doesn't help that she's shedding more hair than an arctic goat holidaying in the Bahamas right now, and huge clumps of it have accumulated around our house during the last few weeks' holidays. Ah well, what better incentive for me to belatedly begin the big post-hols tidy-up. I never did like that damn cat. Anyone want to take her off our hands? Add comment | this item Shit, I Just found a problem with the comments script I use on this section of my website... about 3 months ago, Blogger changed their posting IDs from sensible numbers, like 94855842 (which I could just about read, remember and then re-type somewhere else), to inter-planetary phone-numbers like 106262389915736793 (the reason for my adding the "this item" link to each item was because I frequently link to old items in my blog, and in the past I would memorise the Blogger ID and type it into the anchor tag, but now there's no hope of my doing that). Now, my Perl comments script still copes admirably with all of this, writing comments to a file named after the Blogger ID. But the PHP script which lives in every Life Less Literary page and scans for comment files named after the Blogger ID doesn't. Instead of looking for a comment file called 106262389915736793 I find that the PHP is hunting for one called 1.0626238991574E+17. Ho-hum. This is the kind of problem that ought to be easy to fix, and no doubt is, but off the top of my head I don't know the PHP function required, and I can't be arsed to fish it out at this hour, so for the time being please rest assured that your comments are still being noted and stored on the system, it's just that nobody can now see that you've made them. But they will be able to, once I get the damn system working again. 1 comment Add comment | this item Wednesday, September 03, 2003
Yay, Guy got his completed travelogue online!. Guy and I had a couple of fretful days battling with server disk allocation and Perl guestbooks, but we got it all working in the end only 2 days late (hey Guy, why is it that any time I try to work with you I encounter these weird counter-intuitive problems, like the Dreamweaver thing. You're jinxed man!) And it's wonderful (of course). I'm still only up to day 12 (a lot of reading, looking and downloading to do there), but determined to look at the whole lot at some point soon - apart from it making me feel quite immersed in Thailand and Cambodia, now that I've been doing a lot of image retouching I'm hoping to get some inspiration from Guy's superlatively sexed-up photos. 2 comments Add comment | this item It's that time of year when Summer busts into a fuzzy frayed final fling, the massed total of several months sunlight give plants their final raggedy push, and everything starts going to seed. Wandering around town, my urban filter slipped for a moment and I noticed the greenery everywhere - plants in the gutters, beside the lamp-posts, growing rampant from every nook and cranny in defiance of the highway department's attempts to poison them. I was amazed by the variety and the beauty of some of the wild flowers growing in the heart of the city. Add comment | this item Lola asked me to read Old Pig tonight - I haven't read it since Rowan was about the same age, some five years ago. Back then I found myself more and more moved by this child's story of bereavement every time I read it. The intervening years had obviously done nothing to halt this progress. By the end of the story, although Lola was no longer paying much attention, I had tears streaming down my face and found it hard to get past a single word without my voice warbling in sorrow. Add comment | this item Monday, September 01, 2003
Gorgeous - reminds me of the Clangers. Clues:
Add comment | this item Tuesday, August 19, 2003
More pictures - from this weekend's mini-festival affectionately referred to by everyone except Jon as Jonstock 2003, in the New Forest. Add comment | this item |