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Movieblog podcast

Richard, who writes for The Movie Blog, has been trying to get an all-Scottish version of their regular podcast going for some time now. On Thursday he finally made it happen! And I got invited along as a guest for the session! So if you feel like hearing the two of us ramble on about the best and worst movies of 2005, head on over to The Movie Blog for the download.

We had some technical troubles that prevented Louise from doing her “Voice Of God” thing, the output volume has ended up quite low, and you can hear the nerves shaking our voices at times. However, given that this was our first podcast ever, I think we managed to not totally suck. Might we do it again? Time will tell…

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Somersaults

Over the last year, Alex and I have been practicing a bunch of acrobatic moves. With me lying on my back, he has been standing on my hands. I’ve been throwing him up in the air and catching him. And just this last week, we managed to nail his first somersaults. The picture below links to a (20MB) video clip of him doing backwards somersaults in our garden. I’m still giving him the initial boost, but just wait another year or two…

Alex doing somersaults

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My Christmas rant

‘Tis the Season of Obligation, and I hate it.

If you’re feeling full of Christmas cheer and good will to all men, look away now, because reading this will only make you feel sad, angry, or insulted. Possible all three. I mean it. Really. Stop reading.

I love giving presents, but I hate giving them because the calendar says I must. I love my friends and family, but I hate having a massive list that we must methodically and mechanically run down to see that everyone receives at item appropriate to their status and closeness. And because everyone is buying presents all at the same time, I hate having to coordinate to ensure that the unwanted trinkets I plan to buy won’t clash with someone else’s purchase.

Likewise, I don’t care about getting presents for Christmas any more. I have everything I want already, and I would far rather you got me nothing than that you bought me something I don’t need and will never use just because you feel you have to. In fact, you know what’s the greatest gift you could get me next year? To tell me that you haven’t bought me anything. I would truly appreciate knowing that I have saved you that small measure of hassle, and that your Chistmas workload has been lightened just that little bit.

You think I’m kidding? You think I couldn’t possibly mean it? You think it’s just because the preparations for this Christmas have been getting me down? Absolutely not. I am being completely honest. Stop. Giving. Me. Shit.

(And please don’t give a charitable donation instead of getting me a gift. That’s just as bad. Give to a charity because you want to give to a charity, not because you feel some residual obligation to me. Charities need our money all year round.)

I have a wish list, and I hate not being able to buy anything from it in November or December, just because someone might selected something from it already. As of 2006, the wish list is going away.

If you really want to get me something, get something for ME–not for Christmas. If you have some music you particularly like, and you want to share it with me, send me a CD in the middle of March, out of the blue. If you’re browsing through the Autumn sales and see a T-shirt you think would suit me, give it to me in September. Show that it’s me you’re thinking about, not just another item on your shopping list.

I’m having a tough time keeping up appearances for the kids, and trying to keep things magical for them. I don’t want my grumpiness to ruin their pleasure. But equally, I don’t want them to grow up into Christmas Want-monsters. The American Thanksgiving tradition seems to me a much better model for a mid-winter holiday: the absence of gifts keeps things focused on the family, and the togetherness. There’s only so much preparation you can do for a big meal, and the shops don’t play psychosis-inducing festive music for two months solid leading up to it. (Honestly, the next time I hear “I Wish It Could Be Christmas Every Day” someone is going to get their nose bitten off.)

Finally, anyone who wants to call me a “Scrooge” can just fuck off. Get an original thought once in a while, you sheep.

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Second best

If you’re feeling a bit technical, you might be interested in a new blog I’ve just started: Second Best. I’ll be using it as a place for writing about my professional interests, i.e. web standards, usability and accessibility, and software development.

If you don’t care, that’s okay, too.

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S…l…o…w…

The more work I do inside Virtual Machines, the more I think my PC is coming ripe for an upgrade. An addional factor is the amount of Photoshop work I’ve been doing lately, including our annual photo albums.

For Christmas each year, Abi binds a set of albums, and we fill them with a selection of the best photos we’ve taken of Alex and Fiona. I don’t normally do much retouching of the images, but when Liza visited us earlier in the year, she enlightened me about the proper use of levels, curves, and colour balance. I’ve been practicing with these tools since then, and they are enormously useful. However, doing the photo albums is the first time I’ve used them for full-page, 600dpi print work. That means images of 6400 x 4100 pixels, and it doesn’t take too many of them to kill teh snappy.

So I’m pondering a few upgrades for Frankenstein:

  • AMD Athlon64 X2 (dual core) processor. Dual core is gooood. The 4400+ is the sensible choice, I think. The 4800+ is too expensive for too little added benefit. The 3800+ is cheaper, but given that the 4400+ has both a speed bump and twice the L2 cache, the cost difference is probably worth it.
  • Asus A8N-SLI SE motherboard. A new CPU means a new motherboard, unfortunately. This one supports all the features I need, and is reasonably priced.
  • 256Mb Gigabyte PCI-E Geforce 6600 with SilentPipe (GV-NX66256DP). A mid-range card, because I’m not overly concerned about gaming performance (although it should certainly be good enough for another year or so). However, a chunky integrated heat sink allows it to run without a fan. Another option would be the higher-spec 256Mb Asus PCI-E EN6600GT-Silencer, but I’m not sure if it’s worth it. Given how I use the PC, less money on the graphics setup means more money to go on the CPU.
  • 2GB DDR400 RAM. Lots of memory is gooood. 2GB would allow me to run several virtual machines at the same time.

Hmm. Next year…

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Dynamically created (or included) Javascript

Dynamically created page elements? No problem. Dynamically created Javascript? As in, using document.createElement() to create a <script> element? Sounds like black magic, and it’s not something I would have tried myself until I saw the article @import voor JavaScript on Naar Voren (in Dutch). Basically, it’s a technique for giving Javascript the ability to include other script files “on demand,” much in the same way as PHP’s include() and include_once() functions.

This technique has actually been around for a while: a quick google showed me the article “Javascript includes – yet another way of RPC-ing”, by Stoyan Stefanov from July of this year, which in turn points back to articles from 2002. In addition to making the whole include() thing possible (a fantastically useful feature), using dynamically generated script also allows you to use make remote calls to other domains–something the HmlHttpRequest object forbids. In fact, Simon Willison was just talking about this the other day, in the context of Yahoo!’s web service APIs now providing output in JSON format as well as traditional XML.

It’s all coming together. A bundle of key techniques that have been around for ages (Unobtrusive javascript, object-oriented javascript, Ajax/remote scripting) have suddenly seen massive adoption and tremendous development. Javascript has matured a great deal over the course of 2005, and is rapidly tuning into one of the cornerstones of modern web development. It’s a very exciting time for the field.