Legends of the Sun Pig

I’m quite excited about the next couple of days: flying to London this afternoon, followed by a late supper with Jules & Becca; dConstruct conference tomorrow; walking across London on Saturday.

dConstruct is a conference I’ve heard lots about, and have often envied people for attending, especially because it is (relatively speaking) nearby and inexpensive. So I’m taking the plunge this year. The line-up of speakers is terrific: James Burke would be worth the ticket price alone, but having watched recordings of some of Jason Scott‘s talks and enjoyed his Get Lamp and BBS documentaries, I’m sure he’ll deliver something amazing. Scott Jenson gave my favourite presentation at Mobilism earlier this year, and I’ve been using Seb Lee-Delisle‘s canvas examples from his talk at Fronteers last year as a starting point for teaching my kids some JavaScript. I’ve admired Ben Hammersley since the very early days of personal blogging over a decade ago, and Tom Armitage’s blog Infovore is another long time favourite. It’s going to be fantastic.

Then on Saturday I plan to get up before sunrise, and watch dawn break as I walk some 25km across London. I’m staying at a hotel in Crawley, and I’m going to try and catch the 05:33 train from Three Bridges to East Croydon. From East Croydon I’ll head north-west through Streatham and Clapham to Battersea. Cross Battersea Bridge, north through Kensington towards Hyde Park. From Hyde Park across to Westminster Bridge, and along the South Bank to cross the river again at London Bridge. West again past St. Paul’s towards Holborn, and then finally up north-west to Camden Market.

My original idea had been to just take a train to just inside the M25 and then head north without a plan, and I’d still like to do that some time. But on this trip I want to spend more time winding through the centre of London.

Of course, the hardest part of preparing for a trip is deciding what computing power to bring with me. Just for reference, let me note what we (as a family) brought with us for our three-week holiday in France, so you can see how bad it can get with us:

• Four laptops
• Four iPads
• Two Nintendo 3DSs
• Three phones (2x Android, 1x iPhone)
• Two Kindles
• Two cameras
• One 2TB ext hard drive containing our video library
• One Apple TV

For this trip, I’m going to be so busy with actual activities that I won’t have the time & concentration to sit down with a laptop, so that’s an easy one to leave behind. So I reckon it’ll “just” be my iPad, kindle, and two phones: one with my normal SIM, and one with my UK SIM for data to use as a personal hotspot. I’ve put the Nokia N9 back in the general pool for now, and am back on the Motorola Defy+ because it is nicely rugged for travelling, and (unlike the N9) it can sync all of my contacts. The secondary phone for data and hotspot usage will be the “Internet Puppy”, aka the Samsung Galaxy Y. Small and lightweight, running Android 2.3, it is the least fussy of my devices about wireless tethering.

Clothes? What do you mean?

I was lucky enough to win a Nokia N9 phone at the Mobilism conference last month. The N9 runs the MeeGo operating system, an ill-fated attempt by Nokia and Intel to build a Linux-based smartphone platform.

The N9 was announced shortly before Nokia decided to ditch Meego for Windows Phone, and it occupies a weird niche. It’s the only device Nokia intend to ever release with MeeGo on it, so it’s an obsolete phone on a dead-end platform. But the design of the phone was greeted so enthusiastically when it was announced that they could hardly not release it. Nokia seem embarrassed by the fact that despite almost non-existent marketing and limited availability, it has sold well and is very well liked. They have re-used almost exactly the same case design for the Lumia 800 Windows Phone, and the design heritage lives on in the Lumia line as a whole.

I love trying out different devices to get the feel of them, so I was absolutely delighted when out of all the different phones the sponsors had donated to Mobilism, it was the N9 that fell into my lap. Its minority status makes it highly attractive for checking out the far ends of the bell curve, but the fact that it’s quite pricey means I was unlikely to actually splash out on one myself. So I’ve definitely enjoyed walking around with it as my primary phone for the last month or two.

What I love about it:

• The case is gorgeous. The way the huge screen curves and blends with the all-in-one, high-density polycarbonate case is sleek and tactile. The cyan blue colour makes it stand out even more. Different is good.
• Double-tapping the screen to turn it on is very nice. I’ve totally got used to this; turning on other phones with a side or front button feels old-fashioned and clunky now.
• The full-screen MeeGo UI is terrific. Swiping all the way across the screen takes you to different views to take you to different views: apps, running apps, and notifications. The UI is sleek and responsive, and feels entirely in keeping with the case design.
• The web browser is pretty good. It doesn’t score as highly as Mobile Safari on html5test.com (284 vs 324), but it beats Android browser handily, and it feels pretty fast and smooth.
• The on-screen keyboard is pretty decent. Again, not as good as iOS, but an awful lot better than every Android keyboard I’ve come across.
• The notifications summary screen is nice, and I like the notification summary messages on the lock screen.

What I don’t like:

• Closing browser windows is a pain in the neck. This matters a lot for Twitter: when I click a link in a tweet, it opens in a new browser window. To close this window I have to: 1) Swipe left to bring up the list of running apps 2) Tap and hold the thumbnail of the browser window to enter “close screens” mode 3) Tap the X to close the window 4) Tap the “Done” button to leave “close screens” mode. 5) Tap the thumbnail of the Twitter window to return to Twitter. This is nuts. Part of the problem is down to the Twitter app shelling out to the native browser instead of using a webview within the app, but some of this is just the design of the OS. It drives me crazy.
• The Camera app is often, but not always, very slow to start. I mean slow to the point where it gives me the “Camera not responding – close application?” dialog. This is awful. I’ve tried rebooting, and even doing a complete factory reset, but it still happens.
• You can only enter landscape mode by rotating the phone 90 degrees anti-clockwise from portrait mode. This is a Nokia thing, I think — my C5-03 works the same way. Somewhat annoying, because I naturally turn phones the other direction to do landscape.
• Changing ringing volume, and switching to silent mode is fiddly. Switching to airplane mode should be more easily accessible.
• Subjectively, battery life feels very poor. I haven’t done precise measurements, but in standby mode (screen off), the battery seems to drain in just two days. Using GPS in the Maps application makes the device run really hot.
• Every now and then it just seems to forget about fetching/syncing email.
• The built-in Panorama app puts its photos in a non-standard location, which made me think that I had lost all the panorama shots I had taken with it. I met this with my usual swear-heavy mix of panic and anger.
• The Ovi Store is a bit of a sad mess.

Basically, there are a bunch of rough edges to the operating system. This is the point at which I was going to say, “But because MeeGo is dead, these problems will sadly never get fixed,” but that appears not to be entirely true! Just a couple of hours ago I happened to see Stuart Langridge mention a new N9 release on Twitter, and when I checked my N9 a few moments later, the “PR1.3” release of MeeGo appeared as an available update.

The release notes say that “This Nokia N9 update brings you many quality improvements,” so that’ll be nice. I wasn’t planning to change my primary phone for a wee while yet, so it’ll be interesting to see if this update addresses any of my problems. Even if it doesn’t, though, my verdict on the N9 is that it’s still a lovely device. It’s simply leagues ahead of most Android hardware out there, and I’d definitely rather have MeeGo than any version of the Android OS before 4.0/Ice Cream Sandwich. Above all, the N9 has got the classic Nokia cool factor. My very first mobile phone was a Nokia 7110, with the spring-loaded cover and navi-roller to scroll through WAP pages. That was a cool phone. The N9 is all that, for 2011. But, sadly, not 2012.

Fiona and I played golf again yesterday. Much improvement since last week! When she strikes the ball well, Fiona is getting good height and distance from her irons now. The long holes are still the ones that cause her the most trouble. But look! She scored two sixes this time, and knocked 17 shots off her score from last week!

I tweeted a question the other day about nesting <em> and <a> tags, to figure out which is better:

<em><a href="#">blah</a></em>

or

<a href="#"><em>blah</em></a>

blah or blah

Both are valid HTML, and browsers render them the same way. I’m also pretty sure that I’ve used them interchangeably in the past, and that I’ve asked myself the “which way is right?” question many times before. But enough! It’s time for me to have a definitive answer based on solid reasoning, not just an arbitrary decision, so that if I ever forget, I can retrace the logical steps and come to the same answer every time.

For me, the primary use case for nesting tags like this is to hyperlink book, film, or album titles. I wrap these titles in an <i> tag rather than an <em> tag. (See Oli Studholme’s article at HTML5 Doctor for an in-depth look at the semantic differences between the two.) Like so:

<a href="http://www.allmusic.com/album/clockwork-angels-mw0002332023"><i>Clockwork Angels</i></a>

Clockwork Angels

It was Vasilis who pointed out that the correct order of the nesting becomes immediately apparent if you add more text, only some of which belongs inside the inner tag:

<a href="http://us.macmillan.com/redshirts/JohnScalzi"><i>Redshirts</i> by John Scalzi</a>

Redshirts by John Scalzi

So that’s the answer: for linked titles (or ship names, or taxonomic designations), the link always goes on the outside.

Fiona and I played 9 holes of golf on the par-3 F-course at Spaarnwoude yesterday. Fiona has hit balls on the driving range before, and played a few holes at Archerfield last month, but this was her first time doing a full 9 holes here in the Netherlands. We both had great fun.

Garbage’s new album Not Your Kind Of People has seen a mixed reception: fans love it, but critics have generally gone “meh.” My own first impression of it was that even the heavy rock tracks like “Man On A Wire” felt pretty lightweight compared to their older material. It took me few listens to catch the flow of the album, and to get caught up in the hooks and grooves. There are some really good songs on there. “Blood For Poppies” has a bouncy sing-along chorus that belies its stark lyrics about war and battle. “Felt” has a throbbing drum and guitar backbone with the kind of melty vocals I find hard to resist. And “Automatic Systematic Habit” is a wicked synth-heavy opener that I would rate as one of their best ever songs, if it weren’t for how terrible and plain the first verse is compared to the tight interlocking slickness of the second.

That didn’t seem to bother anyone else at the gig, though. Melkweg was sold out. The crowd roared with approval when the band walked on stage, and went into a positive frenzy when Automatic Systematic Habit was what they kicked off with. Other songs from the new album got a good reception, too, but it was the older hits that got the biggest cheers. “Cherry Lips” and “Only Happy When It Rains” in particular raised the roof.

Shirley Manson looked great on stage, her hair up in a severe knot, strutting around with all the controlled aggression the songs demanded. Duke Erikson was absent, but Eric Avery took up bass duty and prowled around the stage like a groovy panther. I love watching drummers play, but unfortunately I didn’t see much of Butch Vig — the stage at Melkweg is low, and the Dutch are very tall. Fortunately, Garbage will be returning to Amsterdam in November to play Parasido, which is my favourite venue. This time, I must remember to buy tickets early, so that I’m not stuck buying them after-market.

1. Automatic Systematic Habit
2. Shut Your Mouth
3. Temptation Waits
4. Queer
5. Metal Heart
6. Stupid Girl
7. Why Do You Love Me
8. Control
9. #1 Crush
10. Cherry Lips (Go Baby Go!)
11. Blood For Poppies
12. Special
13. Milk
14. Man On A Wire
15. I Think I’m Paranoid
16. Bad Boyfriend
17. Only Happy When It Rains
18. Push It

Encore:

19. Big Bright World
20. The Trick Is To Keep Breathing
21. Vow