Minimal

Programming.

Thanks to a change in my hosting package, I now have 250MB of web space instead of the 25MB I originally bought. This means I can now post my full-lap trackday video from Croft, July 2004. Yay for free lunches! :)

Unfortunately, for all you Mac users (one or two of you, that is), the video’s only available in .WMV format. Life’s a bitch, no? Well, just for you, here’s an utterly ridiculous attempt to recreate the video using an animated gif. You even get lyrics to help you sing along to the original video’s soundtrack.

True Faith, sister fanzine to The Mag, offers this summary of the Bolton game last night:

Woeful. Beyond the point where you stop getting angry and just want to be away from it all and on your own. The kind of result which will leave you staring into space in an empty, quiet room wondering why you’ve wasted your life following a shower of shit.

I gave up my season ticket this year. Right now, it feels like a very good move indeed. Sack the board.

Welcome to the 21^st century, dad. Yep, he’s finally got his own weblog. And a flickr account. Just in time for the 2-month road trip the ’rents are about to take in the US. So, no more postcards that arrive weeks after they’ve returned from their latest jolly. Hurrah!

Note: I get my grammar pedantry from my mother, as you may be able to tell from my dad’s first post. Missing apostrophes?! Soft line breaks?! Why, I oughta...! ;)

Bush blocks bush on .xxx [The Register]
The most obvious and sensible top-level domain yet proposed and some conservative from the Bush administration just had to stand in the way. Typical.

You may have noticed a few things changing here over the last couple of days. I’ve:

• added a search facility,
• rationalised the links in the page header,
• added the Serenity theme,
• allowed you to select your preferred theme and
• fixed a whole raft of CSS bugs.

One thing I’ve not fixed, however, is the weird extra pixel you get to the right of the header in IE. Turns out it’s nothing to do with the usual box model nasties. It’s all down to the faux columns I use as a background for the page.

The columns’ tile is centred in the body tag using the CSS background-position property. The page content, on the other hand, is centred by setting its horizontal margins to auto. In Internet Explorer 6 (which is all I’ve got to go on), these two centring techniques don’t agree and the faux columns are shifted 1 pixel to the right. As a result, the right-hand column appears to peep out from the side of the header. Gah!

So, what do I do? I can either stop using faux columns, or I can just live with it. Were this a commercial site, I’d probably stop using faux columns. However, it’s not, so I won’t. I’ll just wait for Microsoft to resolve the disparity and let IE users deal with the ugly header. I’m all right, Jack—I use FireFox. :)

It might’ve taken me nearly a year, but I’ve finally posted a bit of blurb to go with my photos from the Middle East. Expect all future photos to go directly onto Flickr. :)

I’ve always considered soft line breaks in the middle of paragraphs to be a Bad Thing™. If you want to break a paragraph, do it properly and visually separate the two blocks of text. However, as far as I can tell, this is all just based on my own sense of aesthetics and readability. I’m not sure I’ve ever read anything on the subject and I’m having difficulty finding anything to back me up. Do you know of any grammar rules that cover it? Got a URL?

If you’re wondering why I’m bothered, it’s to do with the formatting of error messages in desktop software. So, no, it’s not particularly exciting. :)

I’m sure someone must’ve said this before, but I can’t help thinking the OK, Cancel and Apply buttons that appear on property sheets throughout Windows are a little... suboptimal. Ignoring the button order (that’s a whole other issue), there’s the confusing nature of the Cancel button. Everything makes sense until you press Apply for the first time. Now, the behaviour of the Cancel button is something you have to learn, not something you can intuit. Will it reverse the changes you just made by clicking Apply? Or will it act more as a Close button, keeping your applied changes?

Actually, you probably can intuit the behaviour — after all, it’s still enabled and it still says Cancel. It’ll reverse the changes, right? Well, no, it won’t. In fact, the Cancel button now works like a Close button; exactly the same as the OK button at this point. Once you start making changes again, it becomes a Cancel for the new changes. The problem is that at no point in this transformation of roles does the button indicate its new behaviour e.g. by becoming a Close button or by greying out.

Perhaps the interface designers figured a changing button would be more confusing than the implemented behaviour. OR perhaps the OK/Cancel/Apply triplet was fatally flawed from the outset. But what might’ve been better? How about OK, Cancel and Preview? While the observed behaviour of a Preview button would be the same as that for Apply, there’s less confusion over whether it’s a permanent setting. If I cancel after previewing, I definitely expect the original settings to be restored. The behaviour of the Cancel button has become consistent for the duration of the property sheet’s existence. Predictability is back and the user feels in control again.

Or have I missed something important?

Anyone who’s ever seen me kick a football will know I wasn’t exactly born to do it. Last night, however, I managed to keep a ball in the air 10 times. For the first time in my life, I made double figures. Yay for me and my enduring lack of coordination.

[Cue slinky link...] Nolberto Solano, meanwhile, has been juggling something very different. Bad Nobby.

For fellow fans of Joss Whedon’s canned Firefly series, the movie site for Serenity has a new trailer on it (Quicktime required). I say new, but I’ve actually no idea how long it’s been posted. I could just be typically late to the party. Regardless, I’m already getting needlessly excited about going to see it. :)

And still on a sci-fi cinema vibe, when the hell’s Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence gonna make it over here?!?! Bah.