Duke Street Alley

Originally published at Now Is A Long Time Too. You can comment here or there.

Last night was an excellent night out - some of the guys in one of the World of Warcraft guilds we play with came over from the UK, and we pubbed and ate in a fantastic Chinese in Little Mary Street, and went on to Fibbers.

Today we broke out the barbecue, because it was nice and sunny, and cooked outside. It got chilly afterward, but the food worked well. I don’t know why gammon steaks are not more popular - they’re like giant rashers, and they’re really good when grilled. And being able to cook with herbs that I picked and dried last year was also excellent - rosemary, in this case.

I’ve planted some more herbs this year - last year’s vegetables sort-of worked, but weren’t really suitable. I now have rocket coming up rather quickly, and also parsely, dill, and thyme (at least I think it was thyme - I’m not 100% sure now). There’ll be more rocket going in soon, as I don’t expect the current crop to survive long - it’s one of the few leaf vegetables I can’t get enough of.

I’d like to try basil as well, and I have the seeds for it, but it’s a more difficult beast to grow than the rest - needs planting indoors, and then putting out, which I’m not really all that well set up for. I have a vague notion of hanging seed trays in the kitchen window, where they’d get a bit of light and still be out of feline reach. I’m not sure it’s very practical, though.

Originally published at Now Is A Long Time Too. You can comment here or there.

A massive collection of Steampunk links

Steampunk Transformers!

Metronome: A Swedish sound-oriented steampunk game. I think.

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It’s just come to my attention that Microsoft rolled out the Eolas “fix” in the last round of updates, and Flash no longer works in IE the way it used to. If anyone has a cleaner workaround than this javascript, please let me know. Otherwise I’m going to have a less than fun time tomorrow working out where in a massive, dynamically built website we’re using object tags.

Originally published at Now Is A Long Time Too. You can comment here or there.

Wikipedia is “simultaneously a shining, flawless collection of incontrovertible information, and a debased pile of meaningless words thrown together by uneducated lemurs with political agendas”.

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There’s a definite similarity in use between “homeboy” and “guildie”. Discuss.

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You know things have moved on a bit when you listen to Rage Against The Machine and think “Y’know, this is pretty mellow.”

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inranelagh.com is up and running. There’s some activity on the message boards - mostly me, admittedly, but there are two other users registered. There are some business listings in, and I’ll be hunting for more.

What else is useful on a local site? If you live in or near Ranelagh, what information would you expect to find? If you don’t, and you’re visiting, what would be useful? What’s on local info sites wherever you live? Should I concentrate on adding funky cutting edge stuff like tagging and feeds, or should I work on more mundane content first?

Originally published at Now Is A Long Time Too. You can comment here or there.

Where does Engrish come from? The Japanese are so precise about everything else, and yet there’s this imprecise (albeit evocative) stream of non-English coming from Japan.

For some reason, one of the top searches that keeps grounding out on dukestreet.org is “How to make a mechanical arm”.

The Helsinki Museum of Modern Art has comics for sale. Why don’t we get that in the Anglophone parts of the planet?

I like living in a time and place where I can discuss the pronunciation of haecceity, where to get episodes of Battlestar Galactica, and XSL selection, while listening to OPM’s rather anthemic Heaven is a Halfpipe.

Originally published at Now Is A Long Time Too. You can comment here or there.

Woo! Registered user on the message boards! Thank you!

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More work geeking done today on inranelagh.com, so that it now has an events section on the front page that shows whatever’s in the database for a week in advance. I might have to change the format a bit if it gets busy, but Ranelagh isn’t so loaded with happenings that that’s going to be a problem anytime soon. Next in mind are tags for the business listings (although I’m going to have to think a bit more about how I want that to work) and then maybe small ads for the area - for sale, room to let, teach your kids Portugese, the kind of thing you see on shop noticeboards.

And maybe someday soon someone will actually register on the messageboards, dammit. I should probably seed them a bit, but that feels a bit less than honest.

Originally published at Now Is A Long Time Too. You can comment here or there.

I’ve spent the day doing stuff for inranelagh.com, and I’m very pleased with the results. I talked to a wide variety of people up along the village this morning, got listings down for many of them, and left introductory letters for lots more. And then I came home and coded like a maniac for a few hours, resulting in a neatly categorised set of listings up and running on the site. Oh, and the RSS feed for the site is now available as .

It’s a great buzz when a project starts to pick up momentum!

Originally published at Now Is A Long Time Too. You can comment here or there.

Go to Wikipedia and look up your birth day (excluding the year). List three neat facts, two births and one death in your journal, including the year.

Facts:

1839 - John Herschel takes the first glass plate photograph.
1947 - “First actual case of (a computer) bug being found”: a moth lodges in a relay of a Mark II computer at Harvard University.
2001 - 01:46:40 UTC - the Unix billennium.

Births:

1466 - Ashikaga Yoshitane, Japanese shogun (d. 1523)
1754 - William Bligh, British naval officer (d. 1817)

Deaths:

1976 - Mao Zedong, President of China(b. 1893)

Not, in all, terribly interesting…

Originally published at Now Is A Long Time Too. You can comment here or there.

Does anyone nearby have a copy of the Whole Earth Catalog - any edition - that I could take a look at? I don't necessarily need to borrow it, although that would be nice.

Originally published at Now Is A Long Time Too. You can comment here or there.

A question for the more technically minded among ye. I’m going to be doing some work on a database of local information for inranelagh.com, and I’m think about how to structure it. At present, I’ll want to flag entries in the database with various notes, and also attach tags to them, in the short-established Web2.0 style. Since there’ll be an arbitrary number of possible tags for a given entry, and an occasionally changing number of flags, what’s the best way to manage this?

Possibilities in my mind is to have one field, “flags”, containing a comma separated list of words, and the same for tags. Another possibility is to have a field per flag, and let them be 1 or 0 - although I can’t see that working for the tags. And finally, there’s the possibility of a table co-relating flags/tags and entries separately.

I might just use tags overall, but I’d like to distinguish between the ones I set (flags) and the ones anyone else sets.

And a separate question - does anyone know how easy it is to get at phpBB’s user storage, and if that login could be used elsewhere on the site, for comments, feedback, submissions, and the like?

I’m in an odd place on this; I know the stuff that can be done, I work with it every day, but in many ways, I haven’t the slightest idea how to go about it anymore without developer support.

Originally published at Now Is A Long Time Too. You can comment here or there.

Some gorgeous desktop images.

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The very basic form of inranelagh.com has just gone live. Link to it, advertise it, register on the discussion boards (assuming everything is working there) and let me know what else could and should go on it.

Originally published at Now Is A Long Time Too. You can comment here or there.

Here's an interesting term: apophenia. I wonder if this is what causes me to hear constant music composed of ambient sounds?

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For the non-WoW players, I apologise for this incomprehensible content.

1. Thou Shalt Spell Correctly.
2. If Thou Needst To Invent Words, Let Them Look Plausible.
3. Thou Shalt Not Claim To Be A Half Demon.
4. Nor Shalt Thou Describe Anything As Shimmering.
5. Thou Shalt Not Compress Two Pages Of Tolkien Into Thy Description.
6. Thou Shalt Not Have Scars, Because Everyone Else Already Has.
7. Thou Shalt Not Describe The Reactions Of The Viewer.
8. Thou Shalt Remember What Thou Hast Written.
9. If Thou Hast Contravened The Third Commandment, Be Prepared To Deal With The Reaction.
10. Further, Thou Shalt Not Claim To Be A Half Dragon, And Particularly Not A Half Dragon Half Demon Forsaken Like That Idiot I Saw In Orgrimmar Last Week.

Originally published at Now Is A Long Time Too. You can comment here or there.

What's the best way to go about learning the phonetic alphabet? I've just realised, trying to explain in text to a Canadian colleague, that trying to render a Northern Irish accent in the mundane alphabet is wholly impossible. The greeting that you'd write as “How's you?” gets mangled into “Hyee's yi-e?”, and still doesn't convey either the sound or the fact that it sounds pleasant.

Originally published at Now Is A Long Time Too. You can comment here or there.

V for Vendetta is what an angrier Yeats might have produced, had he unfettered access to a museum.

Yes, it is that good. It has shot straight into my top ten films ever, and may even occupy the top slot.