I have updated the graphic. This is still not totally what I envisaged, but I think it acheives everything I wanted to acheive, the most important things being the colours and the little bubble guy. I’m pleased with him, he’s come out very much as I wanted him to, which is always nice as I’m not the handiest illustrator. I thought I would have to use Lightwave or something to model him to get the perspective, but I managed to flange it using the pathfinders and the offset path function in Illustrator. Woo!

Finally! A new design for this page. Sorry that the page has been so ugly in the interim. I like the new design, but it’s not finished. I’ve rushed it today and it’s not quite what I saw in my head originally.

I hope to bring in more elements and make the left-hand graphic less abstract. It also currently frames the text in a way that I don’t really like, so I’m going to try and break that hard line up a bit. Perhaps that graphic would be more suited to the bottom of the page? Anyway, we’ll see how much Illustrator time there is to be had this week.

It’s got a whizzy PHP backend by moi and a whizzy purty front-end by my good friend BibbyBobby [warning: no content] and it’s cool. Bit of hassle with database servers and slack support staff but it all worked out in the end.

I decided to make a list of the things that had annoyed me during the project and learn from them for the next one, which I have already begun (in fact, I should have already finished it). I’ve written a few small classes to abstract things I do a lot. They’re not massively general, but they will make my code a lot lighter. I worry too much about run-time, which is really not an issue these days, certainly not for me, and I should be less scared of writing big useful classes.

I have decided to take a week off to work on Hypothetical in March and try to release a new version in time for Hype’s second birthday on May 1st. I’ve even put milestones in my calendar.

I went to the mass-march yesterday. Like lots of people I’m pretty confused by the Iraq situation, I’m not going to go into the reasons, because it’s ground thats been covered lots of times. Anyway, I decided to go anyway because, if nothing else, I am against the British army going and killing Iraqi soldiers and some innocents and because I was sure I would regret if I didn’t go and not sure I would regret if I did (I don’t). I’d like to say at this point that I am by no means pro-Saddam, of that I am very sure.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the assination route. There’s no need to kill Iraqis, if there are international-scale criminals in Iraq, then they are confined to their Government. War is the traditional, aristocratic way for a group of governments to reprimand another, but there is no need for that here. Assination has been tried by the Americans but it too is morally a deeply questionable tactic. If forced to choose, I think it is better to execute 10 people than a thousand. I think many people might disagree that assination is an option perhaps because it is seen as underhand or cheating. If it saves lives then why not cheat? This is a game between administrations, not peoples.

I think that there is a third way. I think that international law should be modified so that it is possible to interceed in the operations of a government when that government has been proven to be a large threat to life or human rights, be that the life and rights of their own citizens or those of any other country. That way it would be possible to bring a case against the Ba’ath Government of Iraq and have that case backed up by the UN. Many countries are happy to give the death penalty to serious internal criminals and I’m sure this could be used as a political vehicle for those countries to at least threaten a Government with force, sparing the citizens in between. It would also give us ground to bring much more pressure to bear on North Korea, Rwanda, China and a whole host of oppressive regimes whilst hopefully averting all out war.

The problem with this is that, if used unsparingly, it would highlight a deep rift between the major political blocs of the world. Western countries are not going to agree with China or the Middle East about what consitutes a threat to human rights. Possibly they could settle on the lowest common denominator and raise the bar over the next century or so.

It would be a bold move and an extremely difficult one to pull off in the climate of tense co-operation that exists between nations in these times, however, I believe it is a tactic that is in line with the way international politics is headed and could be the hallmark of the 21st century.

The changes that I’ve been making have involved numerous small amendments to a site I didn’t build and that was built with tools that are now several years out of date. Whilst web building is just as easy on any platform, amending sites is considerably faster on Unix. Here’s why:

• wget. First of all I could not log in to the FTP server. No reason, just one of those things, so I wgot the whole site (wget -m), this has the advantage of removing any redundant files.
• tidy. This runs on most OSs, but is just the most useful tool. In one tidy run, I converted the whole site to XHTML, cleaned up any redundant or empty tags, removed all <font> tags and rewrote them to CSS and indented the code properly so that I could find my way around it and so that it was easier to match blocks of code with regular expressions.
• grep. I would locate an error, grep the whole set of files for that error and then look at only those that matched. Using grep I could test the effectiveness of changes made with perl and generally assess what was going on with the site across 116 files with no delay. And, more importantly, no drudge work!
• perl. Cake. Icing. Perl is fantastically useful and extremely flexible when it comes to text manipulation. Within the framework of a very simple program I built sets of regular expressions that, when applied to the current site, made the kind of changes I needed to make. These were things like, changing an icon to point somewhere else on every page, changing the header on every page to remove a banner. This kind of stuff is doable with other find/replace tools. But take into account that whilst the banner HTML was visually identical, it’s code was not. Some places would use a <br />, others a spacer Gif. Only regex’s stay ahead in that game.

The most important thing was that all my grepping and perling (the bulk of the effort) was great fun and in no way dull. Using brute force to make all these changes was certainly possible (with the exception of the tidy work) but it would have been dull as fuck. With a little programmatic magic on the other hand, I was able to skip through it, giggling like a schoolboy who’s just dropped a trojan into the staff network.

I rewarded myself by buying a book and a t-shirt.

I’m just talking to a client who’s reviewing some changes I’ve made to her site. She’s going through the changes under her breath. The whole “under her breath” thing is a very similar experience to watching a status bar. You know that there’s business being attended to, but if you try to work out what that business is, it’ll just take twice as long.

On Thursday I got talking to one of the guys at Tai Chi and I found out why the form they are teaching me is so different from the one I learnt in Norwich. It’s the old frame and Kenny was teaching the new frame. Apparently the new frame is more complicated and is generally taught after the old frame. I learnt a little bit more of the 19-point form. I haven’t been practising enough again. However, I have an excuse.

On Friday we had loads of guests come down and went to a Manga all-nighter at The Other Cinema in Soho. I saw Spriggan, Perfect Blue, Patlabor II and, against my choice, Spriggan again. They were planning to show Macross Plus, but somebody fucked up and they couldn’t, when asked everybody else voted Spriggan (which I had seen on another screen). It was a ker-azy ride, felt pretty crazed in the morning and the next day. But free breakfast of croissant made it easier. Plus it was cool to see lots of people and meet some more Hype people (Silas).

Rich, who had been staying for the week, Martin and Miles left on Saturday evening after sleep and Full English Breakfast in Chelsea, but Greg stayed until today. I told him that I was thinking of messing around with SDL a bit and we cranked the API out. We managed to get a basic rotating sprite (blit-tastic) demo running on his machine built under MinGW and mine with Apple’s Project Builder. MinGW is ace BTW and combined with Bloodshed’s Dev-C++ IDE provides everything we need. For anyone else out there pissed-off with DevStudio I highly recommend it. Greg is basically ditching M$ tools, something I did a while ago with the leap to the Mac, but it’s really, really nice to have alternatives that are free and better. Then we decided to stick the code in CVS so we could continue working on it remotely. I’ve never really used CVS properly and it’s a bit mad, but it should be very useful for our purposes. At least all the IDEs integrate with it, if in interestingly different ways.

Developing a single piece of code which compiles on both my OS X machine and Greg’s Win98 machine was immensely satisfying. It’s clearly the way forward. Well done, SDL guys!