I emailed Underwired to apologise and kind of to test the water. I attached some files that they would need to continue the work without me. Kind of expecting an angry response, I was surprised and saddened when I all got was a single word, “thanks”.
That’s that working relationship over then.
:-(
I’m alone. It’s completely quiet. Even the builders next door have shut up for once. All I can hear is the whine of my laptop and the sound of the keys. After being in the bustle of Manhattan and with Louise every moment for almost 2 weeks, it’s sad to be alone in the quiet.
I think I may have to get a job just to get some friends.
Whilst I was away my email application failed nearly totally. Despite my confidence it made a horrible mess of its maiden use. Underwired have basically fired me, insensed that they had nothing and that I was out of reach.
I’m deeply upset and confused. I had tested it and I felt it to be stable. I have no idea what went wrong. My access has been removed and I am unable to do a diagnosis. Whilst I was away they found somebody else to work on the system. I’m not sure whether I’m surplus to requirements anymore or if they will ask that it is completed now.
They have paid me two thirds of the contract price. This is in one sense generous as they have no functionality, but in another it is fair as they have kept all the code I wrote.
This is the second major failure of my freelance career. The first being when I agreed to restyle a government agency site of 5,000+ pages in two weeks. I believed I could do almost all the work with a Perl program. This was not the case and after about two months I gave up. The common mistake between that project and this was a gross misestimate of the time required resulting in a loss of faith by my clients.
The first failure was worse as I put a lot of work in and so did many of close friends and they and I got nothing at all. However, this time I feel worse as UW are close friends and at this point it looks like that relationship is completely finished, ending in the worst possible way with me letting them down and them not wanting to try again. I would like to make good, but I’m not sure they will give me the chance and my confidence in my ability to do what’s needed is shot to pieces.
The worse thing is that it was really outside my control. I put everything I had into the system and my holiday had been booked since last year. I genuinely felt that it was ready to go when I left and now it seems I couldn’t have been more wrong. Underwired didn’t tell me that they’d got somebody else to work on it. If they had they would have ruined my holiday, but I would have done everything I could of from New York to fix it for them.
I started the day today with a bowl of Oreo’s cookie cereal, a sickly mass of souvenir bounty. Yes, we’re back in the UK (as of about 8 A.M. yesterday).
I’ve summarised the holiday a lot for postcards and phone calls already, but I’ll try not to do that here. To summarise though, we had a great time and did loads of stuff. It went far too quickly and we did not want to come back at all.
To anti-summarise then (this is going to be very, very long):
Our flight was OK, the plane was practically empty and Louise slept across five seats for half the journey. I read lots of Life of Pi and failed to sleep. On landing, we got a taxi to the hotel because it was just easiest. The driver was a very funny stereotypical Puerto Rican guy. He was quite chatty and drove like a madman. It was cool watching the city fly by and when the Manhattan skyline came into view from Brooklyn it was stunning. When we arrived at the hotel, we just gave up on life and went to sleep.
We decided to kick off with some major league tourism. We had breakfast (eggs sunny side up) in the diner next door to the hotel and then took the subway to Times Square. We then walked to and climbed the Empire State. The subway is cool BTW, we got a Metrocard that was good for an unlimited number of journeys in seven days for $17.
When we got to Times Square, it was a crazy, all the lights were off and it took us a minute to work out where the famous bit was, we did though and took photos. The walk to the Empire State gave us a chance to look at the city streets a bit. The canyons between the skyscrapers in mid and downtown are cool and we did the standard tourist thing of walking around staring up into the sky. Even at the end of the holiday I was still doing that (and taking loads of pictures of them as well).
The lobby at the Empire State is a horrific piece of modern gothic showiness, but it is kind of fitting I suppose. It’s free to get into and has possibly the highest density of opportunities to waste money of anywhere I know. Entry to the lifts to the 86th floor viewing platform only costs $10. I was not expecting my ears to pop in the lift but the view is magnificent! I could have stayed up there all day. It was a bit hazy but Manhattan and beyond looked very beautiful from that height. The Empire State has the advantage of being far taller than anything for a good half a mile around and as tall as the biggest buildings in the financial district about two miles south.
After returning to ground level we walked a short way up 5th Ave. to the main building of the New York Public Library. We just went to check out the big reading room, but it turns out they have internet access in there. So we sat and posted to Hype in the middle of austere splendor and rows of diligent students (bad photo).
I can’t quite remember how, but by the time it came for us to eat we had found our way to Greenwich Village, quite a way away. We probably walked, we did a awful lot of random wandering throughout the 10 days. We ate and, as became the pattern, went straight back to the hotel and went to sleep.
We continued the tourism with the Statue of Liberty. It was bloody cold down on the south shore and on the boat, but the financial district did look cool from the water. For some reason neither Louise or decided to pack hats etc., pointlessly leaving them in the hotel while we shivered.
It is worth taking the ferry to the Statue just for the views of Manhattan, New Jersey and Brooklyn and it is also probably the best place to photograph the statue from. There isn’t a lot to do on the island except look at the statue and take more pictures. The statue itself has been closed since 9-11, which was a damn shame. I couldn’t quite get over the fact that I wasn’t going to get to stand in the crown and I hatched plans to overcome the guards and sneak inside. Louise suggested I would probably be arrested and held without trial as a terrorist for the rest of my life. Statue fact: the base bit is about ten stories high and the whole thing is frankly bloody huge! It’s very difficult to get a sense of scale from the ground though. Strangely, there was some snow left on the island, even though it was lovely and sunny. A testament to how cold it was.
After the statue we went to Ellis Island. This island houses a group of buildings that used to the main immigration centre for America, but are now museums dedicated to that subject.
Throughout the New York Bay there are a series of islands that were used for various purposes in the immigration chain. At one the seriously ill were separated, at another the poor and the middle and upper class passengers were separated. Most of the passengers ended up at Ellis Island where the poor, the needy, the disabled and those with epidemic scale illnesses such as smallpox or trachoma were summarily sent back to where they came from. These cases represented a very small percentage of those arriving, the steam ships bringing them from the old world were required to pay for the return trip and so only brought lively candidates. America’s population has swelled throughout the last two centuries.
The Museum itself is pretty good. It presents the statistics of the immigration in interesting ways, using huge 3D graphs and maps and a careful spattering of technology. Tufte would love it.
After that we returned to Manhattan, we decided that, as we were nearby, we would go and check out the WTC site. I had previously decided not to go. I had heard that it was a morbid place with people still distributing photos of their loved ones and such things. But when we went there it was little more than a big building site. Given the size of the buildings that stood there we were surprised that the site was not much bigger, it did seem rather small. It was rush hour and there were lots of financial people moving through, few people stopped to look.
We walked up on to a raised platform which our guide book said was a viewing platform. As we kept walking along it we found ourselves inside a nearby cluster of skyscrapers, the World Financial Centre. Some of you may have seen a building topped with a large green dome and another with a green pyramid next to the World Trade Centre in the footage of the attacks, these and a third building constitute the World Financial Centre. The buildings themselves are open, which surprised us as we passed the WTC site. With security far tighter than before everywhere else it seemed distinctly risky to be wandering around the corridors at the base of the WFC buildings. But there was a reason. The WFC centres around a large lobby area called the Winter Garden. This has a set of palm trees growing very happily inside it under the light from an array of floodlights. The light is very sun-like and it is a pleasant place to sit when it’s cold outside. From the top of a flight of steps leading down to the Winter Garden you can see the WTC site. Louise and I and a couple of other people stood here and looked for a while. It seemed strange to see people who obviously worked in the building staring at the site, but such is the nature of New York’s strain to cope with 9-11. Whatever you may have heard about picking up the pieces and moving on does not apply to a large part of the visible city, it is still very much in the pit of dealing with the attack.
After the WTC and WFC it was far too cold to do anything else so we scooted back to the hotel and bought food on the way, there were several pretty nice mini-market places within feet of our hotel. Food in America is far, far better than here. At these small markets we were able to buy relative delicacies. The ranges of fine foods such as cheeses and beers was excellent and they all seemed to have a good selection of freshly prepared ready meals, pastas, salads and more. We had a picnic in our room and watched war footage on CNN, ABC, BBC and NBC.
Pretty heavy rain kind of limited our options and we decided to go to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. This is one of the richest museums in the world with an annual budget of over $120m and indeed there are some pretty audacious exhibits to be found there. The most notable is the Egyptian art exhibit which includes part of a temple lifted from the flood plain of the High Aswan Damn. Remarkably, they allow you to take photographs of pretty much anything, so I have pictures of the temple. It’s a pretty remarkable thing to find in an art museum and it is well presented with a context of hundreds of other smaller objects.
The Met also boasts a fine collection of Greco-Roman statues and busts and, my particular favourite, a fine collection of modern art, particularly surrealists and a nice selection of Klee. By the time we got to the modern art they were closing and we whisked around it all. Just before we left though I caught sight of a number of photographs by Thomas Struth, Thomas Ruff and Andreas Gursky. These three are all extremely skilled photographers and the pictures on display were amazingly perfect. I’m going to try and find a print of Gursky’s Schiphol for one of the walls here in the flat. I found these three particularly interesting because of their focus on photography of the unreal. Each had subjects that were commonplace and had produced images of amazing beauty because of the clarity and quality of the production, but at the same time their compositions and the detail which is normally not seen made the images distinctly unreal.
I do very much like modern art and I regret that we were unable to make it to either the Guggenheim or the Museum of Modern Art during our stay. We did make it to the doors of the currently relocated MoMA QNS in Queens, but it turned out that they are closed on Wednesdays (26th).
After the Met we caught the subway down to the East Village or perhaps even Alphabet City to go to an internet cafalled alt.coffee. Sadly there are no photos on their site. It was a nice little place, vaguely reminiscent of a school staff room with an assemblage of mismatched comfy armchairs and about five computers dotted about. Happily it was the antithesis of an easyInternet hate barn. We grabbed hot drinks to warm ourselves against the rain and a machine to surf Hype and update the hordes.
We had gone to the cafecause I had filled 48mb of storage with photos. It had not been enough to buy a new card at CompUSA two days before whilst wandering along 5th Ave. I was hoping that a place with “alt” in the name would have Macs on hand, preferably running OS X so I wouldn’t need any drivers. They had PC’s, but they also had an Airport base station. After we’d been there for about fifteen minutes a guy with a brand spanking new 12” Powerbook turned up. I asked him if I could use his machine, something which is a lot easier to do in the states than here, and he was happy to let me use his gorgeous computer for ten minutes and not only upload my pictures to this site, but create a page for them as well. Thanks, Ruben!
That evening we waded back to the financial district to eat at Le Zinc, a lovely restaurant serving an extremely fine Thai marinated steak salad and good old Belgian beers. That was probably the best meal I had during the holiday.
We set out to have breakfast at the City Bakery and then try and go to Brooklyn. However, by this point in the holiday we were starting to get up pretty late and I don’t think we actually left the hotel until about two, by which time we were too hungry to wait until we actually got to the bakery. We snacked and then got on the subway. When we got to the bakery we found we weren’t too hungry and went instead to the nearby Barnes and Noble’s store. Their flagship Union Square branch, it claims to be the largest bookstore in the world. It was certainly pretty vast. I didn’t explore that much as I found the IT section pretty quickly. It is an excellent store and I just sat in their comfy chairs and read for at least an hour, eventually only buying two of the five or six books I had pulled out to look at. There was none of the hassle to buy that was present in a lot of big stores particularly Macy’s and Bloomingdale’s. I bought the new Gibson, Pattern Recognition and a book about AI, Blondie 24.
After that we went back to the bakery. Incidentally, I should mention that the reason we were at the City Bakery was because it was featured in Sex and the City. HBO’s site for the series has an extensive guide to the shops and restaurants featured in the series for anyone else wishing to experience Carrie-life.
After all the browsing it was too late to go to Brooklyn and the rain came down again anyway. Louise, who’s love of going to the cinema knows no bounds, convinced me that we should go to a film. I thought this a bit silly as there was so much else to do. I conceded when she agreed we could go to Bowling for Columbine which has now all but closed here. It was great, review to come in my new critical mood.
The weather got nice again, very nice and sunny, so we went to Central Park. Central Park is quite different from parks in London and the UK. Here parks tend to be flat and fairly formal. Central Park is very undulating and feels much more a patch of woodland. It would be possible to get lost in Central Park, but certainly not Hyde Park. It was apparently landscaped to look like the movies but it wasn’t at it’s prettiest when we were there, sporting neither snow, blossom or much in the way of leaves. However, it was still very pretty.
After the park we wandered out into the city again and found, amongst other things, a big Love statue, the Fox and CNN news rooms and the Rockefeller Plaza. The Rockefeller Plaza is a weird place, a mini-mall buried under a skyscraper and an ice rink in it’s shadow. Very odd.
Then we decided to try again at Brooklyn, or at least the bridge. We took the subway under the East River (which is actually not a river at all, but a waterway between two islands) and walked back across the bridge as the sun set, affording lovely views of both the bay and the city.
For supper we went to China town and dined in a crazy Malaysian restaurant. Malaysian food is cool, if slightly indecipherable. We made a mess of ordering and ended up with strange meals indeed. They were still delicious though.
Before we found the restaurant we were wandering around trying to choose somewhere when we discovered a guy selling IT books from a stall on the sidewalk. He had a pretty large selection and all at low low prices. I could have bought a ton of stuff, but I settled for a copy of Lightwave Applied, a hands-on guide to the 3D package. It set me back $20 instead of $50! Woo hoo. I’m going back to New York if only to find that guy again :-)
We went for breakfast at the Diner again. Some woman collared us for being British and proceeded to tell us what to do in New York. Apart from being obsessed by candy shops she had some good points. She told us about a park in north Spanish Harlem called The Cloisters and we decided to check it out. The cloisters bit was actually a monastery that had been converted to a gallery under the banner of the Met, but it was still nice and the park around it was more like Canada than New York City with no buildings visible in the view across the Hudson to Jersey. The was a crazy number of squirrels and they were very very tame, coming within three feet of us.
We had caught the bus up to the park and did so again for the return journey, it gave us a chance to see Harlem a bit without spending ages wandering around, which had done a lot of. Our legs were starting to hurt. A Spanish family, obviously just out of church got on and spent the rest of their journey singing Spanish gospel hymns with gusto, it was funny and distinctly likeable.
We caught the bus back to Central Park so that Louise could go skating at the Wallman Rink, at the south east corner of the park. I would have skated too but I’ve only skated once before and didn’t enjoy it at all. It looked like fun, but I would have just been falling on my arse a lot. We arrived just before sundown and Louise skated as it got dark and the lights came on around the park. It was very pretty and very romantic.
That night we watched the Oscars in our room. It was quite tense waiting to see who was going to say what about the war. Michael Moore was funny, never the pragmatist. Other people particularly Susan Sarandon and Barbra Streisand, both known trouble makers, were remarkably quiet.
Resolving to visit the Stock Exchange and the UN in one day we set off for the financial district straight away. The NYSE apparently has a system where you get a ticket for a particular time and then come back at that time. This is because the tickets all go in the morning. When we got there though we found it was closed to visitors and had been since 9-11. Bugger, we thought, and, resolving to email Lonely Planet, went for breakfast. We wandered up to Pier 17 on the east river looking for a place to eat. I took a nice picture of Brooklyn Bridge, which is just next to the pier and we ate in a little tourist authentic 19th-century buildings area just behind the pier itself.
Next stop, the enclave of international territory that is the UN. We took the tour, which lasted an hour and was absolutely fascinating. Our guide took us through the security council chamber, the economic and social council chamber and the general assembly and explained the workings of the UN as we went. I’d love to go through it all here but there’s just too much. The two most important numbers I took away with me were that 80% of the UN’s resources are dedicated to economic and social functions and that worldwide annual arms spending is $780bn. Wiping out illiteracy would cost around $5bn. That fact nearly made me cry. I’ve decided to make disarmament a priority of my pitiful philanthropy program as soon as I have some money.
After a brief meal of soup in a deli we went to see Chicago in Times Square. Having seen it do well at the Oscars, Louise didn’t want to miss it. It was pretty good. Again, proper review later.
We didn’t really get up to much on Tuesday. We wandered around and did a bit of shopping in midtown and read the Hype backlog at easyInternet off Times Square. We went to a hip hop record store in Greenwich village but I didn’t know what to buy. We tried to find flyers for good clubs but there wasn’t anything happening on any of the nights when we would still be around. Afterwards we snacked and went to a bar and hung around for a bit and had a few drinks before bed.
Determined to do one more cultural thing and attempting to see one of the outer boroughs properly, we crossed into Queens to go to the Museum of Modern Art QNS. The museum has relocated across the river until 2005 whilst it’s old property is greatly expanded. Unfortunately it was closed for the day, as it is every Tuesday and Wednesday. So, running late as usual, we trucked back into Manhattan to do a bit of gift shopping at Macy’s and Victoria’s Secret. As we were nearby, we decided to do the Empire State again, this time at night to see it all in the dark. It is apparently even lovelier at night. Just as we were about to start walking over from Herald Square it started pelting with rain. Not wanting to brave the wind and downpour we called it off and went back to the hotel and got room service food. It was good, I had udon noodles with steak slices. Mmmm.
That night after resting we went downtown to a club, S.O.Bs (Sounds of Brazil). The club plays a mix of latin, jazz and hip hop and we went to a hip hop night featuring The Juggaknots and others. The night was good, The Juggaknots were really good and the other people were OK, all involved freestyled very well. The only problem was the club was a bit empty and the night was almost totally devoid of atmosphere. That’s what you get for going clubbing on a Wednesday, even in Manhattan. At least now we can say we went to see New York hip hoppers on their home turf (even though they probably all came across from Brooklyn).
With only a couple of hours after packing and before the flight we decided to have a slow breakfast and then take a walk in the park. All throughout the holiday I had been taking pictures with my digital and Louise had been with her compact 35mm, but we had my 35mm SLR with us as well and had pretty much an entire black and white film left in it. We decided to run that off between our hotel and the park. We took loads of shots of the streets and people boating and the classic views of the city from the park. On the way back to collect our bags I snapped loads of shots with my digital to fill my last card as well.
To save a load of money we took the subway to JFK instead of a taxi ($3 vs. $30). We managed to get an express train, which are designed for commuters heading out of the city, but it turned local meaning that it stopped at three times as many stations and took much longer. It was also very crowded, not ideal with luggage. Nevertheless it worked and was cheap.
The return flight was much busier than the outward one, but we still got bulkhead seats, on the wing but with loads of legroom. They conveniently were showing Far From Heaven as the in-flight film we actually wanted to see!
Staggering back from Heathrow to the flat was too much effort given our jet lag, but we got here eventually, despite the stretched muscles.
So there you go, we did shed loads, notably less towards the end of the week, but we were holidaying and getting up late and reading the paper in the sun lots which was very lovely.
There are two things that I regret not doing. The first was not going to the large anti-war march on the Saturday. It would have been good to talk to people at the march, Americans are much more chatty, and find out what they felt and why. Beyond the stop the war slogan there is a lot of complexity. What should be done instead and so on. I would have liked to talk to NYC people about the whole America as shaper of international politics issue.
Also there is a really cool club night called Berliniamsburg at Luxx in Williamsburg (Brooklyn) that I really wanted to go to. It’s the top night of the scene that’s produced Fischerspooner and a raft of other electro revivalists. I’m really into my synthpop at the moment. Louise was unsure about it and so I said we’d see. Planning to go out somewhere we went back to the hotel to rest and change. Louise fell asleep and I decided that she would be too tired and that I kind of was too and not to wake her. The next day she said she had resolved to come with me when I woke her up. Doh! Should have been more determined.
All in all, I had a great time and I can’t wait until my next adventure!
Code software or sit on a plane.
I’m doing both, of course, I’ve been hacking like a demon for the last seventeen hours and my five hour flight starts in nine hours time.
I think I’ve pretty much finished Underwired.cc, despite the fact that the point is moot thanks to my imminent departure. I do hope that it holds its own while I’m away, although I’m sure there will be a big list of issues waiting for me when I land on the 27th. I’m quite proud to be finished, 5,799 lines at the end of it all and dang! I’m tired.
I’m also very excited about going to New York. And slightly worried that I might be letting myself in for some quite serious DVT with all this sitting still. Must jog around Heathrow…
I just spoke to Lateral, they aren’t going to hire me. At least, almost certainly not. As I suspected they felt that I was mainly a developer and that the position they were recruiting for was much more one of day to day administration. Loz, the guy who I spoke to, put it best saying there is a strong chance that six months down the line I may well be frustrated and that would be a bad situation for both them and me. It’s a bit confused, they’re going to keep the post open and see if anyone better comes along, so it may be that they contact me in the future. Likewise if they find themselves more in need of a developer.
As you might be able to tell I’m not really that gutted. It would have been good, but I don’t want to be doing admin for the next year, it would bore me eventually and is contrary to where I want to go in the future. I’m looking at it as an opportunity. The project I (hopefully) have lined up for April will allow me to develop my skills as a programmer and put the word Java into my CV a few more times and after that, who knows!
I’ve been ill for the last few days. Fairly hefty fever, headaches and very sore throat. On Tuesday I was actually laid up in bed all day! I don’t get ill very often and find it very frustrating when I do, yesterday I spent most of the day moaning.
I am very lucky to have Louise around though, she took good care of me by prescribing a diet of only fruit and vegetables (mostly in the form of soup) and dosing me with vitamin C and Echinacea and the odd paracetamol so I could sleep. As a result I managed to do some stuff yesterday and today I am pretty much back to normal, although I still have the sore throat.
The illness couldn’t have come at a worse time. I was strapped for time before going away anyway. The projects I have been working on have just had to be cut in functionality. I doubt the Arena4 site will launch as anything more than a super simple site. Although there will be time to add more whizziness after I get back from me ‘olidays.
How much time will be resolved tomorrow, when I hopefully find out whether I will be joining the team at Lateral. I’m still divided by whether I want to join them or not. I have resolved to take it if I feel the money is good enough, because I need money more than I need excitement at the moment. I can make my own excitement, but I have proved pretty solidly that I can’t make my own money.
The irony of the Lateral position is that I was offered a large project for April that would give me some of the experience that I need to get myself into a middle-tier Java job, which is what I would be happier doing really. Thus if Lateral turn me down I will work through that project and hopefully get a “proper” programming job, not watered down with HTML or admin work, some time in June. We shall see…
I went to my interview. It was an interview as well, it said “chat” on the invite but never mind. Me and three guys who I would be working with if I got the job.
I think I did OK, we gelled at least a bit and I managed to break things down a bit by stumbling into discussions they were having and joining in. They were a fairly diverse group, one was clearly a programmer and asked me lots of tricky Java questions, none of which I really fumbled too badly, although it’s hard to tell. The other two seemed more in the admin side of things. I think I was OK there as well, I admitted that although I was experienced as a Windows user I’m not the greatest Windows admin, which I suspect may cause weaken my chances.
Overall I think I came across as a developer who’s a competent administrator in a small way. I made the point that IMHO a good admin is an internally focussed developer, which I hope went down well. I’m not sure if I will get the job, they have other candidates and they may be looking for somebody more on the admin side. The one question I did fail on was “Can you make network cables?” but how hard can it be? Fiddle fiddle, *crunch*, presto. I’d certainly be willing to learn.
Before I went I felt that whether I wanted the job or not would be decided by the level of opportunity for personal advancement. After talking to the programmer guy I feel confident that there’s a lot that I could learn from him and in the setting he and the other guys are in. That means I think I would be happy to do the job, plus the it seems fairly varied which will make it easier to move into it from freelance. As long as they let me use Vi.
It seems like a cycle. Depression and dispair at lack of money and time to make money comes at the end of a project, then I start to look at removing myself from the freelance scene by way of some kind of gainful employment. Then, before that really kicks in, things pick up and my optimism returns and blinds me to the fact that in another month I’m going to be fucked again!
Today I have arranged 2 meetings in April that may yield work, one looks about as certain as it can do on the first day. Also I should leave now as I have an interview at Lateral, a web agency.
Of course I haven’t finished the work I must finish before pissing off to NY a week today.
A week today! I’m all excited!
The Cybernetic Broadcasting System rules! They are currently playing some ultra-dodgy Euro-electro-pop classic with the repeated refrain “I want your sexiness!”:
I wake up, I get dressed and you are on my mind!
I’m laughing, I’m loosing and you are on my mind!
When I can’t be cool, when I’m feeling low
I want your sexiness!
When I sing my song and when I look inside,
I want your sexiness!
When I touch myself and think of you,
I want your sexiness!
Every day, all the time,
I want your sexiness!
Every day, all the time,
I want your body now!
And there’s so much more I can’t be arsed to type, including use of the word “wanking”.
I’m going to do a mix of new school electro and lushness for the CBS, but it’s never going to beat their collection of eighties monsters.
In other news, I’ve been hacking around with DOM 2 functions from HTML. They’re neat. I’m used to DOM from Java and Flash for XML, but the possibilities are a bit more tangible inside the browser for a lowly web developer. I created a form that constantly reconfigures itself in order to let you specify filters to reduce a list of people to a smaller one, depending on what they’ve been up to. You can add new filter lines and configure each one to a reflect simple criterion. It works much like spam filters/classifiers in mail software. DOM 2 seems to be supported pretty well by the current crop of browsers, with the notable exception of IE 5/Mac, which fell on it’s face creating form elements.
I’m sure there’s a lot of potential for creating fun pages that just don’t stop recombobulating and dance around like ponies on crack. I think I’ll leave that for another day though. Special shout goes to BrainJar for being great at teaching things and W3Schools for being the best reference site on the net.
The “Friend of a friend” project is pretty self-evident (which is a good thing). They have a format and are encouraging people to create FOAF-formatted data (mine is here) but they haven’t quite got to the point of implementing distribution and search functions.
A search engine is the obvious function for the data, though none seems to be around yet. It is early in the project at the moment. Also, that search engine really should provide it’s data as a web service.
First up is the new Spike Jonze/Nicholas Cage/Charlie Kaufman film, Adaptation.
The film follows Kaufman’s attempts to adapt The Orchid Thief by Susan Orlean. Paralysed and unable to write anything good he starts to write himself into the script. The movie comes out of the machine as much more than the book, or Kaufman, and is a cool reflection on writing, movies, stories, characters, the people they relate to, life, the universe and everything. It’s great that Kaufman manages to turn the process of writing the script into the adventure itself and still come out of it with the author of the book liking the adaptation! Hardcore.
It was definitely on the bleeding edge of clever-clever, but, for me at least, never quite crossed the line. The cyclic self-reference moved along enough to stay funny and the ending was cool. Often it’s the endings that ruin a film, but this one was sweet. It probably had the highest film-quality to ending-quality ratio of any film I’ve seen for years. The addition of Charlie’s fictional brother, Donald, resulted in a nice wobble, as the film was tugged by the screenwriting of both brothers as well all the other creative work that went before them. Cage’s performances as Donald and Charlie was excellent and the direction and editing that subsequently brought them together was done extremely well. At no point was my suspension of disbelief broken. It’s worth seeing the film for the experience of coming out of the cinema and rationalising the fact that both characters are actually one man.
I didn’t think it was super-fantastic, but it was cool and it’s always nice to see new things being done well. It made me want to write a screenplay!
I can never remember what films I’ve seen. I can do books because they’re significantly more of a life investment. But I just keep forgetting the films. I see about three or four a week on TV/DVD and go to the cinema once every two weeks probably.
This flaw has been particuarly highlighted recently by my flatmate Tom. He is a runner at an ad production company and part of his job is to find stuff for mood reels. A mood reel is where you get shots from other films/ads/TV programmes to illustrate the kind of thing you’re going to do in a new production. He’ll come home and say, “What films have people shooting themselves in?” and stuff like that. Anyway, I can never remember, so now I’m going to try and log what I saw and what I thought. I think I’ll do books and records as well. Any media intake really.
The name of the mood refers to the fact that I’m going to play the critic. I won’t be uniformly critical in the negative sense. Generally I’m pretty upbeat about things if I even vaguely like them.
In some of my recent projects I’ve been lamenting PHP’s lack of exceptions. I’ve been writing blocks of code which perform three or four operations but have to clad those ops in 15 lines of error checking armour. I’ve encapsulated most of my functionality in objects, so if those objects threw exceptions it would make much more sense. However, it may be possible to fudge a try-catch like system using the trigger_error function. A custom error handler could be created that would behave appropriately and clean up and this would be invoked in a similar manner, stepping out of all functions, to a try block. By defining different catcher functions for different scopes, it would be possible to actually do different things when an error comes in. Not that I do that. I always, always just dump the string into a template and push some HTML out of the door.
I found this Zend tip on simulating try-catch-throw. It looks a bit in-depth for my purposes and I’m not sure about the first argument for the try_catch function, but it’s a proof of concept and I think I will try deploying this idea in my next project. Possibly with this method of triggering errors employed in some way in the base classes that throw things.
If you get links that don’t work in Apple Mail it may be because you’ve put align=”left” on the table tag.
Oh god, HTML email is all good but it does mean that I have to go through a slew of new and fairly crappy rendering enginesto make sure that they can all handle what I’m sending them. I’m surprised by the low quality of a lot of the products. Particuarly Apple Mail actually, which does not understand a line of CSS. I hope this situation will change with the whole Safari thing.
By the way, the reason for this and the last post is that I’m developing a direct mail application. It’s nearly 5,000 lines of PHP now and has taken me about 110 hours of coding time to produce. It currently lacks a realistic interface (it looks very much like the database it’s built around) but it’s functionally pretty much there. It will be managed and so should be able to compete with the big boys and undercut them quite a bit.
If you are having problems when generated MIME emails, specifically that the body of the email appears empty even though the required content is patently there, check the line feeds.
Apple Mail allows you to view the source with the control characters displayed which is very useful. I noticed that my blank emails were using \n where lines had been output by qmail and by my own code but \r\n for headers generated by PEAR’s Mail_mime class. The first time \r\n was used was in the content type header, specifying the boundary. The boundary wasn’t being found and the email was blank.
define("MAIL_MIME_CRLF", "\n"); was the quick fix. The results work fine in Apple Mail, Eudora, Outlook 2000 and XP, Outlook Express 5 and 6, Hotmail and SquirrelMail.
Personal site of Ben Godfrey, wandering hacker, serial founder, techno fanboy.
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