On The Road with Vicky Lamburn

I’ve just done the very thing that has haunted me for 2 1/2 years to try and make some peace with someone and myself.  I sent an email; I lingered on the Send button for over 2 hours and now… I just hope that it end amicably something I lost the courage to do properly 2 1/2 years ago.

Ok here’s a screenshot everybody of my Ubuntu 7.10 desktop set to only use sub pixel smooth with no hinting in Firefox with the New York Times’ website open:

(Click on the thumbnail to enlarge)

Yes, Linux font rendering does look good, n’est pas?

Ok quick post this one as it’s late and I need to get to sleep. Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon comes with Compiz Fusion and not only that it attempts to switch it on by default. Interesting choice that definitely is.

I own a ThinkPad T40with an ATI Radeon Mobility 7500 32MB and a Dell desktop with a 128MB GeForce 5200FX. These are hardly stellar graphics cards. They’re more a dependable solution and are better than integrated graphics for the most part. That said they can both run Compiz Fusion which gives Linux desktops as much bling as you get in Windows Vista or Mac OS X Tiger (and later) on considerably less savvy hardware. For Vista you need a DirectX 9 capable part (and a good one) and Mac OS X 10.4/5 something above a Radeon 9550 or GeForce FX (I think.) As such Linux can do the same bling thing (compositing) on lower specified hardware. Is this impractical folly though?

Not entirely.

For four days I have worked on a blinged up Ubuntu desktop and I have to say the Radeon 7500 has been very good at handling Compiz set to ‘Normal’, Emerald Theme Manager running and Avant Window Navigation (AWN.) It sure looked snazzy and for the most part it wasn’t too glitchy. In fact my desktop looked just as ‘modern’ as many of the Vista and Tiger/Leopard screens at Barcamp London 3 this weekend. (Didn’t see any Vista laptops there, all Linux, Mac OS X or Windows XP.)

It does have issues though. One is the window titlebars on a maximised window appearing white but this seems to be related to my Radeon 7500 only having 32MB VRAM (Ok, why not tell me then huh?) This is fixable with yet another stupid arcane tweak. The second involves sometimes loosing the window borders leaving them without close/minimise etc. and this sucks. The only way around this one is running compiz –replace from the command line. This didn’t happen often but it happened a few times.

The final one and most obscure is that sometimes my laptop would actually sporadically reboot/shut down, e.g. plugging in power when battery is low and then the machine still shuts down even though the charging light goes amber. This sounds unrelated but consider this never happens when Compiz is disabled. But this isn’t the only time, sometimes coming back from suspend it would do it. I think my laptop did this about 4-5 times in as many days when it would never do this using plain un-composited desktop.

So my conclusion is: Compiz/Desktop effects in Ubuntu and other distributions are great. They work well for the most part, but there is enough glitching and random errors for me not to work with it switched on full time. These problems need fixing or explaining. That said it runs admirably well on a Radeon 7500–something I didn’t expect. So well done there. The point remains though that if Windows or Mac OS X was as glitchy as Compiz can be and had the foibles that I’ve mentioned here, the Linux crowd would roast Apple and Microsoft for it. Just because it’s on the OSS side doesn’t mean its immune from my criticism. But I think it’s getting there and I really hope by Ubuntu Hardy Heron’s release the thing is rock solid in this aspect. But even then I don’t think I’ll go with it full time. My Radeon 7500 can handle it well but it does really feel a lot smoother and slicker with it all disabled.

After all, it looks just as pretty as Windows XP does and that’s not that ugly–though Vista, Leopard and Linux w/Compiz are unquestionably gorgeous on large displays such as 1680×1050 or greater.

Ahhh what a weekend it was at Barcamp London 3, held at Google’s UK offices in Buckingham Palace Road. It was good fun and very informative. I’ve learnt a lot, more in some areas than others such as jQuery, Caja/Open Social, more on the semantic web, the future BBC homepage and more still. I also did three sessions. Sort of. I talked about Liberating the Writer and The Art of Self Publishing. I feel a bit of an imposter talking about anything as I am very quick to self deprecate and devalue the worth of my knowledge. That said, I think I do the latter things very well and I was very comfortable talking about them. Liberating the Writer particularly was a more impassioned piece as I really was in the mood for extolling the virtue of content when much of Barcamps are (and as they should be) are about presentation and the technical underpinnings of what delivers content.

The third was the geek quiz which started off as being about Linux but soon encompassed all manner of geekery. We did it like QI, although I only came up with some questions but we had buzzers that were the Mac startup chime, AOL’s ‘You Got Mail‘ sound, ‘Fucking Windows 98‘ from South Park and Steve Ballmer’s ‘Developers! Developers! Developers!‘ We also had the stupid answer sound and flashing text. Awesome stuff. It was a lot of fun.

I’m in the middle in case you can’t tell With my trusty beat T40

Apart from that mind (and the slides will be online soon) I met up with some friends and had a wicked time. I mean Google’s offices are cool; a bit more snazzy than the average employer. I mean they had Ben & Jerry Ice Cream Sandwiches; and they were just there in the fridge for the taking. Seriously! If I worked for Google (and I wouldn’t want to) I’d be 350lbs in no time; not good. But the food aside (and it was just fabulous, Thanksgiving Dinner was spectacular) the place was cool. Games room with a billiards table, giant jenga, table tennis, consoles and an arcade machine running something like MAME–it had just about every arcade game ever.

I also got a chance to ride a Segway and crashed it. Repeatedly. Again and again. It was funny and I couldn’t stop laughing.

There was lots more too, from lots of free beer and wine, very intelligent talk and more drinking beer afterwards. And getting progressively hammered to the state that by the time I left Victoria station I had drunk some six pints of lager and was paying heavily for it. Not drunk that much in a long time! It was a lot of fun though.

I’ll write some more about it soon but I’m tired and I just want to go to bed now and read my book.

Me at Google London, Smooth

Yeahhaay Barcamp London 3 is here! Keep checking back for the cool happenings here!

It’s good to get back to some of the core things I love. I love websites and I love writing and designing them. But I love reading and creative writing more… I really do. And I’ve finished this book in three days with work; and Ikea on Wednesday and it has been fabulous. I wrote a very short review of it on Amazon UK. In case they don’t post it, here are my thoughts:

I have had this book on my shelf for almost a year before I actually picked it up and started it. This book is something my collection doesn’t necessarily point towards me liking in amongst the likes of Kerouac, Burroughs, Self and Woolf. However, Sylvia Brownrigg’s ‘Pages for You’ is something of a revelation, a joy. It is so deeply emotive to the extent I was trembling with rapturous joy and eschewing the pages over three wet days in coffee shops and in the evening literally waiting for my next half hour to devour its treasures.

As noted by other reviewers here, this book cannot be defined as a story of a lesbian love affair, or even a lesbian polemic–it’s a love affair in all of its shining glory. I think I was touched particularly by this book as I had a similar enough experience myself and this was a coincidence (I did not buy the book because of that fact.) The description is rich and pristinely clear, the steamy images evoked of New York streets and the love affair, and New England falls are almost fantastical in their quality.

I do not wish to spoil this treasure for you, because this is one of the most heartfelt and sincere love stories of modern times.

I have started writing a book myself called When Lightning Strikes which I started in June 2005 when in hospital about my ’similar’ experience in 2004… that came to an end; but that was my choice–and I believe I did it for the right reasons in the long term… But you never stop loving someone who you truly loved. x

What can I say? Last night I finally started reading a book I had recommended to me this time or thereabouts last year. I’ve not been able to start on it before now (my own reasons) but this book is Sylvia Brownrigg’s “Pages for You.”

It’s one of the best books I have read in a long time. Everything about it is pitched just right, the description is inch perfect, the suspense trembles through you, the sheer brilliance of it shines magnificently. It evokes so much in me, so much that I remember when I was a little younger still…

I really recommend it, it’s on Amazon if you want to purchase it or read about it further.

If anything it exemplifies my own broad tastes in literature and writing itself and it makes me enthusiastic to push on with my writing–it’s been rumbling on slowly lately but when I get in from work… I’m so tired and end up reading fantastic books instead

(And hence why the revised OutputSwitcher and 7.10 install guide is not finished yet!)

Guess what inspired this? Unusual thunderstorm in mid-November is what…I am rather petrified of thunderstorms and I get very spooked by them.

And now the thunder comes
Strobing through the midnight grey heavens
Pouring its applause onto the parched earth
Shaking the ground with its splintered spears

Here comes the thunder again
Thrashing the sea like a begging drum
Creaking through drawn curtains
An’ eyes flashing open as quick as the snap

Here comes the sinister clouds again
Battleship grey looming in the sky
And your eyes lift up to the odd wisps
And crash, roll and lash you come to thrash

Listen here comes a sly blue flash again
Ears prick up and pylons convulse in the heavy air
Sound has gone and eyes are blinded
Burbling and gurgling in the dystopian lands

And you wonder when the next slash will — Just then.
Here comes the murderous thunder again
He’s moving his furniture up there you say,
Maybe the flood’ll come again?

Thinking of something very Ballard ‘The Drought’-esque, something like the end of time as you try to run from the end of time, perhaps with buildings collapsing and motorways being slurped up with cataclysmic noises and light showers before your very eyes, and swallowed up as the world falls away into an eternal void…

Ok this is beta code, not because it’s cool to be beta in Web 2.0 but because it genuinely is. Some of the horizontal rules are out of whack when you turn off the stylesheets. The shadows at the top and bottom of the page seem to be snipped off and I’m sure it’s a trivial fix, I have had enough of it for today so I’ll fix it tomorrow evening. The final thing is Internet Explorer.

My mate, me old mucker Internet Explorer. It’s doing some things that Firefox and Safari don’t. The things it’s getting ‘wrong’ (it has to be, Trident is not exactly renowned for being a standards compliant HTML/CSS rendering engine):

• Transparent PNGs: IE 6 goofs these up completely despite my Javascript fix being present so I need to work on why that is, it makes the ‘violator’ badge also too transparent(!) IE 7 similar messed up the PNG image as it appears the violator badge is displayed with no alpha channel… Maybe that’s Netrenderer’s machine being set to 16/24bit colour rather than 32bit. I’ll check at work tomorrow. Suffice to say Firefox, Safari and Konqeror exhibit no such monkey business.
• Both IE6 and 7 seem to place the corners of the top ‘tabs’ over by the edge of the ‘violator’ badge. Firefox, Safari and KTML … yes you guessed it get it right.

Otherwise the major work of it is done and it’s XHTML 1.1 compliant, the CSS is valid and I have accessibility checked it against about 50% of priority 2 (AA) of WCAG 1.0. I need to trim down the style sheet too as it has a lot of stuff related to Worthing Borough Council’s website in it still–before you say it, I work for them if you’ve not noticed (I’m their web developer) and I designed the style sheet in question in the first instance before I re-employed it over there so I’ve not nicked anything without consent

Anyway enough gassing on here it is: http://www.sunshinesista.plus.com

This is how it should look and will look on all browsers come tomorrow:

Note: none of the links work, this is just a skeleton site and design at the moment. This will come in time.

Oh whatever can she mean? Has she in fact held hostage a talented and qualified web designer under her desk whilst passing off the work as her own? Or is she in fact stealing all of her designs from somewhere else? Maybe she has only been making websites since 2000 and not 1995?

Well none of those are the case. My first web sites were developed and tested using NCSA Mosaic on my Amiga in 1995, and all of my work is my own (except for the snippets of fixes that I occasionally need for Internet Explorer 6…)

My secret is in fact that very reason I have used a blog as my main website. I rarely come home these days and sit on my computers to do further website development. I get my quota at work 5 days a week. That’s not to say I am not interested in it really, far from the truth. I think the web is just about the most fabulous thing in the world. (Just think how different out lives are in the past decade because of the Internet and specifically the web.)

You don’t need a moving eulogy to the web though. What I mean is that since mid 2006 I have not maintained my own website, I use the blog as good way to get my work out on the web with minimal effort. I don’t run a CMS system (it’s only me after all, bit overkill) and I don’t run a web server.

Shadowplay Design Specification

Anyway I have knocked together my website over this weekend using a killer style that I have developed which I am going to be putting to good use elsewhere. This is my so-called Shadowplay design. It uses a number of things that I have wanted to achieve:

• Accessible design: First and foremost navigable easily with mouse, keyboard and other input devices.
• ‘Scalable’ in two senses:
  • Just as suitable for small sites and large sites alike
  • Increasing/Decreasing the font size yields a gracefully shrinking/enlarging ‘zoom’ as found in IE 7 and Opera and soon Firefox 3.  (NB: This is based on my flex CSS design idea but this is slowly becoming redundant with the majority of browsers having page magnification instead of vanilla text size increase. This is a back of a fag packet calculation that ~40% of users use IE7 and soon 15% of the public will use Firefox 3.)
• Little to no CSS ‘hacks’: I detest with a passion CSS hacks using commenting side effects. I respect these were once needed if you wanted your site to work on Gecko based browsers (Firefox/Netscape 6+), IE 5 (Mac and PC) and IE 6 but these days–no need if you know what you’re doing and your target is:
  • Internet Explorer 6+, Safari 2.0/Konqueror, Firefox (Gecko based browsers) and Opera.

  That is pretty much 99.9% of the web browsing platforms in use today (according my statistics.) The only ‘hacking’ is PNG transparency for IE6 via Javascript and the DirectX filter, and a couple of selective comments for IE6. That’s it.

  This is good because it means the core CSS file for screen output is clean and when IE 6 dies (hopefully a slow painful choking death…) I won’t be batting my CSS styles into shape with drastic surgery removing obscene looking CSS comment hacks that I will have long forgotten their function.

  That said I am still catering for IE6 as it’s the most modern Internet Explorer browser that can be run on Windows 98, 2000 and NT 4 (Of which cumulatively makes up ~10% of the browsing market) although I’m really hoping it’ll start to dwindle into 2008 allowing me to leave some of the slight IE6 glitches ‘unfixed’ as I think there needs to be an element of carrot in front of the horse here.

• Modern design that leverages the best of CSS based design, contemporary web design trends (the dreaded 2.0 aesthetic which on the whole is downright gorgeous in my book) and using ‘progressive Javascript’ that doesn’t break the site in its absence but subtly improves things without interfering with accessibility. (jQuery)
• Be a design that doesn’t shout about how good it is, but subtle and something you just appreciate its aesthetic without necessarily consciously acknowledging it as such. The same could be said about the commodity value of Helvetica as a beautiful design that’s just there.
• Small nimble size: How does 90KB in its vanilla form sound including jQuery! This includes all the graphics including gorgeous transparent PNGs.
• Valid XHTML 1.1, CSS 2.1 and up to WCAG 1.0 AA (Priority 2) spec.

As you can see the design brief was quite a tight one. And I am glad to say that I have met all the things I wanted to with this design.

Open Source

The other great aspect is that I developed it using open source free software. Virtually everything worked as well as it has done on proprietary systems in fact in most respects it was better as my humble T40 just soldiered through the work without missing a heartbeat. Whereas I would usually use Notepad, Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator I used GEdit, Gimp 2.4 and Inkscape. Apart from one minor skirmish which infuriated me in Gimp it worked a treat. In fact I do have virtually whole hearted praise to the Gimp team as 2.4 is such a vast improvement in my book as a Photoshop user that it’s just not funny. It’s like using a new program with all the annoying as hell bits ripped out of it. The new design uses graphics generated solely with Inkscape and Gimp.

GEdit does some funny things though on occassion, pasting doesn’t always happen at the cursor insertion point but I just kept an eye on this and I was fine. I don’t know whether this is a bug or not?

Summary

Anyway I’m going to quit jabbering on and I’m going to upload my new website (which will be a companion to this blog, the blog remaining my main area of concentration online) and post the link here and then you can decide for yourself

The other good thing is I have a website of my own to brandish at Barcamp London 3 next weekend Fancy that, was I the only web developer at Barcamp Brighton without my own personal website that I had designed?