Reprocessed, by Matt Patterson

Something approaching a weblog

December 2003

11.12.2003

*tap tap* Is this thing on?

A test message to see what's going on with my MT install and simple template issues...

*squeal* Er, yes, it is...

It is on. Testing multiple-posts-in-one-day for the purposes of template tweaking

12.12.2003

Where have I been?

The last entry I posted to this blog's predecessor was on the morning of 11 September, 2001... I had a job interview that day, at a big corporate design shop in Farnborough. I had to wait when I arrived, and people kept running down from upstairs to try and find the remote for reception's TV. I had my interview and emerged to the sight of the second plane hitting. It was a strange interview, and I didn't get the job.

13.12.2003

A graffiti plotter?

Oh, cool: someone's built a graffiti plotter which can be attached to walls. I like the idea of axonometric projections as graffiti, and the video is cool: the water cycle never looked this culturally unacceptable... (via Abstract Dynamics)

Some stuff is unfinished

I've got the basics of this new site working. I've got the blog running, but I need to sort out comments (design-wise) and trackbacks (design- and head-wise), plus a good bit of the typography. As far as the rest of the site goes: I need to finish reworking the front page, and figure out what to do with the rest of the existing content (it's mostly in XML now, from the last big ideological push (actually, it's mostly in XHTML 2...)).

15.12.2003

Categorisation (and its discontents)

I have a few problems with the way that categorisation works in blogs. The current approach is typified by a filing cabinet approach: things exist in a category, and can exist secondarily in other categories. This is all well and good, but it seems to me that this kind of noun-based classification misses out on vast tracts of the kinds of relationships between what we write and the links between them and the wider world (which is essentially what categorisation is about, after all: we map our mental model into terms which other people can use to help search our stuff).

16.12.2003

Ack!

Several of my apps keep crashing. Particularly nastily is the fact that Mail.app is crashing every time I update the junk mail status of a message. Most annoying. All the crashes seem to be an invalid memory error:

I'd forgotten about the X-Prize

I had. I'd actually forgotten. Thanks to Boing Boing's guestbar blogger Todd Lappin for reminding me. Following links hither and yon I was reminded about Steve Bennett's Starchaser, who has been in the news, on and off, for building various large rockets and firing them off. More on him later.

19.12.2003

More ack!

Grumble. Having updated to Mac OS X 10.3.2 I can report that Mail.app still crashes every time I change something's junk mail status. Which means I probably ought to do a total backup and reinstall. Which means I need an external hard disk. Which means... hang on... it means an excuse to buy an iPod. Maybe things aren't so bad after all.

#billy { don't be a: hero; }

The way that CSS's specificity (how browsers choose which CSS rules to apply) works can be a little baffling, even to old hands. I was writing rules for this site and ran into a problem where one style was overriding another where, I thought, it really shouldn't.

22.12.2003

Yum

Mince pies - pastry in the tray

23.12.2003

Happy Birthday, Mr. Aeroplane

As previously noted, SpaceShipOne looks like something out of Dan Dare, and is trés cool. On 17 December, the centenary of powered flight, it fired its rocket motor in anger for the first time and promptly broke the sound barrier. We like SpaceShipOne. Incidentally, [Paul Allen][] (of Microsoft fame) is the man with the money. If I was Paul Allen, I'd invest in Dan Dare too. But I'd make 'em come to England and wear natty green uniforms. (And I'd make [Burt Rutan][] get a Sir Hubert moustache.) The only thing I'm unsure of is if Digby would fit into SpaceShipOne. I hope he would. [Paul Allen]:http://www.vulcan.com/ [Burt Rutan]:http://www.scaled.com/projects/tierone/NewIndex/photos/images/800/Bert%20and%20Paul800.jpg "A photo of Burt Rutan, Scaled Composite's owner/operator with Paul Allen. Burt's the one with the buccaneer sideburns." [reminded by [bitworking](http://bitworking.org/)]

[Paul Allen]:http://www.vulcan.com/ [Burt Rutan]:http://www.scaled.com/projects/tierone/NewIndex/photos/images/800/Bert%20and%20Paul800.jpg "A photo of Burt Rutan, Scaled Composite's owner/operator with Paul Allen. Burt's the one with the buccaneer sideburns." [reminded by [bitworking](http://bitworking.org/)]

Comments are on

I've switched comments on for new entries now. The UI still has a ways to go, and I might devote some time to it later on today. Once that's done I'll open up the rest of the entries and wait for the comment spammers. Trackbacks are following shortly behind.

Visualising Zip Codes

Ben Fry has a little Java Applet for visualising where Zip Codes are. I must confess that I thought his DNA visualisations were not much better than noise, but this is really, really, nice. Very good use of incremental search. [via [v-2 organisation][]]

25.12.2003

A plan

The Christmas Gantt chart

Not forgetting:

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