Introducing a site I’ve been working on over the last few months, Encouraging Rural Entrepreneurs offers support and training to people who would like to set up their own business in rural County Durham, England. Without the benefits that living in a city gives to those who would like to turn their idea into a business, this site aims to foster community between like-minded people and keep potential rural entrepreneurs in close contact with those that can help them. Most of the content requires registration and the site isn’t intended for people outside of the North East of England, but there is still some content on the pre-registration pages that can be viewed.

The site is written in valid XHTML 1, uses CSS to control layout and styling and is Level A approved with the WAI Content Accessibility Guidelines. Building it has been far from easy, and while I can’t claim that every single dynamically generated page validates, I think it demonstrates that the application of standards and pure CSS to larger websites can be achieved.

It’s my 26th birthday.

I’m sorry that, as documented in OS X Blues I and II, Jeffrey Zeldman is finding the transition from OS 9 to OS X problematic. While the original Mac OS interface broke so many boundaries in terms of user interface, in my experience, it was plagued with stability problems, especially in later versions. I was forever losing work when applications decided to crash and bring down the whole system; I spent as much time sorting out extension conflicts as being productive. Maybe it was due to poor maintenance on my part, but there is no excuse for a machine locking up just when you have to hit a deadline.

I could go on for ages about OS X’s many flaws, but I’ll be brief. Over a year after making the transition, I still find the dock awkward to use: I’m never happy with where it sits; I find the magnification feature serves no useful purpose; and the Dock hiding feature doesn’t work too well if you prefer to use a pen and tablet. Then there are the gaudy icons; an inevitable result of the increasing power of computers. When Susan Kare designed the original Mac icons, she had to produce meaningful visual representations of application tools and folders with only the minimum of resources available to her. When you are limited in this way, sometimes the best design decisions are made (think 5k). This is why Kare’s designs are so magnificent; they are direct and they communicate a great deal only using a few pixels. Now however, computer power is such that this limitation is gone. The designers at Apple have come up with a set of pictographs which, love ‘em or loath ‘em, you’re stuck with, unless of course you make use of Candybar or other icon management software.

Now that the negatives have been dealt with, I’d like to explain why I haven’t looked back since I started using OS X. Firstly, in my experience, OS X is stable; on the occassion that an application does crash, it doesn’t bring the whole system down with it. I can leave documents open and multitask secure in the knowledge that I’m not going to lose anything. Secondly, there’s some great software being produced for it: Navigator is a pleasure to use and is now my default browser; NetNewsWire is a lovely lightweight app I use for reading what’s new at my favourite blogs and news sources; then there’s software like BBEdit, Adium, Transmit and Tex-Edit which are well made and easy to use. All these things have one thing in common: they are apps I use alongside the web, whether I’m consuming it or creating things for it, and this is where I’d like to bring in my third point. Where the Mac was once a desktop publishing and design-for-print machine, it is now a true web machine. Admittedly – and this is going to sound odd after that last sentence – the web browsing experience on the Mac isn’t great; Explorer remains buggy and occassionally mis-renders pages and Navigator, while it renders beautifully, is far from complete. However, as a web designer, OS X has given me a huge boost in my knowledge about the technologies that drive the web, mainly because it has a web server pre-installed. Apache, MySQL and PHP; I knew nothing about these technologies before I started to use OS X. Now I have them set up and running on my machine at home; I can learn and experiment with dynamic web content without being online, which is a great help if you’re on a dial-up connection. So this is the main reason I’d never go back to using OS9; OS X has widened my horizons about what is possible with the web.

So, I hope Zeldman perseveres with OS X. While its user inferface may not be as transparent and generally as cool as its predecessor, it is a better operating system. It just needs time.

You may remember, a few weeks ago, I conducted a poll to find out the direction of your conjugate lateral eye movement, i.e., the direction in which you look when you think about something. Now, if there’s one thing I learnt from the doing this, it’s that when choosing options for a poll, you should try and think of every answer that people could respond with. In this case, I only offered 2 options: ‘left’ and ‘right’; whereas I should have perhaps offered ‘up’ and ‘down’ and of course ‘don’t know’. Anyway, we did learn something from the poll, regardless of the fact that it wasn’t done properly; we discovered that most of the people who visit this site look to the left when they think. Which means that most of you are visual rather than symbolic thinkers and most of you are creative people. Well done, because I look to the left too.

After updating to OS X Jaguar, my machine failed to recognise my Epson C42UX printer. Epson do seem to be slow in keeping the drivers up to date for Mac OS X, which is where utilities such as Gimp-Print come in very handy. It bypasses the use of drivers by printer manufacturers by using Jaguars own open source print spooler.

Both Rik and Adam have written about their take on Humanism and its proponents since I wrote about the British Humanism Association last week.

Rik isn’t the only person I know who objects to Richard Dawkins’ hard line on religion. While I take exception to Dawkins’ slightly patronising attitude to those who choose to believe in a God, I agree with much of what he says, including his opinions on the teaching of religion in schools. I think children should be taught about the worlds religions purely from a subjective standpoint, and they should be taught this alongside evolutionary theory as well the history of the Universe (kids are bright enough these days aren’t they?). Getting a fair education like this provides a platform from which they can form their own opinions about the world and this, I think, is a human right.

Meanwhile, Adam criticises the overall formality of the Humanist perspective with particular reference to the texts on the BHA website. The writing is pretty dry, and does tend to boil down the richness and complexities of life into a few easy-to-swallow statements. However, I’m inclined to support what they say, even if they do need a livelier copywriter.

The fact is that there are people still living in the dark ages and human beings are capable of incredible evil, whether it is driven by politics or religion or whatever. Dawkins would call it mental poison; if this is the case, I just wonder if we’ll ever find the antidote.

You can always count on the Metro newspaper for its well researched news stories. In a report about a competition by Pepsi to win a trip into space, Georgina Littlejohn writes:

‘The fizzy drinks giant is in talks with the Russian Aviation and Space Agency to buy a £10 million shuttle ticket to the Mir space station’

Hmmm…

‘With an approach to life based on humanity and reason, humanists recognise that moral values are properly founded on human nature and experience alone.’

At a time when the population of our planet seems increasingly torn apart via politics and religion, I think many of the articles on the British Humanist Association website are worth reading.

Jeff emailed to tell me about a project of his:

‘Dichotomy: It Was a Matter of Time and Place asks people to submit their stories of September 11th as well as how this date has affected them in the last year from two different perspectives. Participants, those who experienced the events firsthand in New York and Washington or Witnesses, those who experienced the day via the media, are both encouraged to post.’

On a different note, I’m taking a break for a while, so don’t expect any updates for a few days. So long.

With the new conference bike, you could get all your meetings over and done with before you get to work. A marvellous piece of engineering as well as a great idea, don’t you think? [via Tr3nt]

Stu’s Blink images have inspired me to extract my L’Espion key-ring cam from my draw and attach it to my house keys, thus forcing me to have it with me at all times.

One of the best things you can do if you visit BALTIC is go to the bookshop, find a book of photographs by William Eggleston called ‘2 1/4’ and look at it. I stood there looking at it for while, grinning from ear to ear.

One of the worst things you can do if you visit BALTIC is go to the bookshop and spend £50 on the book of photographs by William Eggleston called ‘2 1/4’ . That would make me very jealous.

Update: I’ve just had a listen to something I bought at BALTIC yesterday and it’s definitely worth plinking.

The 1901 census is back online after an eight month hiatus due to technical problems. While you can search for a person for free, you can’t get much information from the database without online payment. I think this is pretty fair considering the quality of information and the amount of work required to make it available online. Intrigued, I decided to pay the 5 GBP minimum payment to find some information about my ancestors. I downloaded a digitised version of one of the census documents which contained a large table of information, hand scrawled by some census officer eagerly awaiting the invention of Tip-pex. One of the information fields concerned disability, and had the following options:

Thankfully, our understanding of disability has changed somewhat during the last 101 years. If this doesn’t illustrate the benefit of modern science to humanity, I don’t know what does.

‘It just appeared one day. This big ugly silver box plopped down on this concrete slab.’

No-one can plop ugly metal boxes down on concrete slabs better than McDonalds Corp. At the moment, they claim that the TikTok Easy Shop is just in its test phase, but it’s a certainty that these things are going to be appearing everywhere; there’ll be mile-long queues for the one on Pushkin Square, Moscow. [via v-2]