I love freshly laid snow crackling underfoot. I walked the quiet street in a zig-zag manner, leaving prints to slightly bewilder those that follow.

I tried to figure out Movable Type’s Trackback a few months ago but I gave up because a) I didn’t quite understand it and b) I found the way it works to be a little intrusive. Tom Coates has come up with a pretty elegant solution by modifying the output of the CGI script and including it into the bottom of each post. I’ve done something similar using MT’s Standalone Trackback and PHP; if the post has no Trackback pings, then nothing gets printed, which is a pretty transparent solution I think. The Trackback URL can be seen in the article permalink.

Stu pointed me in the direction of ”>this interview with Tessa, Chris and Renea Dick: respectively, the former wife, son and daughter-in-law of Philip K. Dick. It gives insight into the way PKD worked as well giving some opinion on the various films that have been based on his books. I’ve read quite a few of Dick’s novels but it is only recently that I picked up ‘Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep’; I kind of stalled reading it because I thought I knew the story, it being the novel on which Blade Runner is based. I was wrong; the book is very different from the film, so much so that I think it could be re-made as a film that follows the book more closely. It wouldn’t have to share the future-noir ambience of Blade Runner; the darkness is suggested in the novel, but Ridley Scott really took this and amplified it for cinematic effect in the film. There’s no doubt that Blade Runner is a great piece of cinema, but it really did skim the surface of the themes explored in the book. Maybe ‘Do Androids…’ can’t be properly translated into a film, although I’d really like to see another director have a go.

Welcome to Jacksworld, where popular is best. In Jacksworld, everyone cowers in the face of corporate might and lovingly buys what they are told. After a hard days work in the Microsoft Office, effortlessly sharing Word documents by Outlook attachment, Jacksworld citizens settle in front of their prided VHS recorders and consume their freshly microwaved Marks & Spencer ready-meals. Best is what the next-door neighbours have; a recursive nightmare of consumer choice pervading the Ford Focus lined streets. In Jacksworld, everyone buys the same, does the same, thinks the same; it’s easier that way, better in fact.
If you’re wondering, Jack is a journalist for The Guardian who succeeds in making my blood boil every other lunchtime.

Dave Winer challenged CSS gurus to come up with a table-less design for weblogs.com and Douglas Bowman responded with this. Bowman – who recently re-designed wired.com – is a web designer I have great respect for; he effortlessly combines good working practice with creative visual design in a way that makes me want to rip up my site and start again. That said, his tale of an Apple switch in reverse makes for disturbing reading…

“Around March of 2002, I upgraded to Windows XP Pro. The deal with the dark side was sealed.”

It was never the same after the mishap. I did fix it, temporarily; until other maddening faults crept in, which only made themselves known when winter started to grip. Engines, especially those that are 20 years old, do not like the cold. I should have learned my lesson by now; this being the second old car I’ve owned in the last two years that has gone wrong. Unfortunately, ageing cars such as these require more day-to-day attention than I’m willing to give them, which begs the question: why the hell did I buy an old car in the first place? Modern cars are safer, more economical, more reliable. However, they are also a boring, homegenised lump of plastic, metal and airbags; the affordable ones at least. The only new car that I consider to have any semblance of unique-ness to it is the new Mini; a car that retains many of the features that made the original Mini such a great piece of design and engineering. Anyway, while I lament at the demise of my latest jalopy and consider finally buying a new[ish] car; Mal has recently become the owner of the aforemention Mini, a Cooper S no less. Congratulations Mal, may your new wheels take you far!

As my occasional tinkering with the site continues, I’ve added a couple of new features:

• I’ve implemented Matt Webb’s Weblog Links Sidebar which is a clever Applescript that allows me to post links simply by dragging them from the browser to a folder of my choice [ie. the desktop]. With reference to Adam’s post, I suppose this is my part in the de-evolution of the weblog. Maybe there’s a general suffering of writer’s block; a result of the declining state of world affairs playing on the mind. Who knows.
• My list of recommended weblog/periodicals expanded to the point of looking a little odd over there to the right, so I’ve decided to display a random selection of links instead. Hit reload a few times and you’ll see what I mean.

There’s something very wrong about projection keyboards; emulating a device that should have been superceded by cooler input devices years ago seems like a bad use of clever technology to me.

However, later on in the document, it suggests other possible applications of this technology, these include: ‘projection notepads that track any pen, pencil or pen-like object; gestural interfaces for devices with inconvenient or ultra-small form-factors or locations (ie-wearable computers); and user identification and authentication through facial recognition’. Now that’s more like it.

After a period of downtime caused by DNS problems, T-melt is back.

It is utterly laughable that, at a time when Blair has talked himself against the ropes, neither of Britain’s opposition leaders can lay a glove on him. But that’s Britain’s tragedy, as it is America’s: as our Governments spin, lie and lose their credibility, the electorate simply shrugs and looks the other way

In a stunning piece for Times Online, John le Carré discusses the implications of war with Iraq. The United States of America Has Gone Mad.

‘Standards are bullshit. XHTML is a crock. The W3C is irrelevant.’

Mark Pilgrim rocks the boat again with an attack on the W3C for deprecating XHTML tags that make his site work. The development of XHTML has seen the W3C slowly chip away at the specification of HTML, and for good reason: to make the Web leaner, faster and easier to build. Because the W3C are dropping a handful of tags like and , Mark seems to believe that they are dropping semantic mark-up.

The Dive Into series of sites constitute some of the most informationally rich and well put together web sites I have ever seen. Marks vast knowledge of web development has won him respect from many web designers who read and respond to his posts on a daily basis. However, in this case, I find myself disagreeing with his self-important stance on XHTML 2 and the future of the web. Surely developing for the web is about excepting that it is in a constant state of transition towards something better and part of the challenge is not to be too reliant on certain technologies.

On browsing through the latest working draft of the XHTML 2 specification, there seems to be some startling omissions like the tag as well as the suggestion that the


through to


tags will be deprecated. If this is the case, then the vast majority of web sites are going to look pretty weird when XHTML 2 is implemented. But it doesn’t work like that, does it? Browsers will begin to support XHTML 2 but at the same time continue to support XHTML 1 and HTML 4. Surely there will be a XHTML 2 transitional doctype allowing it to be valid with the odd or tag included. Just because XHTML 2 presents a big change doesn’t mean that web sites are going to stop working tomorrow; it’s aim is to make the Web more meaningful and more importantly, to make it easier for everyone to create.

Update [24/03/04]: Gimp 2.0 has been released, including a self-contained application bundle for OS X. Get it here

The GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program) is a piece of software similar to Photoshop but with one big difference, it’s free and open source. For many years, it has been the graphic / image manipulation tool on the Unix and Linux platforms and because it has been constantly in development over this time, it is as feature-rich [if not quite as slick] as Photoshop. After Apple launched X11 [an X Window system based on XFree86] on OS X, I decided to get The GIMP running on my Mac. Here’s how to get it running:

Disclaimer: The following instructions are the result of a bringing together of information from various web sources. I cannot guarantee that these instructions will work on your setup as they represent the method I used to get The Gimp to run successfully on my Mac. By following these instructions, you are doing so at your own risk and I am not personally responsible if anything goes wrong!

An overview of requirements:

• Mac OSX 10.2
• Apple Developer Tools
• Fink
• Apple X11 Public Beta [including the X11 SDK]
• A spare afternoon

Instructions:

1. If you haven’t done so already, install Developer Tools CD that came bundled with OS X. The disk image is also available to download from the Apple Developer Connection website [requires free registration].
2. Download and install Apple X11 - http://www.apple.com/macosx/x11/download/ [41.4 MB].
3. Download and install the X11 Software Development Kit [4.0 MB - Download on bottom right of page]
4. Download the Fink 0.5.0a Binary Installer [11MB] and double-click on the ‘Fink 0.5.0a Installer.pkg’ to install Fink.
5. After the installation is complete, open a Terminal.app window and type the following command: “sudo pico .cshrc [return]”. This will open a text editor with the new .cshrc file. NB. sudo requires you to enter your Mac’s administrator password.
6. In the editor, type the following line: “source /sw/bin/init.csh”.
7. Save and exit Pico by pressing [control-0], [return], [control-x]. Then close the terminal window.
8. Open a new terminal window and type: “sudo fink scanpackages [return]“
9. Then type: “sudo apt-get update [return]“
10. Then: “sudo apt-get install gimp [return]”. This downloads and installs the GIMP binary and it takes a while.
11. Go to the Applications folder and double-click on the X11 icon. This will start the X Windows environment.
12. From the X11 menu, select ‘Applications > Terminal’ . This will open xterm.
13. At the prompt, type “gimp”.
14. After being asked a few simple questions by the GIMP set-up program, the application will launch. Enjoy!

Remember that The GIMP is a UNIX application designed to run on X Windows, so don’t expect it look as slick as Aqua. Also, Apple X11 is still in Beta so there are a few interface quirks here and there.

I’m in the process of a much needed clean up of code in order to sharpen things up a bit round here. It’s a live transition so expect things to change further over the next few days. I’ve added a ‘Popular Posts’ section on the right-hand side of the page. This was inspired by Signal vs. Noise who have a similar section on their site. I thought it would be interesting to sort posts by something other than the time at which they were posted; it also keeps active threads visible, which is handy.

Big Dead Place attempts the impossible; to make the frozen wastes of the Antarctic seem like the place to be. It fails, and in doing so, makes for hilarious reading. [via Purse Lip Square Jaw]

This Christmas, I was fortunate to receive a design classic; a product that does its job so effectively and in such an entertaining way that it deserves to be up there with the Apple Macintosh and The Mini. It has large yellow feet and an on/off switch; it wears a rather fetching red hat which doubles as a measuring container and if its form isn’t enough propel it into the premiership of product design, it functions as a popcorn maker. No home should be without… a Duck Popper.

Here is a round-up of Apple’s Keynote speech at Macworld, San Francisco.

• iMovie, iTunes and iPhoto are still free, although they can be bought as a bundle with iDVD called iLife for $49.
• Safari is an Apple browser based on the KHTML Rendering Engine which seems very cool, although I’m not a fan of the brushed metal look.
• Another Microsoft killer is Keynote, a Powerpoint-like app for creating presentations. Again, I think this is going to be a great product.
• A 17 Inch PowerBook with a fibre-optic lit keyboard… nice!
• A 12 Inch PowerBook… hmm. I’m not quite sure what the market is for this product. If you want the speed of a G4 PowerBook, then surely you would want a big screen to use your power-hungry apps on, otherwise a cheaper iBook would suffice.
• No ‘digital lifestyle device’ as yet, but it seems Apple are moving away from the desktop machine. It will only be a matter of time before a PDA is announced or the PowerBook becomes so small it will fit in your pocket!

Yes, the author of Neuromancer now has a weblog.

’In spite of (or perhaps because of) my reputation as a reclusive quasi-Pynchonian luddite shunning the net (or word-processors, depending on what you Google) I hope to be here on a more or less daily basis.’

If only Thomas Pynchon would do the same. [via Kottke].

You may have noticed occassional MySQL errors appearing on this site, and rather unforgiving ones at that. According to Pair techical support, ‘max_user_connections’ errors mean I’m either getting too many visitors to the site for the shared MySQL server to handle, or there is a flaw in my code which is causing database connections not to be closed properly. I think the latter is the case, but whatever I try to solve the problem, the errors still persist. Any ideas?

So what will Steve Jobs have in store for tomorrows keynote speech at the MacWorld Expo in San Francisco? Rumours of a PDA device seem to have a little more credibility this time.
Update: Here’s a more revealing article at News.com.