2010 — 30 July: Friday
Just (00:46 or so) learned that Peter and Peter's g/f will swing by this coming evening on their way down to the New Forest. Very cheering news. They can admire my new carpets and some, at least, of the house re-arrangements. Right; G'night.
Website woes
Cuppas #1 and #2 are both now (10:06) distant memories as I absorb a long overnight email from my ex-ICL chum Ian very wittily recounting some of his current website woes as he works on it for a client. Here's a snippet from his email, and ditto from my reply:
Ian:
Did I tell you? I ran a search that collected a list of all the many PHP files in 4 different categories: library, individual website function modules, website initial reaction, and ...
just all other stuff, called "PHP" in my thing. Then I made that list do a concatenation of all the files in all the 4 categories into 4 superfiles, with PHP comments as headers for each
in the larger thing. Then I totalled the numbers of lines in those 4 code files. Of course lots of comment lines; but the total was
119,800 lines.
Yup nearly 120,000 lines of mixed Drupal 5 and Outsiders special. And that does not include the tens of thousands of lines of style declarations in 39 different CSS files scattered about
the folder tree on the server.
Much of the problem with the site is poor usability which turns out to be down to things set in obscure places in the various CSS files. I concatenated/labelled them also so I can global
search all the files in one edit window when looking for where whatever defines a given feature's attributes is set.
It's ever such fun!
Me:
Your travails with her site and proposed new imagery1 (etc) is a perfect reminder (not that I need one) of a) why I do my web pages in the
way I do, and b) why such a multitude of crappy-looking web sites were around in the days of the Wild West Web.2 Things are improving as more and
more sites converge on relatively few canned themes and paradigms for info org but — frankly — I stick with my "RISC" / Zen approach where I know what every line of (S)HTML
does and why it's there.
Bandwidth bum banditry
Speaking of PHP, a month ago, I mentioned the fruitless scouring of "molehole" by (I assume) robots with malicious intent — intent on finding and exploiting security holes in the PHP they mistakenly assume I must be using. Seems they're none too smart as the game has been continuing:
Well over 15,000 of those "Doc not found" hits are in search of the lost PHP. Almost all the rest are people still sniffing around for traces of the DVD cover artwork I removed from the external web server in August 2007. (Ars longa, vita brevis, it seems.)
Lis tells me Big Bro is nodding off in front of the NZ TV with a wine glass in his hand. Now where have I seen that before? (Here!)
Next task: breakfast.
I love it when...
... some people (let's call them "psychiatrists") get to label and define other people (let's call them "people") as mad. Not that that simple word is the one used. One of my underground comix heroes Ron Cobb did a drawing that perfectly illustrates the thin divide between life inside and outside that boundary. Here's a (deliberately) low-resolution copy of it:
I've also been idly following the tortuous process of drafting the ever-fatter new edition of the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). (My own mild distaste for the pseudoscientific "profession" dates back thirty years.) Anyhowsoever, the article here by Darian Leader provoked a comment that made me splutter delightedly. Source and snippet:
The only difference between those who sit still staring endlessly at the wall and those who sit still staring endlessly at East Enders or into their beer is that the more common flight from Reality is considered "normal".
Wasn't Reality once defined as a crutch for those who couldn't take drugs? [Pause] The excellent piece "Words" by Tony Judt has a truly horrible sting in its tail.
Bother!
Studying the UK Post Office process for setting up mail redirection, it's clear I can't actually do this for dear Mama until I can show a PO clerk the Power of Attorney document certified by a solicitor. (FAQ #34 of 35.) Fair enough, but it's not going to speed things up. But I've just received, signed, and am about to post back, four pieces of the P of A process, and also confirmation of dear Mama's room booked in the care-home from next Tuesday (along with an eye-watering invoice — the first of many such, I don't doubt). Off I go to the local Post Office. It's 13:33 and I'm getting hungry. Business before culinary pleasure... [Pause] And I still had an extra 8p to pay on the package — I shall keep quiet about that. It's now 14:17 and I shall shovel some lunch in to see off the incipient tremors then dodge over to R&E for a C of T.
In space, no-one can...
... hear you scream (the tag-line to Alien, of course). Sadly, by the time that excellent film came out in 1979, the "physics" of Star Wars had firmly established within Hollywood the convention that stonking great space ships sounded, erm, stonkingly noisy despite the fact that they operated in a vacuum. So, while I'm enjoying re-watching today's Blu-ray delivery of Star Trek XI the accompanying Dolby TrueHD 5.1 soundtrack is giving my speakers a heck of a low-frequency workout. Interestingly, the low-frequency components are more pronounced via the hdmi output than via the analogue down-mix. "Illogical, captain!"
My visitors are now (possibly) intending to call in on their way back to London on Sunday rather than on their way to "No mans land" this evening. I shall doubtless still be here.