EXCUSES AND HALF TRUTHS

Brent Simmons has written a detailed account of the decisions he made in designing the series of dialog boxes that pop up the first time you run NetNewsWire.

Although it’s written primarily for other programmers, his post is perfectly readable by the rest of us. It’s not so much about programming as it is about thinking carefully about users’ needs and expectations the first time they run a strange piece of software.

Based on the recommendations of a couple of online sources, and the fact that it’s now free, I thought I’d give NetNewsWire a go. And well, let’s just say I won’t be going back to using Google Reader anytime soon. Configurable, fast, easy to use, and when you tie it into a dedicated tool like Marsedit you have all the tools you need to turn you into a power blogger. Just look at the post rate for today…

(Via Sore Eyes.)

…in movies, at least. Michael Moran over at the Times nails the cliches that still strangle most mainstream movie SF at birth. I can think of few SF films released in the first few years that don’t have at least five of these in there somewhere. Primer, maybe.
Interesting that there’s a YouTube embed in the article to Aeon Flux – which seems to have all ten!

(via the Forbidden Planet blog)

After a long lie-in, I cooked pancakes and bacon for the Clare. Then, after washing up and tidying the kitchen, I spent the morning catching up on correspondence, writing letters to the local council and my MP. As it’s a sunny day, we drove out to a couple of garden centres, where I bought bread flour, making sure it was milled with wheat from local farms. On the way home, we bought seed potatoes, which I chitted. I put some dubbin on my spring boots, and then settled down to write this blog post, with a cup of tea and a Tunnock’s teacake by my side.

Oh, good grief. If anyone can tell me at which point I turned into Richard Briers, and supply me with a time machine so I can go back to just before that point, give my past self a slap and take him out for strippers and beer, I’d be eternally grateful. Thank you so much.

There is movement on the many-headed front that is Rob’s 2008 creative push.

Following a highly successful meeting yesterday that saw the first professional reunion of the 3 Sick Puppies in 18 months, our Straight 8 project, Grey For Danger, is now officially GO. We now have a treatment, a DOP, a sound designer and composer, potentially a kick-ass location, and someone to build us a bomb. A prop bomb. Let me make that clear. A bomb with a heart of Fimo. A fake bomb. OK?
Shoot dates are still up in the air, but at the moment pencilled for the beginning of next month. Next week will see me and Clive nail down a script before we begin work on the voiceover that will form the narrative heart of the piece. That will take place next Saturday, the 16th.

Meanwhile, Decks, Dance and Videotape has developed an almost scary momentum. Dom interviewed Peter Hook last month, a high point for the project so far that I had to miss out on due to the explosive nature of my bottom at the time. However, we now have another shoot lined up with DJ Wayne Anthony. We’ve set up a location in Battersea, and a seriously cool prop – a yellow Lambourghini. Lord, we are so fly. This shoot will take place next Saturday, the 16th.

Have you noticed my minor scheduling snafu? Busiest Saturday EVAR.

In the meantime, work on The Prisoner Of Soho has slowed right down. There just isn’t the room at the moment. I think I’m just going to have to gird my loins and take the slow train into work, and use that dead hour. It’s the only way any writing will get done. I’m waaaay too distractified currently.

Oh, and I’m playing lots of guitar. And looking at buying a vintage amp. Because there’s no harm in looking, is there?

I’m taking the tube from Paddington into work less often these days. I kid myself that it’s a financial and fitness driven decision. You know, walk into work, save on the tube fare. But the Ugly Truth is that I can’t bear to look at the advert that’s currently placed opposite my usual spot on the Bakerloo Line platform.

Damn, I’m good. Don’t take my word for it. Clare was full of praise for the repast I put in front of her tonight, which has been simmering in the lizard part of my brain for the last few days. It’s poshed up fish and rice, basically, making the most of cheap ingredients. And the spec is so loose that you could take this meal up or down town depending on the mood.

We’re talking fishcakes, essentially. Not the bready British version, but something closer to the Thai take on the dish.

A staple of the Casa De LA Verdad Fea freezer is a bag of frozen salmon fillets. They’re fine for curries, fish stews and the like, but you wouldn’t want them as a star of the dish. So tonight I blitzed three of them in the Magimax, with a spring onion and a dollop of pesto, shaped the resultant fragrant glop into little patties, firmed them in the fridge for half an hour, and griddled them. Served with Rob’s Patented Rice Thing (briefly, onion, garlic, peppers and mushrooms cooked in a little olive oil, then a cup of paella rice (long grain will do) a splash of wine and a pint of stock, simmered till thick and yumshious) and a dollop of yoghurt. Aces. You could add chili to the salmon, leave out the rice and serve them with flatbreads and salad, or just dip them in yoghurt as a snack. Or try them with tuna instaed of the salmon. Then you could make bigger patties, and have them as burgers (although frankly you’d be better off wrapping them in a flatbread with a spoonful of salsa). Or maybe even mackeral or a smoked white fish.

Take the basic idea and run with it. Free cooking.

What fuckery is this? Some prime examples of the form came to light today, and the need to jump up and down and yell about them is just too strong.

First up, anti ID register group No2ID has released a Government working paper on strategies for the future rollout of a national identity card. From a quick first reading of the document in question, it looks like people’s fears that an ID card is the early stage into a full blown “database state” could be justified. It’s certainly full of fairly horrific euphemisms and management-speak that describe full-on assaults on privacy and identity control.

The full PDF of the document is here, and I exhort you to read it. I hold a UK passport that’s fully compliant with all border control standards. What exactly is the point to a new national identity scheme that by the looks of it will be expensive, unwieldily and ineffective?

Next. Mildred Von, creator of one of my regular online reads Coilhouse, has posted on LiveJournal about her partner Diz, who has been arrested and imprisoned in Dubai. By the looks of it, his crimes are being in possession of long hair, Asiatic features and melatonin – none of which are illegal in Dubai. Here’s the post. I’m not sure what’s more heartbreaking – the blatant arrogance and disregard for basic human rights, or the good humour and grace with which Matilda and Diz are dealing with the horrible, horrible situation. I wish them a swift reunion, and a plague of boils on the fuckwads that have put these innocent, law-abiding people through this crap.

Lastly, let’s offer a shout out to the California Supreme Court (I’m thinking “go play in traffic, knobends” works well) who have ruled that employers can legally dismiss marijuana users, even if they’re taking the drug in compliance with the Compassionate Use Act, they’re off duty and it’s not affecting performance at work. The ruling beggars belief for it’s lack of compassion, and flies in the face of any kind of logic or sense. Especially when you take into consideration that under the Compassionate Use act, users can now buy the drug from vending machines. On a day which seems to have a distinct lack of joined-up thinking, this is a particularly wild scribble on the crumpled shirt of sanity.

Some of you may be aware (by the fact that I’ve talked your head off about it) that Clare and I bought each other iPhones for Christmas. It was a no-brainer of a choice for me. I was coming to the end of an 18 month Vodafone contract, and the iPhone addressed at least five of the major issues I’d had with mobile phones ever since I’d bought my first Motorola, a Startac, back in the early 90s. For Clare, it was more of a love at first sight thing.
We’ve now had the devices for a couple of months, and it’s been an interesting relationship. We’ve had to upgrade Clare’s iBook to Tiger, and mess around with some preferences to get the Phone to talk to iTunes. We’ve found that, while for the most part it’s an extraordinary, life-affirming device, there are things about it that piss us off heartily. However, the firmware upgrade earlier this month has sorted out at least one of these, and the upcoming release of the SDK will doubtless do more. So, here’s my wishlist of the features the iPhone needs to turn it into the perfect mbile device.

1) SMS
Still not available, and I’m dumbfounded as to why that should be. OK, you can email photos, but that doesn’t help if you want to text a quick shot of your knob to a mate who’s been taking the mickey. You know, in the spirit of lively matey banter. Emailing a shot of my knob to him turns the relationship into something entirely other.

2) NOTES
Again, you can email notes, but why should you have to? If calenders and contacts can be synced to your home machine without having to think about it, why should you not be able to export Notes to a dedicated Documents folder? They’re only .rtf files, after all!

3) PDFs
I want to be able to treat text files on my phone in the same way as music and photos. I want to be able to download, store and read PDFs on my phone. I do not think I want the moon on a stick by asking for these.

Now, I’m aware that these may be available already on a jailbroken phone, but frankly that’s a step I don’t want to take. Running the risk of having a bricked phone when most of the functionality I’m after is probably only a month from an official release seems a bit short-sighted. So, if there are any developers reading this, any of the above will make for one happy punter. Thank you.

Talk about a showrunner listening to the fans. Even before the new season of Torchwood began last night, BBC’s continuity announcer promised us a show that was “pacier, sharper, funnier.” And for the most part, that’s what we got. A lot of the angst and moping that seriously dulled proceedings in the last season have gone, and arguments are much more likely to be settled with a good old punchup rather than a flounce-out and a moody pout over the Cardiff skyline. The tone is lighter, the jokes come out by the barrow(man)load – even if the feel gets a bit ooer missus at times. The running around and fighting quotient is up, the sweary is up, and the episode rattled along like an Intercity 125.

All of a sudden, the cast and crew seem to be enjoying themselves, which is a remarkable turnaround from the grinding lows of the last season. John Barrowman is certainly in his element, chewing the scenery with aplomb when he’s not chewing on James Marster’s face. In fact, ol’ Spike is a genius bit of casting, and from the moment he swaggers through a rift gate you know things are going to be entertaining at least. I hate to use the B word, but the tone feels a lot more like early Buffy now. Jokes, fights and drama flash past at a dizzying pace. There are plenty of cliffhangers, a twist or two, and some fairly hardcore violence. Jack’s “death” in this episode is pretty nasty, dropped off a tower block to land bent almost double the wrong way over a park bench – although I remember something disturbingly similar being suffered by Homer Simpson in an episode from a couple of years ago.

In short, the whole episode seemed geared to getting the fans back on board and quickly. The fanfic community are likely to be in spasm over the new opportunities in this one fifty-minuter alone, and I’m certain the early adventures of Jack and John will be all over LiveJournal in the next day or so. I can’t think of a more fanficfriendly piece of genre than Torchwood currently, and the fact that it’s lead character and his trickster nemesis will shag anything is a very definite plus point. The biggest laugh of the night for me was when Spi- sorry, Hart was ogling passersby out of the window of the SUV (which badly needs retiring. I’d be more impressed with the Mystery Machine than that refugee from the want ads of Max Power) and was told by Gwen to stop eyeing up a poodle. OK, maybe you had to be there, but a joke like that is all in the character and delivery, and with the new lighter tone it’s easier to get away with the panto-grade material. How do you think Carry On gets away with it?

All this, and Martha Jones to come. If Chris Chibnall and co can resist the temptation to slip back into the faux-adult angst and shagging soap dullness, the second season could be a genuine winner. I’m genuinely surprised, and not a little impressed with how much I enjoyed it.

(Stuart Feeling Listless does the WhoCrit with much more aplomb than me. Find his musings on the new season over at Behind The Sofa.)

It’s cold. It’s wet. It’s rainy. It’s the kind of weather that makes you want to curl back up under the covers and take a duvet day or two. I’ve had a few too many of those, since the world’s New Year gift to me was a fat chunky dose of norovirus – which when I think about it was not fat and chunky at all, but thin, wet and splattery.

What is required is a big bowl of love, something filled with flavour, heat and sunshine. So I was chuffed to find Homesick Texan‘s blog, which by itself is a warm and comforting read. Her recipe for proper Texan Big Red Chili had my mouth watering. It’s a weekend kind of recipe, the type of thing to spend a bit of time and care to make sure you get it right. I’ll certainly be trying it when I get a spare afternoon.

I was reminded at the same time of Heston Blumenthal’s recipe which was featured in the second series of In Search Of Perfection. When it comes to chili, I think there’s nothing wrong with an obsessively detailed approach. However, I remain unconvinced by some of his research. Going to a cookoff in a car park in downtown Washington? It’s hardly the heart of Big Red country!