Very True Things

06 December 2009 @ 02:57 pm

Some bad news about Dazed Miniatures - the range is being withdrawn from sale. The silver lining is a 30% off sale to clear the remaining stock.

All that the story on the RLBPS web site says is:

Dazed Miniatures was a partnership and it has been been ended by one partner (the Sculpter) withdrawing the licence to produce any of the figures we made. RLBPS still owns the molds but can not run them.

I wonder what it is with Richard Deasey's lines? He sculpted the second half of the the HLBS prehistoric line and then took it away to found DZ Miniatures, which vanished soon afterwards. The mammals, but not the dinosaurs, reappearing years later from Strategem/Trent Miniatures whose own tribulations made getting hold of them sometimes frustrating (but they are currently available via North Star). And now this. Is there any chance that some of the best prehistoric miniatures will be available from a stable supplier (one with a working e-commerce facility would be really nice)?

In the mean time I need to work out how much I splurge on miniature mammoths, etc., taking Christmas, moving house and exchange rates into consideration. Couldn't be a worse time for a closing down sale.

Tags: dinosaurs, miniatures

Very True Mood:

confused

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30 November 2009 @ 11:59 pm

I blew it

The sidebar says that there are 25 posts in November. But 5 of those are the automated weekly posts of Twitter updates. And 2, including this one, were actually written a week into December and backdated.

Not good. Worse than last year in fact. I fail at blogging. :-(

Tags: blogs, memes, my life, nablopomo, nablopomo09

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30 November 2009 @ 03:27 pm

Movember, the end

Movember, Day 30

Movember Day 30 - me on the left, Moonie on the right, John was hiding (we think he shaved off his pantomime villain mo early and that's why he didn't come into work...)

Day 30. The end. Go on, give some money to charity, just 'cos I didn't shave part of my face for one month. ;-)

Tags: movember, my life

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29 November 2009 @ 03:42 pm

Getting web site developers to RTFRFC

The + sign is valid in the local part of an email address. Please fix the validation on your sign up form.

From now on I'm going to keep track of sites to which I've had to send a variation of the above message. There are only two reasons for disallowing it: technical incompetence and a failure to read the RFCs; or malice in not wanting users to identify spammers or sellers of email addresses to spammers by disallowing tagged email addresses.

Fixed

monitis.com

Pending

demand.five.tv (29/11/2009)

Tags: email, rfc, www

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29 November 2009 @ 02:21 pm

Why is this stuff still in my brain?

Yesterday I was doing a YoGov survey (referral link in case anyone fancies signing up) and got a question which asked me to list as many web browsers as I could. I think I may have been near the tip of the long tail on that one - I wonder if anyone else included Amaya?

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24 November 2009 @ 07:10 pm

Last night I bumped into someone I was at college with on Borough High Street. I knew his first name straight away, but it took me twelve hours to remember his last name. And then five minutes to find him on facebook...

The online, social, networked, web 2.0 world hasn't completely eliminated the need for human memory

Tags: my life, www

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24 November 2009 @ 11:44 am

I need you hosting recommendations

Anyone got some recommendations for hosting? ("Network Failure" was a trending topic on Twitter this morning for a good reason.)
I need to host this blog, another WordPress powered site, a MediaWiki powered site, some basic PHP pages and some static pages across 4 domains.

Tags: computers, www

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19 November 2009 @ 09:55 pm

Day 19. Coming out a bit multi-coloured, brown, blond and some black. Too much blond really so it doesn't show up all that well. But give some money anyway!

Tags: movember, my life, nablopomo, nablopomo09

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19 November 2009 @ 06:00 pm

The Value of Nothing

Raj's new book. Out soon.

Tags: books, nablopomo, nablopomo09, the world

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19 November 2009 @ 01:00 pm

Return of Bog-A-Ten and friends

Bog-A-Ten Cover from HLBS

Via the SFSFW blog comes the very welcome news that HLBS have, temporarily, re-released their Bog-A-Ten rules and some of their dinosaur miniatures range in honour of the game's tenth anniversary. As it was their original range that got me into miniature dinosaurs (I bought a Styracosaurus and some Velociraptors at Salute 2000) this is very pleasing. Get them whilst you can, in particular DA10 Tylosaur, DA11 Elasmosaurus and DA12 Phorusrhacos which have been out of production for several years.

(This does make my web page even more complicated as some of these models have now been released under three different product codes.)

Tags: dinosaurs, games, hlbs, miniatures, nablopomo, nablopomo09

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19 November 2009 @ 09:55 am

IE9 on the far horizon

Microsoft have announced that there will be an Internet Explorer 9 (not a big surprise) and have given an early indication as to what it may include.

Headline features - faster with better standards support (in both cases playing catch up with Gecko, WebKit, Opera, etc.) and hardware accelerated graphics and font rendering which is something new and will improve the speed and quality of rendering across all sites not just ones that add new code.

No word yet on a release schedule, my personal guess would be late 2010 or early 2011 but as it's Microsoft that could be well off.

One thing that concerns me is that the uptake by consumers may be slow. IE7 was the first release in five years and also shipped as part of Vista and IE8 ships as part of Windows 8 so users buying new machines got them automatically. With no new operating system the take up of IE9 may be slower.

Tags: browsers, internet explorer, nablopomo, nablopomo09, www

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18 November 2009 @ 07:56 pm

When pop-up blockers go bad

We have an web application at work that's used by thirty or so people, many of whom are non-technical. The application runs in the browser window and is a mixture of standard HTML forms and Java applets.

The most comment "it doesn't work" message I get from users is caused when the application displays this message:

Unspecified error invoking method or accessing property "showWindow"

The pop-up blocker built into Internet Explorer seems not to like Java applets trying to launch new browser windows. It blocks these by default even though they are "requested" by the user via a click and not launched automatically by a sneaky script. I guess IE can't or won't work out what's happened inside the applet before it calls out to create a new window.

Not once have the users noticed the yellow bar at the top of their browser window informing them that a pop-up has been blocked.

I can see the problem for browser producers - if you make the notification too prominent it becomes as annoying as the pop-up would have been; if you make it too subtle it goes unnoticed when the pop-up needs to be noticed.

Compounding the issue is that Internet Explorer seems to maintain three separate lists of trusted/permitted sites for privacy (i.e. cookies), security, and pop-ups. Would a master list of trusted sites with the ability to fine tune options on a site-by-site basis as an advanced option be easier to use? Or is the interface just leading me to the wrong conclusion? Oh well, maybe IE9 will streamline things.

Oh, and don't get me started on the Google Toolbar's pop-up blocker...

Tags: browsers, computers, internet explorer, nablopomo, nablopomo09, work

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14 November 2009 @ 11:58 pm

Battlestar Galactica, the end

I've just finished watching the finale of Battlestar Galactica. Yes, I'm behind the times (oh I am talking about the new series, not the original one, that would be really behind the times). It's been hard to avoid spoilers for the ending because of the very strong opinions it's generated, hence I was watching it with one eye on the telly and one eye on my reaction: would I hate the ending as much as some people did?

Um, no. I have no problem with the ending per se. I thought it was rushed, but only to the degree that the last four episodes needed to be six or seven episodes (it struck me that characters like Tyrol and Helo jumped in and out of the storyline over the last few episodes).

( I'm trying to avoid outright spoilers but those of you who want to remain unspoiled should click away now. )

It was one of the best pieces of television that we've had. Possibly the best ever in the SF genre. For all its faults, in the ending or in any part, I can't think any less of it. If you haven't watched it, do so; if you have, I hoped you enjoyed it as much as I did.

Tags: battlestar galactica, nablopomo, nablopomo09, tv

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09 November 2009 @ 10:49 pm

Part 1 of a few.

It seems that everyone has started talking about HTML5. I've recently converted sfsfw.org (still a work in progress) to HTML5 (ditto) and built a microsite at work in the language.

So, what parts of the brave new world am I embracing?

The new doctype

<!DOCTYPE html>, well that will save a few bytes per page. I've never tried to type a doctype from memory before, I've always cut and pasted from another project or from an authoritative source, but now I might just type it, saving a few seconds. I can't help feeling that the lack of versioning information is a making a problem for the future (and let's not get into the related area of all the things that HTML doctypes do/mean in comparison with what SGML or XML doctypes are meant to mean...).

The new character encoding

<meta charset="utf-8" />, again that will save a few bytes on those pages where I bother to include a meta tag rather than just trusting to the HTTP header (and I know why the belt and braces approach is useful, so long as they both tell the same story).

The new block level elements

<section>, <article>, <header>, <footer>, <aside> and <nav>. These are rather cool. Not immediataly earth shaking but they make code cleaner and debugging easier - less often will I be staring at </div></div></div></div> and wondering whether my current problem is caused by having too few or too many closing div tags.

The new input types

number, tel, email, url are already being used in several forms on visitlondon.com and it makes me smile 'cos me and a handful of other Opera users get to see the benefit right now. I think these will be my favourite part of the new spec for some time to come.

There's a lot more to HTML5. This isn't meant to be a tutorial, just some personal observations and use cases. I'll try to delve a bit deeper into how I'm using these pieces of code and why I'm using these but not others in future posts.

Tags: html, html5, nablopomo, nablopomo09, work, www

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08 November 2009 @ 10:11 am

NaBloPoMo No Go

FAIL

I spent Friday evening and all day Saturday being ill and unlike certain bloggers (I'm sure we all know at least one) I wasn't going to inflict the details on you. So the goal of posting every day in November has taken a hit even quicker than it did last year. I'll still try to make "30 posts in 30 days" though.

Tags: fail, my life, nablopomo, nablopomo09

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05 November 2009 @ 10:26 pm

Worst laid plans

This blog was down for a few hours this evening. I could have spent the time composing a post and having it ready to cut and paste in here now that everything is working again. I could have done that.

Oh well. Tomorrow is another day (spent at an users' day for the CMS we use at work, held in a building that is one minute's walk away from the office) and the it's the weekend.

Tags: my life, nablopomo, nablopomo09

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04 November 2009 @ 08:37 pm

Very Good Musical Thing

Reasons to love the joined-up-interweb: musicians you love telling you about new musicians they love, with YouTube vids embedded, etc.

Tanita Tikaram recommends Marina and the Diamonds' I am Not a Robot

Tags: marina and the diamonds, music, nablopomo, nablopomo09, tanita tikaram, www

Very True Mood:

happy

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03 November 2009 @ 10:25 pm

Antlers of Gormlessness

Antlers

Just a quick one to point out that when you build a Christmas web site in October, sometimes things go a little strange...

Tags: my life, nablopomo, nablopomo09, work

Very True Mood:

silly

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02 November 2009 @ 08:11 pm

Wargames Foundry Terror Bird

I've been updating my Dinosaurs in Miniature pages. The main differences have been the addition of the MegaMiniatures megafauna that I posted about previously, the continuing expansion of the Dazed Miniatures range and some new miniatures from Wargames Foundry, including the Terror Bird shown here.

BTW, Foundry have a 20% off sale until the 10th November 2009. So now's a very good time to pick up these new goodies.

At SELWG last month I picked up a "new" Smilodon from the "old" DZ range sold by Trent Miniatures. It's in a walking pose rather than the leaping pose that's been available for a while. This range is now available over the web from North Star though this additional Smilodon isn't listed.

There have also been a few additions to the 10mm DinoMight range form Magister Militum.

MY Miniatures ice age range seems to have melted away from the web with the close of Geocities. Does anyone know if they have a new web site elsewhere?

And finally, the Tusk rules are available as PDF via Wessex Games/Wargame Vault. You can still buy the paper version from Irregular but the new version has full colour photos throughout.

I am currently growing a moustache as all big game hunters should.

Tags: dinosaurs, games, miniatures, movember, nablopomo, nablopomo09

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01 November 2009 @ 03:13 pm

November - houses, blogs & moustaches

November has arrived accompanied by wind and rain and cold (and indeed a cold). How to spend the month?

Well mostly Lettice and I will be spending it buying a house. Or trying to. The other day we took a tame civil engineer to have a look round the place we're hoping to buy (in a sort of "look for the massive faults before paying a surveyor" kind of way) and he could only see one potential problem. Fingers crossed that it isn't.

Like last year, I'll be taking part in NaBloPoMo as a form of half-hearted solidarity with the people who are attempting NoNoWriMo.

And I'll be growing a moustache. Some banter in the office on Friday has somehow led to me agreeing at the last minute to take part in Movember. Now, despite having a silly name and being an Australian import, this is a very good cause so please make a donation. I promise to only post very occasional photos of the mo's progress.

Finally I'll be hiding from the bad weather and watching telly, not least Doctor Who which is back for a special on the 15th.

Tags: blogs, doctor who, movember, my life, nablopomo, nablopomo09, tv, work

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