Busy few days

… starting last Wednesday really, when I parted company with my old Fiat barchetta (sic), and exchanged it for a newer and shinier but equally-yellow one. I’m not one to get sentimental about cars, but that one certainly accompanied me on its fair share of interesting trips both here and back in the UK where I originally bought it. I’ve even completed one entire (and two partial) house moves with it– only thing that just wouldn’t fit was my widescreen TV :)

Saturday afternoon saw Dublin’s decision to allow a loyalist parade march down O’Connell Street go predictably wrong, with the place “resembling Bahghdad” afterwards according to Julie, who’d gone shopping in town regardless and somehow managed to avoid the violence and bomb scares.

The evening saw Scotland’s rugby union revival continuing, this time beating England at their own game: rock-solid defence and accurate kicking. (Unfortunately Ireland won as well, so they’ll have the triple crown up for grabs when we visit Lansdowne Road in the next game, so they’ll probably be trying a bit harder.)

After that we wandered round the corner to the local pub for dinner, and who should wander in but an Taoiseach Bertie and his fancy-woman for a quiet pint. Which is just what they should be able to do, of course, but it’s hard to imagine Dubya or Tony B being afforded the same privilege.

And finally, this evening I’m off to this Apple Guitar Seminar in Dublin, which sounds kind of cool… I really haven’t made much use of GarageBand or Logic Express since I got my PowerBook last year, maybe this will give me some inspiration. If it’s successful, it might also inspire Apple to open one of their amazing Apple Stores in Dublin, too… it’s kind of sucky that they have no less than six in Britain, but none at all in Ireland (or indeed the rest of Europe, although Paris and Rome at least are scheduled to get one soon).

Online documentation

As one of those people who complained about the HTML output of DocBook recently, it’s good to see Shaun kickstarting some progress on this.

I think my main concern with those mockups is the line length… in English, ten words is about the most you can fit on a line before reading speed slows down. This isn’t so much of an issue for stuff that turns up in help browsers, as the narrow width of the window naturally restricts this anyway, but it’s a problem for things like the HIG that are normally read in a web browser. I’ve tried to deal with this in the draft HIG’s stylesheet recently by indenting the body text from both sides of the page, which also makes it easier to pick out headers. (Example)

My main gripe with the HTML version of large DocBook documents, though, is the lack of a navigation sidebar. Things like the HIG are a pain in the bahookie to jump around, when every other major online styleguide (Mac, WIndows, Java) makes it simple.

Happy Christmas!

Went up to Enniskillen in Norn Irn this weekend, for Julie’s belated works Christmas dinner. Nice hotel, great views across Lough Erne (the pic is from our bedroom window), but the event was a bit of let-down… it was all booked months ago, so they could at least have saved us some Christmas crackers, made sure the carvery included a turkey, or hung up a few decorations. Unfortunately, all we got was some local crooner and a drum machine murdering the usual Elvis and Beatles repertoire. Still, the six hour round trip drive was pleasantly traffic-free, and it’s always fun crossing the national border on one of the minor roads– you can only tell you’ve changed countries when the painted stripe at the side of the road abruptly turns from yellow (Irish side) to white (UK side). Changed times indeed.

On the plus side, got back just in time for the live Motherwell game on Setanta, in which Jim Hamilton crashed in as good a goal as I’ve ever seen a Motherwell player score (we still lost though), and to find that Eircom’s DSL upgrade has gone to plan (now up to 3Mb/384kB… upload speed still a bit crappy, but better than the 128kB we had before).