Dublin’s Evening Herald newspaper isn’t generally a barrel of laughs, but I had to chuckle last night at the caption accompanying the photo of the late Irish blues guitarist, Rory Gallagher:
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| Gallagher who, unfortunately, didn’t wake up one morning. |
Been playing a lot with various instant messengers this week, and generally being
frustrated by their limitations. Got to thinking how neat it
might be if GNOME just had a “contact” applet that you could add to your
panel, one for each person you cared about– then you could arrange
them spatially to suit you, rather than having them in a meaningless
list. The icon (perhaps the person’s photo) could show their
online status, clicking it would open a regular IM window, and you
could right click to do the usual other stuff (send them an email, schedule
a meeting or whatever). Drop a file on their head to send it to
them. That kind of thing.
If Davyd’s idea takes off and the whole panel becomes a notification area, you’d have your own action-packed
desktop hackergotchi cartoon whenever somebody IM’d or /msged you, or
posted a new entry in their blog, or did anything else you were interested in (that you could write some sort of plugin for, anyway):
It all falls down a bit when you want to do something with a group of
multiple contacts though (email them all, arrange a meeting at a time that
suits them all)… ah well.
Finglas isn’t an area of Dublin you would normally associate with quality leisure facilities, but we went swimming at the new Finglas Leisure Centre last night, and it’s the business.
It’s official– I still have one of the worst-selling cars in the UK[1]:
Pos Model Number Sold 1 Honda NSX 12 2 Lamborghini Murcielago 12 3 Maybach 57/62 15 4 Fiat barchetta 29 5 Rolls Royce Phantom 47 6 Aston Martin Vanquish 61 7 Alfa 166 77 8 Bently Arnage 79 9 Renault Vel Satis 108 10 VW Phaeton 114
[1] Yes, I know Ireland’s not in the UK, but that’s where I bought it…
Once upon a time, before Frank Bough, Selina Scott and Roland Rat, getting ready for school in the morning was accompanied by one of two things. Listening to Good Morning Scotland[1] with Neville Garden and Malcolm Wilson; or turning on the telly and pretending you were posh enough to have teletext, by pointing an imaginary remote control at the TV while the BBC ran its rolling Ceefax InVision slot before daytime programming began. (Okay, maybe that was just me.)
Anyway, this week, the world’s first teletext service, Ceefax, is thirty years old and still going strong (unless you’ve got satellite telly). Originally just an experiment in subtitling, there was a time when half the UK’s population booked their holidays from ads on Ceefax, and there are probably few BBC licence payers who don’t know what’s on pages 302 or 606. And it’s not a bad way to get the latest headlines without the waffle, either– circumlocution isn’t a luxury granted to journalists who have to distill a story into 100 words or so. Online help writers take note 
[1] Coincidentally, in 1980 BBC Scotland broadcast live pictures from the Good Morning Scotland studio while it was on air– the first breakfast TV ever shown in the UK, predating BBC Breakfast Time by three years.
mozilla-accessibility list has exploded.
We posted a proposed keyboard navigation spec for Mozilla there towards the end of last week, and there have been well over 200 replies so far. Mostly from visually impaired users and assistive technology developers (i.e. people who know what they’re talking about), and with disappointingly-few “me toos” among them, so we’re actually having to read them all
Tragically the archives don’t seem to be working, so you’ll just have to take my word for it…
As you’ll doubtless recall, v2.0 of the HIG was released a few weeks ago, albeit without a great deal of fanfare.
Unfortunately there was no accompanying “what’s new that I need to know about”-type section, so I’ve quickly hacked one together now that I’ve finally had a few minutes.
Back in the office today after a week’s holibags in Malta with Julie, staying at the very pleasant Qawra Palace hotel.
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Monday: Arrived Monday |
Tuesday: Lazy day by the |
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Wednesday: Holiday rep |
Thursday: Coach tour of |
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Friday: Lazy day by the |
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Saturday: Day trip to the |
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Sunday: Valetta market, Monday: Up at 3.30am for the transfer to the airport, back in |
(These photos are mine, but you can find lots of others at maltavista.net.)
Offensive as the brick-like monstrosities that purport to be Minis these days are, their advertising monkeys do at least have a sense of humour. Hang around on their website for long enough, and see what pops up…
D’oh… the missing email finally turned up– Evolution had somehow managed to sneak it into my Local Folders Inbox, which I never look at.
Apologies to Steven Garrity, who probably thinks me very rude for not replying. By way of some recompense, here’s the article he wrote that he was trying to tell me about: The Rise of Interface Elegance in Open Source Software.
