I like this idea. Motherwell fans have had two weeks to pay their respects, and Hearts fans have already paid theirs with a minute’s applause before their last two games (and fair play to them for doing it the second time– not entirely sure why they were asked to do it more than once…)
Let’s just get back on with the fitba’ now– it’s what Phil would have wanted!
Numbed by the news when I got home last night that Motherwell captain Phil O’Donnell had died after collapsing during the game with Dundee Utd yesterday.
I well remember his debut against St.Mirren in the 1990/91 season, when as a 17-year-old he was given the complete runaround by Kenny MacDowell. At the end of that season, he scored his first goal for the club– in the memorable Scottish Cup “family final” at Hampden Park. Ironically, that was also against Dundee Utd, in a game which was also tinged with sadness– the managers of the two teams were brothers Tommy and Jim McLean, whose father died a couple of days before the final.
(That cup winning side seems somewhat jinxed, now… it also featured Davie Cooper, who was to collapse and die a few years later on the training ground at the age of 39. And two of our other stars that day never played again, forced into early retirement through injury.)
So, thanks for the memories, Phil. Thoughts are with your family and friends today, especially to your wife, kids, and nephew and Motherwell team-mate David Clarkson who’s been a revelation this year– I hope he can find it within himself to pull on the claret and amber jersey again after what he witnessed yesterday.
So, I’ve just noticed that some of the Google HOPG tasks involve updating the HIG screenshots. I don’t know if the other HIG authors were alerted to this, but I certainly wasn’t.
Apart from a degree of discourtesy to the HIG authors, this oversight is surely particularly unhelpful to the people who claimed the tasks, as the maintainers who will ultimately decide if their work is fit for inclusion have not been around to offer advice as they were going along.
Also, FWIW, the draft version of the HIG already has several updated screenshots in it, so hopefully nobody has wasted their time duplicating those. I’ll review what I can this week, but this is my last working week this year and I have other stuff taking priority. So maybe Bryan, Seth, Anna etc. could help out here too, if they’re reading 
Just a bit deflated that one of the most inexplicably wrong refereeing decisions I’ve seen cost Scotland a draw against Italy this afternoon, but I don’t think it would have been enough anyway, and I’m certainly glad we’re not sitting waiting on the France result on Wednesday. Can’t fault the lads for another great performance (bar the first two minutes), bring on the World Cup qualifiers!
(To be fair, the ref ruled out a perfectly good Italian second goal for offside, and failed to disallow ours for the same offence… but to lose like that was just rubbing it in, really.)
Was slightly surprised to find a Google Summer of Code 2007 t-shirt in the mail this morning– had forgotten I’d even signed up as a mentor. Obviously my services weren’t required this year, which is probably no bad thing for the would-be protégé.
Seems the Theora version really didn’t want to play outside of Quicktime. Courtesy of ffmpeg, here’s a DivX version that works in VLC on Gutsy out of the box, at least (just checked it)… poorer quality and the aspect ratio’s gone a bit squiffy, but what the heck. I don’t really function properly before 10am, and it’s really not that exciting anyway
EDIT: Thanks to Arek for pointing out the blindingly obvious, here’s a proper Linux and Solaris-friendly OGG version. Yay
Upgraded my MacBook Pro to 4Gb yesterday, and was eager to play around and see how much it would help. What better way than to fire up all my virtual machines at once and see how it performed? Here’s the video… sorry it’s a nasty .mov file, but in my defence, it really is encoded as a Theora movie (a plugin for which you may need to install from here, if you’re viewing on OSX or Windows).
I haven’t tried to see if I can trick it into playing in Totem et al. yet on Solaris / Linux– let me know if you have any joy. For the record, the OSes are OS X 10.4.11, Solaris Nevada b77, Ubuntu Gutsy, and Win XP, all running in VMware Fusion 1.1.
Cool to see Sun’s Web App UI Guidelines finally go public. As Chip Alexander says,:
They are a set of building blocks for web applications that have been designed by user interface specialists, thoroughly thought through and usability tested. They can be used for developing full web applications, allowing designers and developers to focus on their application’s particular needs rather than the design of all the controls and elements inside.
The corresponding Woodstock toolkit for which they were written has been available under an open source (CDDL) licence for a while, but of course the guidelines themselves can be applied to any web app. (They do have a bit of a system administration app slant, though, for obvious reasons.)
We’re having summer in Dublin today. Apologies to anyone who will have missed it by visiting on any other day of the year.
The folks at shinyhappyusers.org have just released their e-book and DVD as free downloads, and there are a bunch of video podcasts too.
