April 30, 2003
Meepy coded

I had a garbled message in French on my answering service when I came in to work on Monday, and I really have no idea how I worked out what the message meant. In any case, it was from the local CD store, saying that my order for the soundtrack to Movern Callar had arrived.

I had already written what I thought about Movern Callar, the movie. It is a quirky, intense film with plenty of swinging moods, and the soundtrack is the tape of music that Movern's boyfriend made for her before he committed suicide, meaning that it is an intrinsic part of the film's storyline.

Now, I'm not terribly well-educated on independent labels — I simply know what I like and what I don't. Whilst watching the movie, the soundtrack struck me as magical, reminding me of Tom Waits in parts, perhaps because the music is not necessarily what you would call "comfortable". The tracks by Aphex Twin had me nailed. In any case, I felt that the music added an extra dimension to the film, stating undertones and undercurrents where the images of the film could have very well been representing something else quite different.

Yet, this review of the CD is scathing, and this isn't flattering either. It seems they don't like the moodswings of the CD. However, Jeff Beck liked it. Oh, and this is a review of the movie I just found:

My main problem with Movern Callar is that I never felt a connection with the main character. She starts out as a sort of amoral character, and as she travels geographically and gets into various adventures in Spain, she doesn't seem to be traveling emotionally in any way. It makes one wonder just how close she was to her dead boyfriend — nothing is revealed about him, except that he was a very talented young novelist and cheated on Callar with her best friend. I found myself wondering why I should care about her trials and tribulations. The thing that seemed most tragic was not so much her boyfriend's suicide, but rather her lack of reaction to or processing of the event.

Amoral? Gosh. I just thought she was really lost and didn't know what she wanted, and hence preferred to be elsewhere compared to Scotland. (It brings back a recurring thought — do we have a problem within our society whereby most people can only deal with the black and white, right or wrong, and are unable to properly deal with uncertainty or unable to come to possible conclusions when not all the facts are there?)

And how would you deal with it if your significant other or spouse committed suicide regardless of your relationship? The entire film has the effect of being shell-shocked and a bit out of kink with reality, which, to me, feels more real than having all the facts and relationships laid out for the audience like a stall at the market with all its wares spread out on a cloth, being bleached by the sun.

Anyway, it seems to be a difficult CD to get hold of. You can buy it from Warp Records (whose website is much too messy for my liking).

Posted by sniffles at 08:45 AM | Comments (0)

April 29, 2003
Square eyes

An advantage to knowing local geeks is that they can recommend good optometrists. Brand new pair of glasses on the way, and the morning papers are back given that perl appears to be behaving itself.

Karl sung the praises of "Gerry", but the film had less of an effect on me even if I thoroughly enjoyed the dialogue. This is chiefly because I have seen the techniques within it used to a greater extreme in a movie called "Werckmeister Harmonies" which I saw almost two years ago. It was in black and white, sparse in conversation and lacking almost completely in background music. Recalling my feelings at the time:

[...] I experienced the queerest sensory shock upon walking out of the beautiful Forum Theatre into the freezing Tuesday night air after Werckmeister Harmonies. It was as if my senses have been re-calibrated: reality was sharper in sight, sound and feel; the passing, indifferent hum of what traffic there was at midnight, our footsteps thudding on the pavement as we made our way to the car.

Posted by sniffles at 12:32 PM | Comments (0)

April 28, 2003
We apologise for the interruption to your normal program
Evidently not satisfied with having severely broken the perl install on my local machine yesterday evening, I broke my glasses this morning. (Not happy, Jan!) Seeing as the morning papers rely on my local perl install, they won't get updated until this gets fixed. Mmmmfff. Posted by sniffles at 08:29 AM | Comments (0)

April 26, 2003
The pain of birth
Having read large chunks of the XHTML 2.0 working draft, I would say that its greatest flaws are not its ideals, not its non-backward compatibility, nor that it might not be realistically implemented in browsers anytime soon. These are not flaws, not at this time. If these are flaws, they will emerge later. The greatest flaw of the current XHTML 2.0 draft is simply that it is not well written. You may have the most brilliant spark of inspiration for the most moving poem, but lacking the words to express yourself, your idea would simply wither away unnoticed. XHTML 2.0 in its current form is truly at a working draft stage — the ideas are not solidified; one can glimpse what it is trying to achieve (or perhaps what it should achieve): markup which unambiguously supports true separation of presentation and content, markup which allows clear expression of semantics in the document it is used for. Apart from being somewhat deficient in clarity, the working draft is desperately lacking explanations of how authoring tools should behave. I cannot find the statistics, but I would presume that a greater part of the content of the web is not produced by handcoding. If you take into account the popularity of blogging and website-producing tools, it would seem that most people are not bent towards typing their HTML pages by hand. Authoring tools are responsible for a good part of the content of the Web, and therefore, authoring tools are also responsible for the status of standards-compliant pages online. So, it stands to reason that the considerations which go into designing XHTML 2.0 need not be based on the whims of the handcoder — it should be designed based on semantically meaningful functionality in light of the direction the Web is heading, with authoring tools firmly in mind. As for whether XHTML 2.0 will be implemented or not ... well, take this as an engineering exercise — a software engineering exercise, for argument's sake. After all, the Web is in a sense, a monstrously large software infrastructure. Before you build a system, you need to have the specification in hand in order to know what you need to build (not that this happens enough in the real world, of course, but that is yet another developer-hell kind of story). In the corporate world, unless bound by corporate goals, nothing states that a specification has to be completely implemented, but well-written specifications should describe which are core functionalities, and which are secondary and tertiary (in the case of W3C specs, functionalities which are extensible). A specification ought to be an epitome of the ideal because it should describe what is required without being bound by what currently exists. Otherwise, we will never move forward, we will never improve. There is no need to pass judgments on XHTML 2.0 just yet, because it doesn't yet exist. It is still in the process of being born. Posted by sniffles at 09:15 AM | Comments (0)

April 25, 2003
How many?
Ed Nixon has compiled a list of blogs on Web standards and accessibility based on the thread from the public-evangelist mailing-list. The Australian Bureau of Statistics' population clock gives you a projection of how many residents there are in Australia right this minute. Posted by sniffles at 03:39 PM | Comments (0)

I didn't lie about India

Wish I found these before having gone to NY: Neighbourhood Bookstores, and
Walking Tours of Manhattan Streets.

I dreamed of big, furry spiders with yellow and black stripes which carry pieces of Lego. Hermit spiders? They didn't do much apart from eating daddy long legs and making bunchy webs which hang from the ceiling. Quite boring, really.

I'm supposed to go to Toronto at the end of this month. Hmm ...

Today's Gazette - Back from Asia? Toronto? Stay away, hospitals say: In Toronto, the SARS outbreak has so far occurred primarily in hospital settings, but there's always the risk it could spread into the community.

Posted by sniffles at 08:47 AM | Comments (2)

April 22, 2003
Recharge
It seems predictable that I should catch a cold just as I was coming home. Today had been spent recuperating. I loved what I managed to see of New York, but my skin protested by sprouting ugly things, and it took several shampoos to wash New York dirt out of my hair. I have kept the morning papers going whilst away, and you will find snapshots of the New York Times and other papers I came across. One of the unexpected things that I noticed in NY, is that a fair number of the manhole covers appear to have been made in India. (Warning: hold your breath as you are bending down to look.) The amount of garbage the city generates is staggering — piles and piles of rubbish are heaped on the sidewalks by the end of the day. Monday morning came around, and I was beginning to tire from three full days of walking. Every day, a different place for breakfast; we decided to venture a little further on our last day. He spotted them first — I was probably too busy looking down at manhole covers. It's not every day that you see slides thrown out in a bin, and we are the curious kind. Perhaps these were rejects from a photography studio? There were three big bins — he looked into the first and I looked into the one in the middle. To my right, a man was debating with his wife who picked up a folder, "What do you want them for?" "Thought the folders might be worth saving," she said, but she threw them back, and they both ambled down the street. "It's Keith Richards!" he suddenly exclaimed, and I peered over his elbow (being too short to do so over his shoulder). There were prints, but there were also negatives and folders and folders of slides. The folder that the woman threw back was full of photo slides: Blur, Spice Girls, Ben Harper, Tina Turner, Sam Philips, Traffic, David Bowie, Smashing Pumpkins, Lenny Kravitz. There were letters, memos, legally binding documents, tapes, vinyls ... I was too shocked to be angry. Large companies like Capitol Records (from which all these have been excreted) fight hard to keep their copyright, only to flush out original work which has not been consumed. How much does the artist get? How much does the photographer get? Photographs of the artist merely end up in the trash. There is no value to fame, no value to being on top of sales. The day will come that you just end up in the bin. When I looked up from the third or fourth folder I was flipping through, I noticed that many people have joined us, poking about in the bins for anything useful or interesting. An elderly woman asked me what was going on, and I explained. "Hah," she croaked. "Only because it costs them too much to shred and destroy everything." She complained about having done dirty jobs like shredding, and I bid her good day and thought of my friends who might be happy to have some of these slides. A man was desperate to cling onto his unexpected treasures, and wailed and complained when the folder he had assembled had disappeared. The consumerist society brings out the ugliness in people, I thought. At some point, the garbage collector arrived and asked, "You've got enough?" and he told us that he picks up these things every day. Every day, you are likely to find photographs, slides, prints and papers about those who have risen to stardom which are thrown out the backend of a recording company. If you're in New York, have a browse at the southwest corner of East 23rd Street (towards 22nd Street) and Park Avenue, and see what treasures you might find. Posted by sniffles at 09:51 PM | Comments (2)

Books bought in NY

From the Biography Bookshop (400 Bleecker St., Greenwich Village):

• Impressions of Theophrastus Such, George Eliot
• The Bookshop, Penelope Fitzgerald

From Strand Bookstore:

• Women and Writing, Virginia Woolf
• The Poems of Sappho, Suzy Groden (translator)
• Notes on Thought and Vision and The Wise Sappho, H.D.
• Silas Marner, George Eliot
• Oroonoko or, The Royal Slave, Aphra Behn
• Wind, Sand and Stars, Antoine de Saint-Exupery

From 12th Street Books:

• The Entrancing Life, J.M. Barrie
• 3 Gymnopedies for piano solo, Erik Satie (music score)
• Fantasie in D minor, Mozart (music score)

From Barnes & Noble, Union Square:

• A Murder, A Mystery, and A Marriage, Mark Twain

(Yes, my bag was somewhat heavier on the way home ...)

Posted by sniffles at 09:19 PM | Comments (0)

April 17, 2003
Nu York

Here we come. Offline for a few days. Happy Easter!

Posted by sniffles at 04:59 PM | Comments (1)

Correspondence
> a day off... we leave for NY tomorrow night ... > unique concept despite working 3 days a week normally... I have never been there before ... > still can't sleep in - it's 7.08am! time to be productive around the house... things to do before one leaves, I need to pack, review a doc or two, fit in some paragraphs on Web standards, but I think I'll fall asleep before the latter ... > have a great day! you too ! > xox xox Posted by sniffles at 04:57 PM | Comments (0)

April 16, 2003
Beyond HAL

About two weeks ago, I was thinking about all the names my computers ever had, or all the names I'd given to my computers, if you like. It's because I had to name this one. Here. Meet "Blueimp". She's a 12" PowerBook.

My other computers have been called:

• Binky — after Death's horse of Discworld
• Gaspode — after Gaspode the Wonderdog, also of Discworld
• Treefrog — after a toy treefrog that came home with me from Brisbane
• Cowbell — errm, long story, but it rhymes with Dell
• Carboncopy — just seemed like a cool word
• Starsheep — after a squeaky baby toy that was given to me, a sheep with a star-shaped body

When I started at this job, I was horrified that the computers (except for the ones in the lab we look after) don't have names. How do you know one computer from another?! Some of them were physically identical! So I went around — named them, labelled them and made them feel special.

What is your computer called?

Posted by sniffles at 08:24 PM | Comments (8)

April 15, 2003
Oi! oi! oi!

Something about being an Aussie outside Australia — people are inclined to talk to you about shrimps, beer and crocodiles. Occasionally, they might feel disposed towards making Aussie-related jokes:

Q: What do you call a boomerang that doesn't come back?
A: A stick.

Posted by sniffles at 03:15 PM | Comments (0)

Wet

The voices of my soul are silent and slaves to rain.

The morning papers have moved to a home of their own, but I'll keep a thumbnail in the sidebar.

If I am the first to arrive at work in the morning, I'm always reluctant to turn the ceiling lights on. Nothing more sterile than white, garish, fluorescent lights. I have an old lamp on my desk whose wiring is rather dodgy, that it almost works like one of those modern touch-lamps: *touch* (lamp turns on) *touch* (lamp turns off) *touch* (lamps stays off) *touch* *touch* *rattles* (lamp turns on). It gives off a nice yellow glow, especially when the day outside is grey, colourless and wet.

Posted by sniffles at 08:46 AM | Comments (6)

April 14, 2003
Bouncing along to the rhythm

Chris takes photos so beautiful they make me weep.

"Gardening" on Sunday involved more or less pouring soil in a shallow pot, moisted by water from the biggest glass in the house, sprinkling the seeds in (much like the way I sprinkled oregano over the pasta), covering it with a little more soil and gladwrap, and sitting it on the window sill.

It amazes me how much supplies in Montreal are geared for the apartment inhabitant. You can get potting mix in bags about the size of your box of cereal (maybe smaller).

Posted by sniffles at 10:11 AM | Comments (1)

Monday

Posted by sniffles at 08:40 AM | Comments (0)

April 13, 2003
The darling buds

On Saturday, I bought two pairs of cargo pants, one pair of shoes and a shirt. (My t-shirt arrived on Friday — the graphic turned out reeaalllyy well.)

When you've just lived through a snowy winter (people here called it "horrible"), spring is something else. The sun hurts your eyes (but you put off wearing sunglasses, because it is nice that it is there), you cherish the wind which messes your hair, and you go out in just a light jacket eventhough it is 2°C.

Posted by sniffles at 10:20 PM | Comments (0)

April 12, 2003
Random thought
It occurred to me this morning that very few books I've come across depict male-female relationships with a kind of "equality" — by that, I mean the kind of relationship where it doesn't matter that one character is male, and the other is female. Over the course of reading many books, it seems that there is almost always some noticeable degree of bias in how a female character relates to a male character (and vice versa), simply because of the difference in sex. Two female characters may have a close relationship; two male characters might be the best of mates. Looking through the record of fiction I have read since June 2001, I can only identify one distinct exception, being "Sputnik Sweetheart" by Haruki Murakami, where the narrator has an intellectual relationship with Sumire despite the fact that he is in love with her. An imbalance, do you think? One wonders why so? Posted by sniffles at 11:27 PM | Comments (13)

April 11, 2003
Morning paper #3
Posted by sniffles at 08:41 AM | Comments (1)

April 10, 2003
Morning paper
Posted by sniffles at 08:32 AM | Comments (0)

April 09, 2003
Web standards and forward compatibility (Ohh I am weak)
Recently, Peter-Paul Koch has written an article about forward compatibility and web standards (see also an interview some time ago). I don't know what he seeks to achieve by this article, but I shall cave in to temptation and do a kind of deconstruction. He is right on two points — forward compatibility is not web standards, and that nothing ensures forward compatibility — but he is also somewhat short-sighted on many others. In his article, he claims that browsers will always have to support tag soup because they are bound to succeeding in business goals. Needless to say, this in itself is an unproved assumption. By PPK's words, it seemed as if he was referring merely to web browsers on computers, therefore, effectively discounting other kinds of user-agents. What about those which will be accessing content but do not require a human interface? What about browsers, user-agents on phones and PDAs, which, at this point in time, leans towards the need for more lightweight content? (Let's face it, tag soup isn't exactly lightweight.) Business success is based on being able to supply what the customer demands. We might be able to predict short term demands, but who knows what may change? The more designers develop compliant sites, the more developers create tools which generate standards complaint code, the more clients demand standards-compliance, browsers will be forced to be compliant. There is a convenient clause in the HTML 4.01 specification. It says that if a user-agent encounters a tag which it does not handle, it should ignore the tag and try to display its contents. So, even if I'm using a tag-soup free, standards-compliant browser, chances are, I can still access the information. Current browsers like Mozilla, Konqueror and Safari have a "quirks" mode which handle tag soup based on the document's doctype (if it exists), but they also do a good job at presenting standard-compliant websites. Such standards-compliant browsers are already in existence; you can safely say that if you don't employ web standards, at some time in the future, your websites might not display as expected. And after all that, forward compatibility is not the sole argument for web standards, and there is little point in stirring up confusion with rhetoric. A site that is XHTML/CSS (and not using tables for layout) brings with it advantages such as basic accessibility and the ability to leverage other Web technologies. A website is a product, hence bound by infrastructural, technological specifications as much as high-level requirements from customers. If you want to buy a fast pink car, you can have a fast pink car, but it still has to comply with safety regulations. Web standards are specifications — we often use the term "web standards" too loosely, and I think for the most part, many designers tend to only refer to XHTML/CSS. Web standards are also XML, XSL, SVG,DOM, RDF, WCAG, HTTP, amongst others. There has been significant noise around XHTML 2.0, about its backwards-incompatibility and its drawbacks. Perhaps we are forgetting that standards, or specifications, are a kind of roadmap. A particular standard might exist in telling us what is the acceptable composition of certain compounds in soap, or the diameter of the pipe which goes into your kitchen sink — so we know how to make soap, and how wide to make our pipes. A Web standard exists as a description of how user-agents, servers or authoring tools and their products should function accordingly; embedded within Web standards is the construct of how these bits and pieces should behave and interact together. More importantly, the specification has to exist before the product is built; we need not get unnecessarily worked up about something that is still being designed — in the meantime, we can assist in improving the specification's design because current processes of the W3C allow us to contribute. The mess we have had with existing browser quirks had to do with the lack or the inadequacy of past standards, and sadly, the ignorance of developers. Now that we have specifications — however imperfect — what is the sense in not adhering to them? If the standards are inadequate, not testable or insufficiently clear, then we as the web community can and should contribute to improve them. If a road is being designed in such a way that will benefit the inhabitants of a city is being planned and built, why make maps for mud tracks? Anyway, I'm looking forward to the day that neither you or I talk about web standards; by then, everything is running as it should be. Incidentally, one finds a Box Model Fix. Posted by sniffles at 10:01 PM | Comments (2)

Morning paper
Posted by sniffles at 08:28 AM | Comments (0)

April 06, 2003
Did you know ...

me: la la la
bopuc: fa fa fa!
me: fa la la la la la la
me: did you know that there is an actual name for the kind of folk songs that have "fa la la" every second line in the chorus?
bopuc: hahhaha
me: but of course, I don't actually remember what it's called.

*me runs off to google*

me: c'est une ballette. hm, that wasn't the name i knew it by. fa la la la la la la la la.
bopuc: haha

More on Renaissance music here.

Fa la la la la la la la la.

Posted by sniffles at 08:37 PM | Comments (0)

April 04, 2003
I'm not dead!!
Just dead busy, and dead tired. (Back soon.) Posted by sniffles at 07:03 AM | Comments (5)

April 01, 2003
Two movies
Movern Callar is a mastery of the understatement, the unspoken and the unexpressed. A dark film, its images border on the surreal, its broiling emotions tucked just under the surface. I spent the first ten minutes in tears, cracking beneath its deliberate and painful non-intensity, its non-drama. The music is nothing short of excellent. On the other hand, The Quiet American is a bad movie about bad things. Perhaps it's because the ideas it presents are not new to me, so I did not experience any shock from the story it tells. However, I think it is close to a truth. Stereotypical images, stereotypically bad music, poorly drawn characters, unconvincing performance by Brendan Fraser. Interesting to note that it was based on a novel by Graham Greene, which I have not yet read. It's a bad movie, but not too terrible — acceptable for lazy viewing. Surprisingly, I was most irked by the character of Phuong, the beautiful, silky figure of a Vietnamese woman whom both men were in love with. A shallowly portrayed character, devoid of any hint of personality - let's face it, if one were to present a cliché, one can at least make an effort to present it well. Karl asked me why — of all stereotypes the film faithfully adhered to — this appeared to trouble me most. After some thought, I decided it's because the stereotype that Phuong was based upon is probably very close to the stereotype that is tagged upon me as a woman of South East Asian origins. It does not help the situation when mainstream films extend upon this stereotype — that the desirable Asian woman is pretty, quiet, softly fragile and demure, and therefore needs "protection" and "guidance" from macho men, white or not. Posted by sniffles at 09:58 PM | Comments (3)