I’ve taken up saxophone practise again after a break of six or seven months. Giving up was precipitated by getting a new mouthpiece that turned out to be very hard to play. I could only play for a few minutes before my lip collapsed, my tone became uneven in the upper register, and my intonation went all over the place. I knew it was a good mouthpiece, not because the brand had a great reputation, and not because I’d read somewhere that it was good, and not because it was expensive; I knew it was good because it just sounded amazing, made playing across the break easy, and sounded evenly throughout the registers. For the first few minutes, that is. … read on »
Irritation in Waterstone’s
I have to say to begin with that despite initial appearances this is not a grumpy old man piece. At least, it’s not exactly my intention to voice petty gripes just for the sake of voicing them.
I was in the basement of Waterstone’s at the west end of Princes Street. Three young members of staff, one female and two male, were talking loudly. The males were teasing the woman in a deliberately petty, repetitive fashion. I was quite distracted by this incessant stupid chatter, and although I was in a public place and we can’t expect the silence of a library in a high street shop, I was irritated. I think I was justified:
1. Different standards and conventions – loose … read on »
An Epic Search For an Epic Search For Truth
Logicomix, An Epic Search For Truth
By Apostolos Doxiadis, Christos Papadimitriou, Alecos Papadatos and Annie Di Donna
I have enjoyed comics since I was a child, when, fascinated and entranced by Hergé’s Adventures of Tintin, I argued heatedly with my friends, who all preferred Asterix.
I still read Tintin occasionally, and I enjoy more consciously grown-up graphic novels, but I never thought I’d be treated to a comic-book account of Bertrand Russell’s quest to establish the foundations of mathematics. The idea of such a book is incredible, yet here it is, a story told passionately and illustrated beautifully, which does justice to the men and their ideas. And they’re all in here: Frege, Hilbert, Cantor, Gödel and Wittgenstein….
Read the rest on my philsophy … read on »
Certainly Not My Kind of Book
Oddly for someone whose political affiliations have always lain in the left tradition, I’m more and more fascinated by, and attracted to, the philosophy of Roger Scruton, who is a conservative. I find his manner of setting forth arguments – both in writing and on television – to be irresistible. It’s somehow both gentle and passionate. But it’s more than that: I really do agree with many of his ideas.
Anyway, I was looking at Mark Dooley’s biography of Scruton on Amazon and noticed this 5-star review:
This certainly is not my kind of book. It is a Christmas present for which I was asked so clearly it IS the kind of book enjoyed by the person who asked for it.
CSS Abstracted: Update
In a recent post I described my first foray into…well now, what am I supposed to call them? CSS frameworks? No, that doesn’t work, because Blueprint and YUI and 960 and others are often described as such. CSS meta-frameworks? That appeals to me, but it’s rather obscure. CSS compilers? Yes, perhaps.
But wait. There are CSS compilers, and then there are the libraries and frameworks and plugins that are built around them. Well, I guess that’s where the term “meta-framework” comes in.
One such meta-framework is Compass, which is built around the core language and compiler Sass. I mentioned Compass briefly in my other post. At the time, I had dismissed it as being more than I required, or more than I … read on »
E-commerce for Small Business in The UK: A Starting Point For Web Developers
NOTE: see the comments for updates about how this went in the end.
I think I’ve unearthed a conspiracy. In the wonderful world of the world-wide web (that’s WWWWW for short), with so much information available, and so many companies selling online, surely there must be a collection of standard procedures for implementing an online shop, and reliable sources of information covering them? Apparently not. How else to explain this except an evil conspiracy? In particular, an evil conspiracy against web designers and developers.
This post is drawn from an e-mail that I sent to a tech savvy client, a small business owner. The email summarized their options for e-commerce, in the specific context of the UK, and it was the result … read on »
Everyone a Philosopher King
There’s an old adage that wanting to become a politician should disqualify you from becoming one. I just found it in Plato’s Republic, Book 7 520-521. Perhaps that’s where it comes from?
The state whose rulers come to their duties with least enthusiasm is bound to have the best and most tranquil government, and the state whose rulers are eager to rule is worst.
For Plato this means that rulers must be philosophers: those who have attained the knowledge of the absolute Good, which resides in the heavenly realm of eternal fixed forms of which the so-called real world that we live in is but a poor reflection. These philosophers, as well as being more just, wise and good than others owing … read on »
CSS Abstracted
Half way through the development of my last site I decided to use PHP files for CSS. I had a few stylesheets, and I found I was constantly going from one to the other to copy and paste hex colour codes. And then later, if I wanted to change a colour, I’d have to change it in all those different places. That really is no way to work.
The answer to this, of course, is variables (or constants), so that you can define your colours in one place. Trouble is, CSS don’t got none. In fact, CSS is lacking in several important ways. What it boils down to is that we struggle to get around the fact that CSS doesn’t work … read on »
Mashing, Hacking and Bodging: The Django Adventure Begins
These have been on my to-do list for a while:
1. Write some site or application in Django
2. Begin doing test-first programming
3. Begin using Subversion
4. Learn Python
Notice the order of these items. My sensible self says I should do it the other way around. “You’re not hacking PHP now, you know. This is serious stuff. A strategic and organized approach will benefit you and others.”
I find it disturbingly easy to reject these sensible admonishments. Who wants to be sensible? So I’m taking the items in the order presented above, and I’m currently at step 1, tentatively building a real-world side-project in Django, which may come to something. In fact, I’m fairly sure we’ll use it just amongst ourselves, at least (here … read on »
The Resources of The World Are Limitless
I struggled to come up with a web development angle for this one. I had a brief hope of executing some dazzling metaphorical sleight of hand when I read Thomas DeGregori’s discussion of the “usability” of rocks among proto-humans, but in the end I gave up and decided just to roll with it…
The world’s resources are limitless. I’m not joking. In a world of finite materials – and a finite 88 keys on a piano – resources are no more limited than are melodies and harmonies. Even if we stick to the Western musical scale, we will never run out of tunes. This is because tunes are not raw materials, somehow just there, waiting to be discovered: they come into … read on »
©2010 Alistair Robinson