Daily Archives: Sunday, 6th April 2008
The Last Shadow Puppets – The Age of the Understatement
Now this is fun. The Last Shadow Puppets are the brilliant Alex Turner, singer and songwriter of those lovely Arctic Monkeys and his friend Miles Kane of The Rascals, a band I currently know nothing about, but will be checking out in due course. Alex clearly has far too many ideas fizzing around in his head for one band to cope with, so he’s directing some of them at this side project, which according to the official site stems from being inspired by, among others, Scott Walker. And there is a bit of the Scott Walker about this first single – it’s about as far from the raw sound of the Arctic Monkeys as you can get – it’s got strings! A choir! It also bears something of a resemblance to the utterly bonkers Muse track Knights of Cydonia, which I’d say was a Good Thing. The video was made in Russia, and is only moderately strange. This YouTube version was put up by Domino Records, so it’ll probably stay there, so I’ll omit my normal warning about clips disappearing if someone complains. Oh bother, I just mentioned it.
The single is out in just over a week, with an album following a week later. Well worth checking out.
I never liked those things…
CAPTCHAs[1], that is. Those nasty things that display some hideously distorted text which you’re meant to be able to read then type into a box to prove that you’re human. Well, last time I checked, I appeared to be either human or a reasonable facsimile thereof[2], but I often find that CAPTCHAs are very hard to interpret, and sometimes I have to hit refresh a few times before I find one I can read.
Of course, there are nicely automated systems that have cracked most CAPTCHA systems on offer, so they tend to fail in their aim of keeping spambots out while letting real people in. Yet people still rely on them. So it’s probably only a matter of time before they become a lot more sophisticated as the arms race between spambots and spam blockers wages on:
Wellington Grey — Miscellanea — What Hath CAPTCHA Wrought
I thought this was one of Wellington Grey’s best for a while, so much so that I was inclined to leave a comment, but I couldn’t read the CAPTCHA…. 
[1] One of the most extreme contrived acronyms ever: see Wikipedia for the awful details
[2] I suppose I could be a replicant…
The Management?
On Friday, I had one of my lunchtime walks with the camera. My main target was the Newcastle City Library construction site, where I took some more record shots of the progress of the work. I’ll be posting those later, but I thought I’d make a start with this one of some pigeons who seemed to be watching the builders. I’m not sure if they’re just curious spectators, safety inspectors, or the management.
Given that there’s a mob of them (there were a few more, but they flew off[1]), and they don’t seem to be doing anything useful, I think the final option may be the one…
[1] Or went to a meeting, or something…
Weight Report – 6 April 2008
Oh dear. This is really not going to plan, is it?
I blame the weather.[1] Or something. I’ll aim for more of that self-discipline stuff starting tomorrow. Probably.
[1] From my Big Book of Excuses
Doctor Who – Partners in Crime
If it hadn’t been for my webserver’s fit of the sulks, I’d have posted this last night. But here we go with the first episode of the fourth series of the revived Doctor Who, or the 30th overall, if you prefer to look at it that way. For reasons best known to the BBC, it was moved to an earlier start time of 6:20pm instead of the more usual 7:00pm. Russell T Davies made it clear he thought that this wasn’t a good idea, and might reduce the audience, but it seems that lots of people quite rightly regard watching Doctor Who as more important than anything else they might be getting up to on a Saturday – BBC News reports that it was watched by 8.4 million people, which is quite respectable, and doesn’t include those who’ve recorded it to watch later, or who will catch a repeat on BBC3.
The first episode, like the first one last year opened without a pre-credits sequence, introducing what sounded suspiciously like a new version of the theme tune – it certainly felt more “in your face” and forceful than the last version. I liked it, anyway.
Once the titles were out of the way, the fun started with the Doctor and Donna (from The Runaway Bride) separately investigating some suspect goings-on at a company called Adipose Industries. Donna storms in the front entrance, telling people she’s from “Health and Safety”, while the Doctor sonics his way through the fire exit, telling anyone he passes that he’s John Smith (of course) from, yes, “Health and Safety”. In a nicely silly routine, they manage to be in remarkably close proximity without actually seeing each other.
Adipose is in the business of selling a miracle weight loss product. At a press conference, the only slightly sinister Mrs Foster announces that they already have one million customers in the London area for their pills with the slogan
The fat just walks away
The Doctor and Donna quiz sales staff – both get hold of customer lists, though Donna also strolls off with one of the free pendants the company gives to everyone who buys the pills. And again, quite separately, they go to see customers….
The Doctor sees Roger Davey, who’s quite happily losing a kilogram a day. Well, overnight. Well, at a particular time each night, when he’s regularly woken up by his burglar alarm going off for no apparent reason. The Doctor takes a great interest in his cat flap…
Donna goes to see Stacey Harris, who’s also doing rather well. Stacey’s just getting ready to go out on a date, and while she’s in the bathroom, Donna absent-mindedly fiddles with the pendant she took from Adipose. And that’s when the fun really starts.
Lots of the usual stuff follows – chases, extreme peril, a million people about to die, seriously cute aliens (I’m sure the toys will be in the shops soon…), a pretty alien spaceship, and quite superb interplay between the Doctor and Donna.
You see, Donna’s been regretting her decision not to travel with the Doctor. Going back to normal life after that experience didn’t do it for her at all, so she determined to find him again, quite sensibly reasoning that the way to find the Doctor would be to “look for trouble”. And so, when the little matter of the Adipose has been sorted out, she’s ready to travel. She’s had her bags packed for ages, in fact.
But the Doctor’s not so sure. He feels guilty about Martha’s unrequited love for him, and is reluctant to have anyone else get close.
Doctor: I want a mate
Donna: You want to mate?? You’re not mating with me sunshine!
And with that settled, it’s time to head off. Donna just has to let her mother know where she’s left the car, and leaves the keys in a nearby bin. On the way back to the Tardis, she asks a blonde girl to tell her mother which bin to look in, then walks off.
Then the blonde girl turns to the camera. She is Rose Tyler. She turns and starts to walk away but disappears into thin air before she’s gone very far. Ooooooooooooh boy. Now it was revealed some time ago that Rose would be back this year, but I wasn’t expecting her to appear so soon, or in such a sneakily mysterious manner. Will Rose be making more odd appearances? Will Rose be this year’s running mystery in the manner of Bad Wolf, Torchwood and Mr Saxon? Will things get bigger and better as the year progresses? Damn right they will!
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Reasons to hate IE6, Part 395[1]
This is the current design of the heading of this site[2]. It’s been tweaked and twiddled quite a lot, with the most recent change being the randomly changing picture on the left and the new font for the title. I’m not at all sure about that font, and I’ll probably change it soon. But that’s not the main reason for this post. I looked at the header, and decided that what I really didn’t like was that blue gap below the picture. Surely I should be able to tweak it so the menu thingy could line up with the bottom of the picture? I’d have to make the text smaller, but as I was thinking of changing it anyway, that wouldn’t be a problem.
I soon realised that what I needed was a negative margin on the header block. That would force the menu bar to move upwards and plonk itself on top of the background image, making the whole thing look like a single entity. So I gave it a try, and after a bit of fine tuning of the size of that negative margin, I had something like this. Well, that’s how it looks in Safari. The result in Firefox is essentially identical. I then thought I’d better check it out in IE, so I fired up my virtual machine and had a look. Yay, etc. IE7 was quite happy with it, as was the beta of IE8 that’s running on my little laptop. But then I had the Awful Thought. I know that a lot of people are, for a number of reasons[4] still using IE6. So, I removed IE7 from the virtual machine and reverted to IE6 to see if it liked my new header.
As you can see, it’s not quite right. I was sort of expecting the funny light green bit – that’s because IE6 doesn’t understand transparent PNG files properly[5]. There are some JavaScript tricks that might just fix that, and I’ll probably get round to checking those out later. But that’s quite a minor problem compared to that big expanse of blue below the menu. Where did that come from? Well, it seems another thing that IE6 has problems with is negative margins. Again, there are some tricks that may well get me round that, and I’ll have a play later.
It would be really nice if IE6 would just go away. Soon.
[1] At least
[2] Included here in case it looks completely different by the time you read this[3]
[3] I’m considerate like that
[4] Old PCs, locked-down work computers that haven’t been upgraded lately, inertia, random oddness, etc
[5] Well, actually, it’s something to do with Alpha channels in transparent PNG files, but I figure that anyone who cares about the distinction already knows at least as much about it as I do, so doesn’t need me explaining it.
Layers: The Complete Guide to Photoshop’s Most Powerful Feature
While I do most of my photo processing in Lightroom these days, and the new features in Lightroom 2.0 will probably make that even more true, there are times when only Photoshop will do. The trouble with Photoshop is that it does so much that it can be quite hard to find out how to do what you want in the most effective and efficient way. There are loads of books and tutorials around, but for me they all suffer from either going too far, or not far enough.
I’ve become something of a fan of Matt Kloskowski since discovering his excellent Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Killer Tips, in which he presents tips, presets, and really nice tutorial videos. The videos are great – short enough to keep your attention, but detailed enough to be useful. I’ve recently added his Photoshop Killer Tips to my RSS reader, and I’m getting some Good Stuff from those videos, too.
So when Matt started mentioning his new book on the use of layers in Photoshop, I thought it would be worth a look. Amazon’s price was quite reasonable, so I bought it, and I’m glad I did. For a start, it’s much shorter than a lot of Photoshop books. I wouldn’t normally describe that as a plus point, but so many Photoshop books go into so much detail of features that I’ll most likely never use that they’re too much trouble to slog through. This one has around 250 pages, and most of those contain large, clear screenshots and easily followed instructions. It’s as near to a print version of Matt’s excellent video tutorials as you’ll get, and being in book form, slightly easier to follow if you want to work through the examples. It’s probably worth mentioning that there are no abstruse secrets or amazing new techniques here – what you’re paying for is some good instruction in a convenient format.
Matt starts by explaining what layers are, and why you should be using them – this is very basic stuff, but in that first chapter, he goes from how not to destroy pictures to creating nifty composite images. Then he goes on to explaining Blending Modes – this was great for me, as I’d never quite got my head round how those worked, and why you’d use particular modes for particular effects. He also makes clear which of the many modes available are the most useful, which could save you a lot of time.
From then on, it all gets more interesting, with good tutorials on Adjustment Layers, Layer Masks and doing good stuff with Type and Shape Layers. Then come some sections aimed more directly at photographers, with some lovely examples and suggestions for enhancing photographs. I like his “dodging and burning done right” tutorial (hint: don’t use the Dodge and Burn tools), and I’ll be giving that a try. You can learn about retouching, Layer Styles (woo hoo, reusable effects!) and have some fun with Smart Objects.
You can either work with your own images, or download the examples from the book’s website. It’s probably worth getting the examples so you can compare your efforts to Matt’s, but you can then go on to try your new techniques on your own pictures.
Matt writes with a light, jokey style that’s close to how he talks on his videos. I like this approach, and found the book very easy and enjoyable to read. Now I just need to get some practice…
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Another lovely Spring
I do love this indecisive weather. Last week, we had some nice mild, sunny days. Just the thing for this time of year, and most welcome. But the weekend has seen a bit of a change. Yesterday morning there was some singularly nasty driving, cold rain. Driving straight into my face as I walked up the road, naturally. This was followed later in the day by some quite enthusiastic hail, which I didn’t mind so much as I was safely indoors.
It’s reported that there’s been snow in other parts of the region, with more sleet and hail forecast for the next few days. I’m sure we get more wintry weather in the spring than the winter…
Unplugged?
Anyone trying to visit Losing it[1] yesterday may have been disappointed[1] to be greeted by rude messages from their web browsers telling them that the site could not be contacted. What with one thing and another, I didn’t notice there was a problem until I went to start writing up last night’s Doctor Who episode, when I got the same alarming message.
I checked all the usual things with Dreamhost – power failures, dead DNS, broken network, and found that apart from some ongoing server moves, which didn’t seem to be related to my virtual private server, nothing was amiss. Well, apart from my stuff. Could it have been overloaded? Well, a quick look at the memory and CPU use graph would reveal that. So I looked, and this is what I saw. Not so much overloaded as unloaded – no activity at all, which suggests that it had stopped talking to the outside world.
A status check of my account showed that my sites were not configured on the server, my home drive was missing, presumed dead, and that the virtual private server was not responding. So, I logged a support call and did other stuff for a while before going to bed.
This morning, there was an email waiting for me from Dreamhost support – the offending virtual server has been rebooted, and it’s all running normally. They’re not at all sure why it stopped responding, and I’ve worked with computers for more than enough years to have no trouble at all believing that. Sometimes they just do weird stuff. I’m coming around to the idea that computers just hate people…
[1] Or relieved…
