December 2001
Today is World AIDS
day. I found a
reference to Link and
Think on Dave Winer’s weblog Scripting.com... My
experiences with HIV/AIDS have been mainly through working with
organizations like London Lighthouse (since absorbed in to the
Terrance Higgins Trust) and
the Immune Development
Trust on behalf of my
employer. Well, before that I had bought Strip
AIDS (which funded the founding of Lighthouse), and of
course I was at university in the late 1980s when
discussion of AIDS, safer sex, and celibacy was at its peak. It
was partly because of that that I was so pleased that
OCC’s membership of the SEAHORSE project gave me a chance
to contribute something to HIV/AIDS support, even if (like most
European R&D projects) the main result was an obscure web site.
I thought I knew a reasonable amount about HIV, but
meeting real people and visiting the Lighthouse makes it real in
a way book-learning. I was slightly in awe of the guys who
had been living with HIV for a decade or more—they
don’t get much mention because everyone’s
concentrating on supporting the newly diagnosed and educating
the uninfected masses, but they do have their own different
needs.
I took Thursday and Friday off so I could catch up on all
those chores I have been neglecting—repairing the
puncture that has kept me off my bike
for a month or so, starting Christmas shopping, captioning for
the Caption 2001
photos, buying train tickets for visiting my mother on
Mull,
and so on. Instead I wasted Thursday doing the SVG demo (a reaction to
frustration at work), and spent Friday lying in bed sick, and
wasn’t up to much on Saturday either. So today Jeremy and
I finally tackled the garden a bit, finished the repairs to
my bike, and then walked to the train station (there being no
useful busses on account of an anti-war march), bought the
tickets, and continued down
Botley
Road
to Toys ’R’
Us where we tried to find toys to suit our respective nephews
(no nieces yet). Since my brother Mike’s
son Darren is not quite a year old yet (born 03-02-01),
he’s something of a challenge to find suitable toys for.
Then on to
Habitat to check out this season’s fairy lights and
try out sofas we could not house even if we could afford them.
On the way home we dropped in at the local Odeon to watch
The Others, an excellent ghost story in which
Nichole Kidman does very good mad starey eyes.
As noted below, I have
been experimenting with SVG. So far I have been
forced to borrow Jeremy’s NT box because I cannot get
any of the Linux-based SVG viewers to work. Mozilla with SVG (Alex
Fritze’s build #6, based on Mozilla 0.9.3) cannot
run on my RedHat-6.1-based desktop, because I lack some
libraries. I have downloaded Mozilla+SVG for Windows NT,
which annoyingly does not display (1) the examples in the
W3C recommendation for
SVG, (2) the SVG test suite,
(3) Adobe’s SVG
samples, or (4) my hand-written SVG files. I’m
not even going to try to install any of the Java-based SVG
viewers until I have thoroughly upgraded my Linux box. Sodipodi sounds
attractive, but again I need more libraries.
(I understand Debian GNU/Linux’s package manager will
automatically acquire missing dependencies—is this true?)
So for now I will have to do my cross-platform development
on a borrowed Windows NT box...
A new on-line quiz for all you people out there:
How tall are you?
I have added Javascript code to the page so that it works
out the answer for you (if you have Javascript disabled in
your browser you should still be able to read the page, you just
won’t get any help counting your answers). I have
also taken the liberty of decorating the page with
SVG doodles. This may or may
not give your browser conniptions...:-)
SVG notes.
I have tested it on Mozilla on Linux sans SVG; the fall-back PNG
images display correctly. MSIE 4.0 on Windows NT with Adobe SVG
plug-in 3.0 displays the SVG correctly—you can zoom in and
view SVG in another window etc. And at work I verified
(in MSIE 5½) you can print the page, in
which case the pictures are rendered with the printer’s
resolution, not the screen’s. Cool! MSIE/Mac 5.0 on my
decrepit Performa sort of goes loopy while the SVG files
download, then each doodle turns blank when you scroll the page;
frobbing the the zoom or quality causes the image to redisplay.
Weird.
Google
have extended their archive of Usenet postings back to
1981. Thus I have found evidence of myself
posting
during
my summer placement at Hewlett-Packard in 1988, and
as
a graduate student (briefly) at the PRG (as it then was),
and
offering
advice on HTML usage in February 1994 (before HTML was
fashionable!). But that is probably enough ego frenzy for now.
We spent Saturday evening and night in an orgy of
present-wrapping for our respective extended families. It
was also my sister Rachel’s birthday today.
Sunday was Jeremy’s sister Ellés Xmas party, so we
got to offload the first one-third of the christmas booty
(Jeremy’s sisters and nephew Tiimu),
leaving me with the sack that goes south to my father’s
family and the sack that goes north with us to visit my mother
on Mull.
Today I was visited by my mother and my sister Kate. Since
Kate uses a wheelchair I have learned a lot about the kerbs
along the length of Cowley Road. Ironically a lot of the
obstructions are caused by work on repairing and improving
access for wheelchairs: too bad they could not have taken more
notice of my family’s itinery and get them done a week
earlier...:-) Our back garden sadly looks a little
desolate in winter (pretty much bare earth with some sad-looking
twigs poking out), but to Kate’s Australia-adapted eye
even that looks novel.
Here’s a Christmas card in SVG.
Don’t worry, though,
I have also made a GIF version
for those people who cannot view SVG yet. In this particular
case, the ‘fancy’ SVG animation is 23 KB
(I could have compressed it to make a 2-KB
svgz file), whereas the GIF is 76 KB, and is a
simpler animation (you get the blinking lights, but the SVG
version also has the tree growing out of nothing an a very
amusing manner). That said, the SVG animation needs more
client-side CPU, and begins to get jerky on a 200-MHz
Pentium-compatible NT box, so I have also supplied a simpler version (missing the
background picture) in case that helps.
I’m now back from a week-long visit to my mother’s in
Tobermory on the
Isle of Mull. (Mull is an island off
the west coast of Scotland with a total population of perhaps
3000.) Altogether we had my mum Jenny, her husband Dave, and
their dogs Tubbs, Sacha, and Jerome; myself and Jeremy (from
Oxford); my siblings Mike (Dundee), Kate
(Brisbane in Australia),
and Rachel (Guilford);
Mike’s baby son Darren; and sometimes Mum’s stray
boy Iain and his dog Buster. My reader will doubtless
appreciate that even in a relatively large house this
constitutes quite a crowd... Still we survived with no
casualties, and even got off the island and on the way home
before the Great Storms began and the ferries were cancelled.
Darren is 10 months old and cute as a button. He spent a lot of
his time on Mull crawling at speed up and down corridors and up
and down the various adults who were trying to deflect him from
anything heavy or small enough to try to eat or big enough to
try to eat him. Actually of my Mum’s dogs,
Jerome (the biggest) is no threat; it is Sacha’s misguided
attempts to mother him that might have been a problem if we had
not kept an eye on him.
Today Jeremy and I took the coach in
to London to
visit the Tate
Modern. We thought we had already missed the 2001 exhibit
Surrealism: Desire
Unbound, but no! we were in luck. Some four hours later we
tottered out, tired and £8·50 poorer but greatly edified. They
had one room which was basically gossip about the Surrealist
movement members, illustrated with the books of poetry or
collage or photographs that resulted. Considering how chaste
the period in question (1930s, 1940s) is usually represented in
modern fiction, it’s interesting how many permutations they
came up with: many in the Surrealism movement believed in what
was then called free love and nowadays sometimes called polyamory. The
sections on erotic
art and erotic
objects was good fun. Those crazy Czechs with their lewd
photomontages and unspellable names! Jeremy was
annoyed that work by female Surrealists got little
mention except in the
room about Surrealism’s depiction of women.
This despite the women’s work being often being more
interesting to the modern eye—the men’s talk of
muses and idealized lovers looking more dated today (it was more
radical in, say, 1930). Bought a floppy clock (the Tate is
taking the opportunity to sell more interesting merchandise) and
then tried to figure out from where one was supposed to view the Juan
Muñoz installation. First we looked down at it from the
highest gallery level, but eventually we worked out you are
supposed to look at it from below! By this time the gallery was
closing so we
staggered home feeling very culturally stimulated.
