May 2002
Jeremy’s The Weekly Strip
went on something of a hiatus after her trip to Amsterdam over
Easter. To celebrate its return I have
belatedly moved the TWS files across from the old Alleged
Literature web site to alleged.org.uk. In the
process I rearranged the directory structure (or URL
design, to use TBL’s phrase) to be more
consistent—something that required fiddly changes to some 300 or so
links in more than 50 files. Luckily all the files are
generated automatically so all I actually had to do was
tweak three Tcl procedures and TclHTML handled the
rest. Smug.
There is long tradition of celebrating the First of May, called
Beltane by pagan types. In Oxford, choirboys greet the rising sun by
singing from Magdalen College tower, while the townsfolk gather below
on Magdalen Bridge. For the last few years the bridge has been closed
to the public (citing structural weakness in the bridge). This year
we were allowed back on the bridge again. I borrowed Jeremy’s
newest digital camera for the occasion and took some photos.
The latest installment in my ongoing virtual
tarot deck is all four Nines:
Wands,
Cups,
Swords, and
Coins.
It turns out my front page did not work on
Mozilla—the division containing the main text started at
the top of the screen rather than 76px down from the top (as
I has expected, given that its top margin was 76px).
I changed this, but in order to test on Mozilla (which
takes some minutes to start up on my K6/233) I needed to
persuade thttpd to serve
CSS marked as type
text/css. (This is necessary because the W3C specs
require that web browsers believe what web servers tell them,
and it it says a file is text/plain it is not a
style sheet.)
In theory I did this months ago
(edit mime_types.txt, rebuild, reinstall). Testing
this is a pain as well—Mozilla 0.9.7 does not give any
easy way to find the content-type of auxillary files, so you
have to type HTTP requests in to TELNET by hand... In the end
it ocurred to me to run TELNET in an Emacs buffer so at least
the retyping of HEAD /mumble/foo/bar.css HTTP/1.0
could be done almost-automatically... In the end it turns out
that I needed to do make clean to force a
complete rebuild, otherwise changes to
mime_types.txt made no difference :-(.
This week’s installment of my on-line
tarot deck is two more of the trumps:
XVIII. The Moon and
XVIIII. The Sun.
The Moon proved a little tricky, not just because of the number
of weird symbols that need to be included, but also because
I used a lot of
CMYK colours
with nonzero black (K) components. It seems that this (or some
other property of the colours I picked) caused
Sketch’s screen colours to differ from the numbers written
in to the SVG file,
which broke my automatic palette-adjustment program. I had
to edit several colour entries by hand...
¶ Perhaps you are wondering why I have numbered the Sun XVIIII
rather than the more conventional XIX. There is method to this
madness. For one thing, the form VIIII did once upon a time
exist, until the more concise form IX gained popularity. Using
the longer forms has the interesting side-effect that the Roman
numerals up to XXXXVIIII can be sorted alphabetically (I comes
before V, V before VI, VIIII before X, and so on). The theory
was that this would make the file names for the trumps neatly
sort in to the correct order in directory listings (because
I use names like iii-empress and xviiii-sun). That works
if hyphens are considered to precede letters in the alphabetical
sequence (as they do in ASCII). It turns out that
Microsoft Windows NT has other ideas—it sorts punctuation
characters after letters, which totally undoes my
clever trick.
This week’s entry in the tarot
project is the four Tens:
Wands,
Cups,
Swords, and
Coins.
Talk about being overcommitted. This set is being uploaded a
few hours late, on account of I added some fancy animation to the
Ten of Swords card (as with the other animations, this is
trigged by pressing the small blue button at the bottom of the
card—and uses SVG’s intrinsic SMIL-based
animation). Hope this works on whatever SVG viewer you are
using...
Here is the beginnings of an SVG version
of Jo’s idea of an Oxford-based property-trading board
game that is not as lame as the Oxford Monopoly® set. It is
only just started—like the tarot deck, it will have to
come in installments.
Jeepers, only a couple of weeks to COMICS 2002.
No update to the Alleged Tarot (yet) this week...
Jeremy
needed the Mac to do her flier for the exhibition for CAPTION 2002, so it wasn’t
available for me to finish drawing Judgement and The World—and
I do not want to skimp on this fairly elaborate card. Also
I had some work of my own for the CAPTION web site
I’been puting off.
After a few false starts (and some confusion as to which server
I should be publishing it on) there is now another page or
two on caption.org.
And my Mac has stopped talking to the laser printer attached to
my Linux box. To be honest, I can’t quite remember
how we got it working last time, but I think in the end
I used Apple’s own LPR-based printer driver (as
opposed to netatalk’s AppleLink printer daemon). My
attempts to use this again result in a useless error message
(‘internal error’). Presumably it got broken in the
upgrade to Mac OS 9. It doesn’t help that Macs just
will not print unless you can point to the physical hardware.
Presumably there is some dance you can do to get around this,
given that one is supposedly able to send a disc full of
PostScript to a bureau whose printer would not even fit in your
house.
Better late than never—here is the latest installment of
my virtual tarot deck: the final two
trumps, XX. Judgement and XXI. The World. Since
last week’s episode was the last of the pips cards, that
leaves just the sixteen court cards (the Page, Knight, Queen and King of
each of the four suits).
I added a Google sitesearch box to
the front of this site. It has been interesting watching
www.alleged.org.uk infiltrate the Google
database—for a period of a few days, one Google search
would find this site, and the next would claim it didn’t
exist. My guess is that different subsets of Google’s
gigantic server farm have different databases, or something like
that.
Search boxes belong near the top right corner of web
pages—that’s where people look for them. To
accomodate this I rejigged the layout of the front page.
I would like to be able to boast it was all a simple case
of tweaking the CSS
code, but in practice I found it expedient to add two
div elements, surrounding the contents of the main
and side-bar sections of the page—before that each section
had its own div and that was all. Not sure if the
result is better or worse as far as structure goes!
As we come up to the Jubilee weekend, I have dug out my
little Australian flag in case any flag-waving is required.
Typing Australian Flag in to Google finds
Ausflag, a campaign for
a new Australian flag (I quite like this one), and The Australian National
Flag Association, dedicated to celebrating Flag Day (the
anniversary of the first hoisting of the Australian flag on 3
September 1901).
I had a look and found a cool new New Zealand
flag as well.
