12 entries tagged
updated
This is a selection of
images collected at the CAPTION96 comics convention (in the
summer of 1996).
Attentive readers will have noticed that there is almost a
year-long gap between the con and the photo album. This is partly
explained by the amount a manual labour involved in scanning all
those 7×5 photos on my none-too-fast scanner and moving the
files from the Mac with the scanner to the Linux box with all my
web site stuff on.
Update:
With the creation of the CAPTION
web site, this album has moved home and in the process has been
redesigned with a less archaic look.
Update (23 April 2010):
I have created a new version of the CAPTION96 album on my
Ancient Photo Albums site.
I took almost 200 pictures of small-press-comics folk
at the convention
EuroCAPTION97. Here's
the finished album,
with many of the duff pictures discarded.
Update:
With the creation of the CAPTION
web site, this album has moved home and in the process has been
redesigned with a less archaic look.
Yes! Pictures of
my new bicycle, and not before time.
Actually, I only have my bike here because I
don't have a cat to give a webpage to...
Update (1999): I was intending to add more info about
my bike and cycling in Oxford but so far I have never found the
time. So this page is a little old... :-)
Alas! I have managed to dispose of another bicycle.
This time it was written off in an accident—I was
‘in collision’
with a car door. Luckily for me the bike took most of the damage,
but in the process the front forks and frame were wrecked.
Just about the only component unaffected is the rear wheel.
Since this has the hub gears, it is probably the most expensive
part of the bike...
I sha’n’t bother
changing my bike page
to translate the present tense into the past,
because (I hope) soon it will be true again.
I intend to replace my bike with one just like it.
Update:
Yes, I have replaced my bike. It works very nice too.
Alas! I have managed to dispose of another bicycle.
This time it was written off in an accident—I was
‘in collision’
with a car door. Luckily for me the bike took most of the damage,
but in the process the front forks and frame were wrecked.
Just about the only component unaffected is the rear wheel.
Since this has the hub gears, it is probably the most expensive
part of the bike...
I won't bother
going through my bike page to
translate the present tense into the past,
because (I hope) soon it will be true again.
I intend to replace my bike with one just like it.
Update:
Yes, I have replaced my bike. It works very nice too.
Holiday snaps from Aviemore.
The Scottish village of Aviemore is best known as a skiing resort.
My ex Alex’s parents have a time-share on a lodge there
which this year they were not using, so Jeremy, Alex, Adrian
and I (Damian) headed up to Scotland for a week spent
walking in the forest around the nearby
Loch an Eilein and Loch Morlich.
Update (2 April 2007).
I have
migrated this album to Flickr.
The Flickr version also uses 100-dpi rather than 75-dpi scans of the original
paper photographs.
One day PNG’s
technical and licensing
superiority over GIF will make it ubiquitous.
But not yet.
Update (4 Nov. 2001). I have now
started using
PNGs
on the site—though I have not
yet taken the trouble to convert the existing GIF files yet.
Update (15 March 2002). Today as
I convert my old site at
http://www.alleged.demon.co.uk/ to its new home on
http://www.alleged.org.uk/,
I have been converting most of the remaining GIFs to PNGs. I guess
I now have confidence in the support for this format.
This week my
on-going
on-line tarot deck reaches the sixes:
Wands,
Cups,
Swords, and
Coins.
Alas! the font I am using for the titles is missing the
letter x, so there is a blank square for now.
I will fix this when I have a free
evening—I spent most of this evening finishing off
the drawings themselves. Far too tired to do it now.
I also need to see if I can
think of a better way to combine the pips with the drawings,
since the pips are now obscuring most of the artwork...
Update: I have added x to my title
font, after covering excessive quantities of paper with
mathematical workings as I try to reconstruct enough of my
geometrical and trigonometrical knowledge to calculate the
intersections of all the lines...
Update: I have added an animation to the pips so that when you
click the button to show the interpretation, the pips shrink and
shuffle out of the way!
I have been forced to post
a response
to a page
in SVGWiki, because my attempts to enter a response using
the Wiki page itself have failed with a
VBScript
error.
I also have to say that while I think the Wiki concept
of universal editorship is great, its reliance on its own quirky
syntax is a little annoying.
(On the other hand, HTML is not as amenable to hand-editing as
it might be. This is a result of its being based on the
splendidly verbose SGML syntax.)
Update (8 May 2002). I have updated SVGWiki—after
connecting to it with MSIE rather than Mozilla or Opera.
Perhaps there is some MSIE-specific JavaScript code involved?
Update (14 February 2004).
My note on the object tag has been updated to
reflect the fact that Safari 1.0 (released 2003) cannot handle
objects containing embed.
I have added a couple of pages about how to draw
minicomics to the CAPTION
2002 web site. Not a very profound bit of writing, but I
hope some people will find it useful.
There is also now a proper biog page for Jeremy’s section
of this site, complete with some new pictures.
There are still some links left to the old site,
but we’re working on it...
Update (20 June 2010)
Jeremy]s sectio has been obsoleted by the
Jermey Day web site.
Jo Charman has created a LiveJournal
‘syndication account’ for me. As a result you can
see my RSS feed, converted in to a LiveJournal
journal. She says that if you have a paid-for LiveJournal
account, you can add pdc to your
friends roster. And people can comment on the
LiveJournal pointers to my posts. Woohoo.
Updated (4 March 2007).
Updated URL. Corrected the spelling of Jo’s first name.
(Sunday night.)
Still nothing up for you to see yet, I’m afraid. (Apart
from anything else, I need to ask
my host to install a few
Python packages...) But I do do now have the start of the
second CGI script, the one that accepts reader’s votes for
the current round of pictures. These votes later are used to
decide which picture to use for that panel of the comic strip.
At present the script accepts your vote but does not display
them in any way.
If you vote again, your previous ballot is silently overwritten.
I plan
to support Approval
Voting in future by having a page where you have a checkbox
for each candidate picture and can select as many as you like.
The word ‘your’ is a little misleading; we use
people’s IP addresses as their identifiers, which sort of
works most of the time, but means that people sharing a proxy
server will end up sharing a vote. The alternative (requiring
users to register in order to vote) is not likely to work
because noone will want to register.
Update (Monday night):
The voting form now shows you the pictures with checkboxes.
When you first visit the page, the picture you cloicked on is
ticked, but then you can tick as many more as you like. Because
of the way HTML forms are processed, each form parameter is
potentially a sequence anyway, so the code for each time around
the voting form can be exactly the same. The code that adjusts
the totals is very simple:
def vote(self, uid, pns):
"""Register a vote from the user identified by uid.
uid is an integer, uniquely identifying a voter.
pns is a list of picture numbers
"""
oldPns = self.userVotes.get(uid, [])
if pns == oldPns:
return
for pn in oldPns:
self.pictures[pn].nVotes += -1
for pn in pns:
self.pictures[pn].nVotes += 1
self.userVotes[uid] = pns
The first line retrieves that user’s old ballot, if any.
The first for statement reverses the effect (if
any) of their former vote, the second counts the new vote.
Finally the ‘ballot’ is saved for later. Behind the
scenes, ZODB
takes care of reading the old data in off disc and
(when the transaction is committed) saving the updated
data.
My paid job involves writing a web application as well, except
this one uses Microsoft ASP .Net linked via ADO .Net to Microsoft SQL
Server® 2000. To do a similar job to the above
snippet, I would be writing two SQL stored procedures (one to retrieve
the exisiting ballot, one to alter the ballot). Invoking a
stored procedure is several more lines of code in the C♯ or VB .Net layer as you create a Command
object, add parameters to it, execute it, and dispose of the
remains. (Or you can create DataSet objects which are even
worse, but have specialized wizards to help you draft the code.)
The actual algorithm (the encoding of the business logic) would
be buried in dozens of lines of boilerplate. By comparison, the Python+ZODB implementation is a
miracle of concision and clarity. The
ZOPE people deserve much kudos.
