8 hours…

Fri Apr 22

For fans of the Matrix films there couldn’t be a better place to watch them than at the IMAX cinema in Bradford. That’s a five-story high cinema screen with 12,000 watts of cound system. Wow. And when they are playing all three back-to-back then the temptation is hard to resist. This is part of Bradford’s Fantastic Films Weekend, hosted by the National Museum of Film, Photography and Television.

So my only problems are a) how do I get la inamorata to give me permission and b) what do I do with the kids?

* Of course, I’m only going to see it again for the spirituality in it, so don’t think I’m a sad geek or anything.

Gah, databases…

Thu Apr 21

Ever have one of those afternoons? I do, regularly, and this is another one of them. It works at home, it works here - so why doesn’t it work there? Gah again, and thrice gah.

Impressive…

Wed Apr 20

Thanks to the lovely Stylegala.com, I’ve just spent a very pleasent few minutes drooling over this website. The graphics a re lovely, it very nearly has perfect code, and their work seems to be excellent. Not least of which is their fantastic-looking content management system, which does one very clever thing that I’d not thought of before.

When you write the text for an article/page it automatically pulls out the important words and creates a list of keywords using them that search engines can look at (for the technically-minded that’s the META keywords). That’s clever, and a great use of psuedo-artificial intelligence technology* to generate meta content - content describing content.

* OK, bear with me. It’s not as grand or clever as all that, but it’s still a great idea.

Good luck Dave…

Tue Apr 19

All hail our master, Dave “Wibsite” Walker, who is starting a new venture. I wish him all the best as he’s a jolly decent chap. Keep up to date on his new blog.

More on the big story of the week…

Tue Apr 19

Yesterday I completely forgot to mention Macromedia and Adobe GoLive, both website development tools. I forgot partly because I’ve never used GoLive (so it isn’t at the forefront of my mind) and secondly I no longer use Dreamweaver. I’ve taken a shining to the excellent TSW WebCoder, which to my mind does everything that a web developer needs.

However this Adobe/Macromedia merger/aquisition - I’m not sure what the proper legal terms are - continues to get people chatting. I was happy to see that someone else agree with me about Fireworks, but there remains fair amount of uncertainty regarding what’s going to happen.

Update: More doom and gloom prophecies for web people

In other news: after a discussion with a collegue last week about Fred Dibnah and other fans of older technology I’ve been thinking there aren’t too may people that we could call “craftsmen” around nowadays. At one time craftsmen in a variety of fields could be found on every street corner - jewellers, steam engine mechanics, watch makers etc. But with the advent of a much more centralised outlook to technology - the internet being the epitome of this view - these people are growing less and less.

That’s a great shame, after all the machine and constructions these people made last for far, far longer than our modern efforts, even with the advances in technology we pride ourselves in. Why else would tower blocks put up in the 70s and 80s need to be demolished because of dodgy building practices, yet churches from three hundred years ago can still be found in regular use in many UK towns?

I’m not a Luddite, after all I work with the internet for my job, and it’s my hobby and passion as well. However I’d like to see a return to the traditional craftsmen values of reliability, understanding, patience and above all a well-designed output. In a world of fast-food, mass-production and international travel let us not lose site of the fact that just because the tools of our trade might be a keyboard and mouse rather than a hammer and chisel, we should continue to strive to produce items that will last.

I’m very tempted to put “web craftsmen” on my business cards :0)