It was many months ago now (back in November of last year no less), that I decided it was about time I re-designed this site to use purely semantic HTML and CSS for all the styling. After much experimentation with CSS, and several throw away designs, I came up with what we see now. Traditionally such a layout would require complex HTML tables, but after alot of reading around I gained a new level of understanding of CSS positioning, and managed to transform the very simple HTML into a layout which displays remarkably consistently across Mozilla, Internet Explorer, Opera and Konquerer. The beauty is that now I’ve got the HTML sussed, I can play around with the CSS at will specifying multiple Alternate Stylesheets for testing until deciding upon a new ‘live’ style. While I’ve not quite reached my original goal of working on a Next Cube with the original web browser, I’m orders of magnitude closer that I was this time a year ago.
A few months ago Tom, Jeremy & I paid a visit to a basement bar ‘The Comedy’ off Leicester Sq, where amongst others we heard Tribryd play. Fast forward a few months & I finally manage to get hold of a copy of their demo CD Jeremy picked up at the Gig. Its been the top player this past week, with an interesting sound reminiscent of JJ72, with the lead singer Ally sounding quite like Courtney Love at times. I think I might just have to swing by their next Gig in early December
After a lot more work documenting the configuration parameters for the builder, Test-AutoBuild 1.0.2 release is now available. As well as the documentation improvements, there are two new HTML status page features. First is simply the ability to create arbitrary hyperlinks, second is a facility for copying build artifacts to the website, for example test results.
I’m in the process of switching over to using the PHP Gallery software for managing my photos. Pictures from the BVI, New York & Philadelphia are now online in the new gallery. Many more will be uploaded when I finally get around to buying a Nikon Coolscan and processing the several thousand photos I’ve accumulated over past year.
Last night I encountered the first program on BBC Four that I was actually interested in watching: The Lomo Camera: Shoot from the hip. As you’d expect it was packed full of fantastic photos taken on the classic Lomo Kompakt Automat and the newer multi-shot cameras produced by the Lomographic Society, but the really interesting stuff was about the history of the Lomo. Way back in the early 90’s the Lomographic Society was beginning to take off, and needing a reliable supply of Kompakts, made a deal for its exclusive worldwide distribution. Unfortunately shortly thereafter, the Lomo PLC (now in the world of capitalism) worked out its per-unit production costs and discovered they were higher than the per-unit sale price, thus deciding to cease all production. The Lomo Society tried many tactics to convince them to continue production, in the end involing then Mayor of St. Petersburg, Vladamir Putin. Putin, realising the importance of the Lomo Kompakt to both St. Petersburg & Russian history, as well as to the Lomo Society, managed to convince (pressure ?) the factory to continue production. Truly he is the Godfather of Lomography