Technology, Books and Other Neat Stuff

An hour early too. Pretty much exactly 3 hours of downtime to facilitate a data centre move.

Not a bad piece of work, and expectations well managed by the LJ system administrators. A page right out of Montgomery Scott's book.

In one of those memes that goes around, swisstone asked me to explain seven of my user icons. ( So here they are. )

...you can't.

While LJ lets most media sites that use an OBJECT tag to embed in an entries HTML, Google is using an IFRAME to host its maps. As part of its defence against cross-site scripting attacks LJ blocks IFRAMEs from any entry HTML.

So no Google Maps for you...

(also no Popfly, nor Google Mashups, nor - the list goes on...)

The online Miieditor can save out Miis as 100 x 100 jpegs.

So I had a go with it, and ended up like this:



Oh dear... I'm not sure if it's convincing, but it's certainly fun, tweaking all the options to try and get the right image!

So how quickly will having a mii become a miime?

Now that LJ supports HTML in free text sidebar components, I've been tweaking the design of my blog a little.

A recent addition is a scriptless and Flashless Twitter badge. Found at BunnyHeroLabs, the badge creator generates an image with your latest twittering, and adds some HTML that links to your Twitter page. I tweaked the colours, and some of the badge HTML...

It's not perfect, but it'll do for now. Now if only LJ would let me link to Flash...

...using LiveJournal's bandwidth to post to my Livejournal, while waiting in a meeting room at SixApart...

I've created an LJ feed for IT Pro's blogs: itproblogs

It's a single feed for all the blogs - including jonhoneyball, Davey Winder, marypcb, and me...

It's been a while since I followed any memes, but this one is interesting...

Look at your LJ userpics list. If you have fewer than 50 icons, pick every fifth one. If you have between fifty and seventy-five icons, pick every seventh one. If you have over seventy-five icons, pick every tenth one. If you have fewer than ten, pick all of 'em.

List them on your LJ, and tell everyone exactly why you have it, why it's interesting to you, what significance does it have.

So here is every seventh image from my 57...


Piro at work. From the Megatokyo webcomic, and used when I'm talking about writing. My desk looks a little like this one (but is usually messier, and has more screens).


"It's our ride". The Serenity from Joss Whedon's "Firefly". I made this from a screen cap I took from a Firefly DVD, while experimenting with screen capture software and a new graphics software package.


Lavie and Klaus. An illustration by anime character designer Range Murata, from my favourite anime, the excellent "Last Exile". Steam punk with politics, and rather nifty flying machines. An default icon of old. I have the same picture on a mouse mat...


Cat and Girl. One of my favourite webcomics, everyone I introduce it to seems to run away from its excoriations of hipster culture, and its regular excursions into literary and artistic philosophy. Ah well, I say. Go buy the t-shirts.


The happy iPod. I use this one for music-related posts. Hand edited pixel-by-pixel from a Joy of Tech. Yes, it's another web comic...


A Range Murata character study of Lavie, again from "Last Exile". This used to be my default icon...


Hello Root Kitty. I don't like DRM, though I do understand why some people argue for its use. As a content creator I'm occasionally ambivalent - I want my writing to be free for anyone to read, however they want. But I also want to be paid, and I don't want my work used in ways I don't approve of...


A photo I took of an error message on our Scooba.I use this one for robot related entries. They're such dear little things as they scurry round the house cleaning up after us. Of course some day they'll rebel...

I'm feeling quite pleased with myself.

I've been delving into the mysteries of S2 and have been working out how to add custom HTML to a layout sidebar. The first fruits of my endeavours are now online, and I've add one of Flagrant Disregard's Flickr badges.

There's a lot of help in the new s2expressive community, which showed me how to create a new S2 style from an existing one, and how to add new customtext areas to my layout.

( Here's how I put it all together... )

And here's one I made earlier.

It's been a while since I've done anything to the look and feel of this ole blog. So, I've switched theme to something that gives it a look that's a bit more like my other blog.

With the launch of the new CSS-based Expressive style today, I've switched to using its London Cityscape theme from the grey Component theme I was using. I've quite liked the idea of a London cityscape look, and as this is a London-based blog. There are some nice touches too, including a Tag browser and proper permalinks for each entry, so you don't have to go prying through the comment HTML to link to an entry.

There will be some CSS tweaks to come (I want to change some of the fonts to start with).