Gallimaufry of Whits
Being for the Month of 2007-07
These are quick notes taken by Sean B. Palmer on the Semantic Web, Python
and Javascript programming, history and antiquarianism, linguistics and
conlanging, typography, and other related matters. To receive these bits of
dreck regularly, subscribe to the feed. To browse other
months, check the contents.
On Friday I published a Lo and Behold! post about Jenny Geddes. I'm now preparing the
Spring 2007 issue of Lo! which will be available for purchase on the
web.
Preparing the covers has been extremely difficult, even more so than
typesetting the content which you'd think would be the hardest part. The main
difficulty in the latter at the moment is that Code2000 isn't being recognised
by X11 which makes it rather hard to use it. With the covers, on the other
hand, I've been tweaking and tweaking them in Inkscape and I've still got more
to do. It's stunning already, though.
The content's coming along quite well too, for the Summer 2007 issue.
Because I've been doing so much other stuff in May and most of June I didn't
write any Lo! posts at all; it's nice to be doing them again, even if
it is exacting work. Of course it's on hold for a while again whilst I feck
with the printed version, but there you go.
Nine days since I last wrote a Whits post? Queen Jane was on the throne as
long. I've been thinking about writing a series of themed articles instead,
somewhat based on Bacon's essays and Dylan's Theme Time Radio Show. It's a nice
exercise in thinking big... trying to come up with novel things to say about
"love" or "patience" or "pavements" or "carousels" or "Penzance" or whatever...
Areopagitica, raddishes.
Been doing lots of Shakespeare and other research. A proof copy of Lo
and Behold! is shipping to me, which is exciting.
A note to anyone who experiences corruption in Font Book: try rebooting. I
had a problem with
Code2000 where it was showing two fonts and neither of them were working. They
effectively weren't installed even though it was saying that they were. After
reboot, which I didn't try immediately (this is OS X, man!), no such font was
displayed, so it was a simple matter of reinstalling it. It works now.
On the whole topical posts thing... another thing I've been thinking about
is a kind of reviews of the past site. The problem with a lot of really good
stuff is that there isn't much in the way of intelligent review on it. I mean,
of the sort of intelligent but posed to a layman sort of thing. I can go to
Wikipedia to read about Balzac, but I don't really get a feel for how he
writes, who he is, what his concerns were. What's his agenda? What's it like to
read him? I'd like to know before investing lots of hours reading his stuff.
I'd like some of the insight that someone else who's done that has.
Another example: I was just listening to Packin' Trunk Blues, by Leadbelly.
It's a really good song. Would you like it? Should anyone like it? I don't know
much about it, but there might not be a single other person I know who's heard
the song. Is it worth me reppin' it up to people? What about it do I like? It's
hard to answer these sort of things and write about a thing like Packin' Trunk
Blues competently. It's something I'd like to develop, I think, because it's
little reviews of things like that that fuels a lot of my research.
So with Packin' Trunk Blues, it's a slide guitar song, and the little
microtonal aspects of the slides are wonderful. In other words, he's playing
ever so slightly out of tune, deliberately, in such a way that it still sounds
really sweet. It also really underlines some of the idioms that guitar players
use with the slide; and Leadbelly's a master, so it's a good song for someone
wanting to learn how to use the slide. The blues story that the song tells is
pretty interesting. Probably the best part of the song are the harmonics at the
end that he uses to simulate a piano mentioned in the lyrics. It's rather like
the howling wind in Robert Johnson's Come On In My Kitchen. I don't think I've
heard Leadbelly using a slide before; it sure sounds like him, though.
On the font corruption
problem I had, Terje Bless points out Damaged Font Caches
and Caching Out.
The link to OnyX in the second post is broken, but it still seems to be around.
Installation is via a pkg, which is always annoying; and I don't think much of
the application either.
Morbus wrote an article called Earth
from Sagittarius Dwarf, not Milky Way? today, which discusses a bit of
astronomical hilarity that's been brewing recently. I did some of the research
with him... it's more fun doing pair research than pair programming. With
research you're almost always adding new information; with programming you're
changing structures and reorganising and so on. Making a thing rather than
investigating a truth.
Researching with Morbus is especially fun since he has the superhuman
ability to filter a lot more news than most people. He reads everything that
comes his way, whereas I don't have the steely resolve to do that. I'd not even
heard about this story!
One interesting thing I thought about when he was writing it up was that he
chose to present it the way that it was discovered. A lot of people write
things up by starting with the conclusion, but I think that the process of
discovery is best preserved because it's less likely to be boring that way. In
other words, writing about the process of discovery is like writing a good
crime novel, whereas doing the "conclusion first" thing would be like starting
the novel with "It was a dark and stormy night when the butler did it."
I was looking for places to get some disc space back from today, and I
noticed that my Firefox profile directory was taking up a bizarre amount of
space. It was my bookmarks files: every day Firefox backs up bookmarks.html
automatically to files like bookmarks-152.html, and it had accumulated 631MB of
backups. My bookmarks.html file itself is only 6MB.
The old bookmarks-<number>.html convention is apparently a Firefox
1.5ism; in 2.0 it uses bookmarks-YYYY-MM-DD.html files in a bookmarkbackups
directory instead. I also had a bookmarks.prespaces.html file, which is
apparently an artefact of the Firefox 3.0a5 installation.
So why did I have so many bookmarks? Well I use bookmarks as a kind of
replacement for slogger now. When I clean up a window of tabs, I bookmark all
the tabs in a folder: the most recent one I created, for example, is called
"2007-07-13 Sagittarius Dwarf Galaxy". Since they stretch back hundreds of
days... a grep for "HREF" reveals over 15,000 bookmarks. Scary. Not as big as
my Google Search
History though!
According to the Mozilla KB page on lost bookmarks, "Firefox
automatically makes up to five daily bookmark backups", so it looks like the
silly old 631MB problem is limited to Firefox 1.5.
I wrote an XLX to CLX
XSLT transformation for Björn. Alexander is his new grammar engine, for which
the primary syntax is an XML thing, so I thought I'd hack on the most obvious
RNC-like non-XML syntax. Now he's just got to port it to C. Can't wait for him
to actually release the thing.
Today in my little nature pictorial, a squirrel.
Flickr limits non-paying users to 5MB photos, so I had to resave it as a 98%
quality JPEG; 99% was still too big. For "vermin", squirrels are particularly
fun; I like the way that their tails quiver in the wind. This is a common grey
squirrel, which isn't indigenous to the United Kingdom but has sorta taken over
now. The old red squirrel still persists in places... I even got an old, print,
photo of one once.
The Spring 2007 edition of Lo and Behold! is being held up by the
fact that the "text will not print from file supplied". This is a bit of a
vague message from the printer, so after checking that my PDF was okay
according to their FAQ stuff I chatted with a Live Help person. They couldn't
work out what was wrong with it either, so they've referred the problem to the
specialist printer guys there, and they'll aim to get back to me about it
within the week.
I also got to ask about the cover not displaying right in the preview, and
they pointed me to a better method of preview which shows the run-off areas
correctly trimmed, so hopefully that'll come out okay. If the printer guys can
tell me what was wrong with it and suggest a fix, of course.
Shakespeareana is massive amounts of fun.
The web is not to be trusted regarding Shakespeare. I don't use the web for
finding out about Shakespeare now because it's so bad, but every so often when
I do I'm reminded of all the little inaccuracies. For example yesterday I was
reading a genealogy website talking about William Kemp:
'This William Kemp may be the same that, June 19,1622,London, at a Va. court
brought charges against Governor Yeardley for taking land settled by the early
colonist, which lay within tracts of land designed as "company lands". This
same William Kemp may be the famous William Kemp of William Shakespears group
of actors. He was known to be an actor,was a famous Morris dancer, comic or
clown of Royal court, and wrote "Nine Daies Wonder,in 1600. Part of the reason
I believe tis to be the one and the same is as follows.'
- Richard Quiney-1622-Brandon Plantation
Kemp was never mentioned after 1602, except for one burial in Southwark that
may well have been him. At any rate, it's exceedingly unlikely that he was
still around in 1622.
Information about Shakespeare seems to propagate slowly, too. In 2000, it
was discovered that
was used to be called Mary Arden's House was in fact not; it was a farm
belonging to a guy named Palmer. Yet if you do an image search
for Mary Arden's House, of the 5 out of the 7 unique images are, I believe,
Palmer's farm not Mary's Arden's House. Even the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust
who own both houses still have a photo of Palmer's Farm on its Mary's Arden's House
page but none of the actual house. Why?
Whilst I'm on the subject of Mary Arden's House, there was an article on
about.com called Mary Arden's
House It's Not about the mixup, which has a weird inaccuracy in it
itself:
"Glebe Farm was immortalized in a painting by John Constable, famous for his
breathtaking landscapes."
Glebe Farm is what the real Mary Arden's House has been called for a few
centuries up until now. But John Constable never painted it. His beautiful
painting (or see this bigger
version) isn't even of a Glebe Farm; it was originally called The
Valley Farm, and it's of a scene in the village of Latham, not Wilmcote.
The experts aren't all that much better sometimes, I must say. Eric Poole's
otherwise awesome 1983 article "Shakespeare's Kinsfolk and the Arden
Inheritance", for example, says that Robert Arden's will was proved on the 9th
December, but that's not so. According to the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust
Records Office Catalogue, it was "proved 16 December 1556". On the other hand,
they have the will listed under the dates "24 November 1556; 19 December 1556",
so they seem to be making an error too. Halliwell-Phillipps prints "xvj.|o| die
mensis Decembris"; the 16th December.
Wikipedia is probably the worst. I won't mention specific errors, but if you
go to probably any Shakespeare page you can find dozens of errors. Sometimes I
mark the errors as "[citation needed]" just to see if people will fill in the
impossibility with a source: it's nice to track where these errors come from.
The Wikipedia errors are so rampant that it's going to take a lot of people a
lot of time to fix, and thankfully a wiki is good for that. I got asked to join
the Shakespeare
WikiProject committed to cleaning up Bard-related errors, so I did.
Another problem with the web is that it just doesn't contain very much
information about Shakespeare. There are only two results for "I'le have his
picture in my study" from the famous Parnassus plays, for example (well,
there'll be more when this hits the search engines of course). You'd think the
web would be a great opportunity for getting all this data out there, but it's
not really happening yet. A great potential!
Bloom's ratios
are interesting, underneath his flight of rhetorical stuffiness.
Three rules of good logo
design from Cody:
- Lots of colours is a bad thing.
- It should be simple enough to scale down to horrifically small sizes and
still be legible.
- It should be simple enough for a 3rd grader to draw after looking at it for
a whole of 15 seconds.
Okay, he actually wrote "color". But that is an abomination.
Sean B. Palmer, inamidst.com
