I've been shopping for a new DVD player recently, and have been quite surprised by the attitude of so many shops when I ask which of their players are multi-region.
I'd really like a multi-region DVD & Blu-ray player, but that hardly seems like an option. I expect I'll get an encumbered PS3 later on, and a multi-region DVD player now.
A typical response from shops that sold decent electronics was 'We don't sell that sort of thing' and to suggest I try a cheaper, dodgier part of town.
This is tricky for me as I'm looking for two distinct kinds of quality. I want both:
- a well designed, constructed and built machine, with particularly good upscaling to 1080p, so it looks good on our HD telly.
- a lack of anti-user features that will mean some of the discs I own won't play because of where in the world they were originally sold.
They are both about a smooth and pleasant user experience, but one is the side of that the industry pushes, the other is about how the industry tries to segment markets in both time and space.
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The Web is becoming more fragmented, and not quite so World-Wide. More and more often, I get to sites that can't show me what I'm there for because of where I seem to be coming from.
I know there's nothing in the internet's protocols that reliably dobs in where you are coming from, so it never really gets in the way.
Having recently moved from the UK to Canada, I naturally want to keep in touch with the old country. Moreover, I watch a number of things from our southern neighbours. As a geek I have no trouble routing my traffic so that I can see the end result. It's always a little clumsy but works in the end. If the BBC let me pay for an overseas TV licence, I'd likely jump at the chance.
I've been misidentified as German, Swedish and, very occasionally, Polish. If it's just Google taking a best-guess as to which site you'd likely prefer with a clear link back to what you actually asked for, that's fairly harmless.
[Image from the NASA Earth Observatory, by Reto Stöckli, based on data from NASA and NOAA. Thank you.]
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I still love London, but I'm getting to love Toronto, too.
I've only been here a shade over a week but have already found a gaggle of fine places for The List.
More on Love Toronto…
The UK's Home Office has been running a consultation, entitled Keeping the right people on the DNA database.
I'm gravely sceptical about the entire episode and, throughout, the document tilts heavily towards keeping DNA for a long time because that will – supposedly – make us safer.
David Mery has had some choice words and a very thorough response to the Home Office's proposal. I am not so thorough, and kept my contribution to the section of which Ben Goldacre rightly asked 'Is this a joke?'.
The consultation closed yesterday, here is my contribution, written from the vantage point of my academic high horse.
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I'll be moving out of London in just a few short weeks, but I'm far from tired of it. Here's a quick run-down of some of my favourite establishments. I've been popping in as often as possible lately, each time not knowing if that'll be the last time for a good, long while.
Update at 09:07 BST, 4th August 2009 – Honourable mentions: The Old Mitre and The Harp
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(As you'll have spotted, there's strong language here. If that offends you, I suggest you move along. I try not to swear with wild abandon, but instead I try and save it for abso-fucking-lutely deserving cases.)
A nasty thing happened to me seven months ago today, and for most of that time I've been avoiding talking about it, let alone writing about it. To the few friends I have bothered with this, you have my deepest thanks: for your thoughtful suggestions but mainly for patiently listening to me with a sympathetic ear, even when I was far from my normal self.
Just before Christmas last year, late at night in Soho, a number of things happened that were deeply shit. The nastiest bit wasn't any of these:
- being jumped in the street by three miscreants, while trying to make my way home with Mary
- that the attack was, to me, pretty clearly motivated by three young white thugs seeing a mixed-colour couple, and feeling some caveman-like desire to 'protect' the white woman, who was not in any threat, except inside their tiny little cave-brains.
- having my bag nicked, containing nearly every bit of portable electronics that I owned
The really nasty thing that happened was that at a moment where I felt victimised and in need of support and aid, that the Metropolitan Police turned up. That's when the evening went from being unpleasant to a proper fucking cock-up. Somehow they saw three white blokes laughing, and one distressed pale brown bloke, and assumed the singular guy in torn clothing, crying was the culprit.
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After the G20 mess, I'm exercised about the police failing to identify themselves properly while in uniform.
I took this picture of officers failing just so a few weeks ago. This week, I dropped it in to the local police station to ask what was going on, and to complain.
I've just heard back from the inspector there.
More on #policehide followup…
The police have been misbehaving. I'm angry about that, and would like to do something practical.
I'm pleased that people aren't sticking to the supposed ban on photographing the police. The videos of Ian Tomlinson being attacked from behind minutes before his death and the seemingly brutish attack on a woman at the memorial protest the following day show that we really do need some daylight here.
Update at 10:31 BST, 21st April 2009 – Added notes on how to tag things.
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Testing Web pages is a pretty complex task. Very often we settle for too little, checking little more than:
- that our markup validates against the spec
- that a simple link-checker doesn't find dead links
- & that some monkey-testing doesn't turn up any glaring errors
Those are good checks to make, but we need to do a lot better.
I want to make some declarative statements about what is expected of different pages, and have them run routinely. For complicated pages, that depend on user-supplied, database-held or offsite data, I'd like to run the tests on any pages I might ever ship, and give the administrators a decent stab at recreating the error and damn-well fixing it.
Thankfully, the CSS people have done a fine job of allowing you to pick out parts of an HTML document and then apply styles to them. Better yet, we've just about reached the point where smart designers can express what they want in CSS, without needing to write anything terribly complicated.
This is a little idea for how to do that. There's no implementation yet, but I'm looking for feedback on doing it this way. The basic idea is to express some useful, human-level tests in a CSS-like language that make sense to more than code-nerds, and use them to test individual Web pages, or entire sites, and be more confident that they do all that you expect, and nothing that you don't.
Update at 16:03 BST, 8th April 2009 – Minor tweak to the examples.
More on Cascading Test Sheets…
Here's a little script I wrote a while back to quickly pull up a browser at a particular page on Wikipedia.
It's similar to the one I use for Googling from the command-line, but for Wikipedia (or any site that runs on MediaWiki).
Get the script.
Tagged: Code
Posted at 19:05 GMT, 21st March 2009.
Just a quick note to explain that this site has just moved to a new domain: ashok.org.uk. The old one (ashok.videdot.com) was cumbersome in various ways, not least because videdot is a very sleepy project these days. All old links will work, and take you to the right new place.
Apologies to people who follow my feeds, as you will see fake 'new' items everywhere. It's a one-off thing, and I don't expect to move again for a very long time.
In other site news, you can now get a feed of new places as they are added to The List.
Posted at 08:26 GMT, 20th January 2009.