Goodbye Mrs T, friend of Pinochet and the Khmer Rouge, homophobe, opposer of sanctions in South Africa and destroyer of the domestic mining industry.
It’s bizarre that a grand funeral is planned, when she believed that “there is no such thing as society” and that the state should be rolled back.
I hope that her funeral will be a huge demo against the savage austerity policies her successors are enacting. Let’s also note that her City deregulation allowed the casino banks to behave so recklessly before they collapsed, causing the financial system catastrophe that (apparently) requires the current attacks on the poor.
She was long ago irrelevant. But her legacy is vile, and current.
As you probably know, Google announced Blink, the new rendering engine that will power Opera and Chrome, forked from WebKit (which itself was forked from KHTML).
Thoughts on Blink – “WebKit wasn’t a love fest of like-minded engineers but 2 lions circling each other, always prepared for the battle” by Krzysztof Kowalczyk, an early contributor to WebKit
asm.js is a cool initiative from Mozilla. It’s a subset of JavaScript that will behave identically whether it is run in an existing JavaScript engine or an ahead-of-time (AOT) compiling engine
Nintendo Web Framework “is a development environment based on WebKit technologies, supporting application development on the Wii U system using HTML5, JavaScript, and CSS.”
Responsive Retrofitting – “finding a way to use responsive techniques on legacy sites to create a better experience for more users”
Industry
Introducing Tabula – “Upload a PDF, get back tabular CSV data.” Another cool Mozilla initiative.
Forty mobile phone facts – “every fifth person you meet has two phones and is probably a crystal meth dealer/having an affair.” Or is a developer.
It’s great to be able to talk publicly about Blink, the new engine that will power Opera’s browsers (disclosure: my employer, but this is a personal post) and Chrome henceforth. I know a lot of people worried that there would be less diversity on the Web once Opera Presto was retired, and the forking of WebKit into Blink restores that balance. Opera will be contributing to Blink in future.
[added 22:46 UK time] My boss, Lars Erik Bolstad, said on Opera’s behalf: “Our ambition is to contribute Opera’s browser engine expertise to Blink, ranging from the implementation of new web standards to improvements in existing code.”
My personal feeling (not representing my employer, wife, children or hamster) is that Blink has a lot of promise for the Web. Its architecture allows for greater speed – something that Opera and Google have long focused on. When browsers are fast and interoperable, using the web as a platform becomes more competitive against native app development. I also hope that it’s easier for smaller players and even individuals to contribute to the new rendering engine, with a more transparent gatekeeping process: “Our goal is for anyone to be able to participate, regardless of organizational affiliation.”
It’s also great that there will be no more vendor prefixes in Blink (only legacy ones inherited from WebKit that will be removed or dropped where possible). Vendor prefixes were like Morrissey’s solo career: on paper, a good idea – but in reality, a horrible mess.
So, hello Blink. With Presto remaining in the wild until 2020, and Firefox’s co-incidental announcement today that it’s collaborating with Samsung on two early stage projects to build a new rendering engine called Servo, diversity on the Web has never looked healthier, and interoperability never (er) interoperabler.
After extensive scientific research, I can reveal the four tiers of David Bowie.
Methodology
I realised I own no Bowie except an old 45 rpm single of “Sound and Vision” which I can’t play as I have no record player, went to the web to buy The Platinum Collection and listened to it a few times.
Rating system
- 20% is awarded for a catchy chorus
- 20% for having a good verse as well (often why some songs are relegated to Tier 2 or below – great choruses but weak verse)
- 20% for weird lyrics, sexual ambivalence
- 10% for singing in a funny voice (machismo of “Boys Keep Swinging”, mockney sneering)
- 10% for odd instrumentation (“Heroes”)
- 10% for a blistering guitar part (whether medlodic like Starman or just nasty like “Boys Keep Swinging”)
- 10% for being seminal (“Ziggy Stardust”)
Environment
1 bottle of Toro Loco Tempranillo wine, stereo cranked up so loud your partner wakes up and comes downstairs to give you a bollocking before stomping off to bed and waking early to turn on some bullshit Kerrang radio in revenge.
Results
Tier 1 (80% or more): Starman, Ziggy Stardust, Suffragette City, Heroes, Scary Monsters, Let’s dance, Boys Keep Swinging, All the Young Dudes (but Mott The Hoople’s version is still better at 100%; Bowie’s suffers from too much sax)
Tier 2: (65% – 79%) Life on Mars, Ashes to Ashes, Fashion, Jean Genie, Space Oddity, Sound and Vision, Diamond Dogs, The Prettiest Star
Tier 3: (50% – 64%) China Girl, Changes (great choruses, weak verse) Rebel Rebel, Oh You Pretty Things
Tier 4: the rest
Tier 67: Laughing Gnome, Tin Machine stuff, execrable covers of Let’s Spend The Night Together, The Alabama Song
Conclusion
Bowie’s best is sublime, and had hardly dated at all. There is a perception of a quality drop-off in the 80s, but some great songs came about during that time, although there was a lot of mediocre funk nonsense too. In a career spanning four decades, there is a good deal of filler but that’s both unsurprising and forgiveable, given the brilliance of his Tiers 1-3 work.
If Bowie came round to my house, I’d share a bottle of red with him and we could have a jam, and I’d even let him use my 12 string elecro-acoustic guitar.
Here’s how I did it, in case you’re lucky enough to have to convert Word documents to HTML (this one was pretty good, though – they used proper headings etc).
Replacing <h1><a name=" with <h1 id=" to turn old-fashioned named anchors into ids on elements
HTML Tidy didn’t work for me, leaving lots of redundant </a>s lurking around after step 3 above. So, I had a brainwave; I knew the browser’s parsing algorithm would dump those closing tags, so I went to Opera Dragonfly’s JS console, typed in document.documentElement.innerHTML and pasted the returned code into my document. Thanks Mathias!
some tedious replacement of funny characters with their character entities (isn’t there some utility that will do that?) No need to do this if you use UTF-8 and (d’oh) use a font with the right glyphs
Some very light styling
Don’t tell the boss, though; he thinks I’ve been working.
Pull Quotes with HTML5 and CSS using data-* attributes and generated content. “A pull quote is a purely visual technique, and therefore should not change the structure of the body”
Introducing TAL – TV Application Layer, an open source library for building applications for Connected TV devices, developed internally within the BBC as a way of vastly simplifying TV application development
What The Web Is Made Of – Interesting stats on what semantics (HTML, microdata, ARIA) are on the web.
The Short Cutts – For SEO-minded people, “we’ve done the hard work and watched every Matt Cutts video to pull out simple, concise versions of his answers”. Very useful, serviceable, beneficial, advantageous, helpful, cheap iphone, sex
Is this photo grounds for death? asks Clementine Ford about the Tunisian blogger Amina whose topless protests against Islamism earned her death threats. The article appears in Daily Life, “a proudly female biased website with content tailored to women”, an Australian publication which proudly censors the photo of Amina’s breasts after noting “In a rational society, breasts have no more power to hurt anyone than a gentle breeze can blow down a house made of bricks”. (Ford told me that the censorship is not her choice.)
I’m hopelessly naive about financial systems. (I have a grade C ‘A’-level economics, but that was in 1985, back when people still voted for Mrs Thatcher, so it’s like a degree in physics before relativity was discovered.) So I don’t understand the current lamentation about Cyprus.
Cyprus built up a gargantuan banking sector (835% of annual national income). It was a low-tax regime, in the sun, that encouraged lots of Russians (in particular) to invest their money there.
The significant expansion of the Cypriot banking system in general, and of the big domestically-owned banks in particular, has been part of the broader push to promote the island as an international business centre …
The current size of the Cypriot banking system, and particularly of the two biggest banks, raises the issue of whether growth has unequivocally been a good thing that should continue indefinitely.
In the case of Cyprus, the two big domestically-owned banking groups appear to satisfy the criteria for being systemically important… Their role as intermediaries of foreign financial flows and as providers of domestic financial services means that the collapse of either of them would have significant negative repercussions on the real economy and deleterious reputational effects on Cyprus as an international business centre.
Lots of people invested their money in Cyprus because it had low tax and good returns. They put their money there, rather than somewhere else, because they believed that they would get more money in Cyprus than in their own countries.
Meanwhile, the banks in Cyprus were too big to fail. Those words – “too big to fail” – are to international capitalists what “YOLO!” is to mid-teenage girls as they guzzle five bottles of alcopops, take selfies of themselves doing duckfaces with their bezzies before they snog an ugly stranger, burst into tears and throw up.
In brief: investors got better returns for their money, but took no actual risk because the banks were too big to fail. Until they failed.
The EU decided to bail out Cyprus. If it hadn’t, presumably those banks would have collapsed and depositors lost everything. Because it’s being bailed out (with EU money), depositors with over 100,000 Euros will lose 30% of their deposits, and retain 70% of them. They took a risk in the hope of better-than-average returns, as is their right in a capitalist economy, and lost. But instead of losing everything, they keep most of it.
Meanwhile, I’ve given them some of my money as part of the EU bailout, yet I was never invested in the dodgy Cypriot bank in the first place.
A transgender primary school teacher decided to transition to life as a woman. Her school was supportive:
Mr Upton has made a significant change in his life and will be transitioning to live as a woman after the Christmas break. She will return to work as Miss Meadows.
Richard Littlejohn, a columnist with the Daily Mail (a UK tabloid with a circulation of approximately 2 million), devoted a long column to excoriating her:
But has anyone stopped for a moment to think of the devastating effect all this is having on those who really matter? Children as young as seven aren’t equipped to compute this kind of information …
Why should they be forced to deal with the news that a male teacher they have always known as Mr Upton will henceforth be a woman called Miss Meadows? Anyway, why not Miss Upton?
The school shouldn’t be allowed to elevate its ‘commitment to diversity and equality’ above its duty of care to its pupils and their parents.
It should be protecting pupils from some of the more, er, challenging realities of adult life, not forcing them down their throats.
These are primary school children, for heaven’s sake. Most them still believe in Father Christmas. Let them enjoy their childhood. They will lose their innocence soon enough…
But if he cares so little for the sensibilities of the children he is paid to teach, he’s not only trapped in the wrong body, he’s in the wrong job.
(I don’t know if Mr Littlejohn has any children, but mine and the Primary school children I taught in Turkey and Thailand were certainly far more matter-of-fact about such matters than adults are.)
Sadly, Miss Meadows is dead; it’s presumed she committed suicide. In an email to a friend, she described how she was hounded by the press, noting that many parents had tried to give positive reactions to the press, but those were ignored:
I know the press offered parents money if they could get a picture of me… Many parents have been quite annoyed with the press too, especially those that were trying to give positive comments but were turned away.
Entirely co-incidentally, no doubt, Littlejohn’s column has been removed from the Daily Mail website. The newspaper issued a statement:
It is regrettable that this tragic death should now be the subject of an orchestrated twitterstorm, fanned by individuals… with agendas to pursue. Our thoughts are with the family and friends of Lucy Meadows.
This enrages me. I’m one of those on Twitter who’ve tweeted about how nastily Littlejohn and The Mail have behaved. As a white heterosexual male in a nuclear family with a professional job, I’m probably one of the army of “normals” that the Mail wishes to mobilise against the freaks, perverts, lefties and other undersirables (just don’t tell them that my family is mixed race).
No-one has “orchestrated” my outrage. But I certainly do have an agenda to pursue. It’s the agenda of fairness, of tolerance, of live-and-let-live. These are qualities that I associated with Britishness, incidentally; “Britain” is a flag that Littlejohn and The Daily Mail like to wrap themselves in, yet they want a society in which people think it’s right to hound, harrass and hate “minorities”. And I won’t have it.
For “minorities”, read “people”.
Miss Meadows caused me no harm. She was obeying the law, involved in her community, hurting no-one and helping many. My agenda is that such people deserve our respect and support. And if you find men transitioning to women makes you queasy, simple: don’t do it. Just quietly go about your business and don’t interfere with how other people live their lives.
So, in the unlikely event that any Daily Mail journalist or reader ever sees this, yes – I do have an agenda: fairness, tolerance, live-and-let-live. What’s your agenda?
When I was a young roister-doister, I lived in a flat with my massive tomcat, Bagpuss. Bagpuss was a bit weird, as he was obsessed with water. Perhaps in a previous feline incarnation he’d been a Van cat. It’s all the more surprising considering that once, when he was a kitten, he’d jumped up onto the toilet seat to peer into the water and fallen in, head first. Luckily I was in the bathroom shaving and was able to pull him out before he drowned.
A common way for me to entertain him would be to turn on the tap just slightly so water would drip out once a second, and he’d sit next to the sink and attempt to bat the falling drips with his paws. This could keep him transfixed for an hour.
Here he is, with one of his lady admirers:
Once, however, his behaviour metamorophosed from the quirky to the terrifying.
Picture the scene: I was lying in the bath, naked (as one does) when the door opened slightly and in came Bagpuss. He leaped up on to the edge of the bath to get a better view of the water, lost his footing and fell in. If you’ve ever seen a three feet long tomcat, flailing around in a panic with his claws extended fully, you’ll know to get out of the way. Now, imagine one on top of you, while you’re completely nude. It’s utterly terrifying. With one hand cupping the Bruce Juice Introducer™, I picked him up by the scruff of his neck and evicted him from the tub, and then had to spend 15 minutes soothing him before he’d let me turn the hairdryer on him.
“Browser Versions Are Dead”- One hour talk by @getify on why feature detection is the only sensible development methodology
Media queries for multichannel audio? – suggestion by Netflix: “This would save network bandwidth as well as providing better quality (if the custom-mixed stereo audio is likely better than the end-device down-mixed version)”
Encrypted Media Extensions (the official term for HTML5 DRM) – 1 hour 40 mins video presentation from John Simmons of Microsoft
The purpose of DRM by Hixie. Interesting analysis (“The purpose of DRM is not to prevent copyright violations. The purpose of DRM is to give content providers leverage against creators of playback devices”) but avoids direct question of why Google supports it.
Hyperbole corner: “websites are dead” says person employed by Asda to do social media rather than its website (which they haven’t taken offline) “while exploring ways to tie-in the mobile and social customer journey to their in-store experiences”
