I went along to my first Edinburgh Coffee Morning today at a startlingly early 8am. Met up with Nico on the way who was cycling to work, I should really start doing that. Anyway, the coffee chat was excellent. Talked to lots of different people: designers, developers, teachers, advertisers. It’s an eclectic mix of folks and makes for a good range of topics, generally about web “2.0” (god I’m sick of that term). Let’s see who I can remember: Johnnie Walker, Mike, Ewan, Phil and lots of other people who’s names I can’t remember. I’ll definitely try and make it next week.

The Pixar : 20 years of animation exhibition has arrived in Edinburgh. We need to go and see this.

Desolation Row Redux – a photoset on Flickr of haunting, abandoned futuristic homes in Taiwan

Coworking – really neat idea

11 Top Underground Transit Systems in the World – Highlights, Pictures and Video

My parents were visiting last weekend (and Monday) and we managed to cram in a lot of sights and eating out.

Saturday

Went out for a brilliant lunch at Centotre, a swish Italian place on George street. We had to wait a while for a table but it was certainly it. I had some gorgeous pasta with really spicy rustic sausage stirred into it. Then a super-chocolaty desert that was all very well presented. Highly recommended. Kerry had to work in the evening so my folks and I went to the Cameo to see Notes on a Scandal. Pretty much does what it says on the tin. Judy Dench is rather menacing when she gets to play a villain and Cate Blanchett is, as usual, gorgeously serene.

Sunday

Had breakfast out with Ian and Neil and then toured the many second hand bookshops in the South side. I picked up up a load of retro Bond paperbacks which I intend to do something clever with, and Felaheen by JCG.

Monday

Killed time in National Gallery on the Mound, playing with their very intuitive touch screen “library” computers. Caught the free galleries bus out to Stockbridge. Saw Off the Wall and Geometry in Art exhibitions at the Modern Art and Dean galleries respectively. Had lunch in the Modern Art cafe, good food and a good location. We took a very meandering route back into town by walking up the Water of Leith footpath through Dean Village and emerging at yet more second-hand bookshops where I got More Eric Meyer on CSS for 2 quid, bargain! In the evening we had Tapas out at Barioja and Kerry had her first drink (of alcohol) for three months!

Web events seem to be sprouting up all of the place at the minute in Edinburgh! I’m attending the Highland Fling conference in April which sounds very interesting. Refresh Edinburgh has also appeared out of the wood-work to hold an event on the day after Highland Fling. Plus, there is Barcamp Scotland happening in March, based in Appleton Tower no less. Interesting times.

Update: Also Web Security Conference Day for Windows Developers from scottishdevelopers.com, thanks John.

Fascinating article by the Guardian about the Corsham bunker

Folding under pressure – awesome origami

James Camerson’s “Avatar” pushes boundaries

As usual the Penny Arcade guys are on the button with the recent video game scare story

The Brothers Turnbull have been having a bit of re-design. They now have a shiny new site for their Rotacoo company and Alex has as new site design complete with lavish over-use of moofx.

Very clever video with a good message:

Kerry and I have just starting watching Heroes via our friends in the USA, and it’s awesome! The best new series I’ve watched in a while. It’s a mix of the best bits of all of the recent comic-book movies. The fun bits of Spidey where he is discovering his powers and the more “real word” collisions of x-men. It’s also chock full of comic book references, geeky characters and some excellent story arcs. We watched about five episodes back to back the other night so it must be good.

Sex offenders could be forced to register their e-mail addresses and chatroom names, the government says.

This has got to be the stupidest idea I’ve heard for a while and a prime example of the illusion of security as often explained by Bruce Schneier. In real life it is tricky but not impossible to fake an identity. But online a new “identity” (email address or chat nickname) can be created in seconds. Plus, what is this supposed system that would be screen all of these people? How soon would that system’s powers be abused for “law enforcement” purposes or the database get leaked/stolen? There are some real technological geniuses manning the pumps somewhere in our government…

Hey The Reef! (or Shark Bait as it’s known in the US) Toy Story called, yeah, they want their font back.

Interesting article on the Observer Online about coffee and Starbuck’s domination of the market

Great flickr set of the Branscombe Beach booty

I’ve ditched my oh-so-2006 binary feed reader and switched to Google Reader. It’s pretty slick to use and has clever stats and features that just aren’t present in desktop application readers. I can also catch up on all my feeds in my lunch break at work or just generally when I’m not at my home PC.

I was talking with my Mum last night and realised that we share one (among many) particular trait: not finishing things. In my free time I’m great at starting projects but not so good at actually finishing them. So, with that in mind I’m listing all of my half finished projects here in a hope of shaming myself into maybe finishing them off some day.

Lothian buses routes on Google Maps

Take the route (list of street names) from the Lothian Buses timetable and dump them into the Google Maps route finder. Inelegantly scape the results to extract the GPolygon munge. Then stick all the paths together to get the final route.

Shown left is the (rough) route of the number 22. The bus I used to have to take to work when I lived out in the “boonies”.

WordPress Amazon plugin

I’ve started a WordPress plugin to allow easy access to the Amazon e-commerce API. Mainly to facilitate extracting product information. So you can say stuff like “I’m currently reading –AMAZONASIN–” and my plugin will fetch all the necessary information like title, author, image etc. The API isn’t super-fast so I’m currently at the stage of working out a schema to cache all the necessary information. The different types of products all have a different subset of attribute fields, so I’m trying to work out a flexible solution. I’ve also worked on some image processing trickery to allow for the oh so trendy apple-style “book at angle with reflection” image (as seen left). It’s a bit jaggy at the minute, I need to find out how to do blurring with GD in PHP. I’ve even got a Google Code page for this project which handily has SVN access.

I know there are a few plugins out there that do this already but they either aren’t flexible enough or just look too amateurish for my liking.

Edinburgh Urban Art

I started doing an interface to the Flickr group I set up. The basics are there but it could do with some more pizazz.

Book Blog

Over at /books/ I like to keep track of what I’ve been reading. I’ve managed to keep this up for almost two years but should really get around to doing something more exciting with the design. Actual book data is what inspired my WordPress plugin above. So, when that is finished the page should be awash with tags, photos, reviews etc.

The SCI FI channel are making a TV version of Neal Stephenson’s awesome book The Diamond Age: Or a Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer.

Woman’s Health magazine has an article recommending today’s modern, assertive and adventurous girls should join their ‘fella’ in a few games as a slightly weird form of foreplay

In my mission to get fitter I went for a run this morning. I had my (gleaming bright white) trainers on, trackies and a fleece. Plus my rookie style woolly hat. It started totally chucking it down when I was half way across the meadows and so I was battling along through the elements. Man, did that shower feel good when I got back in out of the wind and rain.

I finally got my copy of The Elements of Typographic Style by Robert Bringhurst from Amazon. As part of my new year resolutions I’m on a quest to learn something about typography. I must layout text on a web page every day at work at I’d like to know how to do it properly, and therefore improving the value of the page. After reading around on the web this book seems to be the bible and is very nicely designed and looks to be pretty readable. There’s even some chap doing an online version with Bringhurt’s typographic guidelines ‘Applied to the Web’. If you’re going to buy it online make sure you get the latest edition (3.1), which wasn’t immediately findable on amazon uk.

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Pellentesque odio est, rhoncus eget, facilisis eu, mattis a, tortor. Class aptent taciti sociosqu ad litora torquent per conubia nostra, per inceptos hymenaeos. Phasellus congue justo eu eros. Donec pretium tellus quis mi. Morbi ultrices vehicula elit. Proin in elit. Donec hendrerit, risus ac pretium interdum, ipsum ligula viverra felis, non aliquam felis ligula in elit. Suspendisse lacus. Etiam id arcu. Sed consectetuer porta enim. Fusce arcu sem, venenatis et, suscipit vel, rutrum at, tortor. Maecenas semper commodo tellus. Donec vehicula urna ut dui. Morbi aliquam porttitor leo. Vestibulum magna pede, tincidunt non, viverra quis, pharetra sed, turpis. Donec elementum.

I was just into this when I lost it with my bag in ye great bag losing of xmas 06.

Just read an excellent article on why the new series of Battlestar Galactica is awesome in todays dead-tree Guardian. I heartily agree with everything said, plus they mention Firefly so the author obviously has some taste and knows what they’re talking about. You can, of course, read it online.

No doubt I’m adding to the general blog buzz here about the latest Apple announcement but it’s just too shiny to pass up. Yes, it is called the iPhone even though Linksys own the name (or whatever that last rumour was). It’s a combination of the “wide screen video iPod” and the “apple mobile” rumours. I have to say, I want one.

In real terms, they are far too expensive, will probably scratch easily and aren’t out in Europe until the end of the year. Still shiny though…

Man puts recipient’s name and a vague map of their location on a letter, and it gets delivered!

24 ways to impress your (web development) friends

Adobe kuler – this is really neat, why hadn’t anyone told me about this?

Christmas at my parents with Kerry was great fun. We managed to get down there without any transport troubles. My Granny was also there, so that made it a ‘proper’ family event. I got some very nice pressies: chocolate, whisky, books, DVDs. Thank you to everyone for all of them. Christmas dinner was both beef and turkey with all the usual veg and stuff. My sister and her boyfriend had made starters and put on a great finger buffet style spread of Italian meats and mozzarella, Indian bites with cucumber dip and melon balls and prawn cocktail. Kerry and I had agreed to make trifle for desert. We’d got all the sponge, fruit and jelly done (and set) the night before but when we came to add the custard it wouldn’t set, even after about six hours in the fridge! We just served it in the kitchen and said it was quite as firm as we’d liked… I think we got away with it as everyone seemed to enjoy it. When we’d finished dinner, we all looked at the clock and noticed that dinner had taken six hours! Now that’s what I call a meal.

Disaster struck on the way back into Edinburgh. We had loads of bags to carry and I managed to leave one of them in the taxi we got back to the flat. It had my digital camera, ipod, scarf, latest copy of Edge and some of my Mum’s christmas cake in it! Doh! I immediately noticed but the taxi had already disappeared around the corner. Raced up to the flat and called around all of the black cab companies but heard nothing back. I reported it lost the next day but still haven’t heard anything 🙁 Looks like I’ll need to claim on our household insurance.

A Christmas Strongbad Email