Tuesday, July 22, 2008
I did the Dunwich Dynamo over the weekend and I saw the moon!
This year it didn't rain; after the bad weather of 2006 and the plain awful continuous downpour of 2007, it was something of a shock. I started at 20:45 and saw the moonrise a little after 22:00 when the disc cleared a cloud bank on the horizon. As this year was fine it was no surprise to see the jam-jars out and lit. 
In fact the elusive lighter, a woman on a recumbent, succumbed to one of my few snaps (with a mobile). However, despite her standing under a streetlamp, she's dark, wearing dark and in the dark, she remains elusive. At an early stop, someone thought my front light sufficiently artistic - you can judge for yourself - there are quite a lot of photos on the Flickr tag.
I did the ride in a few minutes over nine hours of cycling at an average of 13.1 mph, arriving at Dunwich at 06:28 Sunday. I'm getting a little faster each time but nothing like as fast as my companions who, though they stopped less than I did (about 45 mins all told), were well over an hour quicker. The ride was lengthened this year for a different midway stop and they reckon it was 119 miles. I recorded almost exactly that but that counted mine to Ipswich station (1.5) and Liverpool Street to the start (about 2.75) so I think my counter lost some on the way.
This year was more like the early hours of 2006 when we were greeted by curious people, including examples of "Dulwich? You're going the wrong way". Somewhere in dark Suffolk a woman urged us all up a hill, a car-full thinking it was a race yelled that I was in front by miles (the guy I'd been following punctured) and a puzzled drunk bewilderedly repeated "are you going to Dunwich too??" as each of us passed.
My only slight mishap was that my saddlebag opened. Alerted to this by my pump falling out, I discovered my long-sleeved jersey missing. I cycled back about 400 yards only finding a dead rat in the road. I asked a group who had stopped for respite and they'd seen nothing so I decided to give up on it. I'd made about two pedal turns when one of they called out that he'd just seen it in some car headlights about 10 yards further on. I decided wearing it would be safer and warmer. That about sums up the night - everyone looks out for everyone else.
Thursday, January 03, 2008
New year, new look.
I've had this in mind for a while - I noticed that my 'style test' had a date in 2006 - but I thought it would chime nicely with the new year. When I started with a home page in 2002 the prevailing style was rather more elaborate than it is today and the old format had started to look decidedly dated.
I hope you like the new minimalist approach. I suspect I haven't finished dithering the look yet so any comment would be valuable.
Sunday, May 20, 2007
Well, I had hoped to be a little more active here following my quitting the day job but in fact I'd probably have been shaken from inactivity in any case...
In the last week this domain name has been spoofed by a spammer.
As far as researches show, there's not much I can do about it. I have some of the mails - included in undeliverable and out-of-office replies - and can get an IP address but I guess that's not much use. The volume isn't awful, about 150 to date (who knows what hit rate these people get?), and, as of today, appears to be subsiding. Had my mail forwarding not been 'anything@' I suppose I wouldn't have seen any of this. I'm hoping the activity level doesn't cause dubiouslogic.com to get blacklisted.
So, apologies to anyone being bothered by this.
Sunday, January 02, 2005
Just putting down a new year marker as a statement of intent to keep this a little more up to date - or at least have the frontpage show that - the EADT pages continue to be updated weekly. (Incidentally I was quite chuffed that I'd managed to cater for the new year quite well last time - of course I'd forgot and had to go back to the code again, maybe I should write a few notes for myself.)
I'm glad to see Alamut is back after a lengthy absence. In fact, I was slightly motivated by tidiness to delete it - I'm glad I didn't. I have had to remove Craig and Ilse's 'Tripping on Travel' though. That vanished some time early in 2004. I guess they're back in the land of the ordinary now - I must track them down.
Saturday, February 14, 2004
It's hard to keep track of the name changes of Mozilla's browser but now it's Firefox (from Firebird) but as far as I can tell, it's still the best browser by a distance.
Tuesday, November 18, 2003
Not that you'd catch me browsing the web at work you understand, but one of my colleagues pointed out this neat tool, ShockStart that allows you to keep your bookmarks off-line, and so synchronised between two sites. There have been a few of these but ShockStart is a neat example and easy to use.
Tuesday, May 27, 2003
On a dark and windy morning (4:56am to be precise) I was stirred from my slumbers by the sound of nightingales outside. So I recorded some audio clips 1, 2, 3 and 4 (all four zipped), together with photographs of the ground.
My digital camera has the ability to attach a 40 second sound recording to an image. I had got within three yards of the bird which was well hidden and confident of its camouflage, so I pointed the camera downwards. I was slightly alarmed when the flash went off but I didn't want to fiddle with the exposure, lengthen the time inordinately and mess with the sound recording. He didn't seem to notice at all and continued to duel with the another some way off (which you can hear best in one although four is my favourite). The wind was making my eyes water and I muffed the exposure on 3 so it's only a few seconds long.
Wednesday, May 21, 2003
Two people I know have thrown in the towel of corporate concerns and gone off travelling have put together a rather impressive site. Craig and Ilse are currently in North America heading north.
[2-Jan-2005] Their site 'www.trippingontravel.com' has sadly disappeared.
Friday, February 21, 2003
Quiet days on the web.
However, one recent amusing diversion. It transpired that a recruitment agency got the impression 'Dubious Logic' was the vehicle for a high powered company specialising in software for the banking business. Seemed almost a shame to have to disembarrass the head-hunter of this...
Tuesday, December 10, 2002
I've got the definitive handle on the reason why the suit symbols look so bad on IE (only < 6.0 - that's OK). Ed Colley, more usually featuring as bridge partner writes;
Here's an explanation of why Mozilla handles the Symbol font the way that it does. First a bit of background: The ASCII (or ISO Latin 1) 8-bit character set uses 97 for "a". The Symbol font has a lower-case alpha character at glyph index 97.
Historically, character numbers and glyph indices were identical (possibly with a choice of "code pages"). So an old application, when attempting to display "a" in the Symbol font will display an alpha.
This was useful behaviour before the wide acceptance of unicode, although limited to people with the same Symbol font, with the same characters at the same indices. In a unicode world, the direct link between character numbers and font glyph indices no longer holds, mainly because very few fonts support all unicode characters.
A unicode-aware application can easily display an alpha by requesting the glyph for entity α (unicode B1;). The entity α can be correctly processed by any unicode application.
So if a unicode-aware application is processing a document with the entity a (which corresponds to lower case "a") and the current font is Symbol, what should it do? The backward compatible behaviour is to display glyph 97 from the Symbol font, which is a lower case alpha. The forward-looking behaviour is to attempt to display a latin lower case "a". Since Symbol does not have such a character, a replacement will have to be found from a visually-similar font. This is what Mozilla does when rendering HTML.
Although it can (and is) argued that the Mozilla approach is unhelpful, it is certainly the case that using α (finally - α) and the like is the way to go.
So there you go...
Sunday, December 08, 2002
Some time since the last post, but then again, some time since the last change of substance.
The EADT pages continue to grow week by week but I've now re-written the HTML generation so that there are a few extra features together with some formatting changes. Now I think the suit symbols should appear on all browsers. That said, they may not actually look as good on IE as they used to - an effect of moving from the Symbol font and the hard-coded character codes to the entity codes '♠' etc. together with a regular font (I chose Courier).
That's it - happy to take any feedback.
Sunday, July 07, 2002
On a different note I recently uncovered something for which I'd been searching the net for years. Many, many years ago I visited an exhibition in Linz of the works of Alfred Kubin and since then have always visualized the the poster from the gallery. It was a detail from a fantastic creature and made for an intriguing advert for the works. From time to time I tried various search engines and came up with very little - though often quoted as an influence, Kubin's drawings seem rarely represented.
On Friday I during one such peiodic search I found Beauty and Ruin a site devoted to Symbolist art inter alia and there Fairytale Creature, the work that gave rise to the image. All of the artist's works look much darker than I remember them. My reminisences are for a more folk-lore inspired genre; Grimms tales and Gorey without any saving humour; Kubin now looks gloomy and fantastic in equal measure. I wonder how good it has been to actually fill in the detail of the memory.
Good news bad news; new computer but having a bit of trouble getting old data and procedures transfered across, hence no EADT column from Saturday - sorry. Will be up and running soon I hope.
Tuesday, July 02, 2002
Who's have thought a football link would make it here? The author, a colleague, was working in Japan througout the event - 'Sid RB' is a pseudonym - please don't make me explain...
Thursday, June 20, 2002
I've updated the links (right) to point to a couple of friend's sites (Chris R & Steve H) and Comatose Kid - repaying the compliment
Wednesday, June 05, 2002
A bit more messing about. I changed the style sheet so the right pane comes down far as the centre one is allowed to (though without the scroll bars). I think it looks better but I was told to do it anyway. Also added a few more links to that right column including newest Blog, 'Under the table' a set of ad hoc tasting notes on random imbibings. I'll get the wine pages running eventually but this is probably the most useful anyway.
Friday, May 24, 2002
Actually, I got kind of confused. I didn't need to do the right-hand link modify from home. As the whole of the front page is Blogged, it's just part of the template - such is the power of the blog. Speaking of which the Guardian had this to say on the subject.
I've just discovered the pub crawl generator now there's a neat idea...
Thursday, May 23, 2002
Hurrah! I've got the archives to appear on the same page as the blogs - well New Cat Diary anyway.
This wasn't quite the cakewalk that the guys at Blogger make out but probably this isn't their fault. Server Side Includes are the easiest - and likely to most readily allowed by the host - and these are effectively a page pre-processor. In order to keep this to a minimum the files to which it is appropriate have extensions '.shtm'. This has meant that New Cat Diary has changed location - or filename which is the same thing. Sorry to the (few) that have book-marked it. At this very moment even the link on the right is wrong... (I'll fix that when I get home).
Unfortunately the archives exhibit the ghastly American date format. That seems even harder to change but I will try.
Tuesday, May 21, 2002
A Bloggable front page at last!
If I admit it, the real motivation is that I can update it from work.
Shhhh...
Wednesday, May 01, 2002
Having installed Opera 6.01, I've discovered some faults with my CSS - there are still some glitches, but the layout in that browser doesn't look quite so bad now.
[1-Jan-2005] This and all the earlier posts were 'faked' for the front page even after I made it 'bloggable'. But now Google have enhanced much of Blogger you can edit the dates of posts so I've gone back and restored these half-dozen properly.
