The latest National Geographic magazine ran a single page feature on Ecofont – a new font design that is supposed to require 20% less ink when printing, developed by a Dutch agency called SPRANQ. This obviously would provide a financial saving for printers, but also help reduce the environmental damage incurred in manufacturing and disposing of ink and toner cartridges.

The font is not intended as a final print font for design or reports, rather the designers intend it to be used for draft-type printing and for general everyday printing (emails, memos, etc).

But this is rather limited as an effective means of saving resources. For one thing, the document being printed must be written using this font, and since a lot of documentation is typically written outside of an organisation (emails, etc), then this is outside the control of the person printing unless they edit the document to use the new font, which incurs a time cost. There are also many times when changing the font from the original to ecofont just aren’t appropriate – for example, it wouldn’t make sense to replace a specific font in a draft design.

A much better option is to set your printer defaults to draft printing, and only ever use full printing for final print jobs. That way, you get much greater reductions in ink usage regardless of what font you are using, and even when you are printing graphics and images.

After playing a couple of turns on Empire and then closing the game, I got the regular Steam advertising for new content. One of the games looked interesting, so I grabbed the demo and played it as far as I could and then figured that for US$8.99, the full game might just be worth it.

The game is Osmos, and is produced by Hemisphere Games, one of many small independents who are able to market their games through the Steam content delivery system and bypass the usual publishers and problems therein.

The game itself is quite simple – you are a blob (or an amoeba or somesuch), and you jet around by ejecting some of your mass in the opposite direction in which you want to travel (this can also come in handy in order to move other blobs as conservation of momentum is maintained in collisions as well).

Your basic goal is to feed on smaller blobs, and to not be eaten by bigger blobs. There are a variety of other blobs out there, although the game isn’t quite sadistic enough to throw all varieties at you at once. The game ramps up pretty quickly from the introductory levels, and leaves you with some incredibly difficult and frustrating levels towards the end.

The most amazing thing about this game is the realisation that it is a physics game – as well as the conservation of momentum, there are other blobs that ‘attract’, and these levels start you with enough motion to be in orbit. One of the most beautiful levels is the one where a number of attractors are orbiting another central attractor, and you are orbiting one these satellites. The difficulty comes when you have to carefully manoeuvre your blob into another attractors orbit without crashing into the edge of the level or any of the attractors.

Smartly, the game doesn’t limit the number of attempts you have on any level, and so you can keep trying until you can beat the level (or give up in exasperation after spending an hour or more). You also have the option to randomise the distribution of blobs, although this doesn’t apply on certain ‘crafted’ levels.

The graphics are simple, but elegantly so, and visual cues help identify when another blob is safe to approach or not. You also have control of ‘time’ in the game, so you can slow everything down to give yourself more reaction time, or you can speed up through any boring bits and cut down on waiting. The game also has a lot of ambient music – which helps to keep you calm while you start swearing at yet another seemingly impossible (and eventually winnable) level.

Good game, and not bad for the price, although I think it would sell more at $5.

For the last year or more, I’ve been trying to spend time in the evenings working on writing content and creating websites, as well as get fit, cook dinners, do housework, read books and magazines, and a whole lot more. But evenings are very limited – I typically get home from work somewhere between 6 and 7 (sometimes later), and by the time I’ve gotten home and eaten, I have only a short time to spend on getting anything else done before I should be heading to bed and sleeping.

And then, its hard to start something and stop, then to try and pick it up again the next night – so much time is lost in trying to remember where I was up to. The result is that I end up staying up later than I should (and then getting less sleep than I need), and then by the weekend I’m not interested in doing anything except be lazy.

So, now, I’m going to try a new plan. In the week I’ll try and relax in the evenings, and limit the time I spend ‘working’ to about a 30-45 minute task. Then I should be good to spend several hours on Saturday and Sunday to do the bigger things.

One step is to work smarter, and not harder. For example, I find writing is easier if I am doing it in a long session, and so instead of trying to write a blog post two or three evenings a week, I’ll write in long session at the weekend (today, I’ve spent about 2 hours on it) and queue up the posts (I got this idea from my friend John of SixLabRats). That is opposed to the hour or so I’d have spent on each blog post on a weekday evening because of trying to gear up and focus after spending a day at the office (invariably tired because I had been up late the night before trying to get something else done again).

If the experiment is successful, then you should see more content here and at RandomTweak, as well as a new theme at RT next week, and hopefully the Drupal‘d version of HK a couple of weeks after that (with content).

If you want to fly in this war, you must be crazy. If you’re crazy, then we won’t let you fly – but if you don’t want to fly, then that is rational fear of death, so you can’t be crazy which means you have to fly.

- Catch-22

Catch-22 follows a group of young men conscripted into service and flying bombing missions in Italy as part of a fictional squadron in the United States Army Air Force. It centres around Yossarian, a bombardier (bomb-aimer) who is reluctant to continue flying as friends and other squadron members are swatted down by anti-aircraft fire, or other mishaps, but has to keep flying as long he is demonstrating this reluctance (since this is a sane reaction to the evident danger of flying missions).

The book seems to draw on real tales and experiences from the war – although they are obviously fictionalised and further enhanced by Heller’s satire.

There are some incredible sequences in the book – including Milo Minderbender’s amazing ability to get eggs in Malta at 7 cents a piece, and then sell them on for a profit at 5 cents a piece. And then there is the hunt for Washington Irving, a false identity used by a number of officers in the squadron, much to the vexation of military intelligence, and Major Major’s biography and rise to squadron commander, and more and more.

The storyline is a little scattergun in places – talking about events and jumping about the timeline in order to provide more details a little later on in the book, but it is extremely easygoing to read, and even the crazy skews of logic that some of the characters take are fun to follow and reach the conclusion.

One thing I find remarkable is that the book was written before the Vietnam War had even started, and even more years before the mass disaffection with conscription that started the protests and demonstrations of the late 60s and early 70s (although the film adaptation did hit the screens in 1970 alongside M*A*S*H). But, then, the book isn’t really anti-war as much as it is a commentary on exactly how crazy can be.

In the not too distant future, an alien spacecraft suddenly appears in the sky above Johannesburg. Twenty years later, and the ship’s many occupants are apparently trapped on Earth and are being held in a cordoned settlement known as District 9.

The film covers a few days in the life of one of the men put in charge to enforce ‘policy’ with regards to the alien population – a minor functionary whose day goes from bad to worse.

District 9 is a project that almost came unannounced (as far as I can tell) – it is the result of a collaboration between Peter Jackson (of Lord of the Rings fame), and Neill Blomkamp (the director that Jackson has pegged for his Halo project). The writing on the film is excellent, with a tight plot that ignores what can be ignored (it doesn’t matter where the aliens are from, or why they are here – just that they have been for 20 years). The film itself is well-executed, with good direction, superb acting from everyone on the screen, and seamless special effects (including the aliens and their technology – they are there, and interacting with their environment).

It is interesting that a movie on hatred and ghettoisation should come from a country like South Africa – but I guess that those people who have experienced apartheid would be well-placed to utilise it in a film-script. Filming around Johannesburg certainly helped free up more of the US$30 million budget for the special effects – but it lent the film a real anchor. Instead of picking on the cliched arrival over the White House, seeing an everyday city as the backdrop seems to increase the ‘it happened’ factor which the documentary style filming is intended to portray.

Speaking of the documentary style filming – I’ve read a number of disparaging comments about its apparent overuse (and getting motion sickness). Personally, I thought it was used just right. The shaky handicam was used mostly in the first half of the film where we are following the protagonist as he visits the aliens to notify them of their ‘eviction’ to a new encampment further away from the city, but there were plenty of steady shots in between the handicam ones, so you weren’t exactly assaulted by it.

The film has a fair bit of gore and blood in it, and there is plenty of swearing in it, so this is not a film for the little ones, but I don’t see anything wrong in taking anyone from about the age of 12 on up.

The film, also, is not a science fiction film despite the near future setting and alien presence – it is a redeeming hero tale, with a quest, and it is also a commentary on hatred and discrimination, and overcoming that.

It is a film most definitely worth watching.

It seems like almost everyday people produce yet another top so many of whatever lists (or at least link to them) – which then spawns of a massive amount of discussion along the lines of “why didn’t you include X on the list?” or “no way is Z number 1″ or “pfft, B is so much better than C”. Then another website comes along and picks the same topic with almost the exact same positions for whatever they’re listing, except for a handful of meaningless differences, and incurring almost exactly the same discussion and controversy.

A huge portion of these lists are simply the opinion whoever is authoring them – and are highly subjective and rather pointless. Others that are the results of ‘public vote’ are also deeply flawed and subjective – and tend to claim they’re more than they really are (the “nation’s favourite” is typically voted by only a few hundred people out of a total of a few thousand respondants). A further problem with ‘public votes’ are that they are affected by current affairs (the winner of BBC2’s “Big Read” a few years ago was The Lord of the Rings – not surprising, considering that the trilogy was being released to cinemas at the time).

Now I love The Lord of the Rings (I’ve read the trilogy almost every year since I was 10), and it would be up there amongst my other favourites, so I’m not knocking it the position – but I’m pretty sure that if it had not been for the movie releases at the time, it would have been a different book on the “Big Read” list.

But these lists still keep coming. Why?

Mostly, people like to show off that they’ve read the right books, seen the right movies, and been to the right places. We get lists of music, books, films, places to go for a relaxing holiday, places to go for an adventurous holiday, worst places in the world rated by gum per square centimetre on the pavement. Most of these lists are written by individuals who want to show off how cool they are by having read/watched/done everything they are listed – and their personal investment in the list is transparent once you start reading their responses to criticism.

I admit to the same weakness – I list all of the books I own at LibraryThing because I want to show them off. I’d also love the same kind of thing for music and movies – but there isn’t anything as useful or feature-laden as LT for these media.

But that is a fairly passive thing – mostly I just add a book when I buy, and try and review it when I’ve read it. I doubt I’d ever write a top 10 (or more) because I just couldn’t decided on a day-to-day basis.

About the only good thing about top 10 lists is that some list creators will add some interesting information about each item in their list – but most of them end up repeating the same old tired thing so that it is almost like reading the same website but in a slightly different order.

I just wish they would stop (adds top 10 lists to the “Top 10 Lists of Things I Don’t Like!”)

When I write my own websites and frameworks, especially when they’re using rewritten URLs, I setup the sites to have their own 404 pages, so that people know that the site is there, but that there is a problem with the link they followed.

This just makes sense – since you can’t guarantee that incoming links are correct, and getting a generic 404 error page can make people think that you just don’t have a site at all – whereas seeing a branded error page, maybe with suggested places to find related content on your site, or at least some recourse to indicate a problem to a suitable site contact.

A History Lesson

Now, search engines, browsers and other agents, don’t understand page content, so having a framework simply replace the content with the ‘error’ message isn’t enough to let them know there’s a problem. For that, you should use HTTP response codes – which is where the ‘404‘ actually comes from as this is the numeric code sent to identify a ‘page not found’.

Many years ago (before the days IE6, if you can imagine such a dark age), many sites didn’t really setup these 404 pages (although, a significant proportion still don’t – but the majority do). Instead, rather poor and cryptic default error messages were sent from the web server, which would mean next to nothing to the average user.

So, back then, browser developers would replace almost anything sent from a server that wasn’t accompanied by a ‘good‘ response code with a ‘friendly’ message – usually on the lines of a more expansive message, and even a link to a search engine in some cases.

Most site and framework developers are now, and have been for some time, properly handling URL address and other errors, and the need for browsers to provide the ‘friendly’ message was pretty much removed.

Google Chrome – A little behind?

This, at least, has been my experience with the major browsers for the past few years – they don’t obfuscate what the server is doing.

Until Google Chrome came along, at least. It turns out that Google like their new browser to do what most others stopped doing years ago. On receiving the 404 code from the server, the browser’s default behaviour is to ignore any further content and replace it with Google generated suggestions and search form.

Now, I can see why Google would like this behaviour – any chance to channel someone through their search engine is a chance that someone will follow an advertised link, and then Google get money.

This default behaviour can be turned off from the browser’s options, but it isn’t exactly obvious what is happening nor is the option labelled clearly enough that I was not forced into a short round of ‘click and see if that works’. It is also quite naughty, I think, because there is no indication that a site/server actually responded and that its just a page not found.

Let’s see what Google say.

I just opened the admin pages for a client site in Chrome – and the installed WYSIWYG editor (Xinha) produced this nice little message.

It’s a little worrying that the editor doesn’t recognise WebKit properly (makes me wonder if any of the client users have had a problem running the editor on Safari – although we have had no complaints).

Still, I like the optimistic-realism “I’ll try… it might not work”. In fact, that should probably be the motto of the internet.

Well, guess I’ll have to revert to FireFox for this particular task, anyway.

Review at LibraryThing

The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable by Nassim Nicholas Taleb:

The Impact of the Highly Improbable is not really what the book is about.

This book reads as more of an ego-stroke, as Taleb does his best to point out that he seems to have tapped into a great realisation that nobody else seems to have grasped. He is also extremely deprecating of anyone not sharing his views.

That aside, the book is interesting, and does point out that a large number of tools in use by market financiers and speculators are limited and misleading to those who have limited understanding. Taleb stands on the authority of having been successful himself – but while he points out that his peers’ success is mostly due to luck, his success follows from his ‘insight’ into The Black Swan.

In his own terms, there is likely a ‘graveyard’ of investors out there who understood the implications of The Black Swan, but were unlucky enough to bet on the wrong swan.

The book is interesting, does offer some interesting thoughts, but doesn’t go anywhere near far enough in what really matters (that is, it is more important to have a plan to mitigate the effects of a Black Swan, rather than limit the odds).

Shortly after my last birthday, I got a headache. Nothing unusual, I tend to get the odd headache (usually because of a little dehydration, too much/little caffeine, etc) or migraine.

But it became apparent that this wasn’t the usual headache – for one, it started to stretch into several days. Each day, I’d wake up and feel it there (mostly as a tightness, but sometimes sharp and sometimes throbbing), and it’d stay until I was sleeping at night.

Needless to say, this became rather distracting and also draining.

I put up with it a little longer than I probably ought to have because I waited until a time I could cut away from the office and visit the doctor’s.

Eventually, I was put at ease by the doctor’s diagnosis – there are a bunch of possible causes, ranging from infection (including swine flu – apparently a large number of folks who get it are just getting headaches) to cluster headaches. Of course, there were more serious options, but I figured the odds were for something more mundane.

The second doctor I saw prescribed some medication for migraines and headaches, which I took and then when I woke the next day, it was mostly gone. My head feels much better now, two days later, so it seems it was just cluster headaches.

So, that’s something else to look forward to, I guess – migraines and now cluster headaches…