notlikecalvin has been off the grid for most of the weekend – any email sent in my direction over the last few days may have bounced. My apologies.
One year ago, on the dawn of the 2005 General Election, I ranked the UK’s political parties by running their websites through the arbitrary gauntlet that is the W3C HTML Validator. The results were a largely horrendous mixed bag of tragic to awful, with hundreds of errors in total: the surprise of the night was that the Tories got the only thumbs-up.
So, with UK local council elections tomorrow, let’s see if anything’s changed!
A few rules: last year I checked every party with a candidate standing for my constituency, but since there are are only three candidates in my local ward I’m just going to use the same list; again, I’m not including the bee enn pee, whose URI I refuse to type; in general the page checked will be the root of each domain, but I’m ignoring any stupid splash pages and getting to news/listings that have a better potential for decent markup.
The results, in worse to slightly-less-worse order:
- Socialists – not valid, 191 errors, no doctype
- Liberal Democrats – not valid, 112 errors
- UKIP – Not valid, 107 errors, unknown parse mode, no doctype found, tries HTML 3.2(!)
- English Democrats – not valid, 55 errors
- Socialist Labour Party – not valid, 22 errors, no doctype found, unspeakably ugly, nasty frames
- Greens – not valid, 4 errors, unknown parse mode, namespace found in non-XML document
- Conservatives – not valid, 4 errors
- Labour – not valid, 1 error
No valid sites! What’re the chances?
In general, though, there’s not much improvement – just some shuffling around at the back of the class. The Most Hideously Looking (To The Point Of Being Utterly Broken In A Modern Browser) Award goes, for the second year running, to the Socialist Labour Party: it looks as if it hasn’t been touched in the last fifty-two weeks and is still incomprehensibly rubbish. Go on, take a look for yourself.
| Party |
2005 |
2006 |
change? |
| Socialists |
103 |
191 |
88 worse |
| Tories |
0 |
4 |
4 worse |
| Socialist Labour |
20 |
22 |
2 worse |
| Labour |
1 |
1 |
no change |
| Greens |
6 |
4 |
2 better |
| Lib Dems |
134 |
112 |
22 better |
| UKIP |
163 |
107 |
56 better |
| English Democrats |
177 |
55 |
122 better |
The English Democrats get Most Improvement and the Socialists are awarded Must Try Harder.
So what does this tell us about politics? Nothing, really. Which is as it should be when there’s a selection of exciting issues at stake in the real world.
[And yes, it would be foolish of me not to point out that notlikecalvin.com itself doesn't validate, and that valid markup isn't the be-all and end-all of webness. It's just a bit of fun.]
After a five-year absence, I’m back at the National Student Drama Festival in Scarborough. The last time I was here to light Peter Morris’ play A&R: Peter won the Sunday Times Playwriting Award for that and I was granted the NSDF/Stephen Joseph Theatre Technical Residency, so Al Smith’s Enola has a lot to live up to.
This is essentially the second major version of Kandinsky‘s work with the play after its premiere at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 2005 (which I reviewed), and in terms of staging the bulk of the difference is in the lighting. I wasn’t involved with the Fringe production at all, so my approach here has been neither a direct re-light of that original show or an entirely new design. The structure of the piece – in terms of timing and cuepoints – is largely intact, but the festival venue that we were allocated here is perhaps three or four times larger than the cramped conditions in the Underbelly Caves: while the playing space remains as small as is feasible the lighting positions are significantly further away from the stage, and a complete reinterpretation was necessary.
We finished our run of four performances late last night, and we’ve been absolutely delighted with the audience response. The bulk of Enola‘s theatrical soul comes directly from Al’s text, but it’s topped-off with superbly pitched performances and a very mature approach to the production. I’ll have photographs and more post-match analysis up once I get home at the weekend, but for now we’re going to take in the rest of the Festival, eagerly awaiting the awards ceremony on Friday night. We’ll see where it goes from here.
[ Update! Enola swept the awards: the Sunday Times Playwriting Award for Al, an Acting Award for Ellie and - best of all - the Fest-Goers Award, voted for by all attendees of the Festival: we're so very happy!
There are all sorts of highly exciting things on the horizon for Enola, but until then I've onlined some photographs in the usual place, with some bits and pieces from NSDF over at flickr. Enjoy. ]
I was in London for a meeting yesterday (doesn’t that sound grown-up?) and had plenty of free time afterwards to visit the Dan Flavin exhibition at the Hayward Gallery. And I was glad I did.
The exhibition, which is only on until April 2nd, consists of over fifty fluorescent tube sculpture/installations that span Flavin’s entire career. While this is a prime example of an “I could’ve done that” art style, the combinations of standard electric fittings do, on the whole, create something greater than the sum of their parts.
When Flavin’s good, he’s really good – but sometimes I was left feeling nothing. Those pieces which showed a fiercely intelligent understanding of colour theory, or which simply used the architecture of the exhibition space to great effect, had an impact that I felt, rather than thought about. But others, particularly the ‘Monuments to V. Tatlin’ series, did absolutely nothing for me: I don’t see anything too clever in what was, to me, an extremely low-resolution form of vector illustration.
So, I’m being picky. Some of the pieces are fantastic, some aren’t.
The Hayward has a very informative microsite [flash] about the exhibition, which even goes so far as to offer six ambient music tracks from Greyworld, commissioned to accompany certain works: download to your iPod (other mp3 players are not as good available) and listen as you go ’round. Would Flavin approve of other artists piggybacking on his retrospective? Who knows, but in any event I added my own selections to the mix when the Greyworld tracks ran out – if it’s good enough for the supermarket…
Go/no-go? If you’ve got any interest in light, or if you’re willing to give non-standard art a try, it’s a definite GO.
[I should, at some point, get around to mentioning the James Turrell installations that are currently showing at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park: "absolutely fantastic" will have to do for the moment.]
The first couple of days of Penny Dreadfuls shows have gone very well, and things should pick up even more now that the weekend’s here. All four shows are completely free, so pop along if you’ve got a spare moment.
We’re in the Britannia Panopticon, a Victorian Music Hall that’s Scotland’s oldest theatre. It is a very strange place to work, with the oddest atmosphere of any venue I’ve ever worked in. But don’t let that put you off! The Panopticon isn’t open all that much, so it’s a one-hundred-percent unique opportunity to see some genuine Victorian-themed comedy in it’s natural habitat, and support the restoration of the place to its former glory!
We’re there all week(end).
Later this week I’m off to the Glasgow Comedy Festival, providing technical wizardry to The Penny Dreadfuls‘ four shows.
Aeneas Faversham, Shamwagon, Lost in Time and, of course, Sherlock Holmes and the Case of the Missing Plot are all being performed at the wonderful Britannia Panopticon music hall.
Each show is on from Thursday through Sunday, and they’re all free. Free. So pop along, if you’re in the area: I’m particularly fond of Sherlock Holmes and Aeneas Faversham, but they’re all worth a gander. For no money.
I’ve just got my copy of iLife ’06 in the mail, and I was rather surprised by the big box it was shipped in. But I was even more surprised by the teeny-tiny CD-square package that was inside. Tiiiiiny! Though if it cuts down waste and all that jazz then that’s fine by me.
I would’ve been perfectly happy to stick with iLife ’05 for another generation, except that iPhoto has become a real slug lately: I don’t do a lot of photography, certainly not compared to some people, but there was some nasty slowdown even with the 7,600 images in my library. iPhoto’s my main reason for upgrading, but a few extra bells and whistles in iDVD and Garageband won’t go amiss. (I’m not even installing iWeb.)
Before the switch I timed iPhoto during it’s slowest-est operations, startup and quit: 69 seconds and 83 seconds, respectively. Awful!
Once the installation, library update and cache rebuilding was all out of the way, and the system had settled down a bit, I timed those again: 9 seconds and 7 seconds, on average. Wow. Plus a whole heap of snappier selecting, editing and browsing goodness. Book layout has returned to being enjoyably slick and they’ve even fixed my favourite bug from the File Export dialog (which reset custom image sizes to default values if you changed the file format). Joy!
And do I need to mention how wonderful full-screen editing is? Do I?
It’s easy to look at the updates to OS X and the iLife suite – particularly regarding speed and the user interface – as false improvements that only look better when compared to their not-as-efficient earlier versions, and that that is the reason why this software gets faster on the same machines, rather than slower (cf: Windows). But right now, I don’t care.
