notlikecalvin news

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.

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.]

What an interesting day: thanks to Cory (himself something of a fan) my The System of the World @ The Tower of London Flickr set got BoingBoing’d. Woo!

Already there are several more photos tagged with baroquecyclelondon from Flickr user Tarquin Binery, and glenelg has tagged photos of The Hague (which makes an appearance in Quicksilver) with baroquecycle.

But perhaps it’s easier to keep track of all this in a group? The baroquecycle group should do nicely! It’s a public group so anyone can join and post pictures, the more the merrier.

And there’s more! While I’ve been typing this, nairb1 has been establishing the latitude and longitude of each photo to allow them to be geotagged and, I think, sucked into Google Earth somehow. Potentially, there might be some way to visually connect the dots of Stephenson’s London…

To wrap up, here’s a snippet from Warren Ellis‘ latest column:

If you also glean from this that a reverse-engineering of sorts is possible: that a print-first book can generate its own interweb shadow structure, like, for instance, a wiki… well, that would be kind of interesting, wouldn’t it? That an URL printed on the back of a book, when typed into your browser, could take you to a place that provides an entirely new dimension to the work… that could be the eventual optimum way in which a print object interacts with the internet.

Of course, the Quicksilver Metaweb is exactly that sort of added functionality – especially given that it can auto-generate a PDF of the current annotations to form a handy printout – but I’d certainly like to see how far this can go, too.

A few bits and pieces as things get updated:

1. There’s a new version of my CV available for download – it’s been nipped and tucked a little, with much more of a focus on lighting and theatre.

2. After a year with this third major version of notlikecalvin I’ve finally converted this weblog to the same style as the rest. Obviously it’s nowhere near finished, but putting it up now is great motivation for doing more work on it. At least, that’s the idea.

And a couple of tips from recent experience:

1. If, for some reason, you have to survive without your computer for a couple of weeks, you can charge your iPod off any powered USB2 port – including a PlayStation2, although it’s fiddly. Sometimes the PS2 won’t behave, but try unplugging any memory cards and going into the system browser – it seems to be entirely random.

2. If your fridge smells a bit, just get a new one. Much easier.

[Edit: comments are still bobbins in my new CSS, so I've switched back to the Green Marinée theme for the moment.]

I had some spare time in London a couple of weeks ago when we had a school trip to see The Anderson Project at the Barbican: why not photo-document one of the pivotal locations in The System of the World, the Tower of London?

Possible spoilers ahead!

When reading the rather lengthy invasion-of-the-Tower sequence, I didn’t get a clear mental map of what-went-where inside the Tower, so that was my main focus. On a very dismal, grey day with no direct sunlight I found myself in the ancient fortress complex – it was freezing cold and I didn’t get to spend as much time there as I would’ve liked: my photos and notes, cross-referenced with snippets from the Arrow Books 2005 UK paperback edition, text copyright © 2004 by Neal Stephenson, can be found in my Flickr space.

Those photos are all tagged as baroquecyclelondon, and it would really be cool if anyone else wanted to Flickr-ise any of the many other London locations of Stephenson’s The Baroque Cycle and tag them similarly (or maybe just baroquecycle if they happen to be near the Massachusetts Bay Colony of Technologickal Arts…). Perhaps someone might like to document the top of The Monument and the view that Jack would’ve had of the Tower, and tag it?

I guess I was hoping that this could be a visual annotation to TSotW, in much the same way as the Quicksilver Metaweb, but perhaps that’s too grand an ambition. (I’m also hoping that extracting small snippets of text that are, of course, copyright © 2004 by Neal Stephenson, can be considered as fair use.) Any Londoners out there feeling Baroque?

[Edit: forgot to mention that this was slightly inspired by Tantek Çelik and Eric Meyer's obsessively detailed Matrix location Flickr-ing.]

[Edit2: use Google Maps for a great overview of the Tower complex - compare it to the description on page 199.]

It was two years ago that I posted the first image to my moblog, Light & Dark. I’m stupidly sentimental, particularly with numerical significance, so when I noticed that I was on nine hundred and ninety-eight pictures, I knew that I’d have to wait until this second aniversary before I could post #1000.

I started off with a Sony Ericsson T610 – lovely phone with a really rugged feel – and switched a year ago to a SE K700i, with a camera resolution of 640×480 pixels! Hopefully I’ll upgrade to a K750 sometime in the next week, and those 2MP should prove satisfactory for use as a basic, but capable, camera. It almost worries me that phonecam’ery will become too much like ‘normal’ photography, and lose something of its rustic, blurry charm.

Anyway, here’s to the next two years of low-res snapping!

It’s been a nice, cosy, rounded year. Some good stuff happened. Some not-so-good stuff happened, but less of that was directly to me.

2006, on the other hand, is already shaping up to be a year in which a great deal of greatness will be dealt. It has to be, there’s no way around it. There are many changes coming for me, mostly in the personal/professional fusion that notlikecalvin‘s always represented. Expect the first few baby-steps in that direction during the first few days of the new year.

It’s going to be a year of endings, and beginnings. Have a good one, chaps.

Tomorrow’s the UK General Election, and I’m summoning up all the democratic gumption I can to haul myself out of bed and vote before work. But the big question has to be who to vote for? We’re overrun by the usual parties – plus some exciting special guests! – in my constituency, so a game of pin-the-vote-on-the-party could lead to an unwelcome surprise. Imagine my dilemma!

Naturally, I’ve got my own ideas about where that magic X will land once I get into my very own novelty voting booth, but I thought it wouldn’t hurt to find a slightly more webcentric diviner of political fortunes: given the incredibly spurious nature of popularity-seeking policies in this day and age, why not let the equally unpredictable W3C HTML validator sort the cads from the bounders?

I ran markup checks on the homepage of each party that’s standing in my area (with the exception of the BNP: I refuse to even type that URI in case someone, somewhere is watching and judging). At first I went with the page at the root of each domain, but loads of them have stupid splashpages – I was more interested in the news/listings-style pages that could easily be properly coded.

How many would actually validate? How many errors would the others throw up? The results were surprising…

In sort-of bad-to-better order:

• English Democrats – Not valid, 177 errors
• UKIP – Not valid, no doctype, 163 errors
• Liberal Democrats – Not valid, 134 errors
• Socialist Party – Not valid, no doctype, 103 errors
• Socialist Labour Party – Not valid, no doctype, uses frames, incredibly ugly, 20 errors
• Green Party – Not valid, 6 errors
• Labour Party – Not valid, 1 error (missing an ID attribute)
• Conservative Party – Valid!

Believe me, I was as amazed as you might be – the Tories, secretly habouring valid XHTML 1.0 Transitional code on their website! Having said that, the splash page at conservatives.com does have a crappy WMV file on it (and trying to find their URI produced the most popup-tastic link-farms of the night), so that would knock it several spots down the ranking if this was any sort of serious assessment of Britain’s political powerhouses. Which it’s not. Right?

The Most Hideously Looking (To The Point Of Being Utterly Broken In A Modern Browser) Award goes – by a landslide – to the Socialist Labour party for their quite incomprehensible tragedy of missing framesets. It’s a damn shame to see so many parties have lost their doctypes along with their good sense, and I for one am disappointed that the Greens haven’t taken the opportunity to fully embrace web standards as part of their vision for a cleaner Britain.

But the biggest upset of the night has to be for Gordo Kennedy’s gang of loveable chumps: obviously, in their enthusiasm to rush into the Westminster big leagues they’ve been too busy to properly check their code… just like they’re too busy to send a birthday card to their mum. Some flowers would be nice, too. [sniff]

So there you go. If you love web standards as much as you love your country you’ll want to vote Conservative tomorrow.

…

Oh, God! What’ve I done!

Of course, it’s all a bit of fun. I wish I’d thought of this with a bit more than eight hours until the polls open, and then we could’ve got up to all sorts of stylesheet- and accessibility-validating pranks. Still, let’s hope there’s more to politics than websites, eh?

(And yes, I’m perfectly aware that notlikecalvin itself doesn’t actually validate, and that validation isn’t the be-all-and-end-all of webness. Boo sucks.)

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