If..Else Log

Remember kids; punctuation is important.

"Rogers thought… its contract was iron-clad until the spring of 2007 and could potentially be renewed for another five years. Armed with the rules of grammar and punctuation, Aliant disagreed[…]

The validity of the contract and the millions of dollars at stake all came down to one point — the second comma in the sentence."

There is something to be said for clarity in language use; I suspect that the lawyers for Rogers Communication may soon find themselves recepients of Eats shoots and leaves this Christmas.

…or more correctly, Webkit.

Swift is an unofficial Windows application which effectively acts wrapper around Webkit, the rendering engine behind Safari. Whilst the UI is clunky to say the least and that it's very much an alpha release (no context menus, anti-aliasing etc, no OSX magicary), it might be useful for those of you without access to a Mac¹ [via Steve via mail].

If you have difficulties installing it, take a look at Anne's post.

1. If you haven't, what are you waiting for? [back]

I can't say that I'm the world's biggest fan of Bollywood nor the 70's but this YouTube video is strangely captivating in a David Brent sort of way. As the first commenter says, it's the entire 1970s captured in one man. They just don't make videos like this anymore.

Top Gear is always a good watch for a Sunday evening and today's episode was no different. Amongst other things¹, today's show featured James May racing a Peugeot 207 against 2 Traceur (Parkour practitioners). If you haven't seen Parkour (or it's sister art, Free Running) in action, it really is a sight to behold. A few years back, BBC featured David Belle, Parkour founder and probably it's most famous practioner, in a wonderful advert entitled Rush Hour.

Eye-catching, exciting and a joy to watch, having Sway Quien Será playing in the background helped to cap off one of BBC's more memorable sequences.

1. One of the other features on the show was Clarkson and co attempting to build a car in 8 hours. The slightly amusing aside for me was that my boss has just done the very same thing, that is build a Caterham, that they had done, albeit in 2 weeks rather than 1 day. [back]

Scott Adam writes about his favourite consipracy theory (that the upper echelons of power are controlled by a handful of puppetmasters) and how reassuring it actually is.

The only way I can get to sleep at night is by imagining a secret cabal of highly competent puppetmasters who are handling the important decisions while our elected politicians debate flag burning and the definition of marriage.

It’s the only explanation for how the governments of the world could be staffed with morons and yet everything still runs okay, sort of. Granted, things aren’t perfect, but when you hear our leaders talk, you have to wonder why our energy policy doesn’t involve burning asbestos on playgrounds. There must be some competent people pulling the strings behind the curtain, adjusting the money supply, twiddling with interest rates, choosing the winners for American Idol, and that sort of thing.

And to think, the Illuminati had such bad press…

BBC's new cooking show, Cooking in the danger zone, looks quite interesting. Stefan Gates, chef, reporter and blogger, goes on a culinary exploration of some of the world's danger zones; along the way, he samples various local dishes including Live Scorpion Kebabs, Sheep Testicles¹ and Penis'.

1. Amusingly known to locals as the Afghan Viagra; it's also interesting to contrast such dishes with UN rations [back]

If you haven't heard about Valve's upcoming Portal game, then take a look at their video trailer.

As a gameplay mechanic, I can see this having amazing potential. The gravity gun in HL2 was pretty cool but this looks truly impressive.

Top 10 Dumbest Online Business Ideas That Made It Big.

Most of us are probably still envious of the guy behind the million dollar homepage but who would have predicted that you could make a couple of million selling goggles for dogs? Or faux-suede padded covers for game controllers? I have to admire SantaMail though…

I'm a big fan of 37signals so I'm happy to hear Jason's announcement on Jeff Bezos' private investment. Perhaps, unsurprisingly, the responses have generally been of two types; there's the typical congratulatory comments that accompany such announcements like heartache and the England team¹ and nestled in between were some disappointly negative snap responses.

Missing the point

Now don't get the wrong idea, the reason I'm disappointed isn't anything to do with the fact that the comments are negative ² or that I disagree with them and more because I wish people would put a bit more thought into what they write.

We don’t need their money to run the business and our little black book is full. We’re looking for something else. What we’ve been looking for is the wisdom of a very special entrepreneur who’s been through what we’re going through.

What a lot of people don't realise is that there's a lot more behind such an investment. To flip the story around; how much would you have to pay for private consulting with Jeff Bezos? Put it another way, how much do you think it would cost for advice from someone who's been there and done that; an entrepreneur who's raised a company from nothing to the market-leader nay market catalyst; a multi-billion dollar company that's still responsive, agile and innovative.

Investment is all about providing capital in the hope of future return; usually the main investment is in the form of financial capital but the successful deals generally also involve the investment of social and/or human capital. In doing this deal, Jason and the rest of 37Signals have appear to have managed to secure all three; of those, I wouldn't be surprised if the latter were the more significant.

1. I know, I really should be over it. [back]
2. Though I feel that such comments would be better communicated on their own blog or privately [back]

One of the nice things about OSX is the inclusion of a dictionary; every cocoa application has automatic spell-checking and pressing cmd + ctrl + D gives an immediate dictionary definition for that currently selected word. You'll never need to do a Google search again to find the definition or spelling for an unknown word.

The only annoyance is that, by default, by default, you get the American English dictionary. As much as I like America, I've never been able to accept their idiosyncrasies when it comes to spelling. I can't quite bring myself to -ize ¹ and I still spell colour with a u².

If you want to switch the dictionary to British English, hit CMD + shift + colon. Voila, you can -ise to your heart's content.

As an aside, does anyone know how to capture a screenshot of the dictionary definition popup? The usual Apple grab commands don't do the job which is why I had to settle for a picture of the dashboard widget.

1. Before people start commenting, please be aware that I'm aware of both the history behind the differences. However, just as I prefer Coke to Pepsi, I prefer -ise to -ize [back]
2. As an aside, I've never accidentally used the british spelling of colour in CSS; it's interesting how we can train ourselves to switch context'. [back]

Overheard on the bus whilst I was returning from the hospital.

Girl 1: My friends put Tippex¹ above my eyes.
Girl 2: Why?
Girl 1: It looked really good for about 5 minutes when my skin started to itch and so I had to get it off and now I have a rash there.
Girl 1: It looked really cool but I'm not going to try that again.

Why do pharmaceuticals go to all that trouble with animal testing when all they need to do is recruit a couple of teenage girls?

1. White-out fluid [back]

The first part of the redesign¹ of the WP.com tag pages has just gone live and it's pretty fun browsing through the pages whilst observing the related tags. As always, great work by Matt on getting this up and running. Phanks:)

Take a look around and feel free to leave any comments or suggestions.

1. For posterity, here's what they used to look like. [back]

Well, my home phoneline was dead for the whole of yesterday and it looks like it's going to stay that way for the whole of this week. This, of course, means that I'll have no home net access and will be pretty much uncontactable via email.

Fault details:
The repair on your line will be started on: 10 Jun 2006

Fault diagnosis:
The problem is likely to be with BT's network.
We'll start the repair by the time shown above. Sorry for any inconvenience.

Thanks a lot BT.

Following Andy Clarke's lead, here are my world cup prediction marked up using hCup.

It seems that my blind optimism has beaten rational thought as I've fooled myself into believing, yet again, that Football's Coming Home…

Well, in the spirit of self-delusional hope masquerading as reasoned predictions, I also predict that Crouchy will score a hat-trick in the final and Sven, being overcome with emotion, throw off his jacket, runs onto the pitch and does the robot.

According to Sainsbury, 18.

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I guess sometimes you just have to make extra sure¹.
[sent via Mathew via email]

1. I'm aware that this is more likely to be a result of a quirk with the CMS that they're using rather than being handcoded cruft. However, this really highlights the need for clean and responsible code generation by CMS. For a company that was previously highlighted for accessiblity, it's quite a letdown. [back]