log_e.hixie.ch

2002-08-31 19:56 UTC Oops, blamed the wrong people

Apparently I offended someone by saying that AOLTW France IC are paranoid and unable to set up port filtered TCP/IP in my post yesterday.

First of all, I don't care if I offend people with my Web log. This is my personal site, if you get offended, stop reading. If you get offended by my comments, you are not the target audience.

Americans are fat. Smokers are stupid. People who don't speak Perl are irrelevant. Those with an "f" in their name don't deserve to breathe. Offended yet? If so, go away.

Anyway, apparently the understaffed IC of AOLTW France are not the reason we didn't have internet connectivity there. No, apparently AOLTW France's rule makers (presumably some level of management there) are the paranoid ones who don't realise it is possible to run a secure network.

So my apologies to AOLTW France IC.

2002-08-31 16:57 UTC Greece

The Good

• The alphabet rocks.

• The people were relatively helpful and pleasant.

• The new airport in Athens is very clean and perfect. Indeed it really looks like they bought a template motorway-and-airport and just dropped it there. There are still signs that have to have details, like the name of the airport, filled in.

• The wedding ceremony was quite... ceremonial. Lots of singing in monotone voices and stuff. Very traditional. Sad, though, that most of the people there were totally ignoring that and just trying to get a "decent photograph". It looks like as a race we've stopped realising that the photograph or the film is not the object itself, but merely a tool to record the object. Instead of trying to record the event so it can be enjoyed later, why not just enjoy the event itself?

The Bad

• The signs to the new Athens Airport are useless. The few signs that do exist are actually after the relevant junctions, in many cases. On a motorway, that's no good. Not to mention on a three lane road when the sign pointing left is posted on the far side of the junction and you're on the rightmost lane. (Especially ironic in that particular case is that if you missed the turning and kept on going, you would get to the same place, since the recommended path brought you straight back to the same road but one junction later.)

• Public transport sucks. The village whose closest town was the capital of the country only gets about two busses a week, according to the taxi driver who brought me there.

• It rained quite heavily.

The Ugly

• It's almost as dirty as England. That seems quite typical of mediteranean countries, though. Dust everywhere, unfinished road surfaces, scrawled graffiti, run down houses next to sky scrapers...

• Greek food is quite bland. At least, all the meals I had basically consisted of the same four dishes. Maybe Δομνιστα is just too far from the rest of civilisation to get lots of foodstuffs.

Chuckle

• I saw a bus that appeared to have been lost, abandoned down a side street. Its bus number was 404.

2002-08-31 15:40 UTC In short, in matters vegetable animal and mineral, he is the very model of a modern major-general!

I've been listening to Gilbert and Sullivan operas this morning. Yeah for streaming radio.

I've started replying to my e-mails (after deleting over 1,300 which were about 40% spam, 50% mailing lists, and 10% the remainder of mail which I can't seem to stop Bugzilla sending me). Once I get bored, I'll post a quick synopsis of my experience of Greece.

2002-08-31 14:04 UTC Tools of the trade when reading e-mail: The Shovel

Expunge 776 messages from INBOX? Y

2002-08-30 22:53 UTC Hmm? Eh? Whaa? *wakes up*

I just got back to England after a week in Paris at a CSS working group meeting. I'm exhausted, so here are a few rambling thoughts before I hit the sack for the night:

• Charles de Gaulle (the airport (in Paris (which is in France (that's in Europe (outside the US))))) sucks. It says "no smoking" but that appears to be to French people as red traffic lights are to Italians. And as David Baron pointed out, when we arrived they had basically none of the security we have come to expect of sites of controlled collisions between aircraft and planets. Heathrow (one of the London airports, for you uninformed folk) sucks more though. Our plane landed (er, parked) two metres from one of those plane jetty thingies but no, we had to walk down stairs and get in a bus to get to the terminal about 3km away and pick up our baggage. Not to mention the serious amounts of utter mess and dirtiness everywhere. I think Douglas Adams described Heathrow best at the start of The long dark tea time of the soul.
• A short note to the BMI staff: "Apple juice" isn't "Tango". Please learn what good food is from Swiss airlines.
• We had no network connectivity in Paris (AOLTW France IC are paranoid and unable to set up port filtered TCP/IP, I guess), so I still haven't sent out my last call comments on CSS 2.1 (now with orange!), not to mention the CSS3 Background, Text, Line, Font and Web Fonts modules. I have over 3000 lines of comments on those. Oh and now I also have the minutes of 2 of the 6 parts of the meeting. And a proposal for footnotes, comments on the paged media draft, some suggestions for the next version of media queries and an idea for presentation mode. All of this on my laptop's hard drive. Which of course is still only working intermittently.
• No connectivity meant no e-mail, so I only just got to read mine. The following people should expect e-mails, IRC queries or instant messages from me soon: Phil (hope you got the postcards), Nadia (in order: England, busy, and no), Charley (hey), Vadim Plessky (you have got to be kidding), about 15 people I've never heard of before (yes I am very interested in this business opportunity and will send you my bank details right away), jst and pavlov (guys, no biggie, but look at your disk usage please), Ben (dude, I did a quiz before hyatt!), fantasai (we accepted your proposal) and of course the CSS working group (I swear, I will get the minutes off my laptop before calling Dell to get the disk replaced).
• One of the (unminuted) topics of the meeting was of course Web logs. It turns out Tantek has one too, now. That's Tantek Çelı̇k, to be completely correct in terms of typography, HTML and UNICODE. At least, it's correct according to Michel, and he sits on the ISO 10646 working group, so presumably he knows about such things. (I don't know... I'm not convinced that according to the UNICODE charts a U+0131 latin small letter dotless i with a U+0307 combining dot above is actually equivalent to a U+0069 latin small letter (dotted) i. Having said that, the spec does say that a U+0130 latin capital letter i with dot above is exactly equivalent to a U+0049 capital letter i followed by a U+0307 combining dot above, so maybe it is correct. Either way, unfortunately most UAs don't realise that in the tr locale, a U+0069 latin small letter (dotted) i capitalises to a U+0130 latin capital i with dot above, and that the lowercase of a U+0049 latin capital letter (dotless) i is a U+0131 latin small letter dotless i.)
• Håkon has no Web log yet. Hopefully that will change soon.
• The joke which got the most laughs during the CSS meeting had the punch line "...XML has more semantics than XHTML!". Boy was that funny. You had to be there I guess.
• Netscape 7 came out. I wouldn't have noticed but Daniel announced it during the meeting. Blake commented about it (that's a link to blakeross-archive by the way, since he removed the entry on his site shortly afterwards...). As usual, insightful comments. I totally agree that c|net are pathetically stupid. Their review sucks. Not because they slate Netscape 7, but because they slate it for totally the wrong reasons, and compare it to other browsers in completely unfair ways. Constructive criticism is good — incorrect criticism and outright misinformation is not.

Bed time now. Good night.