Archive for May, 2005

Coat of Arms

Published by
Tom Goskar
at 25 May, 2005 in Heraldry. 9 Comments

crestwebsmall.jpgKen, a good friend of mine, and one of the most talented artists I know, has painted a wonderful watercolour of the Goskar coat of arms. The description came from Burke’s General Armoury (available in most larger libraries in the UK), where thousands of family coats of arms are described in heraldic terminology.

 I’m not sure why my family were awarded a coat of arms, but I intend to find out.

The birds depicted on the shield and on the crest are Cornish choughs. More about them later.

Books about heraldry on Amazon…

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“Blog” and the Oxford (American) English Dictionary

Published by
Tom Goskar
at 25 May, 2005 in Apple Mac. 0 Comments

Apple’s nifty new operating system OSX 10.4 Tiger has a version of the Oxford American Dictionary (the American edition of the OED, of course) installed by default. It’s great - you can access it from the Dashboard, so it’s there in the blink of an eye, or you can invoke it at any time if you are using a Cocoa program such as Safari, by hoving your cursor over a word, and pressing ctrl-command-d. It also has a thesaurus, which is handy. I spotted on Scott Moschella’s Plastic Bugs that looking up the word "blog" brought an amusing definition: blog_dictionary.jpg

I’m not American! I demand that it’s update to include us Brits too!

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WordPress RSS Woes

Published by
Tom Goskar
at 18 May, 2005 in WordPress and Internet. 3 Comments

For those of you who are new to the world of Blogging, it is a form of personal web publishing, allowing people to easily post information and comment about whatever they please. This blog is powered by a web application called WordPress, a fantastic system (although not for someone who is not familiar with the dark arts of website hosting) for running a small website.

Recently, an upgrade was issued to WordPress, bringing the version up to 1.5.1, promising lots of bug fixes and performance enhancements. I took the plunge, and a day later, I realised my RSS feed had ceased to be, throwing up an HTTP 304 error. Damn. A quick visit to the helpful folks on the WordPress support forums showed a number of people had the same problem and a fix had been issued. Basically, you need to download the patch, which is a file named “wp-blog-header.php”, and replace your old copy with it (after having backed it up or renamed it, of course!). I duly did this, and hey presto! A working RSS feed again.

Or is it? A quick check of this feed on Feed Validator, shows the error

  • line 69, column 3: content:encoded should not contain onclick tag (2 occurrences) [help]

    ]]>

  • line 69, column 3: content:encoded should not contain relative URL references (4 occurrences) [help]

    ]]>

    • Stumped! I’ll get on to the support forums and see if anyone can help out. In the meantime, apologies if you’re having a spot of bother with the feeds. SharpReader on Windows, and NetNewsWire on OSX don’t seem to have a problem with it, but some RSS parsers do (e.g. Carp and Magpie). If I do find a fix, I’ll post it here.

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    BBC Backstage

    Published by
    Tom Goskar
    at 18 May, 2005     in Internet. 0 Comments

    The BBC have recently launched a service called BBC Backstage, a service which encourages people to use BBC content in their own way using RSS feeds and an API.

    backstage.bbc.co.uk attempts to encourage and support those who have provided most of the innovation on the inernet - the passionate, highly-skilled & public-spirited developers and designers many of whom volunteer their time and effort.

    (from http://backstage.bbc.co.uk/archives/2005/01/about.html)

    BBC Backstage “…aims to foster a newly constructive and open dialogue with the wider development community using BBC content and tools to deliver public value.”

    This is good news for those of us who like to tinker with content provision on the internet. And for those of us who are resident in the UK, it makes the TV License fee (currently £126.50 per annum) a little more value for money…

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    The Framley Examiner

    Published by
    Tom Goskar
    at 12 May, 2005     in Humour. 1 Comment

    Britain’s best-loved newspaper, the Framley Examiner has just seen an update to the website, with a whole 8 new pages. This was due to “The Framley Examiner team apologises for the delay in our Christmas 2004 update. This was due to the enforced maternity leave of Pete who knows how to work the scanner”. It also has details about a possible new book entitiled “Bollocks to Alton Towers - Uncommonly British Days Out”. If you’ve ever read “The Framley Examiner” or “Historic Framley“, no doubt this will be a must. If it’s real..!

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    Weblog Editors: Ecto

    Published by
    Tom Goskar
    at 10 May, 2005     in Computing and Apple Mac. 0 Comments

    Ecto is another visual weblog editor, and from a cursory look has more features than MarsEdit. I’m typing this now in Ecto, and whilst not as WYSIWYG as BlogJet on Windows, it’s not too bad. It features integration with iPhoto, iTunes, Amazon, supports file enclosures (a la Podcasting), previous posts, categorisation, image uploading, trackbacks… See their website for a full feature list.
    Continue reading ‘Weblog Editors: Ecto’

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    Weblog Editors: MarsEdit 1.0

    Published by
    Tom Goskar
    at 10 May, 2005     in Computing and Apple Mac. 2 Comments

    marseditIconLarge.pngI am currently testing the use of MarsEdit, by those clever folks at http://www.ranchero.com. It’s Mac only, and very well designed. It allows you to easily post to your blog, but is still rather clunky in that images have to be uploaded, then an HTML string inserted into your post. Other than editing it by hand, there is no way of specifying an alt tag for the image that I have found, so it’s not yet as WYSIWYG as Ecto. I’ll continue though, as it looks like there’s a lot of potential in it. NetNewsWire is a great RSS reader, also written by Ranchero, and integrates with MarsEdit. Watch this space…

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    Spring 2005 CSA Newsletter

    Published by
    Tom Goskar
    at 4 May, 2005     in Computing and Archaeology. 0 Comments

    The new Computer Technologies for Archaeologists & Architectural Historians newsletter from the Centre for the Study of Architecture/Archaeology (CSA) is now online.

    The US-based newsletter provides articles on current developments in archaeological computing.

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    OSX 10.4 Tiger - it’s installed

    Published by
    Tom Goskar
    at 4 May, 2005     in Apple Mac. 0 Comments

    I installed Tiger on Monday, and I have to say it does live up to the hype.

    I backed up my system and opted for the “Upgrade” option rather than format and install or archive and install (essentially copying my old system into a folder in case you ever have to revert back to it). I backed up everything onto a stack of DVDs (which I should have done a long time ago), and took the plunge.

    Installation took about 40 minutes, and worked perfectly. The one thing I did change during the installation, was to customise the install. This allows one to stop OSX installing the default suite of printer drivers. All 1Gb of them. That’s right - 1Gb of printer drivers, and not one of them was for my Samsung laser printer! 1Gb of drivers that I’ll never use, 1Gb of wasted space.

    When OSX 10.4 booted for the first time, it was immediately apparent that all of my settings had been preserved, thankfully, so my system was up and running, and ready to be used.

    Everything works as expected, and I’ve found Dashboard to be incredibly useful. I can even post to this blog via a simple ‘widget’. Push F12, bang, there’s the Dashboard, type some stuff into Dashblog, hit “Post”, hit F12, bang - it’s gone. That’s impressive, damned useful. I’ve even got Tetris on the Dashboard :-)

    Spotlight took a good few hours to index my system, and it won’t let you use it while indexing. This is to be expected given the amount of files on my hard drive. The way you can view images as a contact sheet or full screen slideshow is a nice touch.

    I’ll post more of my experiences here as I go along. Meantime, if you’re reading this and would like some tips, head along to macosxhints.com.

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