Author: Peter

Sirens and Hal: Winners!

Today’s musical outing was to see roots/blues player Manitoba Hal at London’s premier folk club, The Ugly Mug Café. It was one of the first really nice days we’ve had this year–16 degrees and sunny–and unfortunately that led to a poor turnout, but Hal put on a fantastic couple of sets and stuck around for a while afterwards to talk music (both as art and business) with local musicians Allison Brown and James Cummins (and local music nobody yours truly).

I couldn’t make it to tonight’s London Music Awards presentation but I just got the news that, for the second year in a row, Sirens won! I sometimes get discouraged with London audiences who stay away in droves from deserving acts, but for as long as I’ve known Amber, Donna and Jo-Ann the locals have been incredibly supportive of the group. Congratulations Sirens (and the other LMA winners), and good on you London!

Standards are not accessibility

Dave Shea is impressed at the standards-based design evident in a number of student portfolios, and I’ll agree with him to a point: a lot of them look very nice. However, he fails to note that many are completely inaccessible to non-graphical users; some, in fact, can’t even be used by those with recent traditional browsers. To wit:

Invisible

[Document has only hidden links. Use the 'l'ist command.]

In a non-CSS browser:

Browser window showing a blank page

Linkless wonder

Headless Wonder

The what now?

These  were  team  based  projects  which  took  lots  of planning and
co-operation by all team members. Both these projects
are  100%  standards compliant, built using XHTML, css, and flash.   -
(To view one of the projects click on the above pictures.)

As their teacher says, the results speak for themselves! It might be worth taking a page from Jeffrey Veen’s book for his next course: when Web design is practiced as a craft, and not a consolation, accessibility comes for free.

Long weekend

Claire, Allison, David, Tamsen, Greg, Lenni, Drew, Adrean, Stich, Brenda. All of the preceding people helped make last weekend (plus two vacation days) one of the most fun and unique I’ve had in some time.

David and Tamsen were kind enough to come out to see Claire Jenkins‘ London debut with special guest Allison Brown at The Ugly Mug. After their performance the five of us talked music, movies, websites and psychology for several hours at a favourite restaurant (even moreso now because they didn’t kick us out for grossly overstaying our welcome).

I’d made plans with Brenda, one of my favourite musicians and a talented voiceover artist, to see Lenni‘s show on Monday before giving her a ride to London, but inexplicably had neglected to inform Greg of the gig in advance. Fortunately I was able to get hold of him at the last minute, and so the three of us enjoyed each other’s company (and Lenni and trio, naturally) at the packed venue before heading out just after midnight. A couple of solid hours of singer-songwriters on CD and wide-ranging conversation later (including, finally, an answer to my question: it’s not by choice) Brenda and I hit London and parted ways.

As a fitting coda to the long musical weekend, on Tuesday I returned to the Ugly Mug, this time to pick up a long-lost album of photos. I’ll be adding them to the Sirens website RSN.

Next up: Andrew, Scott, Donna, Rufus, Emm and Dayna.

Demon Stich

Lenni: I lived in California for a year, and this next song [Rufus Wainwright’s Poses] reminds me of that for some reason.

Stich: Because everyone there is a poser?

Of the people Lenni Jabour could have picked to join her for her jazz-singing debut, I’d never have thought Stich Wynston‘s name would come up. It’s not because he’s not an excellent player–he definitely is–but I associate him so strongly with the Shuffle Demons that it’s hard to think of him doing anything more conventional. Yet there he was last night, drumming away behind pianist Adrean Farrugia, bassist Drew Birston, and chanteuse extraordinare Lenni.

Compact this!

File | Compact Folders for imap accounts now compacts all imap folders in the account…. Previously, this command just compacted the selected folder. To compact just the selected folder, you should now use the folder context menu command Compact this Folder.

I’m a keyboard-shortcut user, and have gotten quite used to the buggy behaviour of hitting Alt–F–F to compact the current IMAP folder, so I’ve written my first Thunderbird extension to work around the new behaviour. (I’ve also entered bug 235153 to have the process changed so it’s more responsive to the user.) The extension adds a new item to the File menu called Compact This Folder with accesskey F; it also renames Compact Folders to Compact All Folders and changes its accesskey to A.

A disclaimer: the extension Works For Me in Thunderbird 0.5+, but Your Mileage May Vary. Please let me know if you have problems and I’ll try to fix them (but don’t hold your breath); similarly, if you have suggestions or improvements, please pass them along.

Version 0.2 now works in Thunderbird 0.7. The accesskey for Compact All Folders is now M because A was used for the Attachments submenu.

I’ve removed the Creative Commons license as it’s not designed for software. However, the removal is not retroactive: version 0.1 is still licensed under by-nc-sa. Version 0.2 is unlicensed for the time being.

It’s over

I guess I made it past Donna… not much point in staying up other than stubbornness since, surprising no one, Peter Jackson and crew pulled off a clean sweep. This may be heresy among my friends, but I’m kind of annoyed that it got everything; at the very least I’d hoped A Kiss at the End of the Rainbow or Belleville Rendez-vous might take best song, and the best adapted screenplay award was obviously given for the accomplishment of the trilogy as a whole rather than the individual film. (I still have my doubts as to whether any of the three screenplays, or the entire set, are actually the best of anything.) Of the non-Rings results tonight I’m most pleased that Sofia Coppola won for original screenplay and Denys Arcand won for best foreign-language film.

Happenstance

In a confluence of events made possible by a silly policy of the City of Toronto’s tourism department, I will not be in that city on March 7 before going to see Lenni Jabour at Cameron House on the 8th. This is quite fortunate, because this evening during the intermission of a Michael Kaeshammer concert at the Wolf Performance Hall I discovered that Claire Jenkins will be at The Ugly Mug Café on the 7th. Seeing as I’ve been a fan of Claire’s since I saw her open for Lenni a few months ago, and as I can claim at least partial responsibility for her being at the Mug, it’s great that I’ll actually be in London to see her!

You–yes, you, the usual suspects–should come out, and bring your friends!