Web design is the creation of digital environments that facilitate and encourage human activity; reflect or adapt to individual voices and content; and change gracefully over time while always retaining their identity.

                                                                                                                            -- Jeffrey Zeldman

I've just been reading a great article in the Guardian Unlimited Film section from Shane Meadows about his new film This is England (which i'm hoping will include the song of the same name by The Clash).

There are a couple of choice quotes from the piece, but the interesting thing for me were his thoughts and ideas of what it was like growing up in a small town in the 1980's when you're part of a subculture, and in part, the attendant iconography of the objects that become meaningful.

Late in 1985, when I was 15, I got my first pair of Dr Marten's boots. For a while they had to be hidden at a friend's place, because at the time my Father wouldn't allow them to be 'under his roof'. What they meant to him and what they meant to me were completely different things - for him they were the accoutrements of fascism, while for me they were the symbol of anti everything - benign, insipid, popular, 'normal' and fascist. All of this meaning I had to walk around to my friend's place for the first 6 months of owning them to be able to wear them when we went out anywhere.

When we did go out, if we saw someone else wearing them, we (or them) would stop and have a chat about whatever, there was a good chance that we might have just met a brand new friend. The fact is, ideologically, or at least musically, there was a 99% chance we would be into exactly the same things. If you're my age, you might even remember that you could tell a lot about who you were meeting depending on the colour of their laces. Black and Red could mean Marxist and Anarchist, White could mean fascist or a 'hippy punk' preference.

When I was teaching, I used to tell my film or media students about this and for the most part they would laugh out loud unanimously. Maybe it was oversensitivity on my part, but whatever it was, it used to annoy me that they thought it was so funny. It wasn't funny. It was heart on your sleeve, life and death serious. Why? Because we all felt alone and sincere.

Shane Meadows talks about the multiple subcultures in his small town of Uttoxeter, and although my small town didn't have anywhere near the same diversity, I know exactly what he means when he describes his small town - pull the word Uttoxeter and insert Tauranga - during the weekends.

"In a town as small as Uttoxeter, though, there weren't enough people for each sub culture to fill their own parties or clubs, so most weekends everyone would turn up at the same village hall disco and end up fighting."

It's 20 years later, and a lot of the ideas, values and things I most value hold true to the things I learnt back then. Unlike then, I often wear a suit now, the footwear of choice are still the same.

"The big difference between now and the period in which my film is set is our level of isolation. In 1983, people still cared about society as a whole but now they'll keep their mouth shut as long as they've got the house, the job and the car they want. If you were a kid in 1983, you wouldn't have a PlayStation to sit indoors alone with. You got your entertainment from mixing with a variety of different people. While making the film, I realised that all of my fondest childhood memories surrounded human contact: mucking about with mates or going camping. In 2007, people put less emphasis on that sort of thing and more on planning their careers and their TV viewing. As far as I'm concerned, if you're working from nine to five then coming home to watch shows that your Sky box has recorded for you while you were out, you might as well be on a fucking drip."

Amen.

I just saw this exchange between the 'Journalist' Simon Dallow and Gerry Brownlee, the deputy leader of the National party on Agenda. One kind of agenda was certainly on display. If this is objective media reportage i'd hate to see what happens next. I always thought Dallow was a conservative little prig, but this was just stunning.

GERRY [....] no one can argue that and we are very pleased to be leading in those agenda issues, next week will be a great week for us, we will culminate that week by being able to form the government after the votes are counted on Saturday night.

SIMON We're all certainly looking forward to it. Gerry Brownlee and Pete Hodgson thank you so much for joining us on Agenda today.

Coincidence? I didn't think so either.

Charles Platt has written an excellent article on Sam Cohen, author of Shame: Confessions of the Father of the Neutron Bomb. The article is interesting from a number of viewpoints: Cohen's belief in the morality of his creation, his background with RAND during The Cold War; but also Platt's talent for providing a very good teleological view of how much US foreign policy has remained the same since the close of WW II.

I think the only thing that isn't perhaps given enough depth are the Reagen years. Growing up in the 1980's was a fearful time for many of us. Anyone remember the deluge of nuclear armageddon films like The Day After, a film that my entire highschool was taken to.

Nuclear war did seem like a very present danger and was a time that was filled with a lot of angst for many on the left. I remember long term anti-nuclear demonstrations in the UK that became permanent campsites outside military bases and nuclear facilities. Here in New Zealand we went through our own anti-nuclear transformation. The banning of nuclear warships, which ultimately broke up the ANZUS alliance and created antipathy from both Australia and the US. Then of course French Intelligence decided to come here and bomb the Greenpeace ship, The Rainbow Warrior.

Platt's article also has an insight into the militaristic machinations of history after WW II and succinctly explains Bush, Jr's need to create an omnipresent enemy. This is classic bogeyman stuff. Fear construction to help domestic and foreign policy fall in line with a vision created by right-wing think tanks and gung-ho militarists. Even if those militarists work behind desks and never see the consequences. Profits of Fear

I hate open letters. They're almost always whining about some personal injustice the writer feels they've suffered; so in the spirit of something else entirely, I present a letter from a Mozilla Mac tester who seems to be suffering unrequited love.

Let me please say that I like Thunderbird on the Mac, but I really want to love Thunderbird on the Mac. I also don't want to sound ungrateful, because I can see very, very hard work, but I personally find Thunderbird's handling of RSS in the News and Blogs component unintuitive and extremely un-mac-like. One thing i've discovered in the last 2-3 months of testing Firefox and Thunderbird on OS X is how varied individual usage of the applications are. Usability for one person can often not be likened in any way to another - so, for what it's worth, this is just how I use Thunderbird and what I think would work better. And i'm hoping, what would work better for you.

In some part i've used NetNewsWire as a benchmark, mostly because Thunderbird shares a similar look with a three pane view. There are a bunch of others i've personally tried, but I keep coming back to NNW and the similarities with Thunderbird, I hope, are obvious. I've been testing nightly's for the last while and are currently using version 1.0+ (20050803) while I write this. I should mention, it may seem like I want Thunderbird to be NetNewsWire. I don't. I want Thunderbird to be better than NetNewsWire.

1. Drag and Drop

Basic/Core Functionality:

Drag and Drop should be almost universal throughout Thunderbird, and it very nearly is, however some shortcomings are very obvious in the News and Blogs component. Thunderbird needs to be able to reorder RSS feeds and RSS feed folders into any way the user wants them configured.

At a basic level, it would be great if users could reorder individual feeds along self-organised lines: As an example, perhaps the user wants a hierarchy of most favoured or most frequently checked feeds (or folder of feeds) at the top to the least accessed at the bottom. I think the most obvious parallel is the organisation of browser bookmarks. Each individual feed should be able to be reordered in the main window hierarchy via drag and drop.

Advanced Drag and Drop Functionality:

To take the bookmark analogy further, the inclusion of separater components between feeds and/or folders would be a great feature. Thus, the user could further divide feeds into different categories. For the true RSS sophisticate, the inclusion of meta-group folders/master categories would be great.

The idea would be to have a category folder with a new kind of icon and perhaps a bold font indicating the category of the feed with it's contents being collapsible. Both of the above would mean a couple of different means to organize what can be literally hundreds of individual feeds and save the user scrolling for miles to find individual feeds. This also seems more intuitive than creating multiple News and Blogs accounts.

2. When Is A Folder Really A Folder?

My biggest complaint about the Blogs and News component has been my experience importing via .OPML files (Sage and NNW) and the subsequent confusion over a feed and a folder. The icons are virtually indistinguishable in the main window, and upon initial importing the file/folder relationship is blurry. The user usually expects folders with contents to usually have an expand/collapse arrow widget to the left of it's identifying name. I only discovered that the individual feed was in fact a folder by pulling up the manage subscriptions window and seeing there was an additional layer.

Whether i'm using Thunderbird in entirely the wrong way (quite possibly), it's a peculiar task to have to go through and take the individual feed out of the enclosing folder into a newly named or renamed folder and then have to tell it you would like it checked when updating your feeds via another drop sheet. I should mention that shuffling feeds between folders/enclosures has been problematic on this particular version, for some reason nested feeds are not being updated.

3. UI and Functionality

At the moment I feel like Thunderbird UI functionality is in a bind: The main window is too heavily reliant on the contextual menu for basic editing, or you use the manage subscriptions panel which doesn't seem to go far enough. For example, why can't the user remove a folder containing a feed using the remove button or hitting the delete key? Why can't the user edit the name of a folder containing a feed with the edit button or single-clicking it's title?

I'd love to see Thunderbird remove the 'manage subscriptions'/'RSS Subscriptions' panel entirely and instigate a Command-I key combination for feeds in the main window, which usually gives the user editing functionality similar to Thunderbird's already instigated 'Properties' from the contextual menu. My reasoning for removing the panel is simply that the panel adds an extra level of abstraction to something the user already sees in the main window.

If Thunderbird Devs are really keen on keeping the 'manage subscriptions'/'RSS Subscriptions' panel, could I please suggest that along with Command-I for feeds in the main window, Shift-Click, Command-A and Command-Click functionality should be included. The ability to select grouped or different individual feeds for a new window, editing or deletion is indispensable. Ideally i'd love to see this implemented for the main window, but if everyone is committed to the panel then please include this functionality there.

[To be continued]

Please feel free to comment or complain here

Revenge of the Sith has been out for less than a week and already I know someone who has it on DVD, however it's been publicly hammered by the media as being available via BitTorrent in the last few days with all the attendant arguments for and against p2p file sharing: Capitalism, Lucas' seemingly voluminous wealth and greed, Theft vs. Infringement etc. Interestingly these are the first notices people are receiving due to their perception (or self-perception) of being small-time infringers.

What's interesting about the below paragraph is the initial reading of it gives me the impression that 'Twentieth Century Fox (collectively, 'FOX')' are in fact the sole copyright owners of ALL of the world's cinema. Gauging what their parent company News Corporation has acquired recently, for a second I thought it actually might be. And then it occurred to me that it's the 21st Century and they're probably going to have to play technological catch-up really soon. Or at least start preventing their employees from leaving work with time-coded preview versions.

FOX issuing takedown notices to Sith downloader

"Re:Unauthorized Use of Twentieth Century FOX Film Corporation Property

Notice ID:xxxNotice IDxxx
Notice Date:21 May 2005 xx:xx:xx GMT

Dear Sir or Madam:

TWENTIETH CENTURY FOX FILM CORPORATION and its affiliated companies
;(collectively, 'FOX') are the exclusive owners of copyrights in motion
pictures."

There's mention of revisions being made to the style guide, but I thought i'd include the guide extract here to hopefully encourage some debate, if not with them then with yourself about the practices involved.

BBC News Website style guide extract CAPTIONS (FOR PICTURES*) (REVISED 4/03) LENGTH OF CAPTION: Picture captions can be one or two lines long, ideally one. Never three, except rarely in picture galleries.

WORDING OF CAPTION: The wording should follow the geography of a picture, from left to right (eg if Blair is on the left, and Mandelson on the right, the caption should NOT say " Mandelson and Blair"). But captions should not be literal descriptions of the picture's contents - so "Tony Blair and Peter Mandelson", though an improvement, is still poor. Better to say, eg Tony Blair and Peter Mandelson: Longtime friends

NAMES IN CAPTIONS: In News, you should ideally use both first and second names of anyone pictured - though there will often not be enough room for this, especially if two or more people have to be identified. Sport can follow the sporting convention of surnames only (eg Giggs is confident of another title ) - though take care that first names are given where necessary (eg Neville wants the England captaincy leaves us wondering, "Gary or Phil?").

PUNCTUATION OF CAPTIONS: If you are including a direct quote, use a colon and double quotation marks (eg Homer Simpson: "D'oh!"). Any colon in a caption - whether or not introducing a quote - must be followed by a capital letter (eg Lisa Simpson: Genius at work ).
If you need to focus in a caption on one individual among several, use brackets and NOT commas eg a picture of a group of children might be captioned Bart Simpson (centre) was never his teacher's pet rather than "Bart Simpson, centre, was never...". If space is very short, you can abbreviate such labels to their initial letter only. But since (left) looks strange if rendered as (l) - because it looks like a number one - then we should capitalise all three, for consistency's sake ie (C) (L) (R).
There is NO full stop at the end of a caption, other than in picture galleries.

NB: a caption is often not necessary with a map or a generic graphic.