Posted on by Ian

Some of my friends have been dead for three hundred years or so…

One of the people on my "friends" list, thus proving once more how silly it is to call it that, is Samuel Pepys, pepysdiary.

Yesterdays entry, for Saturday 19 April 1662:

This morning, before we sat, I went to Aldgate; and at the corner shop, a draper’s, I stood, and did see Barkestead, Okey, and Corbet, drawn towards the gallows at Tiburne; and there they were hanged and quartered. They all looked very cheerful; but I hear they all die defending what they did to the King to be just; which is very strange. So to the office and then home to dinner, [..]

There are links to the various names. Turns out that what they "did to the King" was be signatories to Charles I's death warrant and, with the restoration of the monarchy, that was enough to get one yourself.

Their final speeches and prayers are here, which brought home again what a resource the internet is.

I'm also quite impressed that they had chances to avoid their fate, having been abroad, but returned.

Posted on by Ian

Andrea Dworkin is dead

Susie Bright on the late Andrea Dworkin.

The most interesting omission from the googlism is "Andrea Dworkin is wrong", which was a popular t-shirt slogan among American bisexual women back in the late 80s/early 90s.

I'm struck by the difference in my reaction to her death with the reaction to, say, David English or Ronald Reagan's death, where there was a part of me sad they hadn't suffered more.

All of them were often Wrong – English's journalistic career can be summed up with his "Abortion hope after 'Gay Gene' find" headline while he was editor of the evil Daily Mail.

It's probably because, unlike them, she never had power.

Thank ghod.

Posted on by Ian

Stopping web page refreshes in the middle of form-filing

We have a spiffy new intranet at work, otherwise known as hosting a minimal webserver on my PC with a PHP-based message board for internal notices.

Because I just know that half the staff aren't going to refresh their browsers to see if there are any new messages, I wanted the page to refresh automatically every so often.

The obvious way to do this is with <meta http-equiv="refresh" content="1800;URL=mboard.php"> in the head of the page – every 30 minutes this will reload itself.

But what if they're editing a new post at the time? Being cheap and cheerful, this script has the new post form at the bottom of the page that's being refreshed.

With Firefox, this doesn't matter as it will happily refill all the fields. But – as ever – Internet Explorer isn't that nice and blanks the lot.

Two of us have Firefox, everyone else is… well, they don't. And they would complain if this ever happened to them.

So, with a little bit of browsing, it's now has

<head>
<!-- blah blah blah, title and stuff -->
<script language="JavaScript" type="text/javascript">
<!-- reload page every fifteen minutes (reset if start entering a new post)
refreshit = setInterval("window.location.reload( true );", 15*60*1000);
//-->
</script>
</head>

and, in the first box of the 'start new thread' form…

<b>Name:</b><br><input type=text name="name" size=30 maxlength=30 onFocus="clearInterval(refreshit);">

i.e. if the box is selected, stop the setInterval function.

Is there an even easier way? Have I missed something horrible? It looks to work – it assumes you've got a JavaScript 1.2 or better browser, but…

Posted on by Ian

I was looking for something else, when I came across

the obituary for Judge Boreham (most famous for being in charge of trials of the 'Yorkshire Ripper' Peter Sutcliffe and the Brighton bomber Patrick Magee).

As is usual, he'd been a leading barrister before being appointed as a judge, including…

In 1970, he appeared in one of the more exceptional murder cases of the time, representing Trooper Michael Hanson, who was charged with his wife Carol over the sexual assault and murder of a 10-year-old girl near Colchester. Carol Hanson claimed her husband had stabbed the child to death.

Four days into the trial, Hanson told Boreham that he had, in fact, killed the girl, but that he wanted his wife put away to stop her associating with other men. He nevertheless refused to change his plea to guilty and, as a result, Boreham neither cross-examined Carol Hanson nor made a closing speech to the jury. Despite this, she was also convicted, and jailed for a recommended minimum of 20 years. An application for a retrial was refused, and, in 1997, she died in obscurity in prison.

There's more about the case here, but for one of the UK's main miscarriages of justice of the last century, there's amazingly little on google.

At 27 years inside before her death, she shared the 'record' with Stephen Downing (freed), a decade longer than the Bridgewater Four (17 years), the Birmingham Six (16 years) or the Guildford Four (15 years).

Posted on by Ian

I could make this a poll, but there'd be too many choices…

The law in (edit!) England & Wales used to be absolutely clear: STI infection during consensual sex was not assault, even when the infection was deliberately concealed from the partner.

But in the past couple of years, there have been three successful prosecutions of men for sexual transmission of HIV. They're going through various retrials and appeals, but the basic question remains:

Should sexual transmission of HIV be a criminal offence?

What about when someone lies about their HIV status in order to get their partner to consent to unprotected sex?

Posted on by Ian

What does this say about audiences?

From the top left of poster for the original Manchurian Candidate, before even Frank Sinatra's name:

You must not miss the first five minutes to know what it's all about!

Erm… I know I can be like Woody Allen in Annie Hall, declining to go into a film he's seen before because he would have missed two seconds of the opening text-only credits (and nothing else) but…

Posted on by Ian

I'm sorry, but it's so difficult to resist…

In June last year, someone was wondering which DTP program would be a better bet to teach students.

A number of people disagreed when I said Quark was the Word Perfect of DTP – a formerly dominant but outdated program (in its media niche) in the process of being overthrown – and Adobe InDesign was the one to go for:

"Quark. Quark quark quark quark quark quark. I work in a design company. The professionals here wouldn't touch anything else. I assume they know what they're talking about."

"If they want to have jobs later they should use Quark. If you want them to make tea at a designers, give them PageMaker. And if they are to sleep rough after they graduate give them [InDesign]."

So what's happened since?

The Guardian & Observer have dumped Quark and gone to InDesign.

The BBC's forty-odd magazines have dumped Quark and gone to InDesign.

And what prompted this was browsing National Magazines and seeing that they – Cosmopolitan, Company, Esquire, Good Housekeeping, Best, Prima et al – have dumped Quark and gone to InDesign.

I'm sure there are more…

Posted on by Ian

It's been a while since…

Want 15 minutes of fame and can't think how? Why not do what's worked in the past again again, but not recently?

  1. Announce you've discovered that putting microphones in the ears of a model head produces a really lifelike 3D effect in the resulting recording. Discovered before electronics (the first person used tubes from the model head to his own ears!) and 'discovered' about once a decade ever since
  2. Do a shock horror programme based on being able to read PC screens remotely by receiving the radiated signals. Sticking a receiver outside a financial or government institution is good as a starting point. We're well overdue for this one to come around again – for some reason, people are still reluctant to pay piles of thousands for 'TEMPEST' shielding
  3. Base a pop career on Burundi beats, a pretty lead singer and very little else. See Adam & The Ants or Bow Wow Wow