I knitted. I listened to Fauré. I napped. I greeted our landlord and handed him some boxes of stuff he was taking away. I greeted the man bringing home our Roomba. I napped. I made dinner. I read about 3 pertinent lines in my PHP book. I caught up with some blog-posting.
Most of all though, I procrastinated. Big-time. And it felt good 
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Today was our last day in Paris and this evening has been – understandably – a little fraught, with the packing and calculations of how long it will take to get to Gare du Nord tomorrow and so on. I’m also feeling rather frazzled at the prospect of tomorrow as a whole – getting the flat all cleaned and tidied and parents out to get to the Eurostar, then getting us all home from St Pancras, and then finally the most stressful thing of all – getting us out of the house again to go to the premiere of my new piece Deconstruct: Point, line, plane. I don’t know that any of my other premieres have ever had me so worried as this one. I know I’ve built this piece exactly how I wanted it to be. I’m confident that it can work, but the criticism I received about it when it was still in its embryonic state just makes me doubt just a little bit, even while I know that it didn’t want to be anything other than what it is. And then there’s the question if whether the performers have just decided to change it… And if they have, is it still under my name or have they correctly listed it as an arrangement. I tell you, the sooner Wednesday rocks up, the happier I’ll be!
But we’ve had a lovely last day in Paris. Ran some errands, and my Da finally took me to Shakespeare and Company – and what a gorgeous bookshop it is!!! Most of the books upstairs aren’t for selling – they’re for sitting about and reading! And they’ve got a piano up there, waiting to be played, so we were all happy – the Da nosing around the poetry section, me reading snippets of Julia Child on French bread, the mama playing Debussy on the piano (and drawing quite a happy crowd: Mama: ‘It’s just you there, isn’t it?’ Me: ‘No, but they’re not listening, they’re all reading books, aren’t you?’ Small throng: *assorted giggles*).
And then we visited Notre Dame. And for the first time I noticed the lovely chapel and column paintings – don’t know how I missed them before – so clean and clear. Really gorgeous.
I should stop procrastinating with photos and ‘fess up though that I’ve done precious little Creative Pact work today – I really think I’m reaching the end of what I can do on the iPad for this project. It’s been great and really useful, and I’m VERY glad I didn’t bring the laptop (especially now I’m on the verge of having to lug lots of lovely foodie shopping back to Blighty) but I really need to be working in PHP now, which means I need my books and a server and an Internet connection I don’t need to reset every 30 seconds. Um… On second thoughts, I guess that’s not so much an iPad limitation as a limitation of circumstances, due to not having packed the PHP book and only having rubbish Internet. But still, feeling a little hamstrung and like I’m treading water. I have managed to achieve a tiny bit, but it was only setting up template pages for the contact page (will contain a PHP form) and a page to hold the Tate’s video interview with me, which I can’t tell if I can embed because Vimeo just tells me it’s Flash, which obv won’t work on the iPad – going to have to wait till I get home to see if that should even have a separate page at all or just a link to Vimeo (suspect the latter, which means I’ll need to work out the best styling for putting about a paragraph of text into the right column and making it all look nice). So not a complete fail there, but a bit wussy, really. Still, planning in being at home and working in it for pretty much the whole of Wednesday and Thursday, so I think I’m still in with a chance to get it ready to fly on the 30th…
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… because we’re about to go and pick up a van and go out to Ikea. Probably won’t be back until the depths of night. Probably will be completely exhausted by the time we do get back. I’m loading up the iPad with lots to read because Djelibeybi wants to look at some stuff for his new (renting) flat in Scotland, so I’m expecting to be a bit bored.
Today the iPad came into its own for this project. I had to go into town to get my hair cut, so I loaded up Gusto on the iPad with the files I needed from my FTP server and did some editing and tweaking and made up the basis of the two-column template, so barring font thingys and side margins and getting it all to work in IE6 of blessed memory, this is pretty much ready, I think. YAY! Gusto’s actually pretty good. Limited at the moment, but really it’s quite useful. I wouldn’t want to code everything on it but for the moment it’s meeting my limited needs, and of course the iPad is SO much lighter and quicker to turn on than the laptop (also doesn’t have a DVD stuck in the drive which keeps trying to start itself up).
Did discover a slight issue with <audio> which I hadn’t found yesterday though. The gurus of HTML 5 online have been saying things like this:
you need to be careful about the order of the
<source>elements. Because of a bug in Firefox, if you list the MP3 first (which Firefox doesn’t support), it will silently fail and refuse to render that particular<audio>element. The trick is to list the Ogg Vorbis file first and the other formats after. Webkit (Safari and Chrome) handle unsupported formats just fine.
HTML5 Doctor: http://html5doctor.com/native-audio-in-the-browser/
This seems to be fine and dandy (although I should say that it seems to be fixed in Firefox 3.6)… until you try to play it on the iPad. I haven’t tried the iPod Touch yet, but I’m guessing it’ll be much the same – with the Ogg file first, the iPad’s version of Safari chucks a wobbly and won’t play anything. With the MP3 file first, all is fine and dandy. Except of course, that it isn’t because by the sounds of things earlier versions of Firefox may break down and cry. I think it’s a case of JavaScript to the rescue here. For my current website audience, Firefox seems to be more important than the iPad, and I think (warning: gross generalisation ahead) that iPad users in general are less likely to be thinking about or switching off JavaScript than desktop users who may be constrained by workplace policies or mostly unfounded fears that their files may be attacked. At any rate, even if this isn’t the case, there are way fewer iPad users currently visiting the site and the proportion of those who may have JavaScript switched off is probably microscopic, so I’m planning on leaving the code set up for Firefox and using JavaScript to (probably) remove the offending ogg file source tag from the DOM at the first available moment. Hopefully this will work.
And now to face the horror that is Ikea…
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Yes, I know, *yawn!* it’s dull to read about but the reading itself is still very interesting. Today’s chapter (OK, half-chapter) was on web storage. Haven’t quite got up to Web SQL Databases yet, which will be huge fun, but the Web Storage API stuff (described by Lawson & Sharp as “cookies on steroids”) is more than enough for this project. I have knowledge. This is good
I’ve been trying to get motivated to do some more code, but it’s been a crazy, crazy day, rushing about, the landlord finally coming to take away the excess furniture, a spirited attempt on tackling the dust in this place and subsequent discovery that the vacuum cleaner that came with the flat is, in fact, the worst vacuum cleaner in the world. There is a high probability that I will go out in the next few days to buy vacuum cleaner bags and instead come back with a baby Dyson… Not a fiscally sensible way to begin 4 months off work, but I think it would make life immeasurably happier than weekly wrestling with a sucky vacuum that doesn’t actually suck. I’ll chalk it up to the “stress management” account if I do.
Tagged with: learning, programming, reading, study, web | Add a comment
It’s taking a while… partly because this week’s been a killer, and partly because my brain has been feeling a little sluggish and is a bit complicated, so I’ve been taking my time and making sure I understand rather than just skim. I think I’m getting it – it looks pretty groovy, but I’m also beginning to think that once I’m done with this chapter, I might skip over to the chapter on offline storage, and then put the reading on hold for a little – I’ve got a couple of iPod/iPad web app projects lurking that will require things like geolocation and webSQL but as I doubt I’ll need them for this project, and time is short (and busy), I think I should be focusing more on design and actual hands-on development. I’ll certainly keep reading the book, because it’s excellent and stuff I do need to know, but I think I’ve been through most of the bits I’ll need for the current project.
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um… yes. Well, the title says it all really. Except for the bit that I think I’m quite glad I won’t have any need to tackle canvas on this project – looks interesting, but a bit daunting. Going to read the whole chapter anyway, partly because it’s there, partly because I’m bound to need to know something about it sometime and there’s no time like the point where one is reading the rest of book anyway.
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Read the chapter on the new media tags today – very interesting, and great to see that even though they’re not fully supported there’s a range of fallback options available, both built in to HTML and via JavaScript. It sounds like there’s really a lot of scripting opportunities available (or will be available!) to go with both video and audio, which makes me think that my idea of a mobile piece using <audio> and the geolocation APIs, while possibly not entirely feasible right now, may be in the near future – can’t wait!
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Well it is when you’re buying a domain name for your Creative Pact project! This particular item has, I believe, sat on my to-do list for 4 years:
* Buy caitlinrowley.com
and just a minute ago I got to tick the ‘done’ checkbox. YAAAYYY! So now that domain is mine for the next 5 years and will shortly be ready for me to post fabulous HTML 5 content to.
Haven’t got that much else done really, though. I finished the chapter on HTML 5 forms (amazing!) at some crazy hour of the morning and haven’t read any more today because have been distracted by a multitude of other things today, but I’ll be back to it tomorrow, no doubt.
Oh, and late last night I managed to import the rest of the web stencils into OmniGraffle, and was therefore able to make my wireframes look much nicer and more professional
Tagged with: completion, reading, shopping, study, web | Add a comment
I’ve been out for most of the day, so mostly I’ve been reading today – I’m up to the chapter on forms in the HTML 5 book and golly gosh! There’s some serious fun to be had there – obviously there’s minimal implementation of the cutest bits, such as browser-implemented field validation and combobox inputs, but it’s going to be awesome once they are, and at least now we can start using this stuff and just have JavaScript to correct where they’re not yet supported. Brilliant! Getting pretty excited about it all, and also very glad I’m reading up on it now, before it’s widely implemented – there’s a lot to take in.
I want to try out wireframing for this project, so I don’t get too caught up in the designing at the expense of basic structure. So this evening I’ve been looking at web-wireframing stencils for OmniGraffle which I’m going to have a go at getting into OmniGraffle on the iPad. Djeli had a go at this a little while back when he first bought the app, but had some difficulties, so I’ve done some research and hopefully have got files in the right formats now. Crossing fingers…
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and gosh what a meaty chapter that was! But I’m beginning to feel like I’ve grasped the basics at least – this chapter was on text (as opposed to forms or multimedia or the various APIs that go with HTML 5) which will be probably the most important aspect if the site. I feel I could start coding very soon and make a reasonable stab at it, which is comforting.
Thinking I might try to do a bit of design-sketching this weekend. That and persuade Djeli to open up my Macbook Pro to try to extract the DVD that can’t eject from the drive since the case got dented…
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