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dorward online
the personal website of david dorward
this site is authored by david dorward, a professional web
developer based in london. expect commentary on the web, programming,
politics, and playing with little toy soldiers. if you like, you
can read more about this site.
i'm in the process of building a new tool to aggregate content i produce in a
number of places across the web to build this homepage from. please excuse the rough edges
while i work on it.
thursday 6 september 2007
giant catan
entry created on thursday 6 september 2007 at 10:34:08.
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having seen a picture of gigantic settlers played at burning man 2007, i now have an urge to build my own set.
the flat i’m buying has a fair amount of open space nearby, so this might just be a possibility.
friday 31 august 2007
the mugs of catan
entry created on friday 31 august 2007 at 11:06:07.
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snapfish had a special offer on their mugs, so i couldn't resist getting a couple printed up.
thursday 30 august 2007
a six can day
entry created on thursday 30 august 2007 at 18:50:16.
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you can measure how long a day has been by the number of cans of caffeine laced drink have been emptied by the end of the day. six means its been a long one; the frankfurt motorshow microsite has entered the "rapid bug clean up before lauch" phase.
monday 20 august 2007
gulls in flight
entry created on monday 20 august 2007 at 08:38:52.
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i took far too many photos of seagulls on my recent holiday, but some came out really nicely.
thursday 9 august 2007
mongoose publishing open day 2007
entry created on thursday 9 august 2007 at 08:45:33.
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in previous years, mongoose publishing has held their open days at their offices, but this time they moved out to a sports centre on the edge swindon old town.
this made it easier to get to and eliminated the usual fight for parking with saturday morning shoppers, but an echoy room doesn’t lend itself very well to demos of rpgs (which involve lots of talking).
with the extra space, mongoose was able to open up to some third party vendors who dangled some very tempting goodies in front of me. i was tempted to pick up some scenery models, but forced myself to resist the urge until after i’ve finished moving home.
unfortunately, the event seemed smaller (in terms of attendance) than previous years. i’m not sure if this was to do with the room simply being bigger, or if people pulled out after claudia christian gave her apologies and spent the time filming episodes of nip/tuck.
there might not have been all that many people there, but there was plenty to see. mongoose unveiled their shiny new license - traveller. it is a game i’ve heard a great deal of praise for, but never actually got around to playing.
the new conan book is out (running to something in the order of 460 pages) and using art appropriate to the tradition (kids, don’t show this one to your mothers, at least not without slicing out the outside margin on every left hand page).
a call to arms second edition is out, and looks nice. i didn’t get much time to look at it in the end, but it sounds like fighters have been made rather less useless.
there were also plenty of demo games going on. since i’d arrived, looked up, and found sam and louise parked next to me, we ended up in a trio for most of the day, and we’d barely made it trough the door before being roped into a game of paranoia by ian.
a lowly team of troubleshooters we were not! no, we were destined for greater things and our blue clearance officers were responsible for the smooth running of an entire sector. we were, of course, suitable grateful to friend computer for the honour (”oh ****!”).
if you don’t know paranoia then “responsible for the smooth running” is code for “responsible for everything that goes wrong”.
still, we managed to come out of it in one piece, even if we did have a reactor explode, a high programmer drugged into insensibility, and unleashed a batch of scrubbots on our neighbours with orders to leak oil in treasonous patterns all over the neighbouring sector, and steal more oil when they ran out. their poor little bot brains couldn’t cope and they went insane (and not in a good way, at least not if you’re anywhere near them).
umm, obviously femb sector was being run by traitors and we only planted the evidence to expedite due process. honest.
kudos to gareth hanrahan for running a highly entertaining game.
old bear was running kerakhistan race of death, a car racing game with machine guns based on the battlefield evolution rules. it was good fun, although i think the victory conditions need tweaking (people who have scored points in previous rounds are better off trying to end the race rather then score more points), but it was good fun overall.
unfortunately, the race followed by lunch made it too late for us to join in any of the afternoon games, but it gave us a chance to look at all the goodies. sam and louise had a game of acta and i wandered around and did some catching up with people i haven’t had much contact with since moving away from swindon.
overall, it was a good day out.
wednesday 8 august 2007
working for yahoo!
entry created on wednesday 8 august 2007 at 22:54:20.
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'hang on a minute! i still haven't blogged about my new job!' i thought to myself about half an hour ago. then i went and dug through flickr for some suitable photos before checking and finding that, whoops, i had indeed mentioned it, but only in passing, so now i'll go into a little more detail. my previous job was doing backend coding for sophos' website, and it was getting a little dull so i was looking for a change. several months of jobsite didn't turn up anything that encourage me to apply but i was tootling along with no desperate need to find something. then christian approached me and i found myself in a rapid cycle of interviews before being offered a job in london. i compared the pros and cons and then did something i once swore i'd never so - i moved to london. it was possibly one of the best decisions of my life. i'm now working on (generally at least) more interesting projects and rather then the small team i was in at sophos, i get to work with three dozen developers who are all really good people. as christian said, "it is great to have the right people working next to you". …and many others
despite the horror stories, the tube is not all that bad, and it is certainly nice to be able to read a book or doze while i commute. the office, being located in the middle of the west end, is placed brilliantly for access to lots of cinemas, theatres and restaurants. house prices in londin itself are rather on the nasty side, but i've found a very nice place in tonbridge which has great transport links and is frightenly close to quite a few people i know. all in all: life is good. credits: all photographs (with the exception of the one i took) are used under creative commons licenses and link to their sources.
life feed
entry created on wednesday 8 august 2007 at 22:01:14.
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recently (relatively speaking since i've been poor about blogging of late),
i talked about putting together a life feed. it went live weeks ago, but i haven't (until now) gotten around to mentioning it. let's introduce a buzzword: web 2.0.
i hate buzzwords, they're usually ill-defined with half a dozen explanations as
to what they mean, but let us use the definition of web 2.0 that i like: a web with user generated content. (i will avoid the other popular definition 'uses ajax', and stay well away from what 'ajax' actually means. boy, i'm really letting this dislike of buzzwords shine through tonight, aren't i?) in the good old days, there would be strict limits on who could add content to a website, the world was divided into "authors" and "consumers". then along comes web 2.0 and the playing field changes, now some sites have "administrators" and "users" (with some users being active and some remaining passive consumers). so, web 2.0, we've got flickr, yahoo! answers, upcoming, the ten word review and bucket loads of other places where users produce content. this organisation is great, if you're looking for a photo then you can go to flickr and search their collection of photos, or look through the photos of a particular user. incidentally, flickr is how i found the image i use above, its a great service for finding graphics to spice up content. this organisation is dreadful! how are you supposed to find all the works of a particular user across all these different services? it would be nice if we had single sign on (and openid looks like it might be a way forward here), which let you find everything a user does (sadly, while most of the services i listed above belong to yahoo!, you can't trace a single user through all of them). that said, i wouldn't want this sort of thing rushed into since there are privacy concerns. since we don't have a single sign on, i thought i'd do the next best thing. rss , atom and json (where would we be without abbreviations and acronyms?) are common data formats used to present articles in a machine readable format (html doesn't have a way to distinguish between separate articles) and most web 2.0 sites make use of them. so, given a bunch of data sources, i can pull a lot of content from various places around the web (see the bottom of my homepage for a list), mix them together and then spit them out again. my script isn't perfect yet, it sometimes generates html syntax errors (if two twitter entries are too similar, they'll end up with the same id), and it doesn't strip syntax errors out of other sources (i've managed to put some bad material into wordpress while copy/pasting from amazon and i don't want to force the entry to regenerate as it will bump it back up to the top of the index), but it does the job. credits: web 2.0 is here photograph by tantek and used under a creative commons license.
leadership
entry created on wednesday 8 august 2007 at 21:10:44.
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when a character in d&d hits level six, they get to pick the leadership feat, and a few weeks ago my group was having a discussion about whether or not a couple of characters in a game should take it.
the big advantage of the feat, given a sufficiently high charisma attribute is the cohort who is just a couple of levels below the character who takes the feat, but it also comes with a wagonload of minions who would go squish about five minutes after you take them into a dungeon. they aren’t much good for anything other than looking after the character’s manor / castle / secret underground base.
in the traditional generic fantasy campaign (at least in my, fairly limited, experience), if a character actually manages to get their hands on a nice base of operations then it is usually acquired through some means such as lord caractère de non-joueur waving his sword about and saying:
“i dub ye sir Épéiste crédule and grant ye the lands bordering the orc infested hills of the west to defend on behalf of the crown.”
i apologise for the dreadful quality of my french names, which were provided with the aid of an online translation service.
i mentioned ‘fairly limited experience’ earlier. typically the games i’ve played in have involved just following along with the gm’s plot and character backgrounds (with a few exceptions) not coming into it a great deal. that isn’t the case with this game (which is a good thing, i’m enjoying it more then i’ve enjoyed a campaign in a long while, although other factors are involved too) which makes me think that if the party decides to aim for acquiring (for example) a castle, then it might just happen.
that would make the leadership feat rather cooler then a simple source of an extra sword arm, healer or spellslinger.
friday 13 july 2007
tiny kobold electrons delivered my ezine
entry created on friday 13 july 2007 at 23:31:02.
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the first issue of kobold quarterly turned up in my inbox this morning. i haven’t finished reading it yet (i’ve got a weekend ahead of me for that), but my first impressions are favourable.
it has a fair bit of crunch (game mechanics), but most of the content is fluff (setting information) which is how i like it. i have access to more then enough d&d game mechanics already so i’d rather have inspiration for plots then anything else (and i’ll confess to finding fluff more enjoyable to read than tables of combat statistics).
having a high fluff content has the added bonus of making it handy for people who are running non-d&d games with a sword and sorcery setting (i know at least one person planning a runequest game in a d&desque setting).
one feature i’m happy to see is the ecology of series, which was one of my favourite bits of the late dragon magazine.
if you like rpgs then i suggest you pick up a subscription. at $16/year it is pretty inexpensive and is aimed at both dms and players (although, it seems slightly more suited to the former).
friday 6 july 2007
the importance of maps in world building
entry created on friday 6 july 2007 at 15:00:21.
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a friend of mine is in the process of setting up a mud, and we’re going through a world building exercise.
i’d managed to come up with a description of a location (and the journey to get to it) that i was pretty happy with, and then someone came up with a map which contradicted it. there were two choices, either the description needed to be changed or the map did.
i didn’t want to add an ocean voyage so i set about amending the map so i could make my proposal for the general layout of the world. it was soon after that that i realized my error. the start of the journey that was described was in a temperate region, while the end was in a desert, and they were at the same latitude. that, combined with their closeness, mean that the weather simply didn’t make sense.
in future, i’ll always draw a map to make sure that where i put things makes sense.
monday 22 october 2007
lego izzard - cake or death
entry created on monday 22 october 2007 at 15:41:24.
link
sunday 21 october 2007
drop-down menus; no thanks!
entry created on sunday 21 october 2007 at 23:56:43.
link
friday 19 october 2007
06:30
the timeline slider now has alternative stylesheets and instead of having "now" and "elsewhen" it has "now", "future" and "past".
#
05:36
and i think the timeline slider is now is a state worthy of being shown off. woo hoo.
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04:18
my timeline slider is now keyboard accessible.
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03:38
hack day at yahoo! idea: mash up tired hackers who need a massage with http://tinyurl.com/2aalt9
#
thursday 18 october 2007
working with ... ?
13:08
i posted something first class and recorded delivery to leeds last friday. six full days later and it still hasn't arrived. royal mail suck.
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12:08
the data i want is in a table - win! it is a layout table - fail!
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12:00
trying to parse markup. it uses xhtml. i can use an xml parser. it has many well-formedness errors. so i can't. i hate xhtml as text/html.
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wednesday 17 october 2007
charing cross
tuesday 16 october 2007
colour schemes from adobe
entry created on tuesday 16 october 2007 at 17:27:21.
link
sunday 14 october 2007
free game: command & conquer
entry created on sunday 14 october 2007 at 04:33:57.
link
wednesday 10 october 2007
10:32
zoom: 1 - internet explorer's insane magic voodoo that makes things which should work, work. i hate it.
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tuesday 9 october 2007
openoffice.org 2.3: new features, extensions and the much anticipated new charting tool
entry created on tuesday 9 october 2007 at 17:59:50.
link
thursday 4 october 2007
setting media type headers on your web site - w3c q&a weblog
entry created on thursday 4 october 2007 at 12:36:06.
link
tuesday 2 october 2007
css sprite generator
entry created on tuesday 2 october 2007 at 23:09:37.
link
creating a coat of arms in illustrator
entry created on tuesday 2 october 2007 at 16:28:40.
link
monday 1 october 2007
20:20
watching (with company) the very first episode of countdown, while mocking it and drinking, and still doing better than any of the players.
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10:49
pondering a "usenet: 2.0 communities since 1979" t-shirt design
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tuesday 25 september 2007
scrap text resize widgets and teach people how to resize text
entry created on tuesday 25 september 2007 at 15:33:08.
link
friday 14 september 2007
making text larger in your browser
entry created on friday 14 september 2007 at 21:54:05.
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something to give to people who ask how to build custom font resizing controls for their websites; an alternative that works on the majority of websites and so is of more use to the visitor.
thursday 13 september 2007
photos taken on thursday 13 september 2007.
running kde on the n770
entry created on thursday 13 september 2007 at 22:11:04.
link
09:38
the bug is fixed. visual studio has saved the day. oh dear.
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09:12
why is visual studio throwing validation error on my markup? its complaining about xhtml 1.0 syntax errors, but i'm using html 4.01.
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09:11
oooh! visual studio does code completion for javascript. this is kinda nice. (argh! what are you thinking david?!)
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09:10
i'm editing web pages using microsoft visual studio; it makes me feel dirty
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tuesday 11 september 2007
09:01
hello cnet. i understand you want page views for your advertisers, but i'm not going to read a 10 page article @ 3 paragraphs per page.
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monday 10 september 2007
image compression: seeing what's not there
entry created on monday 10 september 2007 at 15:35:31.
link
friday 7 september 2007
photos taken on friday 7 september 2007.
thursday 6 september 2007
ext js - javascript library
entry created on thursday 6 september 2007 at 21:48:05.
link
this library does some impressive looking ui things. i don't know how accessible it is, but it looks like a very slick toolkit for writing web applications with.
wednesday 5 september 2007
shift happens — fixing tricky layouts with the yui dom collection » yahoo! user interface blog
entry created on wednesday 5 september 2007 at 16:04:26.
link
15:12
i shall make tomorrow's london.pm meet. except i have to be up at 0600 for dconstruct on friday ... so perhaps not!
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tuesday 4 september 2007
david dorward's blog
entry created on tuesday 4 september 2007 at 19:56:59.
link
my blog (for the benefit of certain bots which use del.icio.us as a source)
10:59
why do they decide to have two 72 hours tube strikes just before i move somewhere where i won't be using the tube to get to work?
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mainline to paddington - the tube's on strike
monday 3 september 2007
non-geographical alternative telephone numbers
entry created on monday 3 september 2007 at 16:51:53.
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useful for finding telephone numbers for companies that my mobile provider won't charge me a fortune to use.
saturday 1 september 2007
photos taken on saturday 1 september 2007.
friday 31 august 2007
the mugs of catan
thursday 30 august 2007
a six can day
16:50
i'm fixing bugs while listening to opera; its very relaxing.
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equal height columns with yui grids
entry created on thursday 30 august 2007 at 16:24:26.
link
08:50
photobox screwed up and processed my order twice ... but only billed me once. now i have a spare 30"x20" print. win!
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sunday 26 august 2007
photos taken on sunday 26 august 2007.
friday 24 august 2007
tobago accommodation at marys hill lodge & mt pelier cottage
entry created on friday 24 august 2007 at 21:49:51.
link
laura's new venture - damnit - now i'm wanting another holiday!
tuesday 21 august 2007
ieblog : ie6 and ie7 vpc refresh available
entry created on tuesday 21 august 2007 at 17:41:47.
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latest virtual machine images for testing webpages in other versions of ie under windows
thursday 16 august 2007
photos taken on thursday 16 august 2007.
thursday 9 august 2007
how-to: debug javascript in internet explorer
entry created on thursday 9 august 2007 at 18:14:55.
link
scene completion using millions of photographs
entry created on thursday 9 august 2007 at 16:37:59.
link
recent blog entries
subscribe:
the mugs of catan
a six can day
gulls in flight
working for yahoo!
life feed
see the blog homepage for more.
recently from the core worlds
subscribe:
giant catan
mongoose publishing open day 2007
leadership
tiny kobold electrons delivered my ezine
the importance of maps in world building
see the core worlds for more.
recent photos
subscribe:
working with ... ?
charing cross
photos taken on13 9 2007
photos taken on7 9 2007
mainline to paddington - the tube's on strike
photos taken on1 9 2007
the mugs of catan
a six can day
photos taken on26 8 2007
photos taken on16 8 2007
see older photos on my flickr stream.
recent bookmarks
subscribe:
lego izzard - cake or death
drop-down menus; no thanks!
colour schemes from adobe
free game: command & conquer
openoffice.org 2.3: new features, extensions and the much anticipated new charting tool
setting media type headers on your web site - w3c q&a weblog
css sprite generator
creating a coat of arms in illustrator
scrap text resize widgets and teach people how to resize text
making text larger in your browser
running kde on the n770
image compression: seeing what's not there
ext js - javascript library
shift happens — fixing tricky layouts with the yui dom collection » yahoo! user interface blog
david dorward's blog
non-geographical alternative telephone numbers
equal height columns with yui grids
tobago accommodation at marys hill lodge & mt pelier cottage
ieblog : ie6 and ie7 vpc refresh available
how-to: debug javascript in internet explorer
scene completion using millions of photographs
read about these bookmarks or see more bookmarks.
recent twittering
subscribe:
the timeline slider now h…
and i think the timeline …
my timeline slider is now…
hack day at yahoo! idea: …
i posted something first …
the data i want is in a t…
trying to parse markup. i…
zoom: 1 - internet explor…
watching (with company) t…
pondering a "usenet:…
the bug is fixed. visual …
why is visual studio thro…
oooh! visual studio does …
i'm editing web pages usi…
hello cnet. i understand …
i shall make tomorrow's l…
why do they decide to hav…
i'm fixing bugs while lis…
photobox screwed up and p…
see more of my twittering.
recent ten word reviews
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there are no recent reviews. for older content please see the all my ten word reviews.
© david dorward
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featured information
if you are looking for a great place to visit while in london, check out the saatchi gallery of contemporary art. they also have an amazing interactive art gallery on their website. if you are interested, i found a pretty interesting site about dog health and dog training kennels. btw, i have many business holdings, some are domestic and some are offshore corporation. buy & sell tickets on viagogo, an online ticket exchange that allows people to buy and sell live event tickets in a safe and guaranteed way. cell phone number reverse search. look up by cell phone number, by name. search unlisted phones also.
a lot of people are finding each other on myspace, but do you think this could be a new avenue for international mail order brides services? of course, using a psychic is always an option. i lost my phone and i had to use a phone card for a while. it was convenient. the only issue is that if you lose your password to the site you may need a data recovery service to help you re-find this special someone. who knows, a 3d ultrasound visit may be in your near future. sounds like an expensive series of events.
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