bellyphant → page six

Well, they seem to at least. They’re semi-useful: I’ve managed to make a fairly good runtime code generator that fills in some abstract properties for you (based on custom attributes). But how do I make my own “magic” attributes — you know the ones: ThreadStatic is a good example. It’s an attribute that the runtime knows about, and just does some magic stuff behind the scenes.

What if I wanted to make my own attribute that actually does something? Why can’t I? Why aren’t there hook methods that get called when the class is loaded, or when the method is called, or something along those lines? I’d quite like to make an equivalent of ThreadStatic for sessions: the static variable is shared between all requests in a web session (I’m not using ASP here, I’m using my own framework). But I can’t (it seems).

It’s this sort of poorly thought out “magic” stuff that is used throughout the .NET framework — and it seems to me that, most of the time, whoever thought it up didn’t really think about who might be using it. Beyond the simplest of wizard-code-generated cases, that is. I guess I’m not supposed to actually do any real work with .NET?

Learnt about two random startups today. Wordie is, according to itself, like Flickr without the pictures; according to me, it’s vaguely interesting, but more like a specialized wiki; or perhaps just like Del.icio.us. But perhaps I missed the point of Flickr :). People put up lists of words, and other people also put up lists of words. Hilarity ensues. Would be more interesting if people would put up more interesting words…

On the less interesting side is Twitter. It’s kind of like a log of people’s IM status messages. Which might be nice, I guess. If I cared what anyone was up to. I think this is a good example of Web 2.0 going ridiculous — it’s just never going to be that interesting. Unless, like Asoboo they start mapping in locations and hobbies etc. And even then, it might just be more trouble than it’s worth bothering with.

I added an RSS 2.0 feed for this site, so for those of you with RSS aggregators, you can now find out about my exciting stories as soon as I write them! Excellent!

Please be nice to it. It currently has all stories in it — this will become a problem in a (short) while. For now it should be okay.

Well, there you go. That storm earlier this morning was a little stronger in some parts of London than others. Specifically Kensal Rise, a street away from where I lived for a couple of months. One of the buses I caught a bit (the 52) was caught up in it, and it all seems like it was pretty much about 200m from my old house. So there you go.

• Eye witness: Tornado hits Kensal Rise (BBC 12/7/2006)
• Six hurt as tornado hits street
• Kensal Rise Tornado photos
• Google Map of Chamberlayne Road — I think it was north of where the Google Maps indicator is

Weird!

I don’t know how I came across this stuff (some random Google search), but it’s cool stuff — open-source even. It’s all available at Danga Interactive. Basically stuff for doing large-scale web apps — distributed file-systems, distributed code execution, and a distributed DB cache; and more… No idea if they’re actually good, but certainly worth checking out (I’m mainly interested in seeing interesting designs for these sorts of things).

I didn’t mention in my new bike post that I actually salary packaged it. And it’s a terrific idea! Under the UK government’s Green Travel IR176 scheme, a company can buy bikes for its employees as part of their salary benefits. And then they’re income tax (and VAT) free! Which is the main reason I bought a bike that was a bit out of my price range.

Australia should definitely consider doing something similar. The only weird thing about it is that the company owns the bike rather than the employee, which seems a little strange (considering it came out of my pay). But if it gets me a bike, I’m happy. Perhaps the Australian government could implement it the way it does other salary packaging things, and the employees could retain ownership of the bike. It’s a great way to get people into alternative transport options.

Incidentally, the bike (a Rock Lobster Tig Team SL) is excellent. I’d recommend Merlin Cycles to anyone. I’ll get around to reviewing it at some point, and all the associated junk I bought to go with it…

Somehow got sidetracked into the questions of Semantic HTML etc. Should tables be used for form layout? I would say that as a rule, probably not (unless you’re entering values for a table). This question led me down a road of reading the following things:

• Prettier Accessible Forms — a pretty good recipe for marking up your forms in a non-table way.

And then onto other topics (A List Apart is an excellent site):

• Long Live the Q Tag — I didn’t know about the Q tag, or that it wasn’t support by Internet Explorer (even version 7).
• Citations and Quotes — discussion of the CITE and Q tags.
• Quotations: The BLOCKQUOTE and Q elements — the specification

Totally unrelated:

• Printing a Book with CSS: Boom! — just interesting, for no particular reason…