No Middle Name

The BBC's excellent Cult TV site is to close on July 15 . Damn shame, get it while it's still there. [via Whedonesque ]

Alaska state flower Originally uploaded by GalleyWench . Between my office and the nearest supermarket, there is nothing. Just busy roads, lined with pothole-filled pavements and grass verges peppered with rubbish thrown from passing cars. Until today. Thanks to the weekend's sunshine the road to lunch is now splashed liberally with colour. Wild flowers have moved in. Marguerites are hiding the rubbish. Forget-me-nots are distracting people from the stubbly bald patches on the verges. Wild rose bushes leap out and point to the sky, yelling "Look, over there!" as you walk past the now-unnoticed steel crash barriers. The trip to Tesco's has been transformed from a trudge to a pleasant stroll. As usual, I saw lots of things to photograph but didn't have my camera, so a quick tag search of flickr returned the beautiful flowers you see here. I used to know the names of very nearly all the flowers I saw today. When I was little, maybe 6 or 7, I used to have a...

The wedding poster was a success. It didn't arrive in time for the weekend, my wife was presented with an empty frame and was duly confused. It turned up yesterday, and the missus was pleased, but it was too big for the frame we'd bought. So she nipped to the shops and now it's being framed. Which means I won't get to see it for another week or so. The only drawback is that now I've set a high standard for wedding anniversary gifts. This one was made by me, was very personal and she liked it a lot. If I'd been thinking long-term I should have started off small - like the books from amazon. Sure, she'd have been disappointed, but not as disappointed as she'll be next year when she gets crappy books from Amazon.

eclectech : the very model of a modern labour minister : a tribute to charles clarke and his id cards . Very funny.

The Dress , winner of the Orange Prize for Fiction short story competition. Really good, I'd read it if I were you. Go on. There's nothing anywhere near as good here, and probably never will be. [via bookslut ].

Wedding Poster Originally uploaded by No Middle Name . It's our first wedding anniversary this weekend, and I finally came up with a gift idea yesterday. The first year's gift is supposed to be paper, and at first I thought of a book from Amazon. But that didn't really seem right, even to a man of limited romantic sensibilities like me. Then I remembered reading about this guy making a poster out of pictures from iPhoto. A quick google later and I was convinced. It's a nice way of making sure the wedding pictures don't stay in an album on a shelf, or tucked away on the computer never to be viewed. The only problem was getting it printed. There are a couple of photo shops nearby that will print photos from CDs or memory sticks, but the largest they do is 15" by 10". I wanted to go for the big one: 30" by 20". More googling came up with photobox who seem quite good, and will do the big sizes. They'll even print it out on canvas stret...

I spent the weekend up to my nuts in XML-RPC shenanigans. It took me about 4 hours to add a web service interface to the dodgy content management system I knocked up for my wife to use on our family website. The php xml-rpc library is great, and made the whole thing really straightforward. Then I knocked up an applescript to allow us to upload an album of photos from iPhoto in one go. Previously we'd been uploading them one-by-one via a web page. Tedious. All was going well, until I got to the part where I needed to attach the image data to the xml-rpc request. In the php test client I'd written it was easy; read in the image as a string, and the php library would convert it to base64 and tag it as such in the xml. Bingo, Bob's yer uncle. Applescript's xml-rpc support is provided through the Apple Event Manager which performs the translation between applescript data types and the xml equivalent. It should convert binary data into base64, same as the php library. I coul...

I wish I could be as grumpy as Harlan Ellison : What annoys me is that Spielberg is such an egomaniac these days that it has to be "Steven Spielberg's War of the Worlds". No, you puss-bag. It's "H.G. Wells' War of the Worlds", and it wouldn't kill you to put his f--king name on it. I have this image of Harlan Ellison zooming around on a wave of burning bile, like Iceman or Frozone but with flames, looking for fights instead of helping people. He's my hero. Kicking ass and taking names. No, just kicking ass and slapping H.G. Wells' name on things. I have no idea what a puss-bag is, but I'm going to make a point of calling somebody it today.