Number munching

I can’t add anything to this from George Monbiot in the Guardian on 15 April, except to recommend a read. The link comes from Avaaz.

BBC4: Stephen Fry and the Gutenberg Press

This is a programme that I have been looking forward to for months*. Obviously, because Mr Fry is a great entertainer and one who we believe we know is able to understand subjects rather than parrot them. But also because of the involvement of two of my Reading University Typography lecturers, Alan May and Martin Andrews.

Alan May is maker of models of historical things, who understands how things work by constructing them – or perhaps it is the other way round: perhaps they gain understanding of what they do because he constructed them, I’m not sure. Martin is a great communicator who can bring history to life with immense and engaging enthusiasm and insight. At Reading they taught me the basics of typographic design, in terms of analysis of the design problem, use of time and materials, etc and I look forward to watching them interact with Fry.

*It is also an iPlayer link to a BBC4 programme so it will disappear. Full details:

Stephen Fry and the Gutenberg Press.

Duration: 60 minutes

Stephen Fry examines the story behind the first media entrepreneur, printing press inventor Johann Gutenberg, to find out why he did it and how.

10:24. Update: forgot to thank Ruth for the link.

Freeconomy

Only just seen this and I’m tickled by it [enough to sign up]. Thanks to Mandy for the link.

I don’t want to give the wrong impression of the site’s purpose, but there is one rationale I have to quote:

It's about communicating face-to-face and phasing out technological communication.

Thanks to Mandy for the link.

Rocket science

Royal Gunpowder Mills in Waltham Abbey, Essex, are having Rocket and Space Day on 21 and 22 June 2008. To a certain extent this event is, to coin a phrase, ‘aimed at young people’ but it looks fun. And there are some quite soberly-titled, serious-looking talks too. The British Interplanetary Society will be there. I’ve been meaning to visit the Mills for a while, so perhaps I will go along...

Talking books

Inspired by a talking Tower Bridge, I thought I’d give a voice to another institution that’s not far away. In this case it’s a library. And perhaps because it is a library, its pronouncements are delivered very quietly: but if you’d like to follow, go to stbridelibrary’s Twitter page. The intention is to send out a message once in each week when there is an event at St Bride to act as a (gentle)  reminder. If you want to know more about the Library and the kind of things that happen there, see http://stbride.org/.

Oh, and I have to admit that having greater access to the site meant I didn’t have to screen-scrape ;-)

Non-standard fonts on the web are getting closer

Here's a nice demo of how linked fonts should look on a browser near you. This is possible because Apple has forced the issue a little: while the technology isn’t very hard to understand, there is much discussion about the intricacies of protecting restricting the typefaces used so that – for example – a design agency can use a font they have bought from a type foundry without infringing their licence. As can be imagined some people think this capability threatens their livelihood current business model; some think that DRM should be mandatory for this technology even when, as in the demo, the font is free-as-in-beer zero-price software with a licence allowing whatever distribution results from sticking it on a web server. In the case of the fonts used on the demo page, the licence says:

You may use the fonts on an unlimited number of websites using the font-face command. To do so you can upload the fonts on a public webserver or you may embed the fonts in SWF files or similar web documents.

You will need Safari 3.1 to see the demo.

The way it works is simple. Quoting the CSS:

@font-face {
font-family: "GraublauWeb";
src: url(http://www.fonts.info/info/press/GraublauWeb-Regular) format("truetype");
}

This directive tells the browser that whenever it sees a reference to ‘Grablau-Web’ it should use the font it grabbed from http://www.fonts.info/info/press/GraublauWeb-Regular.

Thanks to Dave for the link.
11 April 2008: corrected following suggestions from Dave.

Perphormance-related pay

Really, enough has been written in recent weeks about Phorm. But to overload the whole thing a tiny bit more: I never, repeat never, pay direct attention to commercial advertising I see on web pages. Relevant or otherwise. Unless I’m alone, then for Phorm to help ISPs to ‘reach full revenue potential’ it will need to do something more than chew over the fascinating pages about HTTP status codes, W3C specs, browser quirks etc that I habitually visit and shove in some ads based on a bit of keyword analysis or whatever. To get my attention and my ‘click-through’s, the inserted material will have to be stimulating and useful reading matter in its own right. Possibly this reading matter equates to the content of the pages I originally requested, in which case a satisfactory system is already in place.