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Play Me, I'm Yours

While the weather was still gorgeously hot last month, I went for a wander round London and ended up at St Paul's where I came across one of the Play Me, I'm Yours pianos being played to a large crowd.

It was an almost perfect scene: beautiful music being played enthusiastically, a crowd that had gathered round naturally and St Paul's cathedral as a backdrop. I ended up staying for over an hour listening to various players having a go, each with their own style.

What a brilliant idea these pianos were.

More photos over on flickr.

Goodwood Festival of Speed

This year I was lucky enough to be given a couple of free tickets to the Goodwood Festival of Speed by some friends of the family and not having been in a couple of years I jumped at them.

The tickets were for the Friday, the quietest (and perhaps best) day to go to Goodwood if you can only do one, so I took the day off work and headed down to Goodwood with my flatmate, Ken.

When we eventually escaped London traffic and got to Goodwood it was lunch time, but a quick burger and we were on our way up to the forest rally stage at the top of the hill. There was a WRC event on elsewhere in the world that weekend, so there weren't as many modern contemporary rally cars as the last time I went, or the star drivers, but there were still plenty of classics, including a Lancia Stratos.

We spent a couple of hours in the forest stage, watching the cars fly round and taking loads of pictures. The jump towards the end of the stage was great, but as ever quite hard to get a good vantage point for taking pictures. The festival happened amidst a heat wave this year, so the mostly-chalk stage was massively dusty.

With only one-day passes time was quickly getting on, so we headed back down the hill to the main marquees and pavillions.

It was clearly an 'austerity drive' year as none of the manufacturer pavillions were particularly lavish this time round, though Alfa Romeo (celebrating its centenary) and Peugeot did the best jobs.

I got another chance to drool over the most stunning car of the past couple of decades: the Alfa Romeo 8C Competizione. This is very definitely my current dream car. Alfa was also showing off the new Giulietta, which looks nice enough but I can't say I lust after. I'll be sticking to saving up for a second-hand 3.2 V6 Alfa GT I think.

The Peugeot SR-1 concept car looked pretty stunning, though the dashboard was a bit 70s sci-fi from what I could see peeking over the shoulder line (it was on a high stand).

Peugeot was really pushing the new RCZ to the full, though seeing it for real it looks a bit too much like an Audi TT. The sculpted glass 'cockpit' roof is a nice touch but seems like it's been toned down from the concept car I remember seeing a couple of years ago and other than that it's a bit bland.

I felt the main show-piece sculpture in front of Goodwood House was a bit poor compared to previous years as well. The cars involved were lovely of course (including my old fave the 8C), but I didn't get it. I read afterwards that it's apparently supposed to represent the Alfa clover symbol, but it was lost on me at the time.

Great fun

All of this is not to say the Festival of Speed wasn't fun this year; it was great fun!

The rally stage is always fantastic and catching a glimpse of Formula 1 cars blasting (or smoking) their way up the hill at such close proximity is something you don't get elsewhere.

The Style et Luxe concours had some stunning cars in it and I even ran into an old friend of my Dad's who was displaying his Maserati Quattroporte II. There was also a Maserati A6GCS which, apart from the slightly dodgy two-tone blue colour scheme, was beautiful and a load of Alfa Romeo supercars.

I think my favourite car from the Style et Luxe section has to be the Alfa Romeo Tipo 33 Stradale prototype; just a stunning car.

Moving round from the concours we headed to the paddock where you can get right up to the cars that have been launching themselves up the hill at speed all day. It's a chance to see some amazing cars up close, as well as catch some famous names (for example, we passed Jason Plato and Matt Neal having a chat on the way in).

In the paddock I found one of my favourite cars from my childhood: Gabriele Tarquini's BTCC-winning Alfa Romeo 155. I had a couple of Duke Video VHS tapes of the couple of seasons when the Alfa 155s dominated the British Touring Car Championship when I was younger and pretty much hero-worshipped them.

By the time we had made our way round the paddock, the show was coming to an end for the day and the sun finally crept out from behind the clouds. This was probably a good thing as I still got a bit sun-burnt despite the cloud cover.

The Festival of Speed was great as ever, but it definitely confirmed to me that you need to take a couple of days to do it properly (we didn't spend any time watching cars go up the hill!) and that the rather large amount of money I shelled out two years ago to be in the Kinrara enclosure was also worth it, dress code and all.

There are more photos from the day in my Goodwood 2010 set on flickr. I also cobbled together some of the video I caught on my 5D during the day, which you can see below.

Internet Explorer 6 z-index bug

Internet Explorer has a minor bug with z-index that often crops up when you have an element which is displayed as an overlay on top of other elements (e.g. lightboxes, drop-down menus and the like).

The problem is caused when the element you want to overlay is nested inside a parent element, which in turn has sibling elements. Normally, we just give it a z-index to force it higher in the display order but IE6 doesn't seem to pay attention. See the figure to the left or a live example.

Luckily the solution is quite simple: just add a z-index to the parent element that's at the same level in the source as the other elements that need to be hidden under the overlay, comme ça

Vector maps of Great Britain and Ireland

I'm writing this post a bit later than I intended. About a year late in fact, so here's hoping it's still useful!

Just over a year ago I was working on some design mockups that required nice partitioned maps of the UK and Ireland, divided up by county and/or region. The Ordnance Survey provides a rather spiffy vector map of Great Britain covering 'coastline and administrative areas'. There were two issues: I needed it to cover Northern Ireland and at least an outline of the Republic of Ireland, and I needed to group counties into regions.

So I spent a day grouping counties into regions and finding a way to build a vector outline of Ireland that fit the proper Great Britain outline I already had. I can't remember how I did it in the end; I think I overlaid and traced a map I found somewhere else to as close as the right scale as possible.

At any rate, it was a total faff so I thought I'd release the files for anyone else having the same problems. It's just taken a while…

Behold, a vector map of Great Britain and Ireland, based on Ordnance Survey's, with added region polygons for England.

Download the .eps file or .ai file.

Crackdown 2: Fun With Friends

Like most geeks I do like a good computer game and Crackdown, released in 2007, was a great one.

Created by David Jones, the man behind classics Grand Theft Auto and Lemmings, Crackdown spun the GTA gameplay model by making you a law enforcer. With super powers.

The over-the-top voice of the Director who gives you your missions combined with a great sense of humour and excellent gameplay to make Crackdown a game I couldn't stop playing for quite a while.

Having briefly flirted with the games industry by working at a game developer during university, I still have an account on Games Press I keep an eye on and today I got woken up by some screenshots and a video for Crackdown 2.

It looks as fun as ever, so I thought I'd share. If your browser can handle HTML5 video, enjoy it below. If not (e.g. you use Internet Explorer), or if you just prefer, you can download a .mp4 (105.2MB) or .ogv (110.8MB) version of the video.

The game is slated for release on the 9th July.

Art-directed blogging

For the past year or so I've been wanting to rework my blog, inspired by sites like Jason Santa Maria's fantastic art-directed blog and Khoi Vinh and Liz Danzico's A Brief Message. A couple of weekends ago, I finally got inspired to do something about it.

Unfortunately for me, no existing blogging platform is suited to the kind of blog where every post can have its own design. A few months ago I did find a plugin for Habari that allowed me to include custom CSS in a post, but to do it properly you need more control than that. So I re-invented the wheel and wrote my own small blogging CMS.

This post isn't so much about that (although doing it re-affirmed my love of Ruby on Rails as a fantastic framework for very quickly building web apps), as it is a quick intro to my plans for this site.

The plan

Although I have no intention of turning the site into an online magazine (for a start I write here far too irregularly), the idea was to have 'cover stories' like a magazine: articles that get the special front page treatment with big images and all. Once you click through to the article inside, it too might have more attention paid to its design and layout than other regular articles.

A start

I've launched with three ready-made covers: two photographs and one article. The article is one I wrote recently based on some work we did with progressively-enhanced Google Maps at Gumtree. Its cover actually makes use of the technique described within to load a live Google Map as its background. These cover articles don't have to be too static!

The two photo covers are a couple of photographs I've taken in the past year that I really like and that I thought suited the cover treatment: one of Grand Prismatic Spring in Yellowstone National Park and the other closer to home of the Design Museum in London at night.

Please let me know what you think of the site and try to forgive anything that breaks: it's all still very new!

New blog

It's 2am and I've done the stupid thing of launching my new blog, custom CMS and all. Obviously, things are breaking.

I'll try to fix the big ones in the morning, but if you've already found the new site, I hope you enjoy!

Night at the Museum

I took my flatmate out for a birthday meal at Gaucho's near Tower Bridge and we went on a bit of a photograph-taking mission either side of dinner.

I'm really pleased with how some of them came out, especially this one of the Design Museum. It's a really nice building, but sandwiched in-between a few others so hard to get a decent photograph of; but at night and with some kind of function going on inside, the lighting really made it stand out from its surroundings a bit more and I was able to make the next-door building go away with a little raising of the black point.

A List Apart Survey 2009

The annual A List Apart Survey 2009 is live. If you work on the web, fill it in.

Gumtree beta launched

The culmination of a summer's work, today we set live a beta test to start testing changes we're making at Gumtree. A small proportion of people will be automatically included in the test, with the ability to opt out, or you can opt in to the test with the link below:

http://www.gumtree.com/r/opt_in