Sorry for the delay, but I finally got around to sticking my presentation from last month's London Web Standards meet-up on slideshare. Slideshare is a bit naff to be honest, but it'll do for now. If you click through to the talk on slideshare, you'll be able to get my notes which should hopefully make the pictures more useful. Jake's busy syncing up both of our presentations to the videos so that we can show them on the BBC developer blog, so as soon as they're available I'll link those up too and you can view me in full hand-flapping, ranting form.

I think I speak for both of us when I say that we really enjoyed the evening - everyone was lovely and friendly and asked really excellent questions. Highly recommendable meet-up, and we're both intending to try and make it to some of the future sessions.

Some useful links from my stuff:

• My previous write-up about using Woosh (although note that Woosh has become a bit more featureful since that write-up)
• QUnit
• Glow Github repos and the Glow website and docs
• JSDoc Toolkit

Jake and I will be guests at March's London Web Standards meetup. We're giving a pair of JavaScript themed talks that should give plenty of fodder for the latter half of the evening's discussion. I'm doing "Pro bun-fighting", covering how we manage working on a large scale JavaScript project with a small team, our process, the performance and quality testing we do, and how to integrate group hugs, and Jake will be doing "The events left behind", talking about the horrors of keyboard events, how to work around them and what's their future.

Although it's not a Glow specific talk, we will be using Glow in our examples, so feel free to come along and talk to us about the library too, if you're interested.

Tickets are available now for the event on Wednesday 31st March at The Square Pig in London.

One of the things I enjoy doing that isn't web related is illustration, and last week I was asked to create a set of illustrations and a book prop for Patrick's short-film, The Christmas Bunny. The film was shot this weekend past, and is in the editing stages, but I thought I'd share some photos of the prop and illustrations.

See the rest of the shots on flickr.

Making the book

I ended up bracing the illustration and text pages with extra blank sheets on either side, binding the edge with masking tape. Then I used some partially dried glue stick (pritt-like) which I could pinch pieces off and roll into sausage shapes and press into the masking-tape spine, to create a malleable, but strong, join for the pages to move on. No super-glues I had seemed to work as well as this rather Blue Peter-esque technique. The best thing about the glue-stick solution is that it rubs off the paper anywhere that it shows, so the join is seamless.

It was a nice little project and I'm really glad to have been able to contribute to the film in some way. The first two illustrations and title are used as the introduction to the film, with a narrative voice-over and music, and the final illustration is used as the outro. Hopefully I'll get to do some more illustration work in the future.

Barbie has her 125th career - computer engineer! There's been a few comments around about how Mattel are pandering to further stereotypes - sticking her in a pair of pink glasses is enough to insinuate that she's now "intellectual". I don't think that's all that bad. The glasses thing, sure, I'm a bit biased, but I don't see anything wrong with putting Barbie in a pair of specs for her computer engineering job. It's not an entirely false correlation. Many people who work on computers need glasses because they stare into the pixel void for 12 hours a day. So what? I think it's kind of cute - and why not portray a computer engineer as cutesy? The fact is, that's the only wearable "accessory" they felt she needed to portray her new job. That's right, isn't it? What more do you want? Computer engineers should look however they like - there's no uniform. The bluetooth headset is a bit daft, but small details.

Rachel Andrew blogged today about a very sad incident yesterday, where herself and her fellow female speakers were mocked by audience members of Boag World's live podcast event. Essentially, viewers in the backchannel decided to concentrate on their physical attributes rather than their well educated views, with suggestions that they were far too good-looking and well presented to be there for their abilities alone.

Rachel has rightfully pointed out that such behaviour shouldn't be tolerated, but she also writes about how women in technology shouldn't be encouraged to dress down or become more tom-boyish just to feel accepted or to avoid attention.

Barbie has a whole host of more fundamental reasons why she's probably a poor role-model for little girls (her figure is the obvious one), but I don't think having her careers be varied and non-traditional is one of them. I'm actually into the idea of a Barbie that helps to say that it's okay to be as girly-a-girl as you want to be and work in traditionally male dominated industries. And hey, I think glasses look cool.

This year, I thought it might be fun to try taking part in something that would get me writing more. Anton Peck started Project52 with a simple aim to produce a blog post a week for all of 2010.

It's hard. Really hard.

It's week 5 and although I generally suffer various rage related incidents* over the course of a week, nothing has presented itself as particularly bloggable. Likewise, work has been fairly unspectacular and I've not been especially creative so I'm lacking anything of true substance to talk about or teach. Next week should be better, as there's an upcoming event I'll be involved with and I'll have produced some extra-curricular illustrative commisions I'd like to share.

I asked twitter - the natural home for people who don't know what to talk about - and the suggestions came back that I just get this stupid meta-post over and done with and talk about writer's block (cheers Olly and Craig).

I like writing. I don't think I'm particularly good at it, but I can string a few words together into something that vaguely resembles prose. Finding topics that haven't already been talked about excessively in the web world is just an especially difficult challenge.

Only today, a mailing list I frequent has been discussing how difficult it can be to stay motivated and interested in a field that's coming out of it's emergent phase. Finding a cause that doesn't already have more than enough band-wagoners is rare and finding something unique to add is unusual and perhaps it's feeling less ground-breaking. There's less to do for the invidiual as more hands come on deck. Ultimately, this is super for the web but not so good for personal satisfaction, in my opinion. The word "jaded" was used, but I think (and hope) it's a bit early for that.

Finally, a suggestion from Matt:

@phae Ask for suggestions of what to write about. :)

matthewpenell

So, dear readers (probably, mostly, I should just address this to "mum"), anything I've hinted at in the past that you'd like me to elaborate on in the future? I know it's a cop-out, and it's lame to ask, but hey... you never know, it might work.

• OK, here's a little bonus list of things that have made me want to strangle people this week:

• CSS3 being compared directly to Java Applets - please, people. Lets at least let it out of the stalls before we condemn it.
• More pro-homeopathy articles, the Pope, the Daily Mail, the usual.
• Email responses to technical debates that consist of nothing more than off-topic quotations.
• Latest version of Chrome reporting unexpected background-repeat values in JS-land.
• iFrames.
• A guy on the tube who complained about the placement of someone's feet (they were a cm too close to his) and the crowded nature (it wasn't very crowded) of the carriage.