April 2002

This week’s installment of the Alleged Tarot project is two more trumps: XVI. The Tower and XVII. The Star. That makes for quite a contrast—the Tower represents sudden, disruptive change, the Star peace and tranquility. At the same time, both have origins in ancient Babylon: the Star is related to the Babylonian goddess Ishtar, and the Tower is obviously an allusion to the Tower of Babel, a story from that early part of the Bible that is rooted in pre-Judeo-Christian mythology.

I have been forced to post a response to a page in SVGWiki, because my attempts to enter a response using the Wiki page itself have failed with a VBScript error. I also have to say that while I think the Wiki concept of universal editorship is great, its reliance on its own quirky syntax is a little annoying. (On the other hand, HTML is not as amenable to hand-editing as it might be. This is a result of its being based on the splendidly verbose SGML syntax.)

Update (8 May 2002). I have updated SVGWiki—after connecting to it with MSIE rather than Mozilla or Opera. Perhaps there is some MSIE-specific JavaScript code involved?

Update (14 February 2004). My note on the object tag has been updated to reflect the fact that Safari 1.0 (released 2003) cannot handle objects containing embed.

This week’s slightly delayed installment of my virtual tarot deck is the Eights of Wands, Cups, Swords, and Coins. This week’s main advance is behind the scenes—the algorithm used for generating the tables for mapping Sketch’s colour space to Adobe Illustrator’s so that it works better.

I have now converted the photo albums (Aviemore, Roch Castle, and Bologna) on my old site (http://www.alleged.demon.co.uk/) to go on the new site (http://www.alleged.org.uk/). In the process I have ripped out the old HTMLgen code that generated them and replaced it with the more streamlined TclHTML equivalent (using the code I concocted when building the photo albums on the CAPTION site). As a result, the last vestiges of the old Alleged look and feel (with the tabbed-notebook style) is gone! I guess it must be time for a redesign, then... :-)

I have now put up the first page on my brand-spanking-new web-site, whose URL you should find familiar: http://www.alleged.org.uk/. So far its only content is a new and improved front page, all of whose links link to this one. Eventually all the old content will be copied across, but I want to give myself a chance to tidy things up along the way.

The latest installment in my stick-figure tarot deck is two more of the trumps: XIIII. Temperance and XV. The Devil. Hope you all enjoy them.

The virtual tarot deck continues with all the sevens (Wands, Cups, Swords, and Coins). For some reason these have been the toughest cards so far—the concepts they embody proved elusive when it comes to devising a stick-figure illustration. Luckily for ’their’ weekend I have had an extra day or so in which to draw them (because it is the Easter break).

I have also tweaked the navigation between the pages for pips cards—each now has links at the bottom to the same number in the other three suits.