Photographer, software developer, sysadmin, startup-founder, atheist Buddhist, vegan and Green. Wears a hat.
This blog reflects my personal opinions only, although most posts are so old they might not even do that anymore.
The move to Textdrive went fine, I’ve just been too busy/lazy/disorganised/distracted/sleepy/mysterious to post anything since, other than Del.icio.us bookmarks and Flickr photos.
Textdrive are about to relocate their own servers, so various things might break for a while sometime over the next week.
I had a very nice bowl of carrot soup at a wedding at Shieldhill Castle recently, and in honour of the surprisingly tasty orange ingredient, I present: The World Carrot Museum
A set of photos around Manchester’s Northern Quarter. We’re starting to collect the invaders, a few at a time whenever we pass a new one.
Link: Invasion 1
At long last Fljud 0.5 can do at least as much as Fljud 0.4! The “three month” rewrite has now taken a year and frankly I’m looking forward to getting back to something web related for a while as a sort of holiday from messing about with XMPP/Jabber.
First I need to tidy up some of the mess, add a few missing bits, and release the beta, sometime in the middle of August if all goes well. Then the beta can sit around revealing obscure bugs while I fix them, and a final release of 0.5 should occur in mid September.
Get it while it’s ‘ot: File Details: fljud-0.5alpha2.1.tgz - JabberStudio
I’m going to be moving all the various Binary-Ape.Org bits and pieces over to TextDrive. Despite allegedly being an IT clever person I shall no doubt thoroughly bugger something up along the way. Just to make sure, I’m changing DNS providers and email routing soon too.
It’s certainly had many returns, though most weren’t exactly happy. An excellent example of how amazing technology can’t survive bad (mad?) management and conservative customers.
I still want an A4000.
Link: The History of the Amiga
25,000+ civilians dead in Iraq since the “end” of the war. Many, many more injured, raped, robbed, destitute, bereaved. And Blair claims that this won’t make anyone blame the UK, blame the apparently stupid or heartless British public who let Blair get away with it.
For once I wish he was right.
I hereby apologise and humble myself for wrongly insisting that “The Thing” of The Fantastic Four comic was “just a bloke in a suit someone gave him, not someone with superpowers”.
Link: Thing
I’m enjoying Timo Maas’ new album ‘Pictures’, but the title track is a little too experimental. ‘Pictures’ has a good tune but the lyrics are simply disturbing: the spooky, threatening and pleading words of a paedophile with a camera talking to a boy. The music is enjoyable and the words are repellent, which makes it stronger as a work of art (and quite a brave thing to do - would this get on Radio 1?) but more difficult to listen to.
Also, ending a sentence with “… boy…” in a southern USA drawl can make practically anything sound sinister.
The BBC dress up their RSS feeds with XML stylesheets so they’re viewable in a browser as a page that has clear, readable content and a paragraph explaining what it is. This is a excellent practice; typical users will be confused when faced with raw XML data and assume that something has broken, which, in a way, it has.
I must try to do this. The BBC are using XSLT, a rather heavy official XML format for transforming XML, but there is also a lighter, simpler alternative: ordinary CSS. Ben Hamersley has written a quick intro to using CSS to present XML on OReillyNet.
