I’ve been quickly adding posts to this thing in draft mode for months but not actually publishing them, so now I’ve got a long waiting list of extra, out-of-date rubbish to be added. I think I’ll keep the original dates… Too much to do right now, and I don’t think I’m doing anything particularly well. As as a result, I’ve given in to the Mac-worshipping blogging techie peer group pressure and bought the “GTD” book… I could have got more done had I not spent most of Easter being sick.

And I had no chocolate at all, at Easter. The End Times Are Upon Us.

Lovely soothing pictures of forests. The Japanese forest reminds of the forest in Princess Mononoke.

Link: Forests Forever

I’m English, and partial to a “traditional”* breakfast and fried bread, but I can’t keep up with A. I’ve managed to cook enough of the stuff at once to discover that she does have a limit, but it was a truly awe-inspiring experiment.

This marvelous site is all about fried breads from around the world, from the humble doughnut to the You Tiao of China and the native American/Scottish fry-bread or bannock. You’ll probably need a mug of tea after looking at the site.

Link: A Guide to Ethnic Fried Doughs Around the World

(* Not quite traditional in my case, with me being a vegan.)

I’ve abandoned the cheapish floppy hat I bought last year to fend of the cruel, blistering rays of the sun, and got myself a Tilley Hat T3. So far I’m very impressed. If nothing else, this hat has the most advanced and cunning marketing material I’ve ever seen, but it’s still a genuinely nice bit of kit. They’ll even sell me a replacement for half-price if this one is stolen or gets blown into the Medlock. It can resist both ultraviolet rays and the digestive system of an elephant, which aren’t a risk in Manchester for most of the year, but it’s reassuring all the same.

Of course, I look completely daft wearing it, but as the man in the shop said, “that’s what hats are for.”.

Link: Tilley Endurables

An ‘about’ page for Pete Birkinshaw. You can see my main OpenID identity and linked resources at ClaimID.

The Man…

I live in Manchester and work as a senior sysadmin and developer for a large university in the UK. I’m specialising in middleware and web development and prefer working with UNIX, LDAP, XML, Perl and Ruby.

After staring at a computer display all day I like to go home and stare at a computer display for a while longer, as maintaining a healthy work/home balance is important.

Sometimes I go outside and take photographs, with a strong emphasis on quantity over quality. I have most of the hobbies you would expect someone like me to have, plus a few you wouldn’t.

The Legend…

I tend to use the online monikers “BinaryApe” or “Binape”, and use the binary-ape.org domain as my own scruffy corner of the Internet. I’ve been Slashdotted, very briefly mentioned in The Guardian, cited in a letter to Congress by Ralph Nader, and yet I’ve still done very little of interest.

The Contact Information

If you’d like to get in touch I’m usually available every day at this address:

• Email: pete@binary-ape.org
• Jabber: binaryape@jabber.org
• My PGP/GPG public key for email, Jabber and file transfer. You can also get it from most keyservers, with ID 0xE7406338 and fingerprint 9B9A 4087 0A2E 63A5 6A63 DFDF 5857 3046 E740 6338
• There are various RSS feeds of mine available in the column over to the right side of this page.
• I sometimes wander around in a confused manner in Second Life as Ape Yamabushi
• My Nintendo DS WFC Friend Code is 326479115054
• My Nintendo Wii code is available on request

Things That I Sometimes Do

Here are a few personal projects I work on. Please bear in mind that I’m an enthusiast/hacker type rather than a proper software engineer, despite sometimes being mistaken for one.

• FLJUD - A Jabber user directory based around LDAP. It’s used by a number of universities and businesses around the world as an online addressbook.
• BAXL - A framework for quickly assembling Jabber components. Used by Fljud, and I’ve got many plans for this once it’s more stable.
• Tehuti A new way to share files within an organisation, based on Ruby on Rails. This is actually under active development at the moment but no files are available.
• Hippo - A rather large project intended to produce a novel content management system with a focus on metadata and microcontent. Very much on the backburner at the moment while I work on FLJUD and BAXL. It will probably never be finished, or useful.
• Fingerbob - A Finger to LDAP gateway. Little more than an LDAP version of Hello World, but still quite useful for people wanting quick access to company addressbooks from command-line systems without LDAP tools. I plan to rewrite it in a new language at regular intervals.
• Writing - I specialise in unfinished, unpublished, often unseen fiction.
• Ape::Tracks - Yet another personal blog, I’m afraid. Interesting links and opinionated badly written grumbles for the most part, but lacks kitten photos and stories about babies.
• LazyWeb - In the spirit of the LazyWeb, gentleman adventurer Ben Hammersley and the general public provide 100% of the content for this grand site. (Currently offline, due for re-release soon)

You can see other links to various net identities over at my ClaimID page.

Apes, Books, Contributions

If you feel the urge to send me things:

• Bug reports, suggestions, patches, angry-but-useful comments, ideas will help my software projects improve
• Technical books from my Amazon Wishlist would be much appreciated, and well-used.
• Most of all, if any of my projects are of use to you, please consider making a small donation to The Gorilla Organisation (previously known as The Diane Fossey Gorilla Fund) as there are some great apes who need your help much, much more than I do.

The way things are going, the Steve Jobs altar would sell well.

The Apple Store Of The Future

Christianity has survived the execution of it’s founder*, the persecution of his followers, the Roman circus, Vikings, The Mongol Hordes, The Black Death, The Ottoman Empire. Christianity even survived the Christians, many of whom have dedicated a lot of energy to vigorously persecuting other Christians.

Why all the fuss about a singing ‘slightly gay’ Jesus in a nappy? Have any of these people noticed ‘South Park’?

I’ve read and heard some Buddhists say that if a religion can’t cope with ridicule and “blasphemy’, then maybe it isn’t fit enough to survive, and I have to agree.

I sent an email to the BBC saying:

Mediawatch, if you think “40,000” complaints are enough for a TV show to be banned, would you mind this same process also applying to ‘Songs Of Praise’ or any other show? I’m sure once the precedent is set it wouldn’t be hard to organise. The BBC is trying to provide TV for everyone. Its schedules aren’t a reality-TV style phone-in for the public to vote off shows they don’t like.

Grrrr. The opera was a bit dull though. The BBC should do a graphic TV version of Richard Herring’s ‘Talking Cock’ show next.

• Although I think he survived and eventually died in Kashmir :-)

There are special train services from Manchester called “Folk Trains”. Folk bands play on the trains, then at a pub at the destination, and then accompany everyone back to Manchester Piccadilly.

Some trains play “folky” folk (possible risk of “Streets of London”! Be alert!) while others feature genres like blues, jazz, skiffle, even Eastern European and Jewish.

Link: Folk Train

There’s a lot of potential for other themed train services.

When the pioneering multimedia company I worked for was bought out by A Big Old Media Company*, it quite rapidly stopped taking risks with products, quite rapidly stopped losing so much money, and quite rapidly stopped innovating. Products that weren’t bids specified by customers were for safe, known markets, low investment and with stable demand. Known, because other companies were now doing things first, and taking the risks. We made good products but stopped sweeping up award after award every year. And then almost stopped being nominated. At least it paid the bills.

BETT this year features some really smart looking products. I’ve not visited, and I’ve not seen them, so they could be hype and hot air, but there are small new companies and organisations with some really good ideas, particularly Nesta Futurelab. Augmented Reality (AR) research! Wow. The Savannah project is fascinating. Nesta Futurelab acts as an R&D group. I really hope that these ideas get picked up by companies or open source projects, and get into schools.

If I had more time I’d love to be more involved; after almost ten years working around educational multimedia I still find myself thinking about ideas for projects and products. On the other hand, the potential for magical things like AR in university environments is vast, and even more interesting. I like my job.

*Twice. And probably again, quite soon.

So what did you do on your Newtonmas Holidays? Made a New Year’s Resolution to foment revolution, possibly using your cool decentralised reputation-management idea, which this year you’ll be writing in OCaml or maybe Ruby?

I’m a little disturbed by the 100% accuracy of that. Is this the LazyWeb at work again? Is everyone else doing this too, all at once? Should I just sit back and let the LazyWeb provide? Or will everybody think that, leaving me to save the world? I certainly hope not. All I’ve got is a lot of incoherent scribbles, and some Ruby books.

Link: NTK