CD ripping - not new tech, but it’s rapidly heading towards being as ‘easy to do at home’ as digitise VHS tapes. I suppose the fact that I only have one machine in the house with a CD/DVD drive should have given me some warning, but whilst it’s a 2007 24" iMac, it worked fine for many hundreds of CD’s up until now.
So storage may be cheaper - a 256GB USB thumb drive is around £25 - but old formats keep throwing up odd quirks, in this case the first of many of my 3" CD Singles, and old plastic spacer and a slot loading drive… Yup: it got stuck :( Happily, because it’s old tech, stripping it down and taking the lid off the CD unit wasn’t that onerous (just annoying), but it’s a clear warning that I’m doing this at about the latest time possible.
As part of getting more invested in blogging/public wittering again, I’ve been looking at technical details that have pretty much been entirely unnoticed by myself over the last decade, and found there’s a now bewildering wealth of behind-the-scenes seetings that can be tweaked and configured.
As part of living up to the domain name and stripping things back to the bare minimum (well, as little as I want to be able to get the result I want…) I’ve spent the last half an hour playing with Mozilla Observatory for this site, and have risen from an ‘F’ rating to a ‘B-’.
Do you have iOS 14 ? Has your home WiFi become unstable ?
No, it may not be you – look in Settings -> WiFi -> (your SSID) at the state of the Private Address toggle. If it’s on, then turn it off.
You’ll get warnings about making your device less secure, but the way this security works is by changing the MAC address of your iOS device each time it connects to the WiFi base station, so if you have multiple emitters (ie: a mesh, or perhaps even a few extenders), then when the device switches it will change MAC.
Up until today, I’ve been shooting near-infrared images on an IR modified Fuji X100 (after a short, painful dalliance with a modified 20D) which was converted via a full-spectrum (minus UV) conversion: the hot filter was replaced with UV opaque glass meaning that the camera can be used as normal with an external hot filter mounted, or with any choice of IR frequency filter applied.
I had chosen to use an 830nm-ish filter and convert the result into monochrome in camera (as there’s little normal colour information left) and for additional contrast, it’s often a B&W+R setting in camera so any clear blue skies are rendered almost black – there’s loads of examples in the gallery
Earlier this year I had been considering buying Nik just for the Silver Efex Pro 2 editor, but as usual I couldn’t decide if my rework would be that much improved by new toys compared to just learning to use what I already have, and so didn’t go shopping. For some reason, Google rewarded me (and a few others besides) by making the Nik Collection free to download and I’ve since spent a large number of hours just clicking through the presets and seeing what comes up.
Looking at old tech (although in this case, actually relatively recent tech) has drawbacks when it opens up a new level of obsession…
I naturally gravitate towards wide-angle lenses and have been playing around with multi-image stitches recently to get wider, more detailed images, but after watching Kai use a Hasselblad Xpan in this video, I found that the aspect ratio of a dual 35mm film frame was very, very attractive.
It’s no secret I’ve never really bought into the Linux mindset: I’m a *BSD diehard inside, even if I’ve had to ‘slum it’ on remote Linux servers for the past few years. I’m happy to find a UK host who has a pocket money KVM base system on offer that appears to work with both FreeBSD 10.1 and OpenBSD 5.7. Sadly the control panel on the hosting backend refused to recognise any NetBSD .
Ok, a bit unfair – my mind has clearly been infected by skimming one too many clickbait headlines: I am sorry.
I use CloudFlare for most of my non-temporary sites so I can skimp on hosting. I’m pretty sure that’s not the tagline they push, but it works well and gets rid of those annoying image loading lags for the most part with very little effort from me.
I’d been ignoring the Universal SSL stuff as I just don’t have the need for their commercial CDN, but that’s changed with the recent move to enable it for all customers, although just visiting https://minimal.
There are plenty of discussions around why you might need to enable sshd options if you see this error, but before hacking your config, did you add a new key to a key-only login config with the following type of command:
$ cat >>authorized_keys [paste text] [ctrl+d] $
If so, take a look inside your authorized_keys file and see if the terminal used for pasting has helpfully added newlines into your key…
So I’ve used Green Flag as a breakdown service for the last 5 years, with multiple call outs for one horrid vehicle (but hey it’s my fault, it was American built: never again !) and had managed (finally) to get 3 years of no claims on my account.
Renewal request: £90 after no claims has been applied
Enter my details on their new customer site: £59 with ‘online signup discount applied’
Ok, so this is bound to get me some name calling from colleagues but I’m talking about the amorphous and wide-ranging ‘act of Marketing’ rather than a department or individuals…
Why ? Well I’ve just worked out (after getting annoyed by an email from Google for their totally pointless AdWords service †) what the root cause of my recent outburst about SEO fluff articles was all about, and it’s nicely represented by the shill article on Wikipedia describing the ‘Call To Action’:
Photo of Jean-Michelle Jarre performing in Helsinki in 2009 © Miemo Penttinen
What happens when a music teacher suggests instrument variety is a driving force behind a child enjoying music, the child says “anything unusual” is good, the other child wants a techie project and the father has far too much 80’s electronica ?
We decide to get a laser harp, of course ! 🙂
And there’s no way at all this could have been due to my obsessive saving of paper-round money to buy Jarre albums on tape to listen to on my Walkman (with Dolby-B, I’ll have you know – quality antiquity !
Ok, the secret to blogging more ? Reading Twitter, it seems…
This morning’s gem (from the amazing-in-everything Mark Gatiss):
“@xxgoingdown: @Markgatiss do you like doctor who? If yes, what’s your fav doctor?” Sheesh. What does one have to do, eh?
— Mark Gatiss (@Markgatiss) July 3, 2014
For me this strikes me as part of the same problem highlighted by the also-excellent Charlie Brooker:
…The first face was Bob Hoskins, prompting a wave of respectful applause through the auditorium.
Ok, so I’m old. Curmudgeonly. Fixed in my ways. And feeling older every time I venture out of my comfort zone and attempt to embrace new ideals – I’m sure every generation feels this, but stuff it – the web used to be for geeks, and now look at it…
I don’t blog as much as I used to, but that’s for a hugely complex number of reasons, not least of which is that there is so much out there to _do_ it’s hard to stop learning and tell others – plus my day job is now decidedly non-commercial when compared to my previous companies, and so a lot of what I do, investigate or experiment with day-to-day is no longer anything I can share publicly.
Not a normally fruitful exercise, but yesterday (27th Feb) a Kp 6 event hit well after sundown, just before a new moon and when the sky was virtually cloudless… Impressive alignment !
Sadly, I didn’t know I’d seen one and until I looked carefully at the above image and noticed an odd green patch near the tree – simply by taking pictures because I was out with the camera anyway meant that I didn’t choose my framing or reduce my ISO as much as I would have if I’d known what was going on.
Awesome !
Seriously, the most accurate insights into programming languages that any non-programmer can use and start fights with as easily as if they had been programming for years:
http://thequickword.wordpress.com/2014/02/16/james-irys-history-of-programming-languages-illustrated-with-pictures-and-large-fonts/
(From a tweet from @computermuseum, whom you should both follow and visit, in any order you like as long as you do both. And not just because some of my donations may end up on display. That would be horrid self-aggrandisement)
Meteorological scales like Beaufort are an essential part of tasks such as building, shipping or rigging work where real people regularly face conditions which truly threaten life, but there’s a class of First World Problems that could benefit from a more refined scale to which everyday people can relate, and which answers essential questions, such as:
When cycling to work on a windy day, how presentable will your hair be immediately upon arrival at the office ?
First pass 12V lighting system for my bike: front is a 15W 3 LED DRL cluster, and the rear is four strips of silicon dipped 12V LED’s with a common 12V 3Ah battery pack under the saddle.
Things still to do: improve the wiring so it’s waterproof (!) and also find out how long the battery pack lasts, as well as investigating the white LED strips for front running lights (town visibility, rather than out-of-town road coverage).
So the Nexus 7 was an experiment, and one that for the most part was a success but one that left my iPhone relegated to being used for iMessage and music (and the odd call, once a month or so). Given that the 3GS is a bit long in the tooth, and needs a new case, screen and battery just to last the year I decided it was time to risk a jump further into Android and pick a Phablet that would let me just have the one device to carry around.
Apple recently updated their native OS X RAW decoder to support the X-Trans sensor, and from comparisons of their efforts (original link) appear to have done a very good job for a first public release – it certainly looks like Adobe have placed a software AA filter into the X-Pro1.
There are, however still some aspects to work on – it looks like the lens corrections might be a little overdone when compared to the camera native corrections.
Note that the opinions here are my own: they draw upon real world experience at my current employer, but they are not their views, I do not speak for them and I’m far from the only person there who reads CV’s, so my suggestions should not be assumed to offer a quick route to an interview.
I’ve been interviewing for over three years, and in the past year I’ve spent a lot of my working time looking for fresh Graduates to hire.
!FujiFilm
My 21 month old X100 had been causing me problems since the end of 2012: I just couldn’t seem to master the metering and assumed that I had more to learn about how the camera behaves, but when I reviewed images from a recent from to London, particularly this one on the Embankment, it was obvious that it had developed the Sticky Aperture Blade problem.
Part of the reason it took me so long to discover this is that I naturally prefer to stay at the f2.
A fascinating day out at the National Space Centre for the kids, and a lot of interesting exhibits for those of us who spent far too long reading about this sort of thing 30 years ago.
Even though the facts were well known, actually seeing physical which had only been pictured in books was quite something: like finding myself face-to-face with a real SR71 Blackbird at Duxford, seeing a Blue Streak and Soyuz craft at just an arm’s length really brought home the fragility of the craft, not to mention the exceedingly friendly terms you need to be on with your fellow astronauts when cooped up in the main Soyuz pod.
Time for another make-over: my old gallery subdomain was fine at the time, but has suffered from 5 years of neglect and has become rather dated and annoying when it comes to trying to navigate or show images to others, so now that I have a WordPress theme which supports both gallery and slideshow modes, I shall be reposting some old images along with newer content, but with added WP tags.
So this has been driving me potty, but thanks to this bug report and lots of checkbox clicking it turns out that the Google Sitemap plugin v2.7 from BestWebSoft breaks the admin backend, but the plugin from Arne Brachhold works properly.
Still, not impressed at the 100% opaque 500 response from WP: impossible to debug from browser logs turned up to the max 🙁
A while ago, I noted that the initial UK Citizenship Test was a) hard and b) pointless – the recently proposed revision isn’t much better, but thankfully Twitter and genuine locals are on hand to offer:
The Real UK Citizenship Test
I can proudly state that I scored 10/10 on my first go, without cheating and reading the JavaScript… I am pleased that this test addresses much more fundamental and important questions for those looking to live here and attempting to understand the behaviour of the natives.
Back in 1982, AcornSoft released a program designed to be a gentle introduction to understanding the internals of computer operation and 6502 assembly language. I found the original tape and manual a little over a year ago and it struck me that the sort of simplicity and clarity that the program brought to a fairly complex topic could still have a use today.
A couple of weeks ago I finally sat down and spent 8 hours or so on the task, and have come up with an HTML/JavaScript version, complete with a clone of the stunning 1980’s UI design (pictured above…) which not only executes the first two problems in the manual correctly, but has an extensible instruction set which allow experimentation and expansion of the original concept.
http://www.buzzfeed.com/expresident/london-underground-maps-you-never-knew-you-needed
Brilliant visualisations.
I’ve been wanting to make my own hex-grid flash modifiers for a while but was stumped for a reliable and robust mounting system for plastic drinking straws until I came across this post from Instructables. The secret I had been missing ? Silicon sealant…
Right, so you’re welcome to just go and read the original, or you can read about the metric version for a Canon Speedlite 430EX below.
To cut the straws I took the very simple approach of just chopping them above the first articulated bend, which comes out at around 44mm.
So the latest update isn’t all sunshine and kittens: it’s nowhere near as soul eating as iOS 6 was when I found what had happened to the Maps, but it has many more rough edges than I’d have expected, given that the Android experience on the Nexus 7 has been pretty impressive so far.
First up, the lack of Over The Air auto update: as found online in multiple places, you can force a real OTA check by going to Settings > Apps > Running > Google Services Framework and pressing Clear Data.
So having previously raved about how discrete the X100 is and how good it can cope with low-light, here’s a few shots from a recent trip around the Glenfiddich Distillery (no, I’m not linking as they have a stupid age limit on the web site, despite the fact that both my currently under-18 children were welcomed on the real tour with no problems at all).
Web-idiots aside, the tour was fascinating anyway: it’s something that should be experienced rather than watched as the range of smells, sounds and temperatures as you are taken through the various stages of the process was quite unexpected.
Home hosting of content is a great idea (I’ve been doing it for over a decade) but at some stage the cons start to outweigh the pros. In particular, the speed of UK ADSL uplinks (448kbps) is a large factor in considering external, commercial, hosting, as is the availability of the line and the amount of SysAdmin time needed to keep ahead of the script kiddies.
Ok, so you don’t have to put in time to beat the scripters: staying on top of security updates is often sufficient, but in the early days of WordPress I found that could loose my outbound bandwidth for half an hour or more as a stream of dumb proxy attacks came in.
This post is sort of a follow on from last year when I wrote about how great it was to seek out 5 year old hardware as it can give better results than new. Now, just over a year later I’m saying how great it is to buy new: consistency is great, isn’t it?
Ok, so silly openings aside, what makes this fascinating to me is that it’s all about the Fuji X100, possibly the most talked about pre-announced digital camera I’ve seen so far, and a camera which I dismissed and ignored mainly due to the huge volume of hype and excitement.
If you have used an iPad SD card adaptor to review images taken on a Fuji X100, then you may find that the camera is slow to respond or wake from sleep. In my case, I thought the camera had broken as it took 30 seconds to display any data after being turned on, but it turns out that the iPad had created a folder in the root of the SD card, and it was this that was the culprit.
For the most part, I’ve had no real issues building pkgsrc on my PogoPlug, but all three variants of MySQL server failed to build due to a conflicting type declaration error. For the 2011Q2 branch of pkgsrc and the mysql55-server package, simply comment out the offending line 169 in sql/mysqld.cc so that it reads:
<br></br>#ifdef HAVE_FP_EXCEPT // Fix type conflict<br></br>//typedef fp_except fp_except_t;<br></br>#endif<br></br>
Ok, so I’m not that bothered about my camera’s clock, but when shooting with multiple bodies and one happens to be 55 minutes slow, it’s a jarring experience to review the full set of images in time order. Aperture 3 does have a neat time adjustment tool in Metadata -> Adjust Date and Time that does, as many websites say, allow multiple images to have their time changed.
What I hadn’t realised until I needed to do it is that whilst you set an explicit time on your pick of the selection group, the adjustment is applied to each image, not the exact timestamp you’ve just entered.
Having bought an end-of-line v2 (pink) PogoPlug, I ignored all the setup guides (of course !) and reflashed the stock u-Boot image with Jeff Doozan’s version. After the obligatory messing with Linux (both ArchLinux and Debian) and discovering that the all-singing, all-dancing setups simply don’t work at all for me (the multi-hundred line shell script for debootstrap simply can’t cope with armel as both host and target), I switched to a real OS and had fun with a CF card and Nicole’s Kirkwood FreeBSD pages.
Whilst LensPens and SensorPens work brilliantly on lenses, sensors and mirrors of DSLRs, do not attempt to use one on the focussing screen (the translucent white area above the mirror with the AF point markings on it). The minute particles of cleaning compound will remove larger items of dirt, but in the process they are small enough to get lodged in the fine fresnel markings etched into the screen, resulting in an almost soot like coating.
For over 10 years I’ve been concerned and then frustrated that the UK (state) school system appears to regard teaching Computing as simply running a series of Microsoft Office training courses. No, just because I thoroughly enjoy programming I do not expect every child to be equally as enthralled, but then, I also went to lessons in History, Geography, Art and more which didn’t excite me: the strict separation of subjects from one another is no longer a valid form of teaching – too much is interdependent, and interweaving facts leads to a more valid and holistic world view.
From an evening spent messing around with Custom Function (CFn) settings on the 5D and 430EX, here’s a summary of behaviours:
5D 1st curtain (CFn.15=0) 5D 2nd curtain (CFn.15=1) 430EX 1st curtain E-TTL mode 5 pin connection Pre-1st curtain metering flash11st curtain main flash Pre-1st curtain metering flash11st curtain main flash 430EX 2nd curtain E-TTL mode 5 pin connection Pre-1st curtain metering flash12nd curtain main flash Pre-1st curtain metering flash12nd curtain main flash 430EX 1st curtain Manual mode 5 pin connection No metering flash 1st curtain main flash No metering flash 1st curtain main flash 430EX 2nd curtain Manual mode 5 pin connection No metering flash 2nd curtain main flash No metering flash 2nd curtain main flash 430EX 1st curtain Manual or E-TTL mode 1 pin connection No metering flash 1st curtain main flash No metering flash 1st curtain main flash 430EX 2nd curtain Manual or E-TTL mode 1 pin connection No metering flash 1st curtain main flash No metering flash 1st curtain main flash 1NB: The metering flash is a short burst from the main flash tube, and so is a very noticeable white light (indistinguishable from a proper flash firing if in front of the camera) and not a pulse from the red AF unit.
After plenty of frustration trying to upgrade my LinkStation box to a newer version of Debian, I gave up and tried Gentoo as per the nas-central guide, and discovered just how friendly and cuddly apt-get can be… Whilst I have used Gentoo from source on my Qube, trying to do anything with pre-built stage3 tarballs is a royal PITA when the portage EAPI has changed.
As all I wanted was a simple ARM box, I decided it was time for something less complex: Linux from Scratch, but to avoid having to pull the hard drive each time I made a boot config error, I though it would be useful to add a serial port using another nas-central guide and a Nokia 7250i DKU-5 USB data cable from eBay, for a whopping £1.
I probably should have started my 5D blogging with this post, but it’s only just dawned on me that it might not be a common thing for people to choose to do…
When I started shooting with my 20D I was impressed with it’s low-light ability compared to 35mm film but after the novelty of changing ISO between shots wore off, I naturally started experimenting with ISO 1600, H (ISO 3200) and also H-2 (two stops under exposure, on the basis that shooting in RAW mostly allows up to 2 stops of recovery in post).
I was intending to mention the dealers I bought the second hand gear from, mainly because the descriptions and packaging were excellent and they deserve to be credited, but I’ve also been asked a few more general photography purchasing related questions today and so have decided to compile a list of all the places I’ve had good service from in the past:
Ffordes Photographic
Based in Scotland, and used multiple times by my Dad for 2nd hand Contax lenses and more recently by me for the Canon 5D body.
I’ve recently become the (very happy) owner of a second hand Canon EOS 5D, and despite the camera being 5 years old this year the difference between it and my previous Canon EOS 20D is stunning. One unexpected change was the difference in the depth of field at any given f-stop between a full-frame and APS-C sensor: take a look at this review page for a clear summary, but that (like the dimensions of a mobile phone) didn’t mean much until I started shooting with it.
Well this was well buried in the normal media:
European Court rejects Home Office appeal, Section 44 found illegal – British Journal of Photography.
Excellent news, and not a moment too soon considering the latest inane activities in Romford:
Young photojournalist detained for army cadet pics – British Journal of Photography.
I can only hope that the lack of a formal complaint to date is due to potentially deeper legal action based on the European Court ruling.
I’ve been running an ntpd server as part of the UK pool since 2007 but since upgrading from OpenSolaris 2009.06 to snv_129, I’ve had a very poor score. So poor, that for more than a few weeks I’ve been dropped from the uk.pool.ntp.org CNAME 🙁
The problem (after I fixed the missing ptys) manifest itself as a series of entries in /var/adm/messages with varying IP addresses but all of the form:
Tweak the Info.plist if required in order to remove or reduce the CPU MHz limit, and then open up /Applications/Aperture.app/Contents/MacOS/Aperture file in 0xED and jump to the offset 0x6f9a80 and change the text in right hand pane from performRequirementsCheck to performLicenceCheck and then add five hex 0x00 in the left hand pane to make the strings equal length.
Oh dear.
“You have failed the practice citizenship test.
Questions answered correctly: 13 out of 24 (54%)
Time taken: 02 minutes 46 seconds “
Life in the United Kingdom – The Official Practice Citizenship Test does say it should take up to 45 minutes, but it’s flawed in so many ways it’s a joke. There were about 5 questions that were on subjects that I would want applicants to know something about and the rest were culled from the reject pile of I Want To Be A Millionaire.
After getting so excited about figuring out what was up with the upgrade to 2009.06 I ran into another, more sticky problem. I rushed into reattaching the zones I’d had to detach to get beadm working by using:
zoneadm -z zonename attach -F
Oh dear: that was a bad idea. The zone appeared to attach but zoneadm -z zonename boot failed and then I discovered it was impossible to delete, rename or reconfigure the zone.
New OpenSolaris release: Yay !
Updater fails on beadm create, and manual attempts also fail: Boo !
After a lot of grumblingGoogling down plenty of dead-ends it appears that beadm in 2008.11 gets very upset when there are Zones attached. A set of zoneadm detach commands later and the updater completed without any problems at all.
A friend at work has recently moved to Cambridge, and given that the weather has been improving a bit I put together a few things that might be interesting, and then realised that it wasn’t really specific to his needs and thought others might like to know too.
So first up, Cambridge Botanic Gardens. I should note that the only entrance I’ve ever known to be open is the one at the far end of Bateman Street near Trumpington Road (on their map).
I’m a huge fan of CSS and intelligent use of it such as removing images, background colours and scaling down font sizes for print, but some things need more work. If you’re looking at this site from an iPod Touch, iPhone or Android device, you should now get a much more compact ‘just-the-facts’ style view, courtesy of WPTouch. If you have any problems, or think the layout could still stand to be improved, do let me know in the comments.
New version – new offset. Things are getting trickier now as I only have one machine that needs this hack, and that doesn’t have a live network connection which slows down the whole process somewhat.
Having said that, tweak the Info.plist if required in order to remove or reduce the CPU MHz limit, and then open up /Applications/Aperture.app/Contents/MacOS/Aperture file in 0xED and jump to the offset 0x6f7bfc and change the text in right hand pane from performRequirementsCheck to performLicenceCheck and then add five hex 0x00 to make the strings equal length.
Amazon blocks Phorm adverts scan: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7999635.stm
I hadn’t previously bothered to do this, as it seemed to be too early to say how Phorm would turn out and the implementation of the opt-out is so braindead and full of marketing BS that it just made me angry. Yeah, I want to ban all search engines so Phorm doesn’t scan me – right… What about all the other User-Agent strings that <a href="http://www.
I’ve recently been tinkering with OpenSolaris 2008.11 and pkgsrc and have found what looks like a vi/vim typo in libtool-1.5.26 when trying to build the db4 database.
In case anyone else has been tripped up by this whilst using pkgsrc (complaints that .lai files can’t be found when it should be looking for a source lib ending in .la) you can fix this with the following diff:
--- /usr/pkg/bin/libtool.orig 2009-02-06 19:30:08.
Excellent conversation with the eldest, E:
E: You know that house on the TV where they have all those arguments ?
N: Big Brother ?
E: No, the Houses of Parliament
There’s a rather neat screenshot of this Mac OS X calculator program over at the Soulver website. Particularly, it shows that it can (like Google) take plain English questions, such as:
What is 20% off $35?
which is rather neat, and would make a mockery of most of what my Maths homework consisted of if I had a time machine (but I digress).
What would be really neat would be to add a voice interface to that and shove it on an iPhone – forget comparison shopping via taking pictures of barcodes, just pull out your phone and talk to it, and work out those pesky exchange rates (including credit card %age markup), or complicated discount scheme without having to peck around on a keyboard and try to remember how the % button is supposed to work.
Cambridge has a traffic problem. It’s not the worst in the country I’m sure, but it’s problematic enough that various expensive and almost certainly fatally flawed schemes have been proposed, and some even mostly built as a result.
Whilst something as drastic as a one-way inner ring road would certainly be bold, it’d also be expensive and the outcome might not be quite what was expected. One thing that hasn’t been done is try a very simple and fairly cheap experiment, which changes just one aspect of charging for parking: charge less the longer you stay.
It’s a purely personal milestone, but today marks the first time I’ve ripped a DVD (store bought) to a video file without watching the film itself. I’ve been slowly going through my film collection and encoding them so I can put the bulky boxes into a crate and store them out of the way – just as CD’s were a revelation in ease of use compared to having to clean and carefully place the stylus on vinyl, and just as DVD’s (in the early days) allowed direct access to the film without tedious rewinding of the tape, media files finally free me from needing to take up a portion of my living space with boxes that are rarely used.
I’m probably a little naive given that I work in computing, but after the number of years that Argos have managed to run a nice and simple online reservation/order system I’d have thought it was a simple thing to copy.
It’s not.
Having reserved a bike for my eldest at Halfords one Sunday morning last month, we all went down to collect it with the idea of building it together. The actual reservation was pretty straightforward, and I was quite impressed with the SMS reservation code they texted me within 2 minutes – the bike was in stock and available that day and the next and all I had to do was turn up and pay.
An extract from an email I’ve just received:
“As we are trying to have a carbon free Christmas this year…”
So, no Coal as a gift this year ?
Bah. Humbug.
It’s cold, raining and windy, so time for high fat, high sugar food. Based on this recipe, but with some slight changes:
75g Butter 60g Demerera sugar 10ml Vanilla essence 15ml Golden syrup 60g Porridge oats 120g Jumbo oats Mix everything except the oats together in a pan, and warm until the butter has melted. Stir in the oats until everything is nicely coated and then pat down into a greased baking tin.
This is slightly out of character for me but I think there’s an obvious point being missed here:
Apple Retail Store Field Trip: http://speirs.org/2008/11/01/apple-retail-store-field-trip/
Whilst at first glance this does make it seem as though “Media Awareness” should now become a pre-school activity, take a step back and ask what passes for ICT in the majority of UK primary schools right now. I freely admit that without children of my own in such a situation I might not know, but unsurprisingly it’s pretty much a Microsoft shop – there are some glimmers of hope (some variants of free software have finally been approved for ‘purchase’) but basically you will be taught the MS way of working.
Crikey. That was a bit of work – moving from WordPress 1.2 with a huge number of hacks into the latest-and-greatest version, but even though it was pretty much working, software from May 2004 (!) was starting to show in terms of flexibility and general slickness.
I’ve added some static pages for things like my reviews and Aperture hacks as they seem to be the most popular content, and I’m slowly going through the old posts to clean up bad quote marks, odd foreign characters and broken image links.
2008/10.31
@08:36
Full details are in the Aperture 2 post, but after ensuring you have changed the Info.plist file (if required), the offset for this version is 0x6f6bcc. Change the string that starts at that address from performRequirementsCheck to read performLicenseCheck and pad the end with five zero (null) characters.
Ok, this is a very bad take on security. Very, very bad:
Using a second router: A techie how-to
Ignore, if you will, the social aspects of if, why and how to police children online and just look at the totally stupid design proposal – he advocates a second router behind the main router, which is fair enough (ignoring all those protocols that die with a double NAT, or what happens if (gasp !
Wow – this is actually quite hard, especially during the first cup of coffee on a morning:
Take the test
For the record, I scored 10, where zero was the best for my age range (sob !) but the worst a rather startling 1464. I can’ t even blame my monitor colour depth, although it might be an excuse for a calibration device… Hmm…
(From The-Digital-Picture.
Recently I’ve been having some fun with Rapidweaver and have used it to create a web site for Marble Hill Dance Studio which is run by Abigail Cova and is based in St. Margaret’s, London. The main theme was a stock item with customised colours and extended background motifs, but in the end the logo placement and fade turned out to be real issues and so the front page is hand-customised.
This is a very slight modification of the lemon and white chocolate recipe
The depth of the muffin mould is the main issue for cooking time – I have some very deep (8cm) silicone ones that mean that it’s normally timed by eye with liberal use of a hat pin. If you use shallower trays then do reduce the cooking time unless you enjoy eating small bricks…
300g Self-raising flour 100g Caster sugar Pinch of salt 100g Butter 125g Dark chocolate 125g Strawberries 180ml Milk 2 Eggs Chop the chocolate bar into decent sized chunks (this is to taste but I quarter the ones pre-pressed into the bar) and place to one side.
This is a modification of a recipe I found last christmas, and have played with slightly in order to make them more unhealthy and bigger than most shop bought ones 🙂
The depth of the muffin mould is the main issue for cooking time – I have some very deep (8cm) silicone ones that mean that it’s normally timed by eye with liberal use of a hat pin. If you use shallower trays then do reduce the cooking time unless you enjoy eating small bricks…
Having tested the original variant on friends and family, this new one has been tested on work colleagues – most appear to have survived.
So far.
225g Self-raising flour 5ml Baking Powder Pinch of salt 50g Caster sugar 25g Margarine 110g Golden syrup 1 egg 120ml Milk 10ml Vanilla extract 20ml Flakes of 100% Cocoa chocolate Mix the flour, salt, sugar, baking powder and chocolate flakes thoroughly. Warm the margarine and syrup stir together (20 seconds in an 800W microwave).
Previously, most automated vulnerability probing I’ve seen on my systems has been brute force and fairly ignorant: one IP address tries many, many (and in some cases many, many and many) times to get in with varying credentials – the most blocked count recently was over 2500 attempts.
This morning it all changed and the rows and columns of the table of attacking IP’s and target users have basically been switched so that one IP will try one login, and then another IP will try the same login etc.
Ok, the offset for this latest update is 0x6f4bf0 – see the original Aperture 2 post for full details.
The summary is that you need to hex edit the Aperture.app/Contents/MacOS/Aperture file so that the string that starts at offset 0x6f4bf0 reads performLicenseCheck and is followed by five zero characters (ie: replace all of the text in the original performRequirementsCheck string).
Enjoy.
DHS Allowed To Take Laptops Indefinitely: http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/08/01/0958242
Just don’t tell UK Customs & Excise or they’ll want the same rights too. Bet they could make the cost of this back through selling the details they find to marketing firms…
Assuming they don’t take tips from other govt. agencies on data handling and simply leave the laptop on a train on the way home, or in McDonalds, or getting it couriered to the lab for examination, etc.
My desk smells of coffee
My leg smells of coffee
My bin smells of coffee
The floor is damp
My mouse drips
My heart falls
My cup is empty
Oh.
Today, I left the house 45 minutes earlier than normal in order to renew my car tax I waited 15 minutes at the Post Office, and then continued my drive into the city I got on the Park-n-ride as usual When I got off the bus I found I was at my destination a full 1 hour earlier than normal I know I watch a fair bit of Doctor Who these days, but really…
ad to the bone – The Executive Coloring Book: http://www.adtothebone.com/tecb/theexecutivecoloringbook.html
Via John Nack
Despite falling into the role years ago, it never left me behind (despite what my current job title may say) as I’ve just discovered. There’s a power outage right now and I found myself myself:
Unscrewing cabinets to get access to cables laid years ago Moving the DECT base station onto a UPS (something I never got around to doing in the last 12 months) Rerouting the WiFi power cable to come off a newer UPS with spare capacity Patching the WiFi through onto a spare switch Blogging about it …and then realising I’m at home.
I had been wondering why I don’t seem to be drawn to photography magazines very much – I had assumed that sites like Flickr had quenched my desire to look at other people’s images, and unless I had a large amount of spare money, equipment reviews tend to loose their appeal after a while.
Then I read this:
Do Sensors “Outresolve” Lenses?: http://luminous-landscape.com/tutorials/resolution.shtml
Wow.
It’s got about as much to do with photography as metallurgy has to do with driving a car: engine blocks aren’t often the subject of much thought when going on holiday, but go and talk to an F1 designer for a while and it’ll soon become apparent that what you do with the car and how you build the engine matter.
Photojojo – The Fastest Way to Learn Keyboard Shortcuts for Photoshop, Aperture, FCP, and more: http://photojojo.com/content/buy-this/photoshop-keyboard-skins/
This looks interesting: a fairly reasonably priced set of silicon overlays for various Apple laptops and current keyboards (and, for that matter, more than just Aperture).
The layouts are tailored for US keyboards, so I sent a message via Photojojo’s feedback page asking if they had any plans for a UK layout Aperture skin for the slim Aluminium keyboard.
BookMooch: exchange books and trade them, like a book swap or book barter: http://www.bookmooch.com/
Something to add to the list of sites I never knew existed, but wholeheartedly approve of. So much so that 10 minutes after signing up I’ve got 11 books available without even digging hard into the various piles scattered around the house.
This is a variant of the Gingerbread recipe, and is decidedly Version 1.0 in that it’s both complete and in need of more work… It’s actually a little too sweet, and could perhaps be attempted with less sugar, and possibly with less vanilla, although as it seems that good vanilla extract is the human equivalent of cat-nip, I’d resist all calls to reduce the quantity.
225g Self-raising flour Pinch of salt 110g Caster sugar 25g Margarine 110g Golden syrup 1 egg 180ml Milk 10ml Vanilla extract Mix the flour, salt and sugar thoroughly.
This one isn’t mine: Michal was so quick off the mark I haven’t even downloaded the update yet 🙂
this time performLicenseCheck is @ 6F2B0C
Thanks very much for the speedy update !
Given that a stable tarball of pkgsrc is coming up this is possibly just a temporary aberration with a couple of broken commits but as of the 17mar08 the pkgsrc.tar.gz tarball won’t build on a FreeLink enabled LinkStation without a couple of tweaks. Annoyingly, the deaths are during the bootstrap stage so everything has to restart from scratch each time so it took longer than normal to track these down.
This is pretty much the same as the original Aperture 2 trial hack, but with a different offset for the binary once it’s been installed. Follow the previous instructions but change the offset for the start of the performRequirementsCheck string to be 6dcd44
Update: 09mar08 Ok, fixed. Not sure when this changed, but each city now has its own registration link.
I had been going to let this pass, but seeing as there’s no change after three days I think it needs to be at least pointed out…
Apple have announced an Aperture World Tour to show off Aperture 2 worldwide. Excellent: they include London, so I’ll click on the Reserve Your Seat link and I’ll book one for myself…
Update: 18feb08 My original hack required multiple edits in order to get the program to run, but Michal has found a far better method that just means a single change is required – I’ve reproduced it here from his comments and email so it’s easy to see what to do.
Update: 04mar08 At the request of hydr0, I’ve added screen shots of the application to demonstrate what zero-padding is – click on the image to view the whole application window grab if you require more context.
Are you in need of a low-level software engineer with over 12 years of commercial experience ? One that is happy to play around with JTAG probes and softcore CPU designs debugging unproven bitfiles ? One that can utilise logic analysers, oscilloscopes, multimeter’s, GPIO/LED’s and serial ports on first spin hardware when there’s no debug port available ? Has programmed in many types of assembly language (MIPS, SPARC, ARM, 6502, Z80), as well as the ‘usual’ Unix stuff (C/awk/sed/perl/sh) and has backend web programming (perl/PHP/MySQL) and performance tuning experience ?
Exim and SpamAssassin can work very well together to screen incoming email during the SMTP receive phase and reject messages without them ever having to get close to a user. Although the borderline spam cases are the most annoying and give rise to false positives, there is another class of spam which is so totally bogus I wonder why they even bother to send it although it does give credence to the concept that spamming itself is no longer profitable – bot-herding and supplying delivery services to spammers is the new market, and the I-can-get-rich-quick-too spammers are themselves being ripped off.
This is the full version:
N: “What’s the next number in this sequence…”
E (interrupting): “7”
N: “…”
N: “Err, yes.”
The best bit is that she was, indeed, absolutely right…
Cambridge – Sights & Attractions – Abbey: http://www.schmap.com/cambridge/sights_abbey/#p=122574&i=122574_4.jpg
A picture of mine, on another site ! Well, ok: it’s not the first one, as Ivan’s had of mine one on his homepage for ages, but Schmap found this one on Flickr and asked to use it: one of the very few times that unsolicited email is genuine and has a pleasant result.
Hmm, this is turning into a regular saga now: so much so I’ve added a voip tag to these posts to help keep them together.
My original macro worked just fine when the incoming number and the dialled extension matched, but this is only true for my LAN and is not generally true when using external SIP providers as the incoming extension is very often the user id of the account.
Now I haven’t actually got around to trying find these myself: 1.5.4 was working just fine for me and I couldn’t see anything that the 1.5.6 update would give me until I get OS X 10.5 (and that’s not likely until Aperture is properly supported there[1]) but others have found this information and posted them in the old 1.5.2 and 1.5.4 threads, so I thought it would be helpful to make a more Google friendly URL.
Ok, so who thinks of Dilbert’s boss when reading this snippet from a product spec PDF:
Dimension 25mm x 115mm x 75mm (when laying flat); 115mm x 25mm x 75mm (standing up) I really, really hope that was put in there after an inane comment in a meeting… If the writer was actually serious about that, then I fear for the future of all documentation: at the very least they could have included the size of the stand and made it a useful statement.
Update: Thanks to Steve for pointing out that SayNumber (line 5 of 1471 below) is a bad idea: it works just fine in limited testing on my LAN, but when given a normal UK 11-digit number it seems to have some trouble trying to pronounce 01234 567 890 as 1 billion, 234 million, 567 thousand 890…
Switching that command for SayDigits not only lets the function work, it also makes far, far more sense when listening to the result, too.
Wanting to make my home Asterisk box a convergence point for VoIP and PSTN mans that I really wanted to have the “last number caller id” option that BT offer in the UK, but sadly the page on the Asterisk Wiki that mentions 1471 is no longer valid, so here’s my own implementation. It’s not 100% feature complete, but it does work in a comparable way to the PSTN version.
Taking pictures in cold weather has always been a little problematical as nice warm gloves don’t really help when fiddling with DSLR settings. One fairly decent solution I found in 2002 was a pair of Windstopper lightweight gloves with a thin leather palm that is just sensitive enough to allow buttons to be felt through them which worked well in Yosemite in the spring with a compact digital camera.
Needless to say, this year I manage to loose them (since found in the pockets of an old coat, of course) and so found myself wandering around shops trying to find something similar, and not prohibitively expensive as I’ll probably be doing this on an annual basis when I ‘loose’ these ones too… For some reason, this seasons fashion is for hugely impractical (for camera use) ski gloves, so I’d pretty much decided that I just has to get used to cold hands when my eldest spotted an interesting pair of gloves in my local John Lewis: they are fairly standard looking knitted fingerless gloves with a Thinsulate lining and hence nicely wind proof, at least for the lowlands of Cambridgeshire (-9ft to 480ft ASL) but with an extra pocket (again, lined) stitched to the back of the knuckles that folds down to create a mittens and velcros to the back of the hand when not in use.
Today, I has been mostly trying to convince FrameMaker not to change baudrate into obdurate.
It’s very persistent, though.
How about 2000 fps ?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rm3Zirh-j50
Found via dpreview
A quote from a meeting at work earlier today:
P: So, will this be a complete audio/visual presentation ?
S: Yes. It’ll be me, talking.
Geeks – pfft. I’m not even working in an English department…
I’ve wanted to get a VoIP application working on my N770 pretty much since day 1: the trouble is I’m rather picky…
I want to be able to use it without pain from any WiFi point I happen to find myself at and I can’t use the N800 version of Skype, but that’s fine by me as I want to have some control over my datastream. It does however pretty much rule out most SIP-based solutions, as one-way audio is the best to hope for without control of NAT port forwarding (and that isn’t something hotels/coffee shops are going to have much truck with).
Apple – iPhone UK on O2 – Macworld UK: http://macworld.co.uk/ipod-itunes/news/index.cfm?newsid=19123
Alluding to the decision to make market moves with O2, Jobs said: “We wanted to know a few partners and find the one most compatible with us, so we dated lots of other carriers, but decided to marry O2. There’s a few upset girlfriends out there.”
LOL – is it just me, or does that conjour up a very carefully rehearsed analogy straight out of the Scott Adams/Derren Brown school of public speaking ?
After meaning to get around to it for a year or so, I’ve finally got my Qube 2 providing time public services to the NTP UK Pool. Check the current status:
pool.ntp.org: minimal’s pool servers: http://www.pool.ntp.org/user/minimal
So if you use uk.pool.ntp.org then there a 1 in 738 chance (currently) that you’ll get data from it, or just use ntp.minimal.org.uk for a direct feed.
As with the previous v1.5.3 tweaks, the Info.plist change for CPU speed (and RAM, if your system needs it) was all that was required to enable my ageing 1GHz 12″ PowerBook to run with v1.5.4, but the MDD Dual 867 machine still needed a tweak. The MDD system is now running a supported graphics card (a Radeon 9800, but don’t worry: it was also hacked from the PC variant), so I don’t have any offsets for getting around the video detection code.
Chuck Kimmerle, fine art photography from North Dakota: http://www.chuckkimmerle.com/deadwoods/photo000.htm
Found via John Nack’s blog, these two galleries (particularly the first one) make me want to give up on colour immediately, and spend the rest of my time shooting black & white.
Outstanding.
A few years ago Tesco caused a stir with their loyalty card and the use of purchase histories to offer targeted coupons to users of the cards, which caused some privacy worries (IIRC about the same time Scott McNealy said “You have zero privacy anyway. Get over it.”) and that made me start wondering about the software used to predict buying habits, and what it made of my purchases. Am I statistically average ?
I’ve been more than usually annoyed by a particular set of spammers who keep pushing press releases of their Windows blogging software – annoyed because it slips though SpamAssassin and has no clear sender for each new run (if I’m fast I can block it for a set, but it seems to come back every 90 days or so) but it’s 100% identifiable by the Received: header lines – no, I’m not going to mention the domains as they don’t deserve any more Google hits.
What to do with 4133 frames of video, a D-SLR and a printer with plenty of ink and paper…
Max Tyrie’s Hand Made Modest Mouse Video: http://www.woostercollective.com/2007/05/shit_were_diggin_max_tyries_hand_made_mo.html
(Via: Photojojo)
New to me that is. Slightly less late to the party than I was with OK, Computer (10 years after release !), I’ve found a lot to listen to in the SXSW torrent files. Over 5GB, in fact. The 2006 torrents are still available and contain names that I’ve certainly become aware of through mainstream radio exposure/iTunes in the UK: Abigail Washburn, Corinne Bailey Rae, Editors, Josh Ritter, KT Tunstall, Paolo Nutini, and We Are Scientists, so I fully expect that somewhere in this year’s 3.
These last few weeks I’ve been rather distracted, thanks to a question from Duncan regarding lolcats, in particular linking to icanhascheezburger, which I can now say does run out of images. After 70 pages or more…
But wait ! Finished icanhascheezburger and feeling lost? You can has more !
No need to worry that you might actually be productive this week (or have any bandwidth allowance left from your ISP) because there are also Meme Cats (with over 600 images !
Following on from the misogynist email from Amazon, a rather more apposite one from iWorld:
From: iWorld.co.uk@….
Subject: FREE Noise Isolating Earphones for Fathers Day!
Doesn’t say which sort of noises they isolate against in particular, though.
After having used it for a few weeks I really ought to mention Mozy 1, partly to try and get some extra storage space, but mostly because it’s a very interesting service for both Windows and Mac OS X users. I’ve only used the Beta release Mac client, but running it on my 1GHz G4 Powerbook has been relatively painless. About 2 times out of 30 backup runs I’ve noticed it was active, but the rest of the time I’ve been pleasantly surprised at just how up-to-date it’s kept my files – far more recent than any manual system I’ve ever used.
The ‘local noise’ entry in the sidebar is now active with last.fm‘s Flash based widget and shows the most recent tracks I’ve been listening too. Not that exciting, really (especially with my current addition to OK Computer – just shy of 10 years late to this party…) apart from the fact that the little arrows in circles on the right of the track will play a 30s clip of the track just in case you’re curious, whilst mouseover the track name shows the album art (but in a thumbnail that’s too small to make out properly – hey ho).
gallery.minimal.cx: http://gallery.minimal.cx/
After a few days of PHP brutality, I’ve redesigned the gallery to use my own OSS POTD software, Alder. I aim to have daily updates – some old images and some new ones, with an RSS2 feed that does include the full size images.
The software itself will take care of the posting: just feed it a directory full of images and call the script once for each new image.
Disneyland in China? – Japan Probe: http://www.japanprobe.com/?p=1678
Classic quote:
“It’s not a mouse. It’s a cat with very big ears”
(via /.
Showbiz – News – ‘Spamalot’ team breaks coconut record – Digital Spy: http://www.digitalspy.co.uk/showbiz/a45654/spamalot-team-breaks-coconut-record.html?rss
Could only have been better if it had been reported on a Monday morning.
I don’t generally bother with games that much, mainly because trying to get tens of Unix apps to play nicely after one of them has a security upgrade, or two of them just have to be tweaked to add a feature I want takes as much thought as an Infocom adventure. (Hmm, perhaps unfair; I’ve never finished an Infocom game, but I have had the apps work together. Mostly.) So that aside, here’s three games I’ve found very playable recently, and none of them involve aliens or bullets.
Update 22apr07: Hex offsets for MDD dual 867MHz now available
Ok, things haven’t changed much for machines close to the minimum spec since 1.5.2, so for my 1GHz 12″ PowerBook all I need to edit is the Info.plist file inside the Aperture.app/Contents directory. I changed both the minimum RAM and minimum CPU requirements down to 500MB and 1GHz:
<key>AELMinimumRAMSize</key> <string>500</string> and:
<key>RKG4LaptopMinimumCPUSpeedMHz</key> <integer>1000</integer> Edit those entries with either a text editor, or the plist editor that comes with the (free) Developer Tools.
Realmac Software | Weblog: http://www.realmacsoftware.com/blog/files/rapidweaver_35_macuser_free.html
The next edition of Mac User will have a full and free version of RapidWeaver 3.5 on the cover disc. If you’re at all interested in publishing more web pages/sites than iWeb lets you, and like the idea of simply using Cut-n-Paste to create a web page (from TextEdit, Nissus, Word, et. al.) with all styles intact, then you really ought to get this software.
From Tim, who obviously thinks I need a distraction:
whomix – doctor who theme remixes: http://whomix.trilete.net/
What a lot of work – a few select examples also came with the link, with my favourite being the Nyman one:
Nyman: http://whomix.trilete.net/download.php?remixid=45
007: http://whomix.trilete.net/download.php?remixid=167
Flamenco: http://whomix.trilete.net/download.php?remixid=106
Morse: http://whomix.trilete.net/download.php?remixid=97
Piano: http://whomix.trilete.net/download.php?remixid=169
Cyberdisco: http://whomix.trilete.net/download.php?remixid=120
Ambient: http://whomix.trilete.net/download.php?remixid=128
Neil Gaiman’s Journal: Rabbits and Tygers and Butterflies oh my: http://www.neilgaiman.com/journal/2007/04/rabbits-and-tygers-and-butterflies-oh.html
Oh, the Tyger ! Now that is a great 4m 30s film combining animation and theatre styles I would never have expected to coexist together into a most evocative story (worth having the music on too, as it does add to the film).
Update: More info about the film, as well as higher quality downloads from the authors site (from an update on Neil’s site).
Well, hubert put his score up, so I decided to have a go:
Oh dear – and the more worrying thing is that I know I could have scored more, if my science history had been better !
Ok, after using my Lenspen I was ready for the really scary one: the Sensor Klear CCD cleaning pen. Did I buy both at the same time ? Yes. Without knowing if the Lenspen would work ? Yup. That’s because 7 Day Shop were having a sale and the Sensor Klear itself was less than the cost of the P&P for the order…
Ok, so I’m about to put something that’s cheaper than the stamps and envelopes for the whole order onto the most delicate portion of my DSLR, and not only expect no damage to result, but expect it to clean as well as a cleaning system costing 15 times as much ?
Snake oil1. That’s what I had in mind for this product, and to be honest I’d been fooled by the name into thinking that there was something inside that scribbled over the lens/filter and this somehow made it clean.
Not even close.
Yes, it’s cheap, and in the world of Cameras and Hi-Fi the unspoken rule is that if it hurts to buy it, it’s got to be better than anything that costs less – having seen first hand ‘Best Quality Mains Cables’ being sold at stupid prices by people who have zero knowledge of power supply design I’m cured of the Hi-Fi price/sound lie, but sensor and lens cleaning are still worrisome to me: I want them both clean, but don’t have a working knowledge of what materials are used and how tough they really are.
Just for added confusion for those arriving via Google, this is the cake and not a loaf of bread with ginger in it…
Based on an original recipe by Be-Ro from my Gran’s 16th edition of “Be-Ro Home Recipes” and modified by my Mum and more recently myself. From some background on Be-Ro it would seem likely that this particular edition was from around the 1930’s, and is both simple and tasty: the speed my kids lick out the mixing bowl isn’t any slower than the stories I heard about my Mum…
Guardian Unlimited | Comment is free | I hate Macs: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,2006031,00.html
“I hate Macs. I have always hated Macs. I hate people who use Macs. I even hate people who don’t use Macs but sometimes wish they did. Macs are glorified Fisher-Price activity centres for adults; computers for scaredy cats too nervous to learn how proper computers work; computers for people who earnestly believe in feng shui.”
Charlie Brooker being, well, Charlie Brooker.
“Knight Rider” (1982) – Trivia: http://imdb.com/title/tt0083437/trivia
“According to Brandon Tartikoff, the head of programming at NBC during the 1980s, the inspiration for the series came about when NBC executives started complaining about the problems of casting handsome leading men in TV series, because many of them couldn’t act. Tartikoff and his assistant came up with a concept for a TV show called, “The Man of Six Words”. Each show would begin with the leading man getting out of a woman’s bed and saying, “Thank you.
Interstellar Ark ::
Strange Paths: http://strangepaths.com/interstellar-ark/2007/02/14/en/
Fascinating maths and theoretical physics behind what might be done, and what is patently not going to happen (given our current level of understanding) in terms of interstellar exploration. Well worth a leisurely viewing.
On a side note, this might be the first case of accurate maths on /. although technically only the link is on there, but with one depressingly plausible alternative vision in the comments:
After getting my new camera bag, I sold my old one (thanks Andrew !) and got this tripod with the proceeds. Looking at the PDF on the UK distributors site (trust me: you don’t want to bother with the manufacturers site) they indicate that it’s not suitable for SLRs when using long lenses, but the collapsed size is just too good to ignore so I took a mild gamble at bought it anyway: mild in that my current tripod is around 20 years old and is so unstable it’s only marginally better than hand holding (plus it’s now got enough chipped or broken bits that trying to use it quickly results in needing to stop and add plasters to the cuts…)
Marksman Called In To Kill Kingstons Pigeons (from Surrey Comet): http://www.surreycomet.co.uk/news/localnews/display.var.1039169.0.marksman_called_in_to_kill_kingstons_pigeons.php
Uninspiring article, amazing comments: don’t read them whilst drinking any sort of liquid unless you want to buy a new keyboard…
Via Scary Duck, a wholly inappropriate site. Wonderful.
Since my last camera bag review seemed to generate so much interest, here’s another one !
Things have changed quite a bit in the last 17 months, and the main issue with my original Lowepro is that it’s no longer large enough for a day out with my family: the primary problem being that my youngest walks everywhere now so we don’t have the extra load space of a pushchair anymore.
Cloud Shapes: http://pic1.funtigo.com/valuca/?g=25544746&cr=1
Some amazing pictures here (page will take a while to render though) that make UFO stories so much more understandable. Assuming I haven’t been duped by excessive Photoshoppery: the ship heading towards the storm is something straight out of a special effects department.
Via John Nack
BBC NEWS | Entertainment | Unsigned band make chart history: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/6260995.stm
Number 31. Now I might just have to find out what they sound like, but to be honest that secondary to what they’ve done:
“Murphy added that they had been contacted by a number of big record labels, including one who recently turned them down.”
🙂
Azarhi Software: http://www.azarhi.com/Projects/DSW/
What a useful program: found in the comments to a hint on MacOSXHints, this Preference Pane allows applications to be triggered on disc mounts and unmounts.
Great for launching backup software, such as iBackup when I insert my 1GB USB stick, so one further click will copy all my most essential passwords and documents to the device.
Sleep. Very nice. What was nicer was waking up in time to go and look for Comet McNaught and actually finding it in time, although I missed out on a better photograph due to running home to get my camera gear and the kids into their wellies to come and see it with me.
Colours are messed up (it was a nicer orange/blue sky) as I have attacked the image in Adobe Camera Raw to enhance the tail as much as possible (although you’ll have to trust me that I didn’t use an airbrush to really ‘improve’ it).
BBC NEWS | Entertainment | Unsigned band set to crash charts: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/6248535.stm
Unsigned, and tipped to make the UK Top 40: not without plenty of hard work (500 live shows), but with a cracking quote:
“If someone comes along and gives us an offer, we’ll talk to them.
But it depends whether we need it. If we can get enough exposure and get in the top 40 by the end of the week, do we necessarily need a large label?
Tony Hawks – The Official Website: http://www.tony-hawks.com/skatemail.php
“As you can see, they are not the same person.
Tony Hawk is an American whizz kid skateboarding champion, whilst I am a startlingly good-looking British male model.”
Browsing his skatemail archive amused me no end:
“Tony u is my number 1 fan I love the sk8ing you rox I loved the 9000 wot u did when r u coming to wigan I want to see u demo in wigan soon can I have ur autograph?
Update: 15dec06 If you have a PowerBook model with a CPU below 1.25GHz then there’s no need to binary edit this version of Aperture: click on the post title to read the comment from Shane
As with all the 1.5 series, this latest update just needs the one change to the binary to function on a 1GHz 12″ PowerBook. The method is the same as for the Aperture 1.
Neil Gaiman – Neil Gaiman’s Journal: By Request…: http://www.neilgaiman.com/journal/2006/12/by-request.html
Now that’s a film I wouldn’t mind watching…
(requires Flash)
AtomFilms – Animator vs. Animation II: http://www.atomfilms.com/af/content/animator_vs_animation_2
Superb flash animation: noisy and with so much action it’s almost impossible to take in on the first viewing. If you haven’t already seen it, do take time to watch Animator vs. Animation first.
Via Userfriendly.
Botox face: http://www.geekculture.com/joyoftech/joyarchives/892.html
It’s almost as if they read my last post: cool – I get my very own personal comic writers !
Or maybe not, but I certainly prefer my initial conclusion.
Amazon. What a wonderfully crafted email they just sent my way (straight from the lads’ mag marketing department), entitled:
Great gifts from £5.99 for her this Christmas at Amazon.co.uk
There were the usual laughable excuses for presents, but they saved the best ’till last:
Wow. Now that’s the way to a memorable christmas morning:
“Merry Xmas darling. I think you’re fat.”
Although the alternatives in that line up aren’t too great either:
Matrix Transform: http://xkcd.com/c184.html
Well, it made me laugh this morning but I think it merely confirms that even with so many camera posts lately I haven’t stopped being an all-round geek…
Not new, but (finally) updated versions of the previous four themes for the new location of the web themes in Aperture 1.5 (and 1.5.1).
This version also has a faster installer that simply assumes the program lives in /Applications, and so the whole thing is over in less time than the .dmg file takes to open 🙂
Download the .dmg file
Really, this obsession with MTF charts is undoubtedly unhealthy for the wallet but it can also be so all-consuming it confuses solving the most obvious of problems. After getting annoyed with the auto-focus on the 350D and going back to the joys of a ‘proper’ manual lens (Zuiko 135mm with EOS<>OM adaptor) I had then become frustrated with the viewfinder: too small, too dark, too tunnel-like when compared to my aged OM-10 and plainly the cause of all my manual focus woes (being just that little bit wrong when viewed at 100%).
It’s update time, which means hacking the minimum requirements again. More details on how to actually change the numbers are in the Aperture 1.5 post and comments, but this time I only seemed to need one change to the binary:
0xb8e8: 40 9E 00 88 -> 48 00 00 88 and the Info.plist minimum memory requirement had to be adjusted down for me as I only have 768MB on the 12″ PB.
View Flickr Photos in Google Earth: http://kmlphotos.metaltoad.com/
Now that is a great timewaster, although given my new-found amazement at just how close Cairo and Luxor city boundaries are to the Great Pyramid and the Valley of the Kings, it’s also educational.
Aperture seems to have a pretty good set of defaults in the main – it certainly doesn’t get in my way for simple things, but recently I’d been getting upset with the performance of the EOS 350D kit lens (Canon EF-S 18-55mm) where my images just simply looked poorer than I expected. Until recently I’d not been able to use Adobe’s raw convertor, but after a terrible shot of a climbing wall I was really annoyed and on a whim tried the image in PSE3 as well as Aperture.
For about 3 months now I’ve not been able to use Photoshop Elements 3 for no reason that I could find. I tried erasing preference files, repairing permissions, deleting plugins, emptying caches, uninstalling TWAIN drivers, removing over 300 fonts and re-installing all to no avail. The Adobe PSE support forums were of no use and I had resorted to either PSE2 or just making do in other software and hoping the problem would fix itself…
This is a Ginger Bread, and not Gingerbread (not that I’d try to confuse anyone intentionally of course…)
1/2 tsp Yeast 200g Strong White flour 200g Strong Brown flour 15ml Virgin Olive Oil 1 tsp Salt 1 tbsp Sugar 2 tsp Ground Ginger 30g Crystallised Ginger 100ml Semi-skimmed milk 170ml Water Bake for 4 hours on a standard raisin bake, and make sure that the crystallised ginger is finely chopped before placing in the nut dispenser.
I am completely obsessed with the colour tool in the latest point release of Aperture, but it’s got to the point where I’m not sure if I like the results, or clicking the change button on and off and looking at the before and after results… Have a look for yourself and see what you think. The index pages have some description of the images, but looking at the full page views allows a simple before/after click to see the differences.
I’ve got a new favourite – it’s s slightly modified version of the Orange loaf from page 25 and smells amazing once made. I’m not sure what I might put on it, as half the loaf had to be ‘tested’ whilst hot, and was great just by itself. Place the ingredients in the pan according to the manual; the cranberries into the raisin/nut dispenser, and then set for a 4hr basic raisin bake.
It seems as though the minimum system requirements are still in force in Aperture 1.5, which means that although 1.25GHz PowerBooks are supported, my dual 867GHz MDD isn’t, which is rather odd. Still, the hack for Aperture 1.1 still works on 1.5, but the offsets have (unsurprisingly) moved a little.
Using a hex editor (I found 0xed very useful), try changing the following:
0×0b548: 40 9E 00 88 -> 48 00 00 88 0×0b5e4: 40 9E 00 88 -> 48 00 00 88 0×17390: 40 9E 00 E0 -> 48 00 00 D8 The updated binary has been tested on both an 2GB MDD 867GHz PowerMac and also a 768MB 1GHz 12″ PowerBook, but note that the Info.
Tech Zendo » Blog Archive » OS X: How To Perform an Action During Fast User Switch: http://www.radiotope.com/writing/?p=71
How to write a configd kicker script to enable event driven actions on OS X [via AFP548.com]
I’ve not done much flash work as I never really liked the look it gave the subject when I first tried it, but that was on film (20+ years ago) and I simply couldn’t afford the trial and error learning process. Digital is far better for this sort of experimentation and there’s a couple of sites I’ve read recently that have taught me something useful and are worth trying out.
Being a total Aperture convert, I’ve been amusing (?) myself over the summer trying to get 18,000 or so photos into something like a useable state, but being scattered over 4 hard drives and two computers (with no one drive having enough space for them all, of course) has been an exercise in watching progress bars moving GB of data around.
As part of all this I’m correctly tagging, naming and rating images as I get a logical group together, and many images that look good on camera, and occasionally on screen just don’t hold up in terms of sharpness when examined at 1:1, so they’re being classed as Rejects from within Aperture, meaning they effectively vanish from all normal views of my photos.
The Observer | Food monthly | If MSG is so bad for you, why doesn’t everyone in Asia have a headache?: http://observer.guardian.co.uk/foodmonthly/story/0,,1522368,00.html
Going by my previous metric of ‘If I’ve emailed a link to two people, I should have blogged it’, here’s a fascinating mini-history of MSG and umami together with a Top 19 of foods that you might not expect to but do in fact contain large quantities of contain MSG.
Suffolk Restaurants – The Round House Restaurant: http://www.allenby.co.uk/index.html
Found at the side of the A12 on Saturday quite by accident whilst camping near the Suffolk coast with friends, where I had an excellent lunch, was impressed with the tone of the menu and the attitude of the staff and the only possible point to note is that the dishes are described in almost too plain a fashion (but taste absolutely amazing).
Update 07nov06: Note that the download here is only for Aperture versions up to (and including) 1.1.2 The location of the themes is different for Aperture 1.5, so view the updated post if you’re using 1.5 or 1.5.1.
Well, more variations than true themes, but if you have Aperture I have add a new Stock theme which has a grey background, and also created versions that have a link to a parent directory in the theme itself so it’s a little easier to get at least a one level deep gallery out of the program.
If you are using Aperture and are going through a large collection of older images it’s very nice being able to add IPTC Copyright entries during import. The auto-complete is very handy too, as most of mine have been in a few distinct locations and the saving on typing is very easy to get used to, but I found a problem when I came from adding a load of images from 2005 into 2006: the auto-complete works on an ASCII ascending match rather than most recently used, so by default my Copyright was coming out as ‘Ian Spray, 2005’ which was annoying to correct.
After far too long leaving my gallery languishing, it’s now been reborn in a very bare fashion: using (at the moment) Lightroom to caption and edit, and the rather simple to config JAlbum to build the images I have knocked up a mostly CSS (yes, the tables will be going) design that apes the Stock theme from Aperture. Why ? Because it shows the images as the main focus of interest.
I’ve not seen this mentioned over at the Google Help page, but it understands plain English time zone requests, so asking it:
time in new york
does exactly what you’d expect: the current local time at the top of the page, and a list of links for the rest of it. Very handy, as I rarely need a full blown world clock, but just need to check it’s sane to make a call.
Well, the issues with my ADSL line are getting worse: it seems to loose DSL sync randomly and no combination of phone sockets or microfilters appears to help. This means that email may be delayed by two days or more (although I do now have backup MX thanks to GratisDNS), and the web site(s) will not always be available 🙁
Still, the good news is that it’s so nice to have an ISP that isn’t run into the ground by PHB’s: yesterday I called support (for the first time) and was rather worried by the ‘Press 1 if you are using a Mac’ voice menu, but I didn’t need to worry:
Whilst I’m in a positively frenzied posting mood, I’ve ended up emailing this link to more than one person which is the usual indicator of “should have blogged it”. Yes, months after I first read it on Rob Galbraith’s site, here’s a fascinating use of IR photography that just makes me want to get a second camera just to have it converted for full-time use:
http://www.sportsshooter.com/news/1570
I like RapidWeaver and really like the idea of static pages for my website (it’s not as if I update it that often !) but I also have one or two posts in WordPress that I don’t want to loose. Currently, there is no AppleScript or Automator support in RW and the plugin dev kit is not yet out[1](it’s promised for v3.5, but the current application release is v3.5 Public Beta 1) so I thought I’d try a little GUI Scripting.
If you’re having issues trying to access this or any other site hosted here then no, it’s probably not you: my DSL router appears to be having lots of fun resetting itself and generally being unhelpful (giving me log messages from February, but not from today…) The ADSL sync speed keeps changing too, so it could be an ISP or BT issue: in other words there will be no ETA for it working properly again.
In the Canon EOS 350D manual there is a comment next to the colour space menu option description that states:
“This setting is not recommended if you do not know about image processing, Adobe RGB, and Design rule for Camera File System 2.0 (Exif 2.21)”
To which I had always replied (mentally) “Of course I do”. Ahem. I need to modify that statement to read “Of course I do, under OS X” as it turns out I hadn’t quite done all the config I thought I had.
Canadian Music Creators Coalition: A New Voice: http://www.musiccreators.ca/
This is very satisfying to see: artists signed to (major) labels publicly gathering to point out that the aims and desires of the Artists are not the same as those of Labels themselves.
“…not in our names…” is a very apposite statement indeed, and it behoves the labels to notice that this time it could hurt even more: whilst there appears to be a limitless supply of small-time copyright infringers to sue (even with the public relations damage it entails) there is a much smaller set of artists, and making them rethink their affiliations when contracts are up for renewal could be a very expensive lesson.
The Sneeze – Half zine. Half blog. Half not good with fractions. : http://www.thesneeze.com/mt-archives/cat_steve_dont_eat_it.php
The phrase ‘Steve, don’t eat it’ just doesn’t do this page justice, but do make sure you’re not trying to eat anything yourself whilst reading…
TV Scoop: American Cats – Officially Funny http://www.tvscoop.tv/2006/04/american_cats_o.html
Do not watch the clips in that post whilst attempting to either drink or eat. You will probably be left wondering how any cats have managed to survive at all, given that these are only the acts that actually managed to get filmed…
After reading about the BBC HD trial, I was idly wondering what the UK DVB-T channel line up might look like in the post-analogue days (2012, at the current estimate) and trying to decide how much HD content there might be (or how many more shopping and +1 channels[1]could expand to fill the space and so force people onto pay platforms for HD content. Not that I’d accuse any other operators of using up DVB-T spectrum as a loss leader in order to force customers to buy better quality[2]from their other arm).
…they tell you that you have a security hole that you weren’t aware of. I just received an email which said:
“It has been identified that your internet connection is acting as an open recursive DNS server. This means that your connection could contribute to a DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack resulting in your and other people’s connections becoming unusable.”
This confused me, as although the IP given was in my range, I was sure I didn’t have anything on that number.
In no particular order:
Although OmniGraffle 2.2 is very outdated, it makes short shrift of flow charts, especially when using Lucida Grande 9pt text and frequent use of the Align Center to Grid button You need to have at least a 1280 x 1024 display to do sane flow charts on A4 in Omnigraffle, as there’s enough room on the screen to have the Font, Palette and Inspector windows open too Adding the Font to the Favourites list in the Font Inspector makes it very fast to change a page once it’s been roughed out: Option+A and then a single click Our children will gaze at us with wonder[1]when we descibe how disc filing systems used to erase the previous contents of the file when saving data with the same name, assuming we can get the concept of a ‘Save’ across to them.
Web 2.1 server-side blink tag demonstration: http://cheese.blartwendo.com/web21-demo.html
Now here’s something the mainstream fuss over AJAX has missed: real, tangible and downright useful code. No more silly browser intelligence: let the server control everything !
Roll on Web 2.5
AIRTIGHT – PostcardViewer Download: http://www.airtightinteractive.com/projects/postcardviewer/
I meant to mention this a while ago when I was looking at various galleries and it’s a great non-linear way of presenting images, plus it’s free. It just got a lot better for Photoshop users though, as there’s now a script for automatically generating albums.
No, it doesn’t work in Elements 3 (I tried !) but there is an iPhoto exporter mentioned which I’ve not had a go with yet.
DSL ZoneUK – Common terms: http://www.dslzoneuk.net/maxspeed.php
If you’re on one of the majority of BT’s exchanges in the UK then by the 31st of March 2006 it ought to be possible to move to ADSL2 (assuming your hardware and ISP support it). If you can get access to the current attenuation and signal-to-noise figures from your modem then the above link will give an idea of what you can expect from the new service.
Writers Block Live | Blog Archive | The HD Boycott Begins Now: http://writersblocklive.com/part-156
Well said that man, and what is interesting is that this isn’t from an uninformed teenager, but from Apple’s former director of video product marketing.
Again, I tend to sit a little more on the fence, and don’t, per-se, have an issue with the end of analogue content, but I do have a major issue with the idea that only big firms are legal content creators, and that the ‘little people’ are all out to rip them off: have a listen to almost any collection of independent artists online and see how many of them appeal to you more than commercial radio does, and it’s mind numbingly apparent that now more than ever it’s people who tinker in their spare time to satisfy their own creative urges than can create more satisfying content than big business does.
Skycache – About: http://skycache.pureftpd.org/project/skycache
This is a very quick and easy caching solution – I’ve checked it in on top of my (hacked-about-a-lot) {Wordpress} install and it does appear to make quite a difference. I might have to up the default store time, as I’m hardly a prolific poster, but I’m not sure how I can integrate a cache flush with a posting right now but I have a couple of ideas.
I’ve had my old OM10 and a selection of lenses (Zuiko 28mm, 50mm and 135mm; Sirius 500m; Vivitar 2x teleconvertor) gathering dust for far too long now: I’ve been kicking myself that I didn’t try to sell everything back in 2000 when we got our first digital camera and I could still have got something for the whole setup, but I’m now rather glad that I didn’t.
I really enjoy using my Canon 50mm/f1.
The eldest is having her first sleepover, and an argument was in full swing that needed some intercession:
R: Nicci, how many hours are there in a day ?
Nicci: 24
R: See ! I told you ! Hahahahahahaha!
C: No. But. You. But…
R: You said there were 30 !
C: Yes, but I was including the night
Hmm, maybe Ray Bradbury was right, and we do have Martians amongst us already…
I’m sure it’s not possible to own a Mac, shoot in RAW format and not have heard of Adobe’s Lightroom software by now, and there’s no way I’m going to attempt a review when others have had preview releases for months. What I will say is that if you do run OS X 10.4.x and have some RAW files then do go and get the Beta 1 demo – I’ve run it on a 1GHz 12″ PowerBook with 768MB of RAM as well as a dual 867MHz MDD with 2GB and whilst the laptop does really need a few moments to get itself settled into memory (if I’m using anything else then the swapfile does get hit fairly hard) the MDD breezes along.
As has already been noted, OS X 10.4.4 now supports non-US EOS 350D cameras: I’ve confirmed the European variant, and TK has commented that the Japanese model is also supported.
Greg Tebbut sent me an extract of the Raw.plist file, which shows that simple name based aliasing of cameras has now been addressed:
<key>Canon-EOS Kiss Digital N</key> <string>Canon-EOS DIGITAL REBEL XT</string> <key>Canon-EOS 350D DIGITAL</key> <string>Canon-EOS DIGITAL REBEL XT</string> <key>Canon-EOS DIGITAL REBEL XT</key> So that’s good news for the future, but what about the decoding ?
Update 08jan06 @ 08:05: After sending this link to Hubert he came back with a change to get the sed lines inside the shell, so I’ve updated the post to reflect this as it’s a far neater solution.
Ok, I couldn’t resist the challenge after Hubert blogged about my pop-before-smtp script, so here’s my rather ugly shell version. Sadly, I’m lousy at sorting out shell escaping so as well as the shell script there is also a sed script that does the log file filtering: please feel free to alter things to work in one shell script – the code is mine, but do with it what you will, as it doesn’t really have much to it in the end (click on the filenames to get the source).
I’ve not bothered with POP before SMTP authentication before but since v1.38 the script can take an optional config file that allows it to watch different log files in an easily customised fashion, which is great as I was wondering what the most efficient way of blocking automated ssh attempts was. I didn’t want to run a one minute cron job to parse the authlog file as it was clunky and most of the automated attacks I have seen are over in under two minutes or so.
My sincere apologies to both Kyle and Phil who left comments weeks ago that were pending approval: it seems as though the email that should have notified me that comments were waiting was swallowed whole and never made it to me, but I shall check things more regularly in future. And here I thought I’d got away with not having to make a list of things to fail to do this year…
“Happy Holidays” Is Offensive by Bill Barnwell: http://www.lewrockwell.com/barnwell/barnwell53.html
An amusing read and a dig at what happens when PC runs amok.
What is more interesting is how dumb PC legionaries are in thinking that hiding Christmas under Holiday is actually helping anything, as explored by Chuck George:
What’s the Big Fuss about ‘Happy Holidays’ by Chuck George: http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig6/george3.html
I was trying my best to answer the neighbours daughter as she came out with the longest stream of questions I’ve ever heard anyone have about an oil filled radiator. Skirting around Specific Heat Capacities and Conservation of Energy[1](but laying the foundations, should she ask later), things don’t quite finish as I planned:
H: Why is it wet ?
Me: Because the radiator has been outside in my car and the metal is below the dew point of the room, so now that it’s been brought back inside the water vapour in the air is condensing on the surface.
I’ve been a bit remiss in terms of keeping my CV (or resumé, if you prefer) up-to-date, but it’s now on-line in all it’s hacked up CSS glory. I would prefer that initial contact be via email, and if the content doesn’t suit a normal or HTML/Rich Text message, I absolutely, positively and categorically prefer PDF for documents.
How to Add a Border to a Picture in Photoshop – eHow.com: http://www.ehow.com/how_6395_add-border-picture.html
Ok, so I’m only talking about Photoshop Elements 3 (or 2) here, and without it I doubt I’d have been so happy to give up my 35mm film camera, but boy does it make some simple things hard. For some reason, with PSE3 Adobe have put in loads of ‘Wizard’ style helper boxes for colour shifts and the like, despite the very easy and obvious colour space tools (like Hue/Sat layers).
I’ve no idea what went wrong, but between 22:34 last night and 07:00 this morning my DSL line vanished, even to the extent that there was no DSL noise on the line when I didn’t use a microfilter between the handset and socket. I logged a fault with my ISP and expected a couple of days wait as there was nothing flagged as broken but for some unexplained but fortuitous reason it’s all back again now.
This morning I found an email waiting for me from some friends who have been setting up an on-line store:
Childrens toys, clothes, gifts and accessories, For Fun and Funky Children: http://funkymoose.co.uk/
What I wasn’t expecting was the line: “We are ‘risking it all’ as we have given up our jobs to do this”. Wow. I’ve not put that much trust in anything computer related even though it has been very tempting at times, so if you have a need for clothes/toys for kids then I know an order would be most welcome – I’ll vouch for the quality of the customer service in advance 🙂
I found this in my Inbox this morning from Apple:
This is a follow up to Bug ID# 4323918. After further investigation it has been determined that this is a known issue, which is currently being investigated by engineering. This issue has been filed in our bug database under the original Bug ID# 4325304.
So it’s officially a problem now 🙂
Update 11jan06 @ 11:33 OS X 10.4.4 is now available, and fixes this problem.
Update 03nov05 @ 12:04: Right, Phil Chapman appears to have sorted out the correct codes for 350D support by utilising values from the Canon PowerShot G6 entry in the Raw.plist file, so rather than post a new entry I’m updating this one so that it shows correct and useful information (the downloadable file has also been updated).
A List Apart: Articles: Attack of the Zombie Copy: http://www.alistapart.com:80/articles/zombiecopy
Possibly the most amusing article on bad writing that I’ve seen: I wouldn’t have thought it possible to include the phrase “Zombie Milk” in a tutorial on English.
The curse Kevin talks about is not just relegated to web pages, but is rife in corporate emails (it’s got so bad at work recently we’re considering retraining SpamAssassin) and has spilled over into one too many podcasts.
photoSIG: http://www.photosig.com/go/main
I’m quite behind the times for many things, and actively critiquing photographs (as well as having others rate mine) is something I’ve been meaning to get around to for the last couple of years. There are lots of places to do this on-line and it’s very tempting to dive into the first new site that offers such features in order to have your images up when there are few to comapre it to, and few harsh reviews are written in order to ensure the site stays healthy.
Which Fantasy/SciFi Character Are You?: http://www.tk421.net/character/
Apparently, this is me:
So now you know. I even took it twice and changed some of my answers, so maybe it’s a time based character selection ?
Wil is John Sherridan, which is a nice cross-over for people not correctly grounded IRL…
Curves (and Other Goodies) for Photoshop Elements – Photo Tips @ Earthbound Light: http://www.earthboundlight.com/phototips/photoshop-elements-curves.html
Wow. It does just workTMtoo. The downside being that I now have to go back and re-read all those PS CS articles with Curves in them that I skipped over the last year or so…
It ought to be worth it though.
Tesco DVD Rentals – the easiest way to rent DVDs: http://www.tescodvdrental.com/welcome/home.html
This (like most of Tesco‘s offerings) is a rebranded service operated by a 3rd party – in this case Video Island who also operate Screen Select: both sites boast a library of over 37,500 titles, with the only difference being the price. At the most basic level, Tesco charge £7.97 per month for a single disc at a time although if you buy yourself a gift certificate it looks possible to get 12 months for the price of 10, albeit tying yourself to paying that amount rather than being able to cancel at any time.
Lowepro – SlingShot 200 AW: http://www.lowepro.com/Products/Sling_Bags/All_Weather_Cover/SlingShot_200_AW.aspx
Update 05feb07: I’ve just replaced my 200AW with the Tamrac Adventure 9, and have a review of that bag as a comparison to this bag
I wanted two things above all others for my replacement camera bag:
to look anonymous to be quick to access The anonymity is purely because I don’t want to advertise how attractive the contents of the bag are to a casual snatcher, but the quick access is because I want to take the camera out with me and the kids, and I want to be able to leave it in the bag until it’s appropriate: anyone who’s tried to help a toddler climb a slide whilst having an SLR swinging around their neck will know what I’m on about, and it’s not simply a case of choosing between trying to grab the camera or child should they fall (that’s an easy choice) but more about not striking the child around the side of the head with the camera whilst bending over them.
ExifTool by Phil Harvey: http://www.sno.phy.queensu.ca/~phil/exiftool/
I’ve been playing around with this tool for a while, mainly using it to add IPTC tags to images so that Photoshop can read the entries, but recently I tried it on some 350D .CR2 RAW files, and was stunned to find that not only did it add in the tags, but the rest of the file was unharmed by this activity.
After messing around with DPP (see older post) I discovered that version 5.
Digital Photo Professional: http://www.photoworkshop.com/canon/dpp/
Until tonight I hadn’t paid much attention to this application as I’d mainly been sulking at the lack of EOS 350D support in iPhoto. I’m still not sure why I looked at it again but it’s actually a very well thought out program with features that are totally complimentary to Photoshop Elements and Adobe Camera Raw which had been my previous point of reference.
In Forth, <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0361217/">nip tuck</a> could also be described as swap drop dup -rot
Which is why Forth programmers should never get to come up with names for TV shows.
Copy Your Digital Photos Onto Film – PhotographyBLOG: http://www.photographyblog.com/index.php/weblog/comments/copy_your_digital_photos_onto_film/
Not as retrograde as some of the commenters might like to think: at least properly stored film has a proven real life of over 100 years, which is more than can be said for ‘accelerated aging’ lifetime figures from over-enthusiastic marketing departments who think that UV is the only ageing process (ie: ignoring CD/DVD substrate eating mould).
Crave privacy? New tech knocks out digital cameras | CNET News.com: http://news.com.com/Crave privacy New tech knocks out digital cameras/2100-7337_3-5869832.html?part=rss&tag=5869832&subj=news
Now this is a fascinating system – pretty much a exploit in terms of the method it uses to prevent the photographs, and easily bypassed by analogue cameras but that’s not the point: camera phones are (I would assume) the main target and without some large changes aren’t going to be immune from this any time soon.
LOW MORALE ::: Presents Radiohead Music Video – CREEP: http://www.lowmorale.co.uk/creep/
Wow.
Wow.
Wow.
Now that animation was so well conceived and executed it actually made me forget that it was Flash, and totally blew away more recent work I’ve seen on TV in odd spots (mainly BBC3 and C4) – it was back to the days when bizarre Canadian stuff made its way onto a regular BBC2 spot, back when BBC2 was the place you went to get away from sports coverage…
3 years and it’s still not quite right… Still, it’s better than before, and even has some more recent stuff but none of it has been retouched in quite the manner I want (no colour balancing, no careful cropping, no RAW highlight checking, no careful smoothing/sharpening, etc.), not to mention I’m falling out of love with the whole geographical nature of the albums.
However, the colours match those of this site a little better and I’ve got the hang of how the whole thing is set up (thanks to RapidWeaver) so it ought to be so little effort to keep it up-to-date when I do finally get some edits I’m happy with that they’ll actually make it off my drive and online.
It’s difficult to describe what it is, exactly, I find so annoying and slightly more than a little distateful about any sort of reunion but most especially school reuinions. I know that I often wonder what it is I’m obviously missing, as Friends Reunited may sound like a morning-after dot.com brainstorm, but there’s no denying that it’s anything but a dot.com site (and to be fair to the original designers, it was never intended to be quite this big and wasn’t built on the back of a dodgy business plan).
The Six Dumbest Ideas in Computer Security: http://www.ranum.com/security/computer_security/editorials/dumb/
Gotta love number 5, ‘Educating Users’:
“…if it was going to work, it would have worked by now…”
A couple of years ago I bought a pair of Panasonic active noise cancelling headphones from Heathow duty free, and after using them on a transatlantic flight my only regret was that I’d made two trips prior to purchasing them. They were cheap (£55) compared to the $300 Bose ones advertised on a previous flight and so I thought they couldn’t possibly be any good: I still can’t compare them to the Bose as I’ve never had the chance to listen to a pair, but they dropped virtually all of the bass rumble of the aircraft and lead to me actually being able to hear the in-flight movies for the first time.
AlphaBaby: http://www.kldickey.addr.com/alphababy/
“My kids love to play with the computer. Unfortunately, they also have the habit of renaming my hard drive to ‘axlfkaj'”
Now that’s a fun program (for OS X).
Eh ? What do you mean it’s for the children ?
Get off: MY go !
Automator World : http://www.automatorworld.com/
Unlike Widgets, I was very interested in Automator as a new feature of OS X, but once I tried it I found it disappointing in a different way to AppleScript. I never, ever, understood how to correctly discover the AppleScript dictionary entries I needed*, and my one (big) script was superseded by later releases of OS X and iLife.
The problem this time was that nothing seemed to actually do enough for me: I was hoping for a GUI front-end to AppleScript rather than a nice front-end on a keystroke recorder, but the above site has given me some hope.
I’m still not 100% sure that OS X Widgets are a great idea (I tried Konfabulator over a year ago, and it was trashed before the end of the afternoon) but there’s one that’s come close to making me a convert: TypeCast.
It’s simple, big enough to be useful, and provides single key movement throughout the entire font library with a custom line of text or the full alphabet: it’s now trivial to discover the right feel without having to wade in with FontBook.
When I first put up a site at this domain back in 1999 I was using hsc on BeOS: when I moved away from that to Solaris for creating sites I (stupidly) trashed the disc as I thought I’d copied everything off it. I hadn’t. The hsc site config was copied, but e-mail, JPG captures of my children (ok, then it was just child) and the fonts I used to create the logos on the site were all lost, but I didn’t notice straight away: it wasn’t until I tried to recreate the site in an updated style (using b2) that I realised my mistake…
Glenn Feron – The Art of Retouching: http://glennferon.com.nyud.net:8090/portfolio1/index.html
Wow: I’d seeen examples before, but not as many as this in one go and not with such small changes giving such a large overall difference. It ought to be top of the curriculum for every 9 year old in the country to see, understand, and try this out for themselves: I’m positive it’d have a far greater impact on eating disorders than all the talks in the world.
BBC NEWS | Entertainment | Music | Net label plans music revolution: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/music/4176486.stm
It’s taken long enough: the bottom line is probably that any given act that pushes hard enough to get a contract these days (and isn’t simply a set of manufacturered-to-order puppets) is likely to have mastered the basics of recording and mixing: a couple of thousand pounds for computer and software might well give results that are up to 80 or 90% of the quality of using a full recording studio.
camilla camel – Google Search : http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&client=safari&rls=en-us&q=camilla camel&btnG=Search
Ok, so maybe it’s not something to be proud of quite yet but Camilla now comes in on the first page of Google for the term ‘camilla camel’, and is two out of the first four hits on Google Images.
Now I have to get it into the top 10 for a search on just ‘camilla’, although there is something rather pleasing about it being result 42 at the moment…
For those of you who have iLife ’05 and OS X 10.4 and haven’t yet tried it, iPhoto will now process RAW files from the Canon PowerShot G3 without any tweaks or modifications: this is something that the OS version brings to the mix of software as even using the latest point updates for all apps under OS X 10.3 does not enable this functionality.
So, if you’ve used any of the hints from my older post and now have OS X 10.
S5: A Simple Standards-Based Slide Show System: http://www.meyerweb.com/eric/tools/s5/
Apologies to the original site which pointed me at this stuff: it’s so long ago I’ve forgotten where I read it first, but this (new ?) version is much improved and works very nicely indeed in Safari 2.0
Do try out the demo and try all of the keyboard shortcuts – after having to play with presentation software a few weeks ago (for the first time), I’m probbaly going to try re-writing my slides in S5 just to see how good it is for general use.
Canon EOS Beginners’ FAQ V – Misc: http://photonotes.org/articles/beginner-faq/misc.html
“Is it true that taking a person’s photograph steals their soul?
Yes. This is why movie stars, fashion models, politicians and pop singers have such dreadful personality and relationship problems – their souls have been severely depleted by all the photographs which have been taken of them.”
“Of course it’s nice. It’s got sugar on top”
Aha. I’ll try to remember that then.
BBC NEWS | Technology | Software patent bill thrown out: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/4655955.stm
Finally dead – it was crazy that the bill should have been so mangled and still managed to get as far as this: as the news story says it was loved by no-one at this point.
Hopefully, sane voices can now be heard as the per-country system as it stands now is far from ideal, but integration for the sake of big buisness interests is a very bad idea.
New Scientist Breaking News – Entering a dark age of innovation: http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn7616
The instant and rather glib answer is that the USPTO is single handedly trying to reverse the graph by granting ‘trivial’ patents, but I don’t think that’s quite it.
The analogy to the Dark Ages is great for column inches but the more interesting aspect is the talk about the move from current computing to nano-tech as the next major point for growth, which could perhaps be compared to past major social shifts: such as from steam to electricity, or from physical post to electronic communication.
Carrel.ORG – GPGMail and Mac OS X 10.4.1: http://www.carrel.org/2005/05/16/gpgmail-and-mac-os-x-1041/
Excellent: works a charm !
UPDATE: Well, maybe not. Just had Mail die during a composition when trying to change the quote level, and upon restart it told me I no longer have a GPG key, and my draft has vanished entirely… Not ideal behaviour, really: maybe it was disabled by Apple for a reason ?
PodSmith: http://www.makienterprise.com/podsmith/index.html
Yesterday’s price reduction on the 1GB iPod Shuffle pays for the licen[c|s]e for this program, and means I finally have an excuse to get one.
Other than they’re small and shiny.
Oh, and they play music.
Boffins create zombie dogs | The Other Side | Breaking News 24/7 – NEWS.com.au (27-06-2005): http://www.news.com.au/story/0,10117,15739502-13762,00.html
This surely can’t be real, can it ?
After a conversation with my Mum about various loaves she’d tried recently whilst on holiday in France, here’s a more interesting savory loaf (based on the cinnamon and raisin recipe):
380g Strong White flour (Tesco) 120g Strong Stoneground Wholemeal flour (Tesco) 1 tsp Yeast (Allinsons) 1 1/2 tsp Salt 1 tbsp Sugar 1 1/2 tbsp Milk powder 350ml Water 20g Sunflower seeds 80g Sweetcorn I took the sweetcorn straight from the tin and blotted it slightly with some kitchen roll to reduce the moisture before adding both it and the seeds to the nut dispenser.
Apple Matters: http://applematters.com/index.php/section/comments/apple_computer_is_piracy_the_pathway_to_profits/
Interesting: not an approach I’d even contemplated as an option, but one which is quite possible. To get an idea of Apple’s opinion on this tactic I’ll wait to see if/when any OS X Intel 10.4.1 sharers receive letters from Apple’s lawyers and what sort of fines are mentioned.
I’m not convinced that this will help once the newer hardware and a later version of OS X arrives, as:
I’ve had quite a problem getting Darwin 8.0.1 to boot on my B&W – holding down the C key doesn’t work, and so that is pretty much it as there are no other instructions… Now I have been messing around with the OpenFirmware settings quite a bit so may have stuffed up some invisible extra, but that’s because I feel comfortable with Sun’s OpenBoot (and so have half a clue and am more therefore more dangerous to myself) and like to tell the firmware what I think of it.
I’ve had a little issue trying to get more than 4GB of data onto this unit, and the usual Google wasn’t helping much. Checking all of the jumpers showed that hardware compression was enabled, but both tar and dump refused to go beyond 4GB of data, which was rather annoying as my root partition is only 4.5GB…
After running mt status I saw that the density was set to 19 which in the man page for mt maps to DDS, and not DDS2, so I then tried mt setdensity 36 but that failed with the rather annoying:
BBC – Radio 4 – The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Play the adventure online: http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/hitchhikers/game_new.shtml
Oh dear – this could be the biggest waste of my time in quite a while (and makes me glad I no longer pay by the minute for my connection), but it does satisfy one of my mild musings about my game playing ability and 80’s computer adventures: I’m totally rubbish at them, and they are harder than lots of todays games.
This is a bug in Apple’s Disk Utility – it will totally choke on my G3 B&W when presented with a drive that has had a NetBSD/macppc disc label applied (ok, incorrectly applied with disklabel and not pdisk, but that’s not the point !). Once logged in the system notices that there is a drive present that is not readable, and prompts to Initialize…, Ignore or Eject. Choosing Initialize… launches Disk Utility, which then crashes saying that a program that it needs to run hasn’t started, and that you should click Quit.
A modified rapid white loaf from page 25:
300g Strong White flour (Tesco) 50g Strong Brown flour (Tesco) 50g Strong Wholemeal flour (Hovis) 3/4 tsp Yeast (Tesco) 1 tsp Salt 1 tbsp Sugar 1 tbsp Milk powder 1 tbsp Sunflower seeds 1 tbsp Pumpkin seeds 280ml Warm water Not too bad – a nice nutty flavour and not so much granary that tooth enamel is in danger. I’m not sure about the pumpkin seeds though, so I might have to have another go without them.
Well, I’m going to admit defeat for the moment – I haven’t yet managed to get a decent rapid bake cinnamon and raisin bread. I’ve added everything in one go, and got mashed up raisin bits due to excessive mixing; I’ve added raisins when I thought the mixing was nearly over and had all of the fruit fall to the bottom of the loaf, which meant they got the bulk of the heat and ended up crispy (a pet hate).
Ignoring the obligatory Dilbert references, I think I might qualify when I found myself using this line to write my age:
<?php echo floor((time()-gmmktime(6,41,0,6,21,1971))/(60*60*24*365.242)); ?> Must check if it was 14 or 41 past, though…
Apollo 13: http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/WEBONLY/wonews/apr05/0405napola.html
Although I was unexpectedly impressed by the film, this is a rundown of the real events without any ‘added drama’, which is much more satisfying for geeks 🙂
BBC NEWS | Technology | Digital switchover firm launched: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/4441079.stm
So does this mean that we’ll have an educated, ordered and event free switch over, with dates being advanced and held back per region, acurately refelcting local takeup ? Maybe I’m jaded, but I feel it’s just a move to allow whichever government is in power to deny any wrong doing in switching over early, as there’s an easy target to blame.
Macworld: News: Nine Inch Nails releases GarageBand 2 project: http://www.macworld.com/news/2005/04/15/thehandthatfeeds/index.php?lsrc=mwrss-0405
Wow – that’s more than just one better than releasing music online; now we just need to wait for the first live fan based remix via the internet…
Macworld: Editors’ Notes: Au revoir, Rendezvous: http://www.macworld.com/weblogs/editors/2005/04/bonjour/index.php?lsrc=mwrss-0405
That’s just fine by me: when typing in IM I could never spell rendezvous correctly: I stand a much better chance with bonjour 🙂
A slightly modified Spicy Fruit loaf from page 26:
400g Strong White flour (Tesco) 100g Strong Wholemeal flour (Hovis) 1tsp Yeast (Allinsons) 1 1/2 tsp Salt 2 1/2 tsp Cinnamon 1tbsp Sugar 1 1/2 tbsp Milk powder 350ml Water 100g Raisins I placed all the ingredients except the raisins into the mixing bowl, and set the machine for a Bake Raisin, Large size, Dark crust. The raisins were put into the dispenser and the whole bake took four hours.
After some more experimentation (I’ve already mentioned that I’d swapped 1g of butter for 1ml of virgin olive oil) I’ve stopped putting any extra fat in the bread at all. On the smaller loaf setting (400g) the top generally breaks a little, but on the 500 or 600g bake the top crust is fairly smooth.
It seems that (in this bread machine at least) the fat just gives a non-craggy top, and so looks more like pre-packed sliced loaves.
Emma Kennedy: http://www.emmakennedy.net/blog/index.php?id=581
I think I’ll stop collecting these now, and go and get the BBC radio series instead. Speaking of which, the fourth part of the trilogy in five parts will start airing on the 3rd of May 2005:
BBC Radio 4: http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/hitchhikers/newseries.shtml
The Tertiary Phase (same production company as the upcoming Quandry Phase) was well worth listening to, so I have high hopes that this version has not been brutalised.
Short film review: http://planetmagrathea.com/shortreview.html
No spoliers in the short version but linked to a longer one with spoilage, both from MJ Simpson who seems to know a thing or two about DNA, as his short CV/Bio shows: http://planetmagrathea.com/mjsimpson.html
Oh dear.
Neil Gaiman: http://www.neilgaiman.com/journal/2005/04/hp-sauce-as-coin-cleanser-and-so-on.asp
Ignoring (like those in question) the main thrust of his entry, this sentence made me smile:
“Well, I looked the Slashdot thread over and, like you, felt that many of the posters had an almost world-class ability to miss the point.”
BBC – Doctor Who – Homepage: http://www.bbc.co.uk/doctorwho/
I started watching this with a fair amount of trepidation, having grown up watching the series and having very fond memories of it which have remained largely untarnished even when watching them 20 years later on UK Gold. Yeah, the sets wobble and the acting can be hit-n-miss, but it’s still got appeal. I was pretty turned off by the DVD padding program that preceeded the actual episode by an hour (I found doing the washing up was more satisfying), but I have to echo the views of the friendly paparazzi interviewed for that show: it really is good.
Armagetron: A Tron clone in 3d: http://armagetron.sourceforge.net/
Wow. I don’t play games on my computer(s) much (I still miss my old phone as it had a really good monochrome version of Solitare on it – that’s the limit of my gaming skills) but this program is just so much fun in multiplayer mode.
Do go and mess with the options to up the resolution (if you can) and try enabling the mirrored floor – that’s simply amazing.
Macworld: News: Hasselblad, Leica to support Adobe DNG spec: http://www.macworld.com/news/2005/03/08/dng/index.php?lsrc=mcrss-0305
Hooray ! Boo !
Great to see it’s being supported, but in a product that I can’t ever conceive of affording…
Update: This is now no longer required when using OS X 10.4: noted here
Well, I’ve given up sulking about iPhoto 5 not supporting my G3 RAW files, fixed it myself, and am now really annoyed at Apple for being so lazy. Basically, the fix means changing the camera ident string in each .CRW file to say G5 instead of G3 – what a totally pointless and trivial change that a slightly expanded set of test strings within iPhoto would have cured from the outset.
The Infinite Matrix | Cory Doctorow | I, Robot: http://www.infinitematrix.net/stories/shorts/i-robot.html
Very well worth the time to read, and not at all offensive if (like me) Asimov was one of your main reads whilst growing up. Sort of Asimov-meets-Matrix, but that’s belittling the story immensely.
Two-Finger-Scrolling with pre-2005 PowerBooks and iBooks: http://www-users.kawo2.rwth-aachen.de/~razzfazz/
Wow – works a treat on my 12″ PB. No more uctrl so I get my Fn key back, and can exprience the whole new world (?) of one handed scrolling…
(Thanks Ben !
Apollo 11 – 17 Missions: Fullscreen QTVR photo from panoramas.dk: http://www.panoramas.dk/fullscreen3/f29.html
Now these are stunning – the new scans of the originals are excellent quality, and the scale of things becomes much more apparent (even on a tiny 1024×768 display).
BBC NEWS | Technology | Reboot ordered for EU patent law: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/4232971.stm
Round 1 for common sense, but the battle will drag on as long as there’s money for corporate lawyers. Hopefully, there will be time to gather more opposition now that things have to be restarted: my fear is that this win will relax people and the process will actually be easier to force through the second time around…
Cable Forum: Major ntl budget cutbacks threatens service for customers: http://www.cableforum.co.uk/article/137/major-ntl-budget-cutbacks-threatens-service-for-customers
Only Network Masters/Outages affecting more than 30 telco subs are to be attended out of hours. Power Outages will be attended until 11pm, then cab will have to run on batteries until 8am. No CATV/BB Outages to be attended out-of-hours. No Service Refferals to be attended out-of-hours. No Preventative Maintenance, only fire-fighting. No Network Upgrades. No Overtime. Oh dear – I am already in the middle of moving from cable to ADSL (I can’t stand the lack of static IP and the far-too-low-upload speeds), but if I wasn’t I’d be on hold^H^H^H^Hcalling BT this morning.
BBC NEWS | News Front Page: http://whitelabel.org/wp/wikiproxy.php
Browse the BBC News website, and for each article an extra side box will appear linking to all blogs (from Technorati) that have an item about the story you’re browsing.
So, for all those times you wished that the BBC News had the quality of discussion, argument and general discourse of /. wish no more: it’s here, right now !
brains-N-brawn.com: http://www.brains-n-brawn.com/default.aspx?vDir=aicaptcha
Using AI to beat CAPTCHA and post comment spam
L337 subtitle = How 2 0wnz blogz 🙂
Interesting stuff, with an odd methodology (trying things live rather than keeping it all in an Academic sandbox) which, I think, will have the desired effect of stirring things up. The comments about harnessing a human farm of CAPTCHA beaters is sad, but ultimately true and just the same as outsourcing to third world counties for cheap labour.
Ok, commenting is effectively disabled, so this morning there are 15 trackback spam links…
Just in case anyone wondered what ‘they’ do next, and yes, for the moment Trackback has been disabled (if it turns out to be an exploit rather than a real Trackback, then it’ll be back on again once it’s patched).
Very nice indeed (our current favourite), and it works exactly as printed on page 32:
400g Strong White flour (tried both Hovis and Tesco) 1 1/2 tbsp Milk powder 1 tbsp Sugar 1 tsp Salt 1/2 tsp Allinsons Easy Bake yeast 15ml Olive oil 290ml Warm water Baked on the Sandwich program (5 hours) either immediately or via timer for a very soft loaf with small air pockets – great for stopping the filling from running though onto the plate !
Given that I have always tried as hard as I can to make browsing my site (in all its incarnations) as similar as possible in both the latest standards compliant browser(s) as well as lynx/links (without resorting to browser idents, thankyouverymuch) it’s with regret that I now announce that I’ve added JavaScript to my site, and you’ll not be able to leave a comment without it being enabled 🙁
For some unknown reason, denying every single spam comment and throwing the IP’s into a banned list just doesn’t stop them – they (the bots, or possibly the spammers) are just so dumb they keep trying.
“It was nice to hear from you during the xmas, it was cold but your call was very warm”
I don’t usually like to let them know their email has even been received, but this one made me smile: it’s just a shame they didn’t take the joke beyond the first sentence.
22nd January 2005
Another new Mac to win over Windows switchers
The new Mac Shuffle features key aspects of the Windows user experience to make ‘switchers’ feel right at home.
The Shuffle feature randomly puts all your documents in a different place every time. Did I save it in My Documents? Or My Pictures? Or the desktop? Or the relevant bit of the Program Files folder? Or up the arse?
NoSoftwarePatents.com :: View topic – (EN) 24 JAN 05: JURI is still out on EU software patents: http://www.nosoftwarepatents.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=314
Yet again, sense prevails thanks to Poland !
ThinkGeek :: Gadgets
:: Lights & Lasers : http://www.thinkgeek.com/gadgets/lights/
Argh ! Nononononononononono. What devil have I unleashed ? I’m not sure I can continue looking at this site until all methods of paying US Dollars have been removed from my person and placed in a locked underground bunker no less than 6.732 miles away.
<homer>Inductive charging, lasers, LED’s, hmmm…</homer>
If you have updated the firmware in the Creative MuVo flash player to support FAT16 (and so allow easy reformatting under OS X) then you may have noticed that iTunes fails to detect the device. No matter how often I tried to add things like MuVo Helper or the ‘unreleased’ Nomad Plugin nothing happened.
What you need to do is throw caution to the wind, and HexEdit the iTunes.app/Contents/MacOS/iTunes file to change the capitalisation of the strings that iTunes uses to match the MuVo.
BBC NEWS | Technology | Windows worm travels with Tetris: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/4170903.stm
“The virus does no damage to machines but heavily infected networks could slow down as scanning traffic builds. Productivity may suffer too if users spend time playing Tetris.”
Finally, all those ‘cost industry 1bn’ claims might be justified…
(Thanks Ben – just a bit late in posting !)
A modified version of the Panasonic Cheese and Bacon recipe (page 27) because I didn’t have any bacon in the house.
200g Hovis Strong White flour 200g Carrs Wholemeal flour 1 tbsp Sugar 1 tbsp Milk powder 1 tsp Salt 3/4 tsp Allinsons Easy Bake yeast 50g Tesco Mature Cheddar (grated) 25g Assorted nuts (Sesame, Pumpkin and Sunflower) 285 ml Warm water Baked on a Wholewheat Rasin setting (5hr), with the dry ingredients apart from the nuts mixed outside the machine, then the mix, cheese, and water added to the baking tin and then the nuts were placed into the nut tray.
This is a bit of a cop out, but Wrights Parmesan and Sun Dried Tomato packet mix works well, exactly as described on the packet for a 400g loaf.
My eldest has a typical childs aversion to most things healthy, including turning her nose up at the 50% wholemeal loaf, so I tried this one which met her expectations of what a loaf of bread should look like but has at least a little more interest for grown-ups:
400g Hovis Strong White flour 100g Carrs Wholemeal flour 1 tbsp Sugar 1 1/2 tsp Salt 1 tsp Allinsons Easy Bake yeast 25ml Olive oil 345ml Warm water Baked on basic Bake Rapid setting (1hr 55m) with Dark crust.
From the Panasonic book, page 28:
300g Carrs Wholemeal flour 300g Carrs Strong White flour 2 tbsp Milk powder 1 1/2 tbsp Sugar 1 1/2 tsp Salt 1 1/4 tsp Allinsons Easy Bake yeast 25ml Olive oil 420ml Warm water Baked on the Whole Wheat setting for a full 5 hours. A very tall loaf !
BBC NEWS | Technology | Gadgets galore get shown off: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/4148473.stm
“The average person has a library of 600 digital images estimates the Consumer Electronics Association, the organisation behind CES.
This is expected to grow to a massive 3,420 images – or 7.2GB – in five years’ time.”
According to iPhoto I have 8,475 photos right now and I know there’s another 250 or so waiting to be added to that.
This recipe works well for both normal (5hr) Whole Wheat and rapid (3hr) baking:
400g Hovis Granary flour 1 tbsp Milk powder 1 tbsp Sugar 1 tsp Salt 1/2 tsp Allinsons Easy Bake Yeast for 5hr bake OR 3/4 tsp Allinsons Easy Bake Yeast for 3hr bake 15ml Virgin Olive oil 275ml Warm water The original recipe (p. 29) only mentions the 5hr variant but the extra yeast makes a nice 3hr nutty loaf.
Are you experiencing unexplained iDVD crashes when clicking on Burn ? Are you using iDVD 4.0.1 and OS X 10.3.7 ? Have you tried removing DivX QT components to no avail ?
Well, all of the above applied to me with a DVD with motion menus and slideshows (no movie files at all) and it happened on two separate Macs (with the same OS/App loads) but appears to have been cured by re-installing iDVD from the iLife ’04 DVD and then running the iDVD 4.
Is amazingly good fun. It certainly has been my obsession for the past few days, but I’ve approached it as a typical geek and actually read up on what each ingredient is used for – my first loaf was a packet mix and therefore just fine. My second was possibly the most useless lump of duck-killing wheat that’s been seen in many years, but I have now learnt some things that are so obvious no-one bothers to actually mention them:
Peter’s Evil Overlord List: http://www.eviloverlord.com/lists/overlord.html
Looks like I’m even later than Wez in discovering this (8 years, but who’s counting ?) but it’s well worth remembering.
For when you are about to take over the world with your eveil scheme, of course.
Thank Poland letter: http://thankpoland.info/
What a very good idea ! If you have any political motivation at all regarding EU Software Patents, then it would be a very nice gesture to link to, or sign the above petition. I’m glad that at least some countries in the EU have enough of a spine to stand up when it counts.
Using Image Calibration Techniques to Reduce Noise in Digital Images: http://www.photo.net/learn/dark_noise/
What an interesting idea – guess what I’ll be trying out tonight !
(Lee asked if this was setting the ‘Black Balance’ of an image – not a phrase I’d heard before, but I like it a lot !)
BBC NEWS | Technology | Musicians ‘upbeat’ about the net: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/4067031.stm
Shock Horror ! Muscians are able to think for themselves: maybe the RIAA should sue them next for not making enough money for the labels…
flagrantdisregard » Dealing with comment spam: http://flagrantdisregard.com/index.php?p=267
Very handy – I tarpitted a silly one yesterday after their first attempt and watched another 9 failed submissions timeout, but today’s one was coming from a botnet (no fixed IP) and going directly to the posting file for articles that didn’t exist. As it was starting from post number 1 I got tired by the time the fifth item came in, and so used the very simple block shown at the head of the above page to stop them.
In an odd move (for me) I have placed a large banner image at the top of my site. If you can, please try to help convince EU politicians that blindly following the US (and other countries) down the path of patenting everything in sight is not helpful to anyone except lawyers.
There’s lots more information at the No Software Patents website.
Oh My God It Burns!: http://www.ohmygoditburns.com/ – Practical Applications of the Philosopher’s stone. For drunks.
Now this looks fun to try and replicate – it’s vital (in the interests of good science) that brands on sale a few throusand miles from the first experiment are checked to ensure the accuracy of the original methodology.
Welcome to MichaelMoore.com: http://michaelmoore.com/
6. Michigan voted for Kerry! So did the entire Northeast, the birthplace of our democracy. So did 6 of the 8 Great Lakes States. And the whole West Coast! Plus Hawaii. Ok, that’s a start. We’ve got most of the fresh water, all of Broadway, and Mt. St. Helens. We can dehydrate them or bury them in lava. And no more show tunes!
Dr Fun: http://www.ibiblio.org/Dave/Dr-Fun/df200411/df20041104.jpg
Of course, one look at a Dr Fun and you just have to browse the archive, so anti-bandwidth wasters should not click on the link…
UserFriendly: http://ars.userfriendly.org/cartoons/?id=20041028&mode=classic
Oh dear – the Temple of Jobs is no longer a secret society ! The hidden message has been decoded…
Dihydrogen Monoxide Research Division – dihydrogen monoxide
info: http://www.dhmo.org/
This is a seriously dangerous chemical, and questions need to be asked of your local politcal candidate as to why there isn’t tighter legislation on the availability of it.
For those interpid souls who are brave enough to experiment with it in your own home, do take care to read the appropriate datasheets concerning warnings and handling information:
http://www.
Car crazy: Microsoft in the driver’s seat | CNET News.com: http://news.com.com/Car crazy Microsoft in the drivers seat/2100-1046_3-5419404.html
Forget petrol prices and congestion charges: this is the thing that’ll make me use my feet/bicycle more. At least they mention it’s not coupled to the braking system.
Yet.
Adobe digital photography white papers and primers: http://www.adobe.com/digitalimag/ps_pro_primers.html
Info from people who know their stuff. I’ve seen similar workflow described in books and online tutorials, but being given a few really solid building blocks direct from the manufacturer is very helpful.
Only had a look at a couple so far, but the Highlight Recovery in Adobe Camera Raw looks to be very helpful indeed.
Now all I need is to get Elements 3 ‘cos my CS trial has expired…
BBC NEWS | UK | Cold winter due, says forecaster: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/3738824.stm
Usual pro vs. not-pro (ie: anyone not the Met Office) spat, but with an absolutely stunning statement from the Met Office:
When asked what the Met Office forecast could be for winter, he said: “We expect temperatures to drop in winter”.
Superb.
BBspot – Which OS Are You?: http://bbspot.com/News/2003/01/os_quiz.php
Apparently, I’m Apple DOS 3.1, which confuses me no end. Oddly, that’s often the effect I have on other people when I try to explain things and get over-enthusiastic…
Which OS are You?
Digital Negative (DNG): http://www.adobe.com/products/dng/main.html
My first thought was “Oh good – another image file format – just what I need”, but that’s a mistake. Adobe do have some very good points about why we need .DNG in their PDF file (see above):
“Camera manufacturers often drop support for a propriety raw format a few years after a camera is discontinued. Without continued software support, users may not be able to access images stored in proprietary raw formats and the images may be lost forever.
http://www.greenfaces.se/upload/uploads/godvsbush.gif
Another link from Duncan – I was going to pass this off as being as loony as numerology, but now I’m starting to wonder…
I tend to use vi/vim quite a lot and have grown from hating it, to enjoying it like a cracked filling: I can’t help but poke at it and am always startled by the results. Today, I learnt about a command that makes all of the others seem tame:
<a href="http://vimdoc.sourceforge.net/vimfaq.html#22.1">q</a>
Wow. It starts recording and will then playback the results, which might sound tame but has just turned an hour and a half of work into 60 seconds of jaw dropping fun.
Waiting for my coffee to brew, I had a great idea: how to add in a new feature to Word that would be more annoying than Clippy ! (that’s great as in “I don’t use Word so I can laugh at those who must”…)
How about a Bumble Bee (called Bumbly, of course) that looks at the action taken during a spelling check. S/he stores the original incorrect spellings for every word that is corrected so that after a few weeks s/he can learn the sort of typing mistakes that you make the most, as well as the words that you most commonly mis-spell.
I’ve seen recent mentions in a few places on the ‘net[1]that SPF (Sender Policy Framework) as an anti-spam measure has failed because more Spam companies have correct SPF details than non-spammers. I feel that for exactly the same reasons, SPF is working, and working well.
Ignoring the merits of SPF (for the moment) the concept is simple: for any given email that arrives at an SMTP server, can the From: be trusted ?
UserFriendly Strip 04sep04: http://ars.userfriendly.org/cartoons/?id=20040904&mode=classic
Oh dear. That is so me… Perhaps it’s a good idea that I’m not going to start learning anytime soon.
Guardian Unlimited | Life | Lonely planets: http://www.guardian.co.uk/life/feature/story/0,13026,1290570,00.html
Nice Einsteinian physics in the excerpt, but it makes me uneasy as it has a bit too much of a heavy handed ‘modern parable’ feel to it. Mind you, I’m very likely to get it at some point 🙂
Pantone to RGB Colour Conversion: http://www.reeddesign.co.uk/test/pantone2rgb.html
Very helpful.
It’s time to get technical, so I’ve finally got around to adding SPF to one of my domains. Being the cautious type that I am, it’s not actually a heavily used domain (in fact, due to the large numbers of Italian messages received in the past it currently only accepts three incoming addresses) but there’s nothing like testing things properly[1]…
If all goes well I’ll start to roll it out over all of my domains, and then get nasty with my {exim} rules and simply bounce anything that fails my own personal SPF rules (ie: all those annoying/silly messages from ‘The Administration Staff at minimal.
PhotographyBLOG -:- Ilford Goes Into Administration http://www.photographyblog.com/weblog.php?id=P3504
🙁
PhysicsWeb – Glass breakthrough: http://physicsweb.org/article/news/8/8/9
Ok, so no whales this time, just transparent aluminium/aluminum… I’m impressed, but just want replicators !
I’m pretty sure this is covered by most ‘fair use’ clauses (do check your own laws: IANAL) but is intended for people with a DVD and a DVD-ROM drive who want the soundtrack to the film but don’t feel the need to pay twice for the same material on different media…
Pretty much all you need to know can be found at Shepmaster’s site, but there are only two pages that matter: how to turn the DVD into AAC files and then how to turn AAC files into stereo audio files.
Macworld UK – Online music ‘rewriting the rules’: http://www.macworld.co.uk/news/index.cfm?NewsID=9443
Yup, parts of the music industry are finally starting to get there, but it’s just so painful to watch… Is this just due to (unreasonably) expecting RL companies to move in Internet Time, or has a big ClueStick been applied at last ?
Mind you, it could be another 5 years before a ‘big’ label ‘gets it’.
Big rain.
Big boom.
Big flash.
No data.
Not my wiring for once, either: the Green Box up the road left the land of the living for a while, and the power is still on the fritz, so it’s all in the laps of the battery lifetime gods at the moment, and could be patchy for the rest of today.
BBC NEWS | Health | Prozac ‘found in drinking water’: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/3545684.stm
BBC NEWS | UK | Blunkett defends terror secrecy: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/3545600.stm
Perhaps they need to up the dose of Prozac before Blunkett either doesn’t get asked these questions, or calms down a bit trying to answer them…
BBC NEWS | England | Diamond made of ashes set as ring: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/3544076.stm
For some reason, visitors to this site seem to love clicking on one or more smiley faces and then sending it as a comment. I’ve no idea why, except perhaps that they feel my site doesn’t have enough images, but if you’d like to have a little more information to go on before deciding to approve/decline the comment then adding the following lines to wp-comments-post.php will help.
Basically, the poster has to put something in one of the three fields besides the comment for it to be considered for approval – no it’s not foolproof, but I’d like to see at least a name to go on before deciding if the icon-only post is relevant, or the result of some random clickage)
BBC NEWS | Entertainment | TV and Radio | Daleks back to fight Doctor Who: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/tv_and_radio/3535588.stm
It’s good to see that both sides could reach an agreement, but I’m worried about the script – the series is supposed to be broadcast next year, and in my naive little world I would have assumed that such basic items as, say the scripts had been written and were in the process of being revised and shot.
Danny O’Brien’s Oblomovka: http://www.oblomovka.com/entries/2004/07/28#1091064480
“David Turner. Works for RMS. Starts by quoting the “spider in the hands of an angry Lord” preach. “Licensing is not theology – it’s rocket science”. He’s a fine preacher.
Parrot licensing will cast you all into hell, he tells the audience, and lo they are sore afraid. Go ye through the Parrot source, and stick there proper copyright notices. Don’t put “all rights reserved”, on fear of your mortal soul, because that the Lord RMS doth not think that it doth mean what thou thinkest it means.
preparingforemergencies.co.uk: http://www.preparingforemergencies.co.uk/
So much better than the real thing.
Oh, alright, for those of you who might not get a booklet, see the coma-inducing original for yourselves: http://www.preparingforemergencies.gov.uk/
The hitchhiker’s movie first unofficial website: http://hitchhikermovie.free.fr/
Now has a trailer for the film, and I have to approve of the opening music, the logo that is shown in the middle, and the final drifting starfield.
Oh, I do so hope that I’m not going to be dissapointed…
The Project Apollo Image Gallery: http://www.apolloarchive.com/apollo_gallery.html
Images from the first moon misson (Apollo 11), very nicely scanned.
RED MEAT . Meat Locker . the fluttering fringe of fecklnessness: http://www.redmeat.com/redmeat/2004-05-11/index.html
Ah, Gnomes now, is it ?
Letter to Warner Brothers: A Night in Casablanca — Chilling Effects Clearinghouse: http://www.chillingeffects.org/resource.cgi?ResourceID=31
“I am sure that the average movie fan could learn in time to distinguish between Ingrid Bergman and Harpo. I don’t know whether I could, but I certainly would like to try.”
Now that’s a letter to send to lawyers !
The World Wide Panorama – QuickTime VR Panoramas: http://geoimages.berkeley.edu:16080/wwp604/
Facsinating, if you can view QuickTime VR’s: the few I’ve sampled are very well done.
I originally wrote this a few years ago as an email to describe the joys of my day at work and was accused of poetry. I’m not sure, but thought I’d give it an airing anyway:
BBC NEWS | Business | Luggage ‘ban’ for Ryanair flyers: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/3878641.stm
I can imagine their boardroom chats now: “If only we could ban those wretched customers, we wouldn’t need the crew or the planes and we could make a killing in airport taxes alone !”
Failing that, simply ensuring that there are plenty of clothing and toiletry stores next to each RyanAir arrivals door (rent free in return for a profit share ?
BBC NEWS | England | Essex | DVD pirate’s pitch ends in arrest: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/essex/3874417.stm
Outstandingly dumb.
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: http://www.virtualschool.edu/mon/Quality/PirsigZen/
An oft-quoted book which until recently I never realised was available on-line. So far I’ve reached Chapter 2 (taken 16 days, in between other stuff) and the slower pace is a really good idea (for me !). Some of the central ideas covered have been directly applicable to conversations I’ve had recently IRL, which I wasn’t expecting. Nothing that helped the flow or that led to a resolution, but it was nice to have a deeper understanding of why.
CNN.com – Star names join Python on Broadway – Jul 7, 2004: http://www.cnn.com/2004/SHOWBIZ/07/07/stage.montypython.reut/index.html
Nice – the casting looks pretty good so far although I think I’ll wait to see if it comes a little closer before I go and see it.
Vietnamese Iced Coffee: http://coffeefaq.com/coffaq7.htm#VietIcedCoffee
and:
http://www.recipesource.com/ethnic/asia/vietnamese/00/rec0005.html
I’ve only had it once on a trip to Cupertino, and it was the first (and only) time that iced coffee has not only been pleasant, but so nice that I felt saddened when it was finished.
Not that sad mind you, as it also felt like I’d just finished a dozen expresso…
BBC NEWS | England | Kent | Storms cut power and block roads: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/kent/3874683.stm
Not exactly planned downtime, but it wouldn’t be fair to say unexpected, given the overhead power lines that supply my house.
Colours on the web – color theory and color matching: http://www.webwhirlers.com/colors/wheel.asp
“Are you about to give up? Just can’t find the right colours for your page?
Well, here is the solution for you!
Just Spin the colour wheel and get a selection of three random colours.
The colour wheel randomizes among some 16 million colours. And since each spin produces three different colours, that gives endless combinations. (or 2 to the power of 70 or so, which is a very large number).
UserFriendly Strip Comments: http://ars.userfriendly.org/cartoons/?id=20040703&mode=classic
Hmm, ok. Maybe my obsession with LEDs is simply a geek thing and not that odd afterall…
They Might Be Giants – Downloads/News/Shows/Ephemera: http://www.theymightbegiants.com/
Similar pricing structure to the iTunes store (99c/$9.99) but the files come direct from the Artist, are encoded at 256kbps and come DRM-free. Nice.
Jeremy Daalder Photography Official Site – Simulating Classic Film Effects in Photoshop: http://www.jeremydaalder.com/singleArticle.php?articleID=4
A lot of interesting info. Not so great for non-Photoshop users (ie: people with normal incomes and Elements 2 🙂 ) but I’m sure that with some creative thinking the ideas could give rise to some interesting results.
Time for another site makeover, this time with {Wordpress} as the main item behind the scenes, which means there’s far more I can do now than with my own (creaky) XML file based blog. As far as I can make it, the design is styled with CSS rather than HTML tricks, and I hope to use this site to learn more about CSS and design in general.
The main reason behind the change was to allow commenting on some of the more popular parts of the site (such as the WinCVS/SSH guide) so mistakes and extra tips can easily be left: there’s no need to register or give your email address if you don’t want to.
Yay ! My exchange will go live on the 15th of December this year, which isn’t bad at all. Finally, the chance to get a proper service with such heady delights as a static IP (gasp!) and maybe, just maybe, direct SMTP and backup MX provided by the ISP ! Hoorah.
That’s ignoring the huge advantage of a 2:1 download:upload ratio instead of the frankly ludicrous 4.6:1 I have now (soon to be 5.
Comment moderation is handy, but it’s annoying from a non-spammers point of view when it appears that the submission has simply vanished. My solution is to add an extra function to wp-includes/template-function-comments.php and a couple of lines in the wp-comments.php file that show a placeholder for pending comments with the time and date of submission (to help prevent abuse such as links in place of a user name there is nothing shown that was typed by the commenter).
http://biz.yahoo.com/bw/040628/285741_1.html
What a neat idea. I wonder how it works in terms of trigger tech – does a fuse get lit before the air launch ? What about misfires ? Can the trigger be armed only if the firework leaves at the right velocity ?
Might be time for a patent search…
http://phplayersmenu.sourceforge.net/
If you want a menu on your site, then this has more than you could possibly have use for. Unless you’re after a bad design award, of course…
All code is under the LGPL.
Comment from the big one after viewing a trailer for a news documentary on Iraq which opened with the statue of Saddam Hussein being pulled down:
“Some people like that. Some other people don’t”
Possibly the shortest and most unarguably accurate statement on the whole affair so far…
“My sources have told me that Apple will name Mac OSX 10.4 iOfTheTiger. The box will have a huge picture of BA Baracas with a huge golden X hanging from one of his thick golden chains. Don’t ask me for anymore information as my source could be sued and possibly fired by Apple.”
(Thanks Duncan)
Computer ‘sick’ days revealed
“Personal computers in Northern Ireland take more sick days than their owners”
I’m sure it applies elsewhere, and whilst an amusing idea (what’s the punishment ? a delayed RAM upgrade ?) it just shows how serious an O/S monoculture is, especially when backed up by ‘broken’ software.
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy — HHGG Interview with writer Karey KirkPatrick
I should have posted this a long time ago when I first read it, but with comments like this:
“WHO THE H*#&! ARE YOU AND WHAT GIVES YOU THE RIGHT TO MUCK AROUND WITH THIS TREASURED PIECE OF LITERATURE, YOU AMERICAN HOLLYWOOD HACK?
Ah. Good one. Yes, I can see why a lot of people might be wondering this.
I’ve only recently found out about the CSS attribute text-shadow after visiting Binary Bonsai (in Safari) and thinking it looked pretty neat, and then showing it to Nicci (in Mozilla) and wondering where thre pretty text went. A quick Google later and I was looking at text-align.
I was so totally blown away by the combined translucency and shadow example that I decided that even if it was just for Safari users, I *had* to have shadows on my headlines and dates 🙂
http://www.maxdesign.com.au/presentation/liquid/
Sort of how I work things through anyway but with some nice multi-browser comments
http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1239688,00.html
Trust me, it is humorous, but only just, and only if you read the whole article…
http://www.simplebits.com/bits/minitabs.html
Hmm, love that effect. The second one that scales with the font size is simply great – dunno how to fit it into my site, but I’m feeling pretty magpie-ish about it 🙂
http://www.uktvstyle.co.uk/WhatsOn/WatchingPaintDry.cfm
I can’t decide if it’s far better than current TV, or a sadly accurate portent of what the huge number of Digital TV channels have in store for us over the coming years…
http://www.martian.fm/artburn.htm
“…existential nausea…”
“…something with ‘phoenix’ in it.”
Classic.
This is totally worth a look, especially if you’ve ever stared dully at one of these things for >20mins each day commuting….
http://www.animalsontheunderground.com
(Thanks for the link Duncan !)
Quickly and easily highlight each section of a web page without having to resort to border colours (which change the shape and size of objects anyway). Try it out: http://www.make-believe.org/posts/04/04/01/0
I’m not sure if this is a real problem or something I’ve managed to stuff up, but when I shoot both movies and still images on the G3 I use Image Capture and the Download Some option to pull off the movie files, iPhoto to read the stills and then reformat the card.
Recently I’ve shot more than one movie file between downloads and it seems as if the first one is the only one that transfers properly, so on a whim I changed the communication type on the G3 from Normal to PTP.
Gotta love this quote:
…some labels are considering “bundling hit songs with other less-desirable tracks…”
A practice that used to be called ‘An Album’. Obviously too hard a concept for those muso-marketeers to grasp, along with the concept that declining CD sales might have something to do with people not wanting to buy the sort of music that’s on sale right now…
(original article: http://www.macworld.co.uk/news/main_news.cfm?NewsID=8397)
head mystery teacher
tukey == turquoise
Right – time to ditch flaky Apache modules and go and play with the real stuff. Well, I would, except that OS X ipfw doesn’t support the pipe directive (no dummynet), so instead the rather nifty throttled comes to the rescue, and with a couple of those going external web and email are now slowed so that the asymmetric line I have shouldn’t get saturated, and all those helpful ACK’s can still make it through.
Well the move is complete – a bit of a trauma as it happened at one of the most busy moments in my personal life (well, so far this year, anyway) but I think everything has been moved. Time will tell, of course, so I shan’t be erasing the old hard drive for a couple of weeks 🙂
A better uptime: 141 days, but just as annoying as before as the cause is as yet uninvestigated. The replacement server has been rebuilt 3 times and is nearly ready to go live, but last minute nerves over the completeness of my testing have delayed things a little while longer.
Ok, I’m biased, but at least someone with a little more mainstream credibility has wondered at Mr G’s recent KBE: http://www.macworld.co.uk/news/main_news.cfm?NewsID=7784
I do hope that Mr Brown got a good discount on MS fees for the UK Govt. when he put forward Bill’s name…
Thanks go to Skip Coombe for finding two very long standing errors in the WinCVS/ssh guide – I can’t prove one of them as my setup works fine as detailed, but it’s been added as a footnote for those that might be having problems.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/3161354.stm
“General Eberhart said the pilots were being trained to overcome a natural hesitation to kill civilians”
Well, it’s only fair that non-combatants should ‘experience’ the joys of friendly fire too, I suppose. Afterall, taxpayers did buy the bullets…
Ok, so I don’t think there’s a lot of content here, but just to be clear about things what there is can be used under the terms of the Creative Commons license shown at the top right of each page (sort of early BSD, really).
Why this doesn’t get more publicity (or even merged with the original jheadsource) I’ll never know. If you have jheadand want to know more about your Canon images, grab the diff from Jarkko Turkulainen.
After spending a couple of hours munging bits in myself, I resorted to Google to try and speed things up, and instead found mention of a jhead patch in Jarkko Turkulainen‘s mpkg photo gallery script.
Of course, I grabbed the 1.
The search facility for my blog still isn’t finished, so instead a new left menu entry called articles is up with a series of direct links to more educational blog entries.
Only one so far, but I have a few ideas that ought to make it a little more interesting. Note that all entries for this item will appear on the main page as standard blog entries, but will be linked to on the article page for future reference, together with a short description of what the item is about.
There may have been a bit of a problem accessing the server last night due to an IP address change. Things should look up a bit in the next 4 to 72 hours as the changes propogate.
For no real reason (again) the system has rebooted. The server is now in a much cooler position than before, so it’s more annoying than ever.
Ok, so perhaps the fact that today has been forecast to be the hottest day in at least 13 years doesn’t help, but maybe the 192MB of RAM and 120GB hard drive are simply too much for the default PSU to bear.
From Red Rock Canyon, Nevada (March 2002). A much reduced selection compared to the previous album as I’m trying to find a way to properly blend the sky in the panoramic series.
Just to add to the previous Cheddar album on the gallery there is now one of the Caves in Cheddar Gorge.
After a very prelonged absence, the gallery is back again, although much, much smaller than before.
There’s only one album in there at the moment, and even that is very likely to change – I’m not 100% on the names of the content of a couple of the creatures (or placenames for that matter) and I haven’t spent any real effort getting the colour balance or composition totally accurate.
The biggest difference is that the album is no longer dynamic and full of lousy photographs – everything that goes up has been added by hand because it was liked for some reason.
Now on 1024/256 rather than 600/128. Yay!
At 13:11 BST the server crashed due to overheating. The system was restarted by 15:21 BST.
There’s a general fault (actually, faults) in my area, so this site will be down for some time, I expect. Service over the last couple of days has been patchy, so I suspect that the recent rain may have something to do with it.
This morning at 00:18 BST the cable connection went down. Service was restored at 01:00 BST.
It wasn’t just the cable modem that went – all of the TV channels turned to snow, and this was backed up by the SB4100 diagnostics page, which showed 0 for the signal level. No, I’ve no idea who tripped over the data cable, but like a good admin I went to bed and waited for someone else to call in the problem 🙂
Due to a VPN at work, the desire to IPSec from home and a collision of IP ranges, I needed to use a different range for home. Don’t ever, ever mistype the IP address on a Netgear RO318 and get it to end in a zero…
I did this (via the web interface), but just as I realised my mistake, the form was submitted. Bad, bad move. What should have been a 5 minute job (I had every system setting pre-configured and ready to launch after a reboot [yes, I know I don’t have to reboot, but I wanted to ensure that everything would work after a reboot, as this server needs to be able to recover from such things by itself]) took over 40 minutes to figure out.
Cool – giving Google the search phrase ‘wincvs ssh‘ means that the guide on this site is the 7th hit !
I gave in on Saturday and got a G3 with 256MB CF card from Digital Depot. What a very nice camera 🙂
No real gallery to speak of – just rubbish I’ve been messing with, but with the amount of camera control available on this model, there’s going to be a lot of that before I’m done ! Yes, I realise that the G5 was announced earlier in the week, but there’s no real difference for me (ok, so making it look more like an SLR is nice, but about as useful to me as the added Sport mode), and the price on the G3 has dropped considerably in the three weeks prior to this.
Ok, the battery is fine. Ahem.
Turns out that plugging in my monitoring cable stops the UPS from running from the battery… That’s some cable design, eh ?
Maybe next time I won’t just go for the pinout of a cable from a Russian site, and find one where I can actually read the accompanying notes.
Ok, so the crashes may not have been so odd – my UPS might be dead 🙁
I (finally) made up a simple APC UPS cable, and built apcupsd for the Qube. Logging looked good, with 60 second health entries in the log file. Pressed the Test button. Server goes off. Oh sh…
Tried the mains switch on the unit and the wall, and noticed that the LED in the power switch only comes on for a few seconds after initial power up.
The first crash since the extra RAM and h/drive were added. No clue just yet.
The system went down just after 20:24 local time, and returned at 21:33, which was over 5 minutes after I rebooted the machine. I took the time to take the Qube apart and plug the internal fan back in, as some of the chips were too hot to touch comfortably – perhaps it’s time to move the server out of the loft for the summer.
I’ve been having problems for sometime when transferring JPG files via 802.11 from my iBook to the Qube. The files can be sent via SMB or ftp, and show up as corrupted images (the initial uploads of Abi showwed this problem). Trying to copy via scp/sftp resulted in the ‘Corrupted MAC on input’ message, which is muttered about in mailing lists, but never fully explored.
I’ve found that the problem lay with IPFilter – it was killing fragments of packets and so presenting corrupt looking information to the Qube.
Just in case anyone else has a DAB receiver (I don’t – this was done for a friend), you can use RG58 50ohm network cable for long runs from an antenna with very good results.
Ok, so the starting point was poor (an indoor dipole), and the final installation has a Yagi in the loft space, but running the signal down the inside of the house via 17m or so of RG58 and into a rubbish ‘screw in’ 50ohm BNC connector gave full strength on every station that the unit could pick up.
In an attempt to speed things up, my Qube now has more RAM and a larger hard drive.
The RAM has been bumped to 196KB total (from 96KB), and the drive is now a 120GB Maxtor DiamondMax 16. Preparing the drive was fairly easy – I’ve partitioned many drives to Qube format by now, thanks to NetBSD Live and Knoppix – but the cpio from the old 17GB Fujitsu took *ages*.
Ok, so things ought to be a little smoother now, as it’s far less likely that any one download can fill my outgoing bandwidth.
I was having lots of trouble getting mod_throttle to work for me, but after reading a tip over at MacOS X Hints, I’ve added mod_bandwidth and got it working without any trouble. So far, only Nicci’s music site has any restrictions, with files under 18KB having no limits, and everything else being capped at around 8KB/s.
Ok, so I’m now using my own XML/PHP based solution, but things are not fully restored.
Some items have been broken for a long time (like the gallery), but other items are freshly stuffed, like the blog search, uptime, virus/exploit logs and archives.
I’m working my way through these items, but getting the gallery fixed is ahead of a lot of little tweaks. Actually writing the rest of the video section is also on the ever-growing todo list…
I’ve finally got fed up with the poor performance of the site and my machine, and have ditched the database blogging software. I’m most of the way through gamma[*] testing my own XML/PHP based software, and the date related problem that has held me up since the middle of January turn out to be a mis-reading of a PHP command (it wanted US date format, which conflicted with my idea of how it should work).
At 9:57am this morning, Nicci gave birth to our second daughter, Abi, weighing 8lb 13oz (just as it started to snow). Both mother and daughter are doing fine, although Abi has yet to open her eyes !
Well, that was fun. Trying to copy off the websites I want to keep live whilst playing with the server, and it goes and crashes. Total lockup, with no clue (as before). I actually had an uptime that was only a little pathetic too 🙁 Anyway, all should be well now (about 30 mins down on the web serving), and at least I do now have an up-to-date copy of the main sites.
I got sent a link to this article which discusses the usage of Windows at Sun. I just had to pass comment…
(Sorry Douglas).
Reads like an account of Windows Users Anonymous: ‘My name’s Stan, and I only used Windows three time last week’.
RedHat. Sheesh. The distro that is so up-it’s-own-IPO that it thinks the BSD licence is evil and needs to be eradicated. Get a real laptop that supports plugins: go and buy an OS X machine 🙂
Oh yeah. Sure. The UK hasn’t decided what to think over Iraq. That’s why there’s been more aircraft activity over my house in the last 48 hours than the rest of the year put together… Noisy things they are, too. I’m sure the convoys of 20 to 30 military trucks that I’ve seen two of in the last 10 days are also out just for fun as well.
Looking in my sock drawer this morning, a few things came to mind – the first was why do I keep getting different pairs of odd socks ? I swear that the ones left at the end change every few weeks… The second was that three pairs of airline socks is three too many, and that I should have signed up for air miles way sooner than I did. The last thought, as I pulled on a matching pair (of airline socks) , is that I really, really should have put a load of washing on a couple of days sooner, even if that meant missing a bit of the Odyssey 5 pilot.
I like iTunes on my iBook, but I often forget the name of a track (I just listen to the album[s] whilst programming) so thanks to the hotkey ability of Keyboard Maestro, I’ve got an AppleScript solution (my first !) that takes up no screen space at all. I also threw in a pause and play pair of scripts too, so other people can interrupt me and I don’t need to hunt for the right app and button.
Hmm, nice. The dispute over the rights to publish the film appear to be over, and you can now order Koyaanisqatsi on DVD in it’s full anamorphic widescreen glory. This is the first widescreen release other than the original cinema version, so that’s one reason to watch it, apart from the rather obvious one of the Dolby Digital 5.1 version of [play.com](<http://www.philipglass.com/Philip Glass’soundtrack.
Oh joy. Another crash. Around 03:30, and yet again, no clues in the log files.
Great – another unexplained reboot, along with an httpd deamon that refused to start. Time to begin downloading NetBSD RC3, I think…
I saw The Faculty last night, and quite enjoyed it – especially imdb spotting actors and previous roles. There’s also a link between [Terminator 2](<http://us.imdb.com/Title?0133751]The Facultyand <a href=>), and no, it’s not simply Robert Patrick…
There’s a character in The Faculty called Prof. Edward Furlong. In T2, John Connor is played by the actor Edward Furlong. That’s a better link, isn’t it ?
My Mac decided to play games with me, and so far it seems to have morphed into a PC 🙁
I had decided that I needed to clear out some space for some video capture (friends wanted a DVD produced for them) but after failing to free up much, I decided to swap out my capture hard drive and chuck in one that was going to be an upgrade for my Qube.
Oh, [](<http://www.dontlink.com/]this oneis a doozy – a list of sites that don’t want you to link to them without all sort of mind-bendingly stupid rules. This site ? Link away – it’s what makes the ‘net so useful in the first place ! (Original story posted on /. – I didn’t find the site myself)>)
Nope, I *hate* innapropriate JavaScript with a passion, but this page has a great idea for those of you who feel the urge to open new browser windows for me. It’s so slick I’d start a petition to make braindead HTML design tools (like, but not limited to Dreamweaver) bung this in when the user makes a popup link, except no-one but me would ever sign it 🙁
I’ve also started planning a neoprene case for an iBook. No, I don’t have one (yet), but that doesn’t stand in the way of a good idea… Unfortunately, just after I got the rubber delivered, I found that the idea is already a product, but I reckon mine will be nicer 🙂
Ok, it’ll be cheaper.
Having upgraded to version 0.6pre4 of b2, I’ve now integrated the b2 calendar function on the top right of each page. Not sure if the extra rendering time is going to make it annoying, but it gives a simply shortcut to all postings made in the current month.
I’m now happily bathing in 2.4GHz radio waves, as I’ve got an SMC 2655W access point setup at home now. Stunning range, and the ap-utils (v1.0.4) package makes non-Windows config very much easier. I might (sadly) have to use the Windows tool to upgrade the firmware, but I knew the second ethernet port on the Qube was going to be good for something…
I’ve just splashed out on a new monitor after using 2nd hand and junk ones for the past four years. Wow. It’s amazing. I can recommend the Hansol 720P for a budget monitor with a decent refresh rate (1280×1024@85 and 1600×1200@75). There are flatter tubes out there, and it’s a shadow mask but the clarity and flicker-free hires modes are a treat for me.
the idea The Apple iBook laptop computer is one of the nicest ones I’ve seen. So nice, in fact, that for the very first time I have been tempted into a purchase, although I haven’t as yet actually finalised the order… One thing that was obviously required right from the start is some sort of carrying device, and I was also 100% certain that I didn’t want something that would draw attention to itself on public transport (nothing says “Snatch me!
Apologies for anyone trying to find Nicci’s music site {Incidental Fusion}, but the web server crashed this morning at around 10:26 AM (GMT) and I’m still investigating the possible cause.
Pootle’s 20 week scan is now on-line (taken yesterday), and all of the pages now have correct WIDTH and HEIGHT entries in the IMG tags so that page loading should feel faster (the page will render, and then wait for the image, rather than the other way around).
Well, I think I’ve spambot proofed it, but I guess time will tell… Hopefully it’ll not get in the way for humans, as it does at least provide a fully working mailto: link to click on.
It seemed silly to keep the old monochrome left menu, with everything else changing colour on the site, so that’s now slightly more integrated.
It looks like one or two people consider this stuff worth looking at, so I’ve designed an absolutely awful favicon.ico for those IE users out there. I’ve also drafted a simple abuse/privacy policy for any comments left on my blog. Not that there are any (yet), but I thought it best to get in early…
Thanks very much to Christian for pointing out that the link to my mod_include update hadn’t been changed at http://modules.apache.org since I moved over to using PHP for the site design. A forwarder is in place, and I hope to get the main entry altered as soon as I get a new password.
Intro Most of the guides I found whilst trying to do this task were aimed at older SSH v1 clients, and a lot of the setup involved custom builds of SSH, which wasn’t really what I was after. I wanted a simple guide that would work for common downloads of free software so my friends could access a remote CVS repository from Windows – this is the result.
Before starting, you need to have SSH (Protocol 2) access to a server that contains the CVS repository, and know the correct path to CVSROOT along with your login username and password.
I’m not sure of the accuracy of the results, but you can now browse this site in eight other languages, thanks to Altavista’s Babelfish service. Just click on the flag of your choice at the top left – click on the site name/logo to return to English.
A quick reshuffle of the logo, and the extra space is now given over to blog, internet or site searching. Find out more by using the searching link on the left menu.
Removed the useless large bitmap, but I’m not sure the result is as pleasing on the eye. It’s smaller and faster to load, but I think it might be time to loose the JPEG altogether.
Well, it was a simple cut-n-paste job, and I’m always using the site, so it seemed logical. Not happy with the layout yet, but it does work 🙂
Ok, the kernel will boot. The NFS root doesn’t want to mount, though 🙁
I eventually found (after trying three different programs) a tftp daemon that likes running on the Qube (nope, the Linux NetKit doesn’t) and the system will now boot up without any problems.
Unfortunately, I don’t think the the NFS server on the Qube is playing nicely with the mount that is requested by the JavaStation. It fails to mount (error 5) /tftpboot/mrcoffee (mrcoffee is the name of the machine on my network).
It’s not as easy as I thought, mainly due to the total lack of a working rarp/tftpd setup – NFS can be bodged. A list of what I did is available should anyone else want to try.
Of course, it’s not fully working yet in that the tftp stage was causing me problems last night, but there’s now an updated in.tftpd on the system so it should all ‘just work’ when I switch it on tonight… The page describes the steps needed to build the various utils to get the system booting, but not in too much detail – the steps that are show are mainly to help me do things in the right order should I need to redo it.
Whilst I’m in a posting mood, has anyone else played with distributed programming/development from the ‘sharp’ end ?
I’ve been looking at packages such as Horde and PHPGroupWare, and they are fascinating – immense amounts of effort have gone into them, and I’ve simply no idea if they work as-is for real work, or if each team modifies them to suit their working practice.
Has anyone set one of these up before a project was running ?
Ok, I’ve decided that it’ll be easier to cut over to b2 and worry about missing data from the last site than wait until I’m 100% sure that it’s all transferred
Other stuff like the posting page and any sort of b2 housekeeping areas are yet to be modified into something approaching my design, but then no-one is going to bother posting besides me, are they ?
win2k/sonic mydvd There will be some details here, just as soon as I can stop screaming at the memory of it all…
macos x/imovie 2 macos x/dazzle hollywood bridge macos x/idvd 2 mac os x/imovie 2/project builder
win2k/tmpgenc The answer to the AVI capture limit was simple: move to Windows 2000 and NTFS, and capture until my hard drive ran out of space. This was good, in that it worked fine, plus the move to MPEG files rather than AVI meant that there wasn’t really a limit anyway. The O/S was far, far better than Win98 in terms of stability, and the Task Manager that could be invoked by a simple CTRL+ALT+DEL was a delight: I could bring the system down to the bare minimum of executing tasks in a moment.
beos/hauppauge wintv Hmm, well that was nice. It’s a wonderful OS, bringing elegance and slickness to the desktop of even ‘slow’ machines, if you can find a selection of hardware with the correct drivers. It can do multiple video and audio streams that even today’s O/S have trouble with, and the default versions even came with Japanese localisations – how about that for a US company ?
Well, not so great, actually.
Thought it might be nice to have a break from monochrome
Not that I dislike white/grey/black of course (and it is in keeping with the rest of the site), but a random dose of colour in a subtle way makes things more amusing. It also helps to see if you are stuck behind a transparent web proxy that isn’t updating properly (*cough*NTL*cough*).
Not sure how bad they’ll look on 8-bit displays, as (thankfully) I don’t have to suffer that indignity much these days – it’ll be a quick tweak to the array if they do seem too bad, if I get around to testing it…
background I’ve been messing around with digital video since my first video camera (JVC GR-DVJ70), and have played with capture on BeOS, Windows 98, Windows 2000 and MacOS X. If I knew at the start what I know now, I’d have saved up the extra for a unit with Firewire output… As it it, the camera is a fully digital MiniDV unit, but it only has analogue ouputs, and no video inputs (external Mic is provided, but no headphone out).
I knew I wasn’t a blogger at heart ! There’ve been too many things to do recently, and so talking to myself has been pushed down the list somewhat. I do have some new piccies from California in the gallery, though.
Nicci is pregnant again, and has been suffering from the same extreme morning sickness (Hyperemesis [sp?]) as with Emma. This has left little time for things like getting b2 sorted, and since GM has no archives on my system it didn’t seem worth adding anything.
What’s a JavaStation ? The best starting point is the Linux on JavaStation HOWTO, which very clearly covers all of the machine variants with nice explanations of the hardware and firmware differences of each device. It also explains that the machines were design to do, should that be of interest.
For the record, the system I’m using is a MrCoffee (“Brick”) JavaStation-1 device with 64MB of RAM.
Why bother ? It’s got the fastest SPARC CPU of any of my Sun gear, so I fancied trying to use it as a VNC client to do some remote working.
The version of the gallery software I’m using has been updated to v1.3
I’ve not had chance to merge back in my own EXIF preserving changes, so rotations are still decidedly dodgy, but the upgrade was as easy as suggested in the text file, although I do wonder what sort of slideshow is on offer when the default timeout is set to 3 seconds… The sub-album listing is well worth the update though, even if I decide to move onto a less CPU intensive system (still testing the various options).
Nearly ready with the b2 version, but I got distracted.
Most of the SSI code has now made its way into php so that the it integrates tightly with b2. Some b2 code has been butchered to fit into my design, but most of it will stand (the automatic conversion of gm entries worked a treat). I did, however, get totally distracted by my new toy (early b’day present !) – a Sharp MD-MT88 portable Minidisc recorder.
What does this mod_include offer ? Post-processing of variables contained within a variable.
Doesn’t sound too helpful ? Well, maybe not, but I found that during construction of this site that I was frequently replicating 5 lines of text with only a single word altered (the left menu). This was both inefficient and awkward to debug, and didn’t lend itself to keeping a common look and feel for the site as a whole.
The archives are hosed 🙁
The link has been removed from the homepage, but of course clicking on ‘more’ for any extended entry will bring it right back up again (obvious if you’ve configed GM, otherwise trust me – you don’t need to know). This isn’t great news, as I’m only up to 26 items or so, and coupled with the fact that I still can’t get the older January 1999 page to build, I’ve decided to dump gm.
Ok, I’ve got a patch for the build process, and it compiles and installs. Not tried any sort of performance or stability testing yet.
It’s a fairly simple fix to the src/template/netbsd file, with an extra three lines added in order to specify -mips2 to the gcc CFLAGS when the machine is running the cobalt port. I hope that there won’t be any non mips2 capable machines doing that, but then they won’t be able to compile the program anyway, as it requires mips2 opcodes in the s_lock.
Well, things are working on the new URL, but NetBSD just doesn’t seem right for me just yet (sob).
The change over from blog.minimal.cx to [www.]minimal.cx went ok with just the expected config edits plus a cname for my local dns. The testing of NetBSD was a little more fraught (check the uptime log), but it all boiled down to using a too recent version of Linux to format the ext2 partition…
Finally replaced the old site with the new blogging version.
Ok, so things may go offline later if I finally get the NetBSD thing sorted out, but the old site which has been languishing for over 3 years has finally been given a make over. It’s also using my modified Apache mod_include.c file, so it’s time to finish up the documentation and see if anyone is actually interested in my alterations.
If you look at the uptime records in the stats section, you might see a few very short runs. There might also be some times when the sites on this system are unavailable.
I’m basically fed up with the 2.0.24 kernel that Cobalt have for the Qube. Yes, it’s an old product, and I don’t expect company support, but it really annoys me that some software simply refuses to run (like Jabber), and other things are, well, odd (pauses in tar unpacking when the CPU load is waaay down).
Simply removed the multiple MySQL lookups from every page
If you want to see the virus or attempted spam counters there’s now a link under stats to attacks. This removed for separate MySQL quries, and helps the response time of all the pages, as there really wasn’t a huge need to show this information all of the time.
Tried to get the menu in php again – gave up. Rewrote mod_include.c to sort things out.
My custom mod_include.c now allows for delayed variable expansion within an SSI variable. This basically means that it behaves a little like a #define clause in C, and allows simple macros to be built up – useful for large blocks of text that have a small change right in the middle of it. Without the delayed expansion this would need to be defined as two separate variables and printed out with two \<!
Well, I updated Greymatter and fiddled with the config, but I still can’t get the archive page for January 1999 to be built correctly.
I thought it was an issue with the first entry being the only one for the whole month, so I forced an entry in beforehand, but it doesn’t appear that gm likes this: either it dislikes ‘old’ postings being forced by hand, or I’ve mucked up some of its config in doing so, and it’s now all inconsistent internally.
Finished adding a correctly dynamic last modification entry to each page. Might be time to think about taking this site live at www.minimal.cx
I had just wanted to use the SSI flastmod directive, but that’s no good for the number of files I have in this dynamic site – I couldn’t see any easy way to pass in the file that is being ‘seen’ (ie: the centre bit) as the SSI simply wants a filename.
Over 20,000 lines of logs added from the old data on this system. None of the previous web server info is available, but then who wants to see 2,000+ CodeRed hits ?
Most of the data is in – there were over 26,000 entries at one point, but I’ve pulled a lot of the rubbish. I’ll be trimming the stuff in there from time to time anyway, and just keeping some of the more interesting stats.
Sorted out the import issues – just need to remove the dross from over 6,000 lines.
That’s quicker than I had thought – there was a stray symbol (thanks, Nimda) mucking things up, so one quick String::Escape module later, and all was fixed. I need to remove the unimportant lines from this, but that’s 6,000+ to go through, and there are more log files to process… Might call it a night now, though.
Removed the “cobalt” logging, and brought in over 3,000 old entries. Got fed up with Perl and it’s sodding versioning requirements.
Found that google.com has a link to http://adlib.org.uk/ which seems to be ignored by Apache when it comes to by VirtualHost directive, and so it gets bumped to /cobalt/ as it thinks it’s part of the root site. This could be the source of the apparent hacks, so I’ve removed that logging page until I can get my wildcard DNS sorted.
Decided to add an extra page just for all those idiots trying it on with formail.pl/.cgi
The entries for Pob (including the rosie subpages) and Emma are now complete. The sub-menu boxing also also been finished[*].
Pretty boring stuff, but mainly cutting out the hardcoded menu and trailing logo from each page, tweaking the tages to be a little more friendly, and then alterting all the HREF’s to point to the .shtml of the new site. I might get around to updating the content at some point, but for now it’s nice to simply see some content at all on the site.
Ok, made it – the Code Red counters are now live !
What a battle – it turn out that I needed a new glibc, libstdc and gcc (ok, egcs) before I could get the correct level of MySQL to compile to satisfy mod_log_mysql. Updating rpms with –force is not a pleasant task, especially when I forget to add binutils into the mix and it all goes *very* pear shaped for a while.
More SSI coding done to try to create a ‘boxed’ sub menu (currently only on the gallery section), but the source looked so complex and easily reduced that I tried a PHP version.
Oh yeah, that was a waste of time. Instead of trying to tidy up the obvious repeating blocks of SSI code, I went the whole hog and created start/middle/end menu functions. Yes, it works just fine, except it’s lousy as a website because each page would need to be built differently.
Yay – time to myself. Well, not quite, but it’s made a nice 3 day week 🙂
Nicci’s not feeling too great, so I will need to look after her a bit. We were supposed to both take today off to tidy the loft, but I’ll be doing that myself now. Not that I mind too much, as I really want to sort out my desk so that the Mac and it’s monitors are ready for capture, rather than just having a jumble of wires and keyboards that sort of works.
Ok, the hacked up version of the site has now been removed – CSS is in, hsc is out.
Basically re-worked the existing design, but without needing any nasty script hackery as I now have control of the web server. The links down the left are dynamiclly checked so that the current page highlight pops up in the correct position, and thanks to the wonders of CSS, hovering over a link will give it a background colour in effect mimicking a JavaScript image rollover, with without any of the bandwidth issues.
Well, *that’s* even easier ! Now I have the look-n-feel of the long defunct / site
Just created the header and footer as two custom macros, then altered the main index page to call those in place of the existing header and footer ones. That way I could still go back if I made a real screw up, but is all appears to be good.
Most of the links will be dead, and only the index page has been changed into my format so the Archive et.
Ok, It’s new template time. Just a quick Google and download, and now it all looks like this.
I got the template .zip file from foshdawg as the first one in the list (block) ought to look familiar. The layout is really dumb on Netscape 4.72 SPARC/Solaris with CSS turned off, but it’s still navigable.Well, ok. It would be if I went and did something with the links that are on the front page…
Ok, so the layout hasn’t changed, but there may be a few oddities in this blogging that I need to sort out…
It looks like even though the paths have been configured, gm doesn’t like me looking into the Archives section. Maybe I shouldn’t have renamed the paths; maybe I should have configured my templates; maybe I should have read the instructions…
Hmm, this surely can’t be right. Added a new CNAME at my DNS provider, created a new virtual host directory on the web server, HUP’ed the service and copied the Greymatter files into the right places. A quick tour of the Configuration screen later, and it all seems to be working !
Not sure about blogging, but if it takes me away from the point of unreasonable obsession with my new (ok, 2nd/3rd hand) G4 400 Mac then I suppose it’s a good thing.
Remodelled the entire site based around the hsc macro language (see design for more information). Added new pictures of Emma to give a better feel.
First pictures of Emma go up, and I start to wonder how much more the site can grow with the exponential amount of work required to keep the left hand menu structure up-to-date.
Still waiting for Pob, so I finished the initial layout of the site, and created a logo for the top of Pob’s images. This new site grew out of a very basic one which was just to showcase the ultrasound images. With a nice new domain name and some silly frame controls to keep from having to pay for fully featured site hosting 🙂