tenpastmidnight blog

Long time, no write

2011-12-05T22:06:00.003Z

First update in a very long time. It should come as no surprise that plenty of things have happened in the last three and a half years...

Katie and I have saved up and bought a house, and moved out to Lancing, which is 20 minutes train ride from Brighton.

Just after we moved, Katie gave birth to our lovely son Tom. Which makes this the moment for some photos. In a little under two years he's gone from this little bundle...

To this little boy...

Tom seems to have inherited my height (he's well above average at the moment) and my hairline (sorry son.) Luckily for him, he has Katie's eyes and cheeky grin.

Unfortunately for us, Tom didn't like sleeping. Whenever he slept on his back, wind would build up inside him and wake him up in pain, and even sleeping on his front wasn't much better. This meant lots of sleeping on mum and dad while we were sitting up, and also lots of lack of sleep for us. Just as things started settling down on the sleep front, he started getting lots of colds so that throws things out again.

So, between working very hard to get the money together for the house, to having Tom and working very hard trying to balance childcare with getting work done to keep said house, things like blogging have been put aside. As has fixing my Beetle, which is now sitting in our garage rather than on my parent's drive, so at least it's rusting at a much reduced rate.

Admittedly, I have been finding time for Twitter, and a bit of Google+. I'm hoping now to find some more time to use the computer for more than just doing client work. I have tried blogging a little about my work stuff on my freelance site but that hasn't been going much better than my writing here.

Oh yes, and Katie and I are getting married next year.

Other highlights from the last few years... being Best Man at Alex and Karin's wedding, meeting my friends Phil and Rachel's son Oliver - only a few months younger than Tom - and all the normal life stuff like birthdays, beer festivals, my friend Richard getting published again, my networking group the Farm growing and growing... and, well, stuff I'll hopefully get around to writing about soon.

New lease of life for my Nokia N73

2008-07-11T09:44:00.001+01:00

I've had my Nokia N73 mobile for a little over a year. It's OK, but not the best phone I've had. It's slow to switch between functions (i.e. going to text messaging) and my top right button had stopped working and I had a lot of dust inside the screen.

Why not just get a new phone? I have a contract with Orange and don't care enough about mobiles to want to buy one separately and I don't want to get a new free phone from Orange because that'll mean extending my contract and I want to get to the end of it in case I decide to get an iPhone now the new ones are out.

However, I knew I could upgrade the 'firmware' - the software that runs on the phone - and sometimes there are useful updates in those. I'd done this a few months after getting the phone and it hadn't made any difference that I could notice, but maybe there was another one out. I hoped that my button had stopped working because of a software problem, rather than it being physically broken.

I found out what firmware I was running by typing *#0000# in to my phone, then found out there was a newer version out from Nokia.

A little Googling led me to download the Nokia Software Updater for N73, which works by connecting the PC (doesn't work on Mac) and phone together with a cable that came with the phone, then letting them talk for a while. Or it should, it turned out I needed to install the Noka PC Suite first, then run the software updater which then worked.

Before updating, I backed up my photos, texts and other bits on to the separate memory card I had in the phone - I did this by going in to Tools -> Memory -> Options -> Backup phone mem.

So, connected everything up, let it run, got worried when it took ages to finish, it finished OK, calmed down, turned phone on. And... woo, it's quicker! Not blindingly quick, but noticeably quicker than it was. Broken button still broken, bugger.

One fix I didn't notice immediately: my N73 has always shown the icon saying there's a voicemail message for me, even when there wasn't. This firmware update fixed that, which is very nice. Although I've lived with it for so long I now think there's something missing when I look at the phone.

Having decided I had a hardware problem, I went looking for instructions on taking the phone apart. I found links to pictures and videos that Nokia has had removed, which was not helpful, then a post with useful pictures (may take a while to load.) It looked like the screen dust could be under the plastic screen which is between the world and the actual LCD screen. Cool, that means I could take the phone apart and clean it.

Getting the phone apart was quite awkward and involves lots of prising and not losing your temper and breaking it. I found the worst part is the bottom corners as they have tabs much closer together than the top, so expect those parts to take a bit longer to get free.

I could clean the screen as soon as the top case was off, but decided to go further to try to get the top right key working again. This required a size 6 Torx screwdriver, which my friend Jamie was kind enough to lend me - he makes presentation equipment for exhibitions and has all the fiddly tools under the sun.

To get at the keyboard you have to take the main case completely off as there are small tabs that need releasing on the side of the keyboard which you can't do without getting the case off. Once I had access to the membrane under the buttons I gently prised the edge up under the broken button and scraped the shiny metal of the contact that gets pressed down by the phone key. When I put everything back together this was enough to get the key working.

Warning - putting the phone back together is rather fiddly and takes some time and patience. I found I had to take the little plastic tab which covers the SD memory card slot off to make it easier to fiddle everything back in to position - it's easy to slot back in later. I got my case back on then realised I'd forgotten to screw the keyboard back down and had to take the case apart again - it's much easier the second time!

All back together and the phone has a new lease of life. It's faster because of the firmware update, the button works again and the dusty screen has gone, now I just have the array of little scratches I always get because I tend to put the phone in the same pocket as my keys. I can now see out my Orange contract with my N73 and decide whether or not I want an iPhone in a couple of months, which will let the furore over the new iPhone die down a bit so I should be able to get one without any silly queuing up. I may be British, but I don't see queuing as a form of entertainment.

'To the power of' in PHP

2008-04-21T11:26:00.001+01:00

If you're programming in PHP and want to do a 'to the power of', you might think you could just use the caret symbol (^) between two numbers, like this:

print 2^5;

But no, this will give you some gobbledegook like bWH�. You need to use the pow() function, like this:

print pow(2,5);

Which will give you 32, which is what you want.

I haven't got time to dig in to why PHP ignored this sort of mathematical notation, when it'll treat + * - and / properly, but it's rather annoying.

Misadventures in watching Iain M Banks

2008-03-04T12:14:00.000Z

I went to see science fiction author Iain M Banks talk last week.

This should have been a relaxing affair - Alex had sorted the tickets well ahead of time, and we'd discussed where the venue - The Old Market - was, near the City Books shop on the edge of Hove. I've walked past the Old Market lots of times and wondered what it was, which makes it more annoying that I couldn't find it on the night.

This was partly, well, totally because I have all the navigational ability of a dead haddock. I found City Books easily enough, having printed a map to it rather than a map to the venue of the talk, and dropped down from Seven Dials straight to it - this turned out to be my largest mistake because I thought "Ah, it's around here somewhere, but the poster says it's in Hove, so I'll walk that way."

Actually, I walked one road Brightonwards and could see that wasn't down to the place, so I went towards Hove. If I'd walked two roads Brightonwards, I'd have found the bloody place.

A good whack of tiredness and stupidity meant I walked further in to Hove than I should have. I then got stopped by a not-particularly-homeless-looking homeless bloke, who claimed to have broken down, be from Lancing, and need some money. On any other night I'd have spotted him a mile off (he even did the standard homeless-bloke weirdness of asking for a very odd amount of money - £47.17 or thereabouts.) This took up a bunch of time and in the end I was trying to give him money just to get rid of him.

By the end of the discussion I'd given the chap some money, he insisted on giving me his address and taking mine and saying he'd drop the money off later. I gave him my office address because I didn't want Katie being hassled by some random guy if he did turn up. Stupidly I didn't ask him any questions about Lancing, a village I know well, but I find myself more sympathetic to old codgers who appear lucid apart from a few facts since my dad had a memory problem a few years ago.

Anyway... I go further in to Hove, feeling daft for not pulling the bloke up about Lancing. Then I start looking for a map - the one I found was useless, then a taxi and can't find a free one - terrific. Having eventually turned around I find some roving Policemen who say it's a long way away on foot - great.

Eventually, looking for a taxi the whole time, I make it back to City Books, then after some swearing, two roads down I find the Old Market. Relieved, sweaty and kicking myself, I make it in for the last third-to-half of the talk.

When I got in to the hall I didn't realise it was in the Q&A session and all I could hear was a voice going and a chap on the stage who obviously wasn't talking. It went on so long I wondered if it was a taped excerpt and IB had lost his voice. It turned out to be an intermidably long question, which I would imagine is stock in trade for Q&As involving SF fans :-)

When he gets a chance, Iain Banks is a good speaker. Enthusiastic and funny, with strange asides and rants. I managed to catch a number of answers, and hear him read from The Steep Approach to Garbadale, which was well worth the £6 admission.

While listening, I could see the back of several friend's heads but managed to lose them all in the scrum to get out, which turned out to also be a queue for getting books signed. Happily, Ian scooped me up on the way to the pub, and we found Jay on the way. I finally got to meet Ben.

All in all, a mess of an evening, which ended well, apart from managing to completely miss Alex, who'd sorted out everything in the first place.

Interviewed for Freelance Advisor

2008-03-04T11:38:00.001Z

I've been interviewed by Andy White for Freelance Advisor, a new blog/podcast to help freelancers and contractors succeed in business helmed by Darren Fell.

We talked about the main points of marketing yourself as a freelancer. Andy is a good interviewer and put me very much at ease, which was great as in general I hate microphones.

Darren found me because of the Farm, and since the interview was recorded has asked me to write for the marketing section of Freelance Advisor. As soon as I have some time there should be some more freelancing advice coming from me there, in the meantime there are a lot of other contributions to catch up on.

Brighton Digital Festival 2007

2008-01-10T17:36:00.000Z

In November (2007) Wired Sussex and it's partners expanded their usual Digital Festival to take in a whole month of events, rather than the few days of previous years. Many (most) of the events were carried out by local groups who aren't affiliated with Wired Sussex, and the Festival offered an umbrella of advertising for all of them.

I had quite a busy festival...

As one of the organisers, my friend Matt asked if The Farm would run an event. After chatting about it a while I agreed that we'd organise a Hack Day, which would appeal to developers, as I felt a lot of the events that had been planned were good for designers, but not so good for the more technical crowd. So I organised a day-long event.

Ian and Jon ran a Start Up Day, and invited David Rosam and myself to do a talk on SEO, which we were delighted to give.

The Brighton Web Awards was back and they once again asked The Farm to judge an award, and as organiser I got to present it.

And finally I went to a usability evening put on by Use8

There was plenty of other stuff happening, including a week of Skillswaps, a special Geek dinner, and some Flash events, all of which I missed due to illness and event-fatigue.

I think it was a good idea to do a lot of events in one month to show how much is going on in the community in and around Brighton. However, with so much happening, pretty much an event every day or evening, I found I got very tired and had to really pick and choose what I went to. Talking to some of the people who ran the events, turn out was lower than I'd expected for some of them, which I think reflects that other people were picking and choosing as well.

Hopefully the festival will stay quite large next year, but I'm unsure how to balance how much stuff is put on with the amount of people who actually go to events. It might be better for there to be slightly less stuff, but give people a chance to go to everything they want. Hmm... I'm open to ideas about how to 'fix' this, it could be that it'll just be a case of "tough, you can't get to everything", which is certainly a fine and understandable attitude to take if you're organising a festival!

BarCamp Brighton write-up

2007-12-04T19:40:00.000Z

(Please excuse huge lateness, only two-and-a-half months after the event!)

Being one of the organisers, the run up to BarCamp Brighton was quite stressful - trying to make sure we'd covered all the potential problems before they came up, or had a plan for them. I'd dealt with a lot of the equipment needs and promotion, so most of my stuff was over by the time the weekend started. I got there, helped Glenn lump some chairs around, then went up to SCIP to pick up the projectors they were kind enough to lend us.

Glenn and the Madgex team did a fantastic job over the weekend. They'd cleared several of their offices for our use, and took care of the door, the badges and chunks of the food when it arrived. Matt, Andy and I could basically enjoy the weekend without having to do much more than help the sponsors out occasionally.

I was surprised how easily the day runs in some ways. Glenn lead the introductions and then sent everyone downstairs to fill out the schedule board, and they just did it, and then went to the first talks - easy! BarCamp makes for a very self-selected, self-organising group, so it should work, but it's great to see it actually happen.

As only a couple of people had agreed to do a first talk, I agreed to do mine - 'A Crashcourse in SEO' - in a first slot, and so did Richard Dallaway, which meant I missed his talk about Xserves.

I was still writing my slides as people were coming in to the room, but luckily only had a couple of points to add before I could get on with it. I rushed a bit as we were running late, but managed to get most of my points across. I needn't have rushed as everyone else was running a bit late as we'd started late.

Getting my talk out of the way meant I could relax some more. The talks I went to were:

Google Earth - the GEO browser by Brian Suda - showing what you can do with cheap GPS units and integrating them in to Google Earth.

OpenStreetMap Brighton by Mikel Maron - describing why OpenStreetMap exists and how they created a free map of Brighton using GPS, the community, and a good dollop of effort.

Web Biology 101 by Phil Blything - talking about how the behaviour of animals can be compared to the behaviour of groups of people as they use web applications and sites. I was completely zonked by the time I watched this talk so wasn't much help in the question and answer section at the end of the talk.

After a break it was in to Let's talk about SWX baby by Aral Balkan - SWX is a very easy way of Flash to get information from various popular APIs, such as Flickr and Twitter, in to Flash as a native object. He'd only just launched it and it looks very easy to use, and that's coming from a non-Flash developer.

Electronics from a Grease Monkey Perspective had (someone who's name I'll fill in shortly!) talking about hardware hacking - he'd built a set of timed glowing lights to help him focus at work. He took us through the various stages of development of the physical product, and talked about other options available for the interested but naive would-be hackers.

Next was Social Networking is Dead! by Ian Forrester - this started out as a talk about how Social Networks could be (much) better by using microformats and shared APML to profile your interests, but was mainly about Ian's 'adventures' with various dating sites. Ian runs the London BarCamp's and his experience with speaking was obvious, especially as he put up with large amounts of mickey taking from the audience.

Dinner arrived in the shape of 100 pizzas, provided by Pizza Express and sponsored by BT Osmosoft. Watching 100 pizzas being carried in is a great experience that I recommend to anyone - it's like a cartoon where more and more people come through a doorway holding armfuls of pizza and the stream never seems to end.

After dinner I went to Bootstrapping piertopier.net by Dave Phelan. Pier to Pier is a free wireless project in Brighton which is best known for providing wireless between the Palace and West Piers on Brighton beach. Dave covered the history of the project and some of the technical details of the kit that they use, and also a call for donations and sponsorship if anyone has some. This is a project I'd love to help out in some way so I really need to think about how I can help, especially if it's bringing some dosh in to help it keep going.

Proving how good Dave's technical ability is and how piertopier.net helps, he brought along some routers and added wireless to BarCamp Brighton for us. We'd sorted out a wired connection for everyone to use because wireless has been so unreliable at previous events this year. The piertopier nodes worked perfectly, which just goes to show: if you need wireless done properly, get someone who's passionate and knows his stuff, i.e. get yourself a Dave Phelan.

There was a couple of talks going on to finish the day, but I was knackered and went down to the kitchen to upload some photos, update the blog and generally try to get my brain straight. By the time I'd finished there was a table football tournament going on, and BarCamp perennial Werewolf was being played up in the main meeting room.

Forgoing the enticement of Werewolf, I stumbled home to a decent bed, and made my way back on Sunday morning, to a slowish start and...

Sales for Geeks, by Ian Oszvald, in which Ian talked us through how to cope with being a salesman if you're also a geek, and how he's used his successful freelance career to bootstrap his new tutorial website showmedo.com

Then it was in to Depression in the World of Geek by David Thompson. This was a very frank talk about living with depression and how it affects you, and how some aspects of being a programmer actually suit depressive personalities, and how other parts can help people with depression. I wasn't sure about going to this talk, but it was one of the best of the weekend, partly because it triggered a very interesting discussion in the group after the main talk.

Next, a double session - Ready, Steady, MVC! where Simon Willison, Jay Gooby, Mark Ng and Wayne Douglas showed off their favourite MVC framework by building a basic job board as quickly as possible. Shown off were Python with Django, Ruby on Rails, PHP and Symfony, and .Net respectively. There was a lot of programming talent in action, I think Jay and Ruby on Rails just got it as the quickest, but Simon and Django wasn't far behind.

After lunch was Liars need Apps too which was another Ian Forrester presentation (I think) and which actually became a more interesting talk and discussion about helping geek kids before they lose interest in being the next generation of programmers and hackers. Some good ideas came from this and I hope it actually turns in to something.

Finally I managed to blunder in to What's a wireframe - and how to avoid it! by Tom Coady, which was partly about wireframes, and partly a demonstration of Rapidweaver (co-incidentally developed by one of our food sponsors, Real Mac Software.) Unfortunately I had to leave party way through the talk (having disturbed it at the start) to sort out the projectors so they could be picked up.

And suddenly, that was it! The talks were over and Glenn was making the closing speech. After clean up, which was greatly helped by the attendees, and Mat appearing from SCIP to pick up their equipment and some of the hubs one of the sponsors was donating to them (I swear Mat was a pack horse in a previous life, there's no way one man can carry so much stuff), it was off to the 'Madgex Arms' - the Victory Inn, for a post-BarCamp pint.

I can't believe how well it all went, and it inspired me to get on with sorting out Hack Day for the digital festival. Getting active members of the new media community together and great things happen, pretty much naturally.

A quick final thank you to Alex for helping me back up the hill with some of the equipment!

Hack Day on Saturday

2007-11-16T18:43:00.000Z

It's Hack Day tomorrow (Saturday), starting at 10am in the Brighthelm Centre.

If you'd like to come along but don't have a ticket, don't worry, just turn up and I'm sure we'll fit you in. Bring a laptop if you want to do some coding with some great people - there are 50 people signed up including some big names from the local community.

Farm Hack Day

2007-11-04T12:07:00.000Z

I haven't had much time for blogging recently, first I was helping organise BarCamp Brighton, and then went almost straight in to sorting out the Hack Day the Farm were asked to put on as part of the Digital Festival.

At some point I should get around to writing up some advice for anyone thinking of putting on an event. In the meantime, the important thing is ticketing for Hack Day opens on Monday at 1.30pm here, the event itself is on Saturday 17th November.

dConstruct Goodness

2007-09-28T16:38:00.000+01:00

I'm very late talking about it, but I enjoyed dConstruct again this year. The talks, centered around user experience this year, were good, although personally I'd have liked to see some more examples of how an actual experience review and changes take place.

I missed Cameron Moll's talk as I was still eating - the food in E-Kagen is excellent, but the conference completely swamped them on a Friday lunch time and they only had one chef on. Apparently they're going to be podcast, which will be great. Indeed, between an MP3 of the talk and the photos on Flickr, I might be able to work out an animation of the whole talk :-)

I found Martin Webb's talk a bit confusing as it was rather hap hazard, in a way showing a negative user experience whilst talking about user experience, so maybe it was all planned that way. Personal best talks were Jared Spool doing the introduction talk, and Tom Coates rounding off the day.

After the main conference was... the after party! Held at Audio, this was a great way to mix with fellow attendees. I met Paul and Cole from the WorkAlone UK list, both down from Edinburgh for the event and the first people I've met from the list. All I can say is, if everyone's as nice as they were it's a very nice list indeed.

It was a relatively early night for me as we had BarCamp starting the next day. It was a good day, and fingers crossed it's as good as usual next year.

BarCamp talks meeting

2007-08-08T14:53:00.000+01:00

As I thought, I shouldn't have worried about the ticketing this morning, EventWax worked well and it all seems to have gone fine - 80 tickets, sold out in 21 minutes.

If you're coming to BarCamp Brighton and aren't sure what to talk about, or want a bit of guidance on public speaking, you should probably come to the Plotting BarCamp Brighton meeting that Matt's hosting on Monday 20th August.

If you're too far away or can't make it, we'll be trying to do something on the blog site as well, and I'll mention that when it's set up.

BarCamp Brighton ticketing nerves

2007-08-08T10:26:00.000+01:00

The tickets for BarCamp Brighton open in just under half an hour and I must admit I'm nervous. Not that we won't sell out - Andy's guess was about four minutes for that, I'm more worried that EventWax will melt or something and people won't be able to register properly.

I'm sure if it survived being dConstructed then giving out 80 tickets won't be a problem, but still, this is the biggest public part of the conference until it happens, and I'm hoping it goes smoothly. I'm also glad Glenn is handling the behind-the-scenes side as I wouldn't want to ham-fist someone's application today :-)

Yuzoz in the news

2007-07-23T13:06:00.000+01:00

Congratulations to Yuzoz for getting coverage in The Register. Yuzoz are half based in Brighton and I met a couple of their staff at a coffee meet a few months ago, and they were nice enough to come to the Farm the week after. I found the badge they gave me last week while I was emptying out my bag for Paris.

Their space-based random number generation seems a bit pointless at first, until you think about where truly random numbers are needed - gambling and cryptography - both areas which have money for proper randomness. Their on-site uses and widgets show a keen sense of fun to have while publicising the numbers as well, which is refreshing.

Courier CSS resizing problems

2007-07-16T17:57:00.000+01:00

A site I'm building for a client uses Courier for it's main font. I was trying to re-size it down enough to fit in to his navigation properly, and it wouldn't shrink down enough. This seems to be something inherent in the font. If you're trying to re-size Courier in CSS, change to Courier New instead - that can re-size down.

I presume this is something to do with Courier New being made for scaling or a True Type font or something, but I don't have time to investigate as I should have left the office all ready. I left this more as a note for people having trouble like I was earlier today.

"OpenCoffee" = open bugger all more like

2007-06-20T15:57:00.000+01:00

I went to the newly restarted 'OpenCoffee' meet this morning, as advertised on Upcoming. Got there at 10am, couldn't recognise anyone although the last one that was held did have a different crowd from normal.

When I got bored of sitting around I gave Dave a shout as I'd seen he'd registered on Upcoming for the meet. He and Josh turned up and showed me some of the stuff they've been working on recently, which was useful. I was there until about twenty to twelve and no sign of Ivan, who was supposed to be running the event.

So, all in all a washout, apart from having a chat to Dave and Josh, who I know anyway.

Two rules for running networking events:

1. Have something with you so people can spot you (i.e. a sign, relevant book, or distinctive t-shirt as Matt uses.)

2. Turn up (this doesn't really matter if no one realises you're there as lots of people won't ask around after you if they can't spot the person/group.)

It doesn't hurt to publicise it widely, invite interesting people you all ready know, and generally try to get people to come along, but I'd have said they are the two golden rules. If you can't be bothered to turn up to your own networking event, I don't know why I should be either.

Idiot driver in Brighton

2007-05-17T11:04:00.000+01:00

This Mercedes driver should really have a BMW X5, I expect X5 drivers to just change lanes and attempt to crush the front of my car, without indicating, on busy roads in the center of Brighton. I don't expect Mercedes drivers to, they're generally better behaved.

So, Mr KY07 UOB, perhaps you should consider a change of car? Changing driving style would be more preferable, but I can't hope for too much

Plugging

2007-05-17T11:00:00.000+01:00

A quick plug for my friend Derek's site on International property investment

Microsoft Maps of Brighton

2007-04-05T11:53:00.000+01:00

While Google Maps tend to get the publicity, Microsoft have a very good set of maps, and their detail level in Brighton is much better than Google's. For instance, here's a picture of my car parked in Hanover - it's the little yellow one in the middle of the picture. Brighton's a lovely place and there are much better things to see if you pan about a bit. It works best if you have a fast computer, but is pretty reasonable on slower machines.

I'm interested in what you can do when you can geolocate / tag items on the maps - it would be good to click on a building and see things like events there, links to pictures of previous events, and/or history on the building. Plenty of community-driven stuff to be done there.

Thailand photos

2007-04-04T15:46:00.000+01:00

Heart bell at Doi Suthep
Originally uploaded by pauls.

I went to Thailand recently with Katie, my girlfriend. We stayed in Chiang Mai, the second biggest city in Thailand in the north of the country. Some of my pictures are up on Flickr

Setting up printing via Draytek 2600 router in OSX

2007-03-29T13:02:00.000+01:00

In the office we have a Draytek 2600 router, and Nathan's just bought a Samsung laser printer for us to use (incredibly cheap - under £60 including VAT, and it's come from around the world!) The Draytek 2600 lets you plug a USB printer in and use it over the network - very handy.

If you're trying to connect a Mac OSX machine to your printer, first install the printer drivers from the manufacturer (you might have to go to their website, they don't always come on the CD with the printer.) Then read the OSX LPR printing setup page on the Draytek support website.

They're not completely clear about how you get to the first screenshot - you go to Apple -> System Preferences -> Print & Fax -> Click the little '+' below the list of printers (if you have any installed.) Then click 'IP Printer' and you'll be where the screenshots on that page start.

(For the Windows world, follow this page for Windows 2000 and XP)

[Update:] We've had a problem: when the printer is turned off, then back on again, the router doesn't recognise that it's there, so we can't print to it (Mac or PC.) The fix seems to be to turn the printer on, let it run through start up, then unplug and re-plug in the USB cable. Not perfect, but it beats running an extended USB cable across the office, which is what I was doing to avoid rebooting the router all the time.

Brighton Rubyists meet up

2007-02-14T14:20:00.000Z

Last night I got to the latest Brighton Rubyists meet up and saw a talk by Dan Glegg on the rise of the one-person business, and how Ruby / Ruby on Rails is very useful for small development companies, including examples from the creation of Tails, one of his apps. Kudos to James for getting the meeting running, especially when all equipment seemed to be against him.

Met several interesting people there, some of which will hopefully come to the Farm at some point. Hello to Ian of Show Me Do - a startup hosting videos of tutorials / people doing things, which fits very well with something I was thinking of doing with my Volkswagen Beetle site, which could be very handy.

Lunch with new media lot

2007-02-10T14:10:00.000Z

Yesterday I went to lunch with a set of local new media people, partly to meet up and partly to meet Jim from Linden Labs, who was down in the area. Big thanks to Andy for organising it, and showing us around the swanky ClearLeft offices afterwards.

Hullo to everyone I met, including Jay, Jon, Josh, and the non-J's: Richard, Dave, Roger, Aral and Rob. Apologies to the people I haven't mentioned / who's names I have forgotten.

It was a great lunch, and nice to meet up with some people I haven't seen for a year or so. There's lots (and lots) of stuff happening in Brighton and it was good to hear about some of the stuff I wasn't aware of. It's a shame I'm going to miss Jay's talk on using Amazon EC2 at BarCamp London this weekend, it sounds very interesting. Hopefully he'll re-use it as a Skillswap now that's getting going again.

Brighton Craigslist opens

2007-01-16T13:04:00.000Z

Brighton now has it's own version of Craigslist. It sports the standard Craiglist look - very 1997 but very functional. Hopefully there will be enough interest to keep it running. So far I have the only group posting on it, but that should fill up soon enough.

New backup service from G2 Support

2007-01-09T13:24:00.000Z

Olly (a fellow ex-G2Blue person) at G2 Support has launched a new backup service for PCs and Macs.

Basically it gives you a bit of software which lets you nominate areas of your hard drive for backing up to a remote site (in fact, more than one remote site.) So if something happens to your computer - i.e. the hard disk breaks - all of your files are safe and you can get at them from another computer. Or indeed if you delete something you didn't mean to, the service will have the file in your backup (and it can even keep them for seven days after you've deleted them, just in case.) Everything is encrypted, so I don't have to worry about anyone else reading my invoices.

The scheduling software is good, it looks very Windows, but that isn't going to upset me on my Mac. It's easy to use and to schedule, which is them main thing as I only remember to backup to CD/DVD occasionally. As well as files you can backup MySQL and MS SQL databases, though I haven't tried that bit yet.

Helpfully, you can restore to any computer where you've installed the software, so I can backup files from my Mac, and get at them from my PC if my Mac is turned off or somewhere else - a very helpful side-effect of all the backups.

There are prices for various options, the basic service gives you 5Gb of space for £15 a month, which should be fine for most freelancers and small businesses, and it's cheap to get more space. Well worth it for piece of mind that my work is safe should anything happen to my office.

Self Assessment - tax doesn't have to be working

2007-01-03T13:54:00.000Z

I'd booked my time out to fill in my tax return on-line today, mainly because most of my clients aren't back at work yet so I could do it relatively undisturbed. Unfortunately apparently lots of other people have had the same idea as I can't get in to the system.

The Inland Revenue helpline have told me it's just weight of traffic with the number of users and have asked if I can try at a less busy time of day. In a way this is fine, but I worry that it'll be bad for people who leave it to the last minute (i.e. like me, last year.) If it's not working now, will it work during a big, last-minute rush?

Removing 'nofollow' from links in WordPress

2007-01-02T16:41:00.000Z

My Google Mini development blog runs on WordPress, which is a great piece of software, but it unfortunately puts 'nofollow' on the rel attribute on links to commenter's websites. This means Google won't take the link in to account when judging how popular the commenter's website is.

rel='nofollow' was supposed to be a way for Google to ignore spam comments left on blogs, which would set up lots (hundreds or thousands) of links to low quality sites and help make them rank well in Google. 'nofollow' means Google won't pass any PageRank through the link to that site. This is all very well, but lots of blogging software now comes with this added automatically to links by commenters, and I think that's wrong. I stop spam comments by using blocking software and moderating each comment - just using nofollow doesn't stop spam comments from being submitted to my blog, it just stops it being such a problem for Google. I think the people who leave good comments deserve the little boost they get from adding to the conversation on my site, I don't want to use 'nofollow'.

To take the 'nofollow' tag off the comments, I edited the 'comment-function.php' file in the 'wp-includes' directory of the site. On line 360 some code writes out the link with rel='external nofollow' - I don't mind about 'external', so I just deleted out " nofollow" and saved and uploaded the file. Now people who comment get a little benefit out of it, which is just the way I want it.

Setting goals for the year

2007-01-02T14:38:00.000Z

At the start of last year I set a few business related goals for 2006: the main ones being:

help WPC expand

get better at using Google Search Appliances / Minis and get more work on them

to save a certain amount of money towards getting a mortgage

These were all pretty loose and happily I managed them all, although I haven't done as much for WPC as I wanted, mainly as I took on too much straight development work chasing part 3.

I was sitting down to work out what I definitely wanted to achieve this year, business-wise, and kept getting caught up in the details - what certain projects would need to make them work, what technology I'd have to use for what. Whilst away from my computer and paper a couple of days ago it all boiled down to the basics I wanted:

Help WPC grow

Help The Farm grow

Make money when I'm asleep

The three things are all interesting to me - WPC is my main business and SEO/SEM has some interesting intellectual challenges as well as plenty of scut work. The Farm helps me meet interesting people as well as having various other advantages, but it would be interesting to help it move on - perhaps helping the more entrepreneurial elements get their own ideas in to working businesses.

The final one covers a problem that many freelancers / small businesses have - when I'm not working, I don't bring any money in, which means taking holidays can be a real dent in earnings. I'm going to be putting some time in to setting up projects that make money even if I'm not monitoring them and putting time in constantly. My Reluctant Mechanic site does this all ready - making a small amount of money through advertising, but I need bigger amounts than that if it's going to make a difference to me when I'm away.

I'd like to build up to a few hundred pounds a month initially, then if I can get it up to a thousand Pounds a month I'd be satisfied. I'll post more about this soon, it's interesting to contrast some of the general ideas that get thrown around in the SEO world, compared to ones that come from being a developer.

New Ruby on Rails freelancer

2006-12-13T11:08:00.000Z

Paul has gone properly freelance again, so if you want a Ruby on Rails freelancer or good systems guy, go and look him up. (He also has a Farm profile which I need to hassle him to update.)

One of the things that makes the Farm worthwhile

2006-12-13T10:38:00.000Z

I've been organising the freelancers network The Farm for just over three years now, and it's been going for about four. Last week I was reminded of one of the reasons it's worth running.

Watching (and trying to keep up with) Nick, Tolan, Danny and Jamie talk object oriented programming, with interjections by Paul, was very cool - bringing together a load of people who can baffle me with something is very neat, and it keeps me on my toes by reminding me just how much I've still got to learn.

As usual, I compiled a list of what was talked about but it doesn't do the actual conversations justice.

Brighton Blogger search

2006-12-05T14:43:00.000Z

You can now search Brighton Bloggers' blogs thanks to Jane and Google Co-op, and a little help / "Hey, this is really easy to do!" from me.

Hopefully at some point there'll be an API for Co-op, so we can integrate the results in to p2b's results.

Brighton and Hove Web Awards tonight

2006-11-09T14:20:00.000Z

I'm presenting an award at the Brighton and Hove Web Awards tonight on behalf of The Farm, so if you're there, give me a wave (or heckle me when I'm speaking, that'll probably calm me down.)

'There' is Fabrica from 8pm onwards.

Editor that allows multi-line search and replace

2006-10-23T12:47:00.000+01:00

I recently needed to take lumps of code out of a large number of pages for a client (EA Heliskiing.) They had lots of Javascript in-line in the page, and I was converting it to be a single external Javascript file. Having lumps of Javascript in the page is a bad idea - it means to change anything you have to update multiple pages rather than just one, and if it's in an external file the visitor's browser can cache it, meaning it won't need to download the same code every time a new page is loaded, which makes browsing quicker.

I needed to search and replace one multi-line section of code, with another, two-line section. My normal text editor (PFE) can handle mutli-line searching, but on a large amount of code it's tricky to set up because you can't see the several lines in the search box. I started looking for an editor that could take a large lump of text and search and replace that across multiple pages. Dreamweaver can do that very well, but I don't own it and I don't think it's worth buying just to use that one function.

After trying a few I've ended up with EditPlus, which has what I want in it's 'More' options in the search and replace facility. Unfortunately it's pay-for, although inexpensive, and I'm not interested in everything else it does as I'm happy enough with my PFE not to want to change.

So... if anyone knows a free editor or utility which will do what I want, please let me know. Otherwise I'm still looking for an editor which is as small, quick and easy to use as PFE, but has a little extra functionality in the search-and-replace stakes.

Brighton Breeze 2006

2006-09-30T19:01:00.000+01:00

I went down to see the end of the Split Screen Van Club of GB Brighton Breeze 2006 run. I've put a selection of the numerous photos I've taken in a Brighton Breeze photoset on Flickr.

Roof racks are very in this year, especially with old style boxes / containers on them, as are old-looking skateboards. Also stickers on windows, especially the rear side windows on Beetles, have become something of a fashion for some people. Good to see 'rat look' is still in, although it can be difficult to tell as the nice thing about Brighton Breeze is it brings out lots of daily drivers as the whole point is driving from London to Brighton en mass.

Beetle battery page

2006-09-16T17:33:00.000+01:00

I've finished off a page about car battery maintenance for my Beetle site. I've had very little free time recently (hence little blogging or other site updates) and it took about four weeks just to write the simple page. Hopefully I'll have time to spend on some of my projects soon. Going to d.construct just over a week ago reminded me how much fun I can have when I'm not buried in work for clients, so I'm determined to block out some time to do my own projects, both for my companies and for fun.

New Facelift site

2006-08-22T20:32:00.000+01:00

Another site I have been working on has just gone live: Facelift.

It's converted from table-based hell to all XHTML/CSS, and contains a load of new information about services they run. Cleaning out the old code was great, although some of the legacy database stuff is a little strange - still, at least that doesn't have to worry the public, just when I program new facilities in.

Course Searcher live

2006-08-22T16:20:00.000+01:00

One of my current projects has just 'soft launched' - Course Searcher is aimed at 14-19 year olds, helping them find courses at schools and colleges around Brighton and Hove. The search, taking in all the local schools, is powered by a Google Mini. I'm intending to write up my various parts of the project, covering the Mini, building a database from mass searching, AJAX use in the site, and will post an update when it's ready.

New(ish) pictures

2006-07-12T12:18:00.000+01:00

Orange flower in the Eden Project
Originally uploaded by pauls.

I've put some new pictures on Flickr - from my recent holiday in Cornwall and from the VolksWorld VW Show 2006

Donating old IT equipment in Brighton & Hove

2006-07-05T12:19:00.000+01:00

I had an old PC that was surplus to requirements (even though it was a touch quicker than my backup PC, but my backup has all the software I need installed and I can't face doing that again unless I really have to.) Mat put me on to Spiders Web IT, who recondition old computer equipment for charities and the people they help. They seem to have a good scheme and I was able to drop my stuff off at a shop in Hove that they have a deal with. If you're looking to get rid of some working equipment, give them a thought. They do have a lowest-spec requirement on PCs (check on their equipment page) but it's pretty low by today's standards.

Alternatively, if you have any old wifi / networking equipment, the people at Pier to Pier might want to take it off your hands (if it's wifi equipment, they might bite your hand in their haste.)

OSX MySQL and PHP - use 127.0.0.1 rather than localhost

2006-06-28T12:02:00.000+01:00

Got MySQL back on my iBook (though a newer version than before, 4 is soooo much easier to install than 3.23 on OSX.) Cocoa MySQL could connect fine to 'localhost', so could ColdFusion, but PHP wouldn't, I kept getting an "can't connect to local mysql server" error. Eventually I tried using '127.0.0.1' rather than 'localhost' on the connection string, and it's started working, so if you're having the same problem, try that.

GSA / Google Mini page update

2006-06-28T11:28:00.000+01:00

I've updated my Google Search Appliance page with my Google Mini work, the Mini's seem to be getting quite popular as a product so I'm hoping to get more of that. I've also written up what I did for Drake and Cavendish as it involves exotic things like custom meta tags to feed parts of the search results.

Group for Brighton Flashers

2006-06-20T15:14:00.000+01:00

Flash Coders Brighton is a networking group for people working with Adobe / Macromedia Flash... in Brighton. It's good to see another local niche group starting up, to go with the Brighton Linux Users Group, Brighton Bloggers, Brighton Freelancers (The Farm), Brighton 2600 and of course the big daddy, Brighton New Media (BNM) List.

(Apologies to anyone I've left off that list!)

Book finding patience

2006-06-07T10:39:00.000+01:00

While out looking for a present for my girlfriend last week, I popped in to the London Road YMCA shop (not for shopping for her!) and noticed a book on the shelf - The Rage for Revenge by David Gerrold. This is the third of four 'Chtorr' books of an unfinished series by Gerrold, and I have the first two from years ago. They've been out of print for donkey's years, and as it looks like they'll stay unfinished, which makes them very difficult to get hold of. Last time I checked eBay for them the prices were ludicrous, but I see they're much more sensible currently. It was great to find one of them and I'm looking forward to reading it. They're better reads than the cover might lead you to believe, with a mixture of good, innovative ideas as well as action. They're not Shakespeare, but they're fun, and a bit of a cult classic within SF, which admittedly is a genre almost completely built on cult classics.

Hmm, checking around I found one of my posts about them in rec.arts.sf.written from 1994, so I've definitely had the first two books at least 12 years. I have a feeling I bought them from a great second hand bookshop in Worthing which has since closed down. All this makes me feel old :-)

You can read more about rumours that the Chtorr series might be getting finished off through a search for 'chtorr unfinished' on the sf.written newsgroup. Personally I'll believe it when I see it on Amazon.

Slashdot redesign and fonts

2006-06-07T10:01:00.000+01:00

Techie news site Slashdot has had a redesign. It's a good update from the previous version, which had got very dated, but it is a touch dull. Perhaps the dullness will help it fade in to the background and promote the content, or age slightly less quickly than a very cutting edge design would.

About the only real annoyance for me is that they've reduced the font size of the main content down slightly too far, and also changed to a sans-serif font. I'm one of the few people who seemed to like the use of Times New Roman on Slashdot because I found I could read a lot of comments without my eyes getting tired. Now they've changed to a slightly-too-small Tahoma I've found I get tired of the comments much more quickly. Still, at least now the design and layout is CSS based I can re-write that myself to get the font I prefer.

(By the way, the fact that this blog and most of my sites use sans-serif fonts isn't lost on me, though they are generally much smaller pages than a Slashdot article with comments.)

Digg removal

2006-04-23T22:12:00.000+01:00

Minor change to my links, I've dropped my link to Digg. The site is OK, but as it's become more popular it's turned from interesting in to more a collection of people's blog posts, and far too many sites for ripped off books (it could be I just remember these rather than them coming up a lot.)

I feel that part of the current problem is also down to the online marketing industry catching on that getting on the home page of Digg is a great way to get a load of traffic and links. Also 'Digg This' links that are popping up on blog posts, making it in a way too easy to post to it.

I may be looking to Digg for the wrong sort of thing. I like my 'add to del.icio.us' bookmarklets, I just wasn't looking to Digg as a website suggester, I thought it was a bit more interesting than that. Even looking at the sub-category pages isn't particularly interesting at the moment.

While I like the fast voting structure of Digg and the fluidity of stories, as compared say to Slashdot, where they have editors deciding which stories go on the site, it is open to a touch more abuse / stupidity of crowds than having editors. At the moment I'm still reading Digg occasionally, but I'm not using it as much as I was and I'm not finding it as useful, so off the link goes.

Installing Xalan in Windows 2000

2006-03-24T19:05:00.000Z

I'm trying to learn some more XSL, as so far I've made do with a few tutorials and results from Google searches.

Dave has leant me one of the most recommended XSLT books.

It asks me to install Xalan, which is a hassle as the Xalan site isn't exactly easy to understand. I eventually found the binary download of everything in a zip. Then I needed some help setting the classpath, but things still didn't work. Eventually I found these extra instructions, which seem to have done the trick.

Sometimes I hate Open Source software, it's so tricky to go to some sites and understand how the hell you can easily start using it.

Mucho breako and mucho linkage

2006-02-13T18:31:00.000Z

A long break in posting, probably to be followed by another one.

I moved a couple of weekends ago, big thanks to Katie, Alex, Paul & Nic, Nathan and Richard for helping. I'm still unpacking, and have large problems with space, all revolving around me having too much stuff to fit in to my new flat/mini-house. However, soon I should be moving my work stuff in to some office space so that should relieve some of the problems.

I have a new / extra blog, covering the various Google Mini development I'm doing at the moment, and there's a mix of Google Search Appliance-related stuff in there as well.

David's passed his Google Adwords Professional exam, which is very cool and means I need to update our site.

I've got a mad amount of work on at the moment, hence lack of updates, and it looks like it's going to be manic for a while as project overlap. Various new freelancers have joined the Farm, so I could outsource some stuff, but mainly it's not work I can do that with. Still, I'm fed up of whinging, so will try not to moan about that too much.

Google in my car

2006-01-03T12:26:00.000Z

Today I picked up the Google Mini I'm working on in a new search project. Giving it a lift to Nathan's in my car brought together two great brands, one of the 20th Century and one of the 21st: Volkswagen and Google. All I need is an iPod for my stereo and I'd have the most Nathan Barleyesque car in the world.

New article hub

2005-12-14T14:38:00.000Z

If distributing articles is your thing, then here's a pointer to a new article distribution hub: Content City. Stephen's been filling it up with some decent articles from other hubs, but I'm sure he'll appreciate receiging some new ones direct if you have them.

Mac Mini DIY memory upgrade

2005-12-13T20:18:00.000Z

I finally got around to buying some more memory for my Mac Mini (from the ever-good Crucial.) I decided to go for the DIY upgrade when I first bought it because Apple's memory prices were rather over-priced at the time, although they've dropped since.

If you're thinking of going the DIY route yourself, my advice is: DON'T. It's very fiddly and difficult to get the Mini open, and it's easy to cosmetically damage the box. That wasn't a problem for me - I did cause a little damage, but it's not normally visible and I'm not looking to sell the computer so it won't make any difference to me. However, if you are expecting to sell one, you're likely to damage it doing this upgrade, which will effect the resale price.

I went the putty knife route for the upgrade, following a video I downloaded when I first got the Mini but can't find at the moment - do a search around if you're thinking of doing the same thing.

One thing I'll point out that wasn't in the video - when clamping it back together, there is a row of clips above the panel of ports on the back. I had to push these back with the knife so I could get the case back together. Not bad, but don't try and force it or you'll flatten the clips and you'll have to take it apart again to sort them out.

Here's some piccies:

Here's the damage I caused getting the putty knife in. I opened one side, then couldn't get the other side open until I'd clamped it back together, then started with the other side. It's underneath and quite minor, so normally wouldn't be visible.

Hmm, nekkid Mini. Perhaps this page will do well as Mac porn.

Here's a rough picture showing the upgrade to 1Gb of RAM worked.

Latest writings

2005-12-12T21:03:00.000Z

I've managed to catch up on some writing for my websites this week. First out of the door is some points on Why CSS is a good thing and on a completely different tack, the difference between drum brakes and disc brakes

Paul passes his bike test

2005-11-29T22:43:00.000Z

As he hasn't got comments on, I'll give my congratulations to Paul for passing his bike test here:

Well done mate!

Damn, another bloody motorbikalist I'll have to look out for :-)

Future Anime

2005-11-20T21:46:00.000Z

Yesterday I went to Future Anime with Alex. On show: a collection of short films showing what the next stage of anime may be like, chosen by onedotzero. Grimy, muddy and bleak, this isn't your RoboTech glossiness and flood-fill pallette.

All the films were good, but Rogue Farm (req. Flash) and Kakurenbo' (Hide and Seek) particularly stood out. I'm going to go for Rogue Farm as the best, mainly because I'm a sucker for post-apocalyptic science fiction, and it's a mixture of Larry Niven's stage trees, Damon Knight's 'Four in One' with a healthy dose of Philip K Dick stirred in, with a Scottish accent. Brilliant.

We were going to drop in to the Comic Expo happening in the Brighton Metropole, but at £10 a ticket it was a bit much, especially as I was only interested in the co-talk by Harry Harrison.

Not going in turned out to be a good thing as I started to get a migraine shortly after which meant I would have missed the talk anyway. I think that's my first one since New Year's Eve, which is an improvement (especially given the stress I've been putting myself under work-wise) but still very annoying. It wasn't a bad one and the tablets I've got stopped it getting to the throwing-up stage for a change, but I still lost the rest of Saturday and most of today to the kind of hangover it gives you. I was hoping to see the new Harry Potter film this weekend, but I don't think I need to worry about it leaving the cinemas any time soon.

dconstruct conference

2005-11-17T19:29:00.000Z

Andy Budd speaking at dconstruct
(there, in the distance.)

Last Friday I was at dconstruct, the 'Web 2.0 grassroots conference' organised by clear:left.

I was a bit unsure of what it would be like, and it turned out to be: good!

The morning's talks were particularly good, covering what Web 2.0 is, or may be, and how it's being used by various companies.

The whole 'Web 2.0' moniker hype was put to bed somewhat by practically every speaker saying it was just a general marketing term to cover a lot of current technologies and the way they're being used. Andy turned out to be an enthusiastic speaker who gave a lively talk to kick off the day.

The afternoon talk by Tom Hume was particularly interesting because it stood out as being about the web and where it's going, but with a slant from the world of mobile phones and services rather than the desktop. I thought it brought a whole level of business-reality to the proceedings that otherwise might have just been "wooo, cool technology."

There are copies of the slides and MP3s of the talks becoming available.

Bookworm addiction

2005-11-13T22:35:00.000Z

I'm addicted to Bookworm (again.) It's been a long time since I played it, then it's straight back in at 'Grand Archivist.' Must avoid playing it during the week when work needs to get done.

To beat: 290860 points
Longest word: fainter
best word: park (2000 pts, can't remember how I got that, must have been some good squares.)

The page says it doesn't work on Macs, but it seems to work in Firefox fine on OSX 10.4, so that shows some good testing!

Firefox search plugin for p2b

2005-11-10T16:55:00.000Z

It was the p2b launch today. In celebration of my sorting out some problems with it before the launch I wrote a quick search plugin for Firefox which adds them as a search engine to my Firefox search box.

Key info that helped me sort this out in short order were:

The Mycroft extensions page

Shadow's example

Simple plugin examples

Installing on a server

Search plugin validator from Mindzilla

The little gif/png that goes with the code needs to be 16x16 pixels, which wasn't completely clear until I got past the initial part where it tells you to make the image.

If you want to delete a search plugin

If you want to delete a search plugin while you're testing, go to the directory (folder): c:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\searchplugins\ and delete the .src and .png for that search.

Latest client live: Fjord Interiors

2005-11-03T10:44:00.000Z

I've just finished work on Fjord Interiors, a store for stylish soft furnishings in a Scandiavian stylee. The design and HTML is by Nigel Gordijk, who I seem to be collaborating with on more and more projects this year. The shop integrates in to Secure Trading as the payment gateway, and I've found their system a piece of cake to work with having set up a WorldPay shop early this year.

HP Deskjet setup in OSX 10.4

2005-11-02T14:35:00.000Z

I've upgraded my iBook to OSX 10.4 (Tiger), which has fixed the problem with the wifi not coming back after it going to sleep, but has caused me some other hassles, some of which are my own fault and some of which aren't.

My ageing HP Deskjet 640c stopped working properly - printing would give me a page where lines were missing, and the tops of letters on lines which did print were missing the top few points of their letters. Joy.

Sevan suggested I try the 'Gimp' drivers that come with 10.4, which I had and they hadn't made any difference. But I tried them again after upgrading to 10.4.3, and they've worked. Which is great and I can print invoices again (very handy, as a freelancer.)

To get the printer working with the Gimp drivers, this is what I did:

First I followed HP's advice and 'Reset Printing System' in the Printer Setup Utility.

I then plugged the printer in and used 'Add' which found the printer automatically. Down where it says 'Print Using: HP Inkjet 2.7.1' I clicked on the drop down list and chose 'HP', then on the list that appears I chose 'HP DeskJet 600/600C - GimpPrint v5.0.0-beta2' I also renamed the 'Name:' field so I knew it was the Gimp driver. Then it started working fine.

Car vandalism update

2005-10-27T21:00:00.000+01:00

My damaged Beetle being picked up
Originally uploaded by pauls.

Before I went on holiday Darren from Beetlewerks came to pick up my car so he could do a quote to fix the damage.

Since then the quote's been through, I finally got my parking permit (while I can't use it, terrific) and today I finally got the insurance letter through saying they're going to write the car off.

I chose the option to get the car back as scrap if they decided on the write off, so I'm going to go that way. The pay out won't quite cover fixing the damage, but I don't want to start again with another old car and it's not actually that badly damaged, so I'll be bunging more money in to it and hoping it'll keep going a while longer. At least I'll be able to park in my own road when I get it back.

Airport problems since update

2005-09-18T21:01:00.000+01:00

Since I installed the latest update to OSX just over a week ago, my wi-fi hasn't been working. When I click on it, I get the spinning coloured ball that says it's waiting for the application to do something, which doesn't clear unless I click on another application. I get the same thing if I try 'Internet Connect', it started to load, then would just sit there with the spinning ball.

Sam from MacAmbulance let me know there was a problem with some Macs with the 4.2 Airport update. He advised downloading Pacifist from Version Tracker, feed it my OSX install disks, then use it to reinstall the following packages:

AppleAirPort2.kext
AppleAirPort.kext

From the 'Essentials' section.

I did this, rebooted and it still wasn't working. Turned off AirPort, rebooted again, then when I turned AirPort back on it asked to update the Keychain, which I agreed, then it started working again.

Cue one happier me, and big up to Sam for telling me how to fix it. Hopefully things will stay working. I don't normally install updates straight away as I've had problems with that in the past - admittedly only on Windows - but I'm going to have to remember to double-check anything coming out from Apple before I install it from now on.

PHP contact form spam checking

2005-09-11T16:50:00.000+01:00

I've written up the code I'm now using to block spammers trying to usurp the contact forms on my PHP sites. It seems to be catching them all OK, one of the sites mails me their IP address and it's catching everything consistently.

Contact form spam blocking. The function at the bottom of the page is more elegant than mine, but I wrote mine up anyway, having put it all together.

Funerals and vandals

2005-09-09T22:18:00.000+01:00

It was my grandmother's funeral today, and while a funeral is never a good thing, she had a decently long enough life to do what she'd wanted to do with it, and fortunately she'd seen most of her family in the last few weeks. I was rather more worried about the funeral bringing up bad memories of my sister's one a few years ago but that hasn't happened, at least so far. The day was made worse when I walked across town this afternoon to pick up my car (which I have to park quite a distance away as I'm still on the waiting list for a permit to park in my road, thirteen months or so after applying for it.) Someone/s have been good enough to smash in all my car's lights, the wing mirror, tear off the windscreen wipers and put a big dent in the bonnet.

The workman resurfacing the front of the house next to the carpark said it was apparently "some kids", but that doesn't really tell me anything. If someone saw them, did they call the Police? And if they had, wouldn't the Police have called me, they have all the details of the car, after all it's only a few weeks since someone ran in to it.

So now I have to go to the Police again with all my details and get a crime number so I can do an insurance claim. In a way it's a positive that I hadn't got all the damage from before fixed yet as some of the same areas were damaged again. But once it's fixed I'll have to leave it in the same area, meaning it might get vandalised again by the same people. Terrific. This is the fourth time my Beetle has been randomly damaged, the second time in a couple of months, and if this is the way Brighton is going I'll have to start moving out to somewhere nicer nearby. It's difficult enough to own a car around here without having to worry about it being wrecked when I can't keep a direct eye on it.

Of all the days to find out about this, today was not the best. With a bit of luck with the train I managed to get over to my parents before the funeral cars arrived with just enough time to get my shirt on and get in the cars. I didn't even get a chance to say hello to all the family until afterwards.

Ack, not the best of days. Hopefully I'll get the car booked in to a garage before I go away and at least it's fixing will be in hand. None of the damage is too bad, I'm just worried about it happening again once it's all fixed up.

Turning off DHCP in a D-Link DI-614+ Router

2005-09-08T23:14:00.000+01:00

Also when messing around with the network the DHCP on my router kept over-riding Richard's. I've got a D-Link DI-614+ router and we couldn't get it to turn off DHCP, it kept saying 'Invalid starting IP address' or something very like it. Eventually we thought to upgrade the firmware from the D-Link support site and the 2.33 revision released in July 2004 sorted out the problem and we could turn off DHCP.

I'm normally very wary of flashing stuff, I heard too many horror stories back in the 486 days of a floppy corrupting the new BIOS file and people turning their fancypants PCs in to large beige doorstops. Now I must remember it's a much more common way of fixing bugs.

HP Laserjet 5 and Jetdirect 2552 IP address setting

2005-09-08T23:08:00.000+01:00

Just been re-arranging my network to join Richard (my landlord) inside his network so we can do funky video things. We finally found out how to get my Laserjet 5 configured to use a static IP address by using the instructions on this HP page...

HP Jetdirect Print Servers -How to Determine, Reset, and Configure an IP Address on an HP Jetdirect Print Server

Wish I'd known we could use Telnet to set it last time I tried to set it up with Alex, as it greatly simplified the job rather than using the router hack that we set up. Hopefully putting this post up means I'll be able to find the instructions again.

Spammers attacking contact form reprise

2005-09-08T19:17:00.000+01:00

So far I've had attacks from the following IP addresses:

17.218.155.73, registered to "Datacommunications Company of Iran"

200.42.225.106, registered to "TRICOM"

I messed up my PHP code the first time around and managed to leave one of the form fields open, I closed that as the attacks started getting through so hopefully none of the attacks they're using at the moment will work any more. Once I've improved the code a bit I'll make an article or something out of it.

A poor space

2005-09-05T21:57:00.000+01:00

I've been fiddling with MSN Spaces and set up another blog there to give it a proper go.

One thing I'll say for it is, if you've all ready got an MSN login from something, e.g. Messenger or Hotmail, it's a piece of cake to start using. I started mine whilst roughly legless from the p2b launch and a Brighton Bloggers meet, downing some toast and water to try and stave off a hangover. Hmm, wine, cider, toast and peanut butter, all the major food groups covered there.

The sign-up process is understandably rather hazy, but it must have been pretty easy.

It's great that they're trying to cover everything for people: blog & blogroll, picture store, music listing, but it's a great shame they made a set of weird decisions on the design...

Crowded, difficult interface

Bizarrely long URLs for blog posts (making them hard to cut & paste when linking to them)

No integration with major ping sites

Difficult posting form

No way of changing the look

I'm not sure if this last one has changed now. I was going to say no RSS/Atom/whatever feed, but there does seem to be one, or at least there is now. I find the inability to make it look the way I want the most annoying thing. They've made the design decision not to underline links in the main content, and also make the shade of blue of the links too dark, so it's very difficult to make them out compared to standard text.

Away from that, the posting form uses some extra Javascript controls to 'simplify' things, but more often means I can't tell which mode I'm in and I end up posting something with a bunch of HTML turned in to text and I have to edit it back to being links. When I first tried Spaces in IE on the Mac I managed to force it in to a mode where I could type in HTML, but I haven't found it again since.

About the only handy thing about it for me is that it makes your icon in MSN Messenger 'glow' when you've recently made a post (or so I'm told, no one else on my Messenger list has a Spaces blog so I haven't seen one.) And this means I can potentially use it to keep the clients on my Messenger list informed of businessy events.

All in all, given the huge number of free blog and photo systems out there, I think MSN are going to have to put some huge improvements in to make Spaces a success. At the moment it feels really half-arsed, and they should be able to make a much better effort rather than staying with their usual comes-good-on-third-revision tradition.

Spammers attacking contact forms

2005-09-05T21:19:00.000+01:00

A few of my sites have contact forms on them and I've received a spate of spam attacks through them over the last couple of weeks.

First they attacked the form on tenpastmidnight, which wasn't a problem as the attack just bounced off the standard CFMail coding as it isn't written to exploit ColdFusion. However, the same thing on SpiderTest does seem to work so I've put some code in to stop the exploit working and instead mail me some details about what/who is trying the attack so I can see about blocking it.

Piers helpfully pointed me to a page on e-mail injection explaining what's going on. Basically the spammer is shoving a load of data through my form which convinces the PHP mail() command that I want to send the message to extra people. The spammer puts in their message and it gets sent to me and other people.

Normally I code to avoid exploits like this, but somehow I'd missed this one, I think I'd been lulled in to a false sense of security by ColdFusion's in-built security (which is pretty good at preventing some other exploits) and forgot that PHP just doesn't have it.

If you're getting weird messages through with things like "This is a multi-part message in MIME format." and lines of "to", "from" and "bcc" then it might be the same thing. They seem to be trying a couple of different attacks, as some have managed to spam others through my form, whereas with others the message has just come to my hard-coded address.

Ack, bleedin' spammers, who needs 'em?

Regrowing mice

2005-09-01T18:29:00.000+01:00

The Times reports on mice that can regrow organs and limbs. If they can find those genes in humans and they have no serious side effects, then we're not far away from an incredible leap forward in health care. Damaged liver? Cut out the bad part and re-grow it. Frostbite and lose your toes? Re-grow them. Now that would be amazing!

Dave Andrew design

2005-08-15T14:39:00.000+01:00

My mate Dave has decided to stay freelancing, so has a website for his work, there's not much there yet, but in these days of delays on getting ranked in Google for what you match, I think getting in the index now will help him later when he's got the site finished.

Gorillaz 'Dare'

2005-08-13T22:57:00.000+01:00

I got a selection of CDs recently - one problem with being freelance is you can run through your music collection and get bored of everything - and at the moment about the best of the bunch is the new Gorillaz CD - 'Demon Days'

Currently I'm mildly obsessed with Dare, maybe partly because I saw the rather disturbing video on one of the Freeview channels. I'm happy to find the video is available on the Gorillaz website. From what I can tell all their other videos are available as well, although some stream better than others. Warning: most need Realplayer or something that can handle WMV files.

I think it's great that a band will put it's videos on their website, it would be even better if Clint Eastwood would stream better for me. Still, I'll give it another go tomorrow with some different codecs and see if that improves things. Currently it's like a little slideshow of the video rather than the real thing.

Google Maps pedometer

2005-08-12T18:50:00.000+01:00

Alex pointed out the Google Maps Pedometer, which I think is a fanastic little addition to the Google Maps system.

Using it I was able to find out the walk I went on recently burnt around 1000 calories (I think, I had to guess my weight.) I can see myself sending directions to people through it, though that will really only come in to it's own if you could print the route. It will print the markers, but they're for miles rather than corners.

Car update

2005-08-12T18:02:00.000+01:00

Alex from the Demon Dweebs VW Club has welded up the main part of my car, which is great (thanks to 'Smartmo' from the VZi forums for putting me on to him.)

I need to get a new wing, patch up some other small bits of damage, and get the repairs sprayed, but at least I'm back on the road now.

I missed a VW show in Hickstead because of the car being off the road, which was rather annoying. There's a show in Chalvington (read: middle of nowhere, well, it's near the marvellously named 'Upper Dicker') this Sunday, though that clashes with this year's Hannover Day, so I'm not sure I'm going to get to that one either.

Anyway, I should be around to see Brighton end of the London to Brighton run again this year, which'll add to my growing collection of VW photos

New version of Spider Test

2005-07-22T10:41:00.000+01:00

I've just uploaded the new version of Spider Test, the tool I wrote last year to help people test how well suited their web pages are to being spidered by search engines.

It's got various improvements to the code behind the tests, especially the way it deals with Javascript and nested tables - before it would not notice nested tables if they were below a non-nested table. I've added checking for people mis-using the meta robots tag, which is one of the banes in my techie/SEO live. It's also done up in WPC livery. I'm hoping to add some extra graphical improvements at some point, but I also don't want to lose the lightness of most of the pages.

There's a list of changes in the history section.

Car damaged

2005-07-12T21:15:00.000+01:00

I went to move my car after a meeting today and found some bastard has heavily clipped the bumper and torn the bumper mount off one side, forcing it through the wing and causing damage to the spare wheel well. Of course there's no note and they've buggered off scot free.

More pictures

I had been having a good week up until then. Now I've probably got to make an insurance claim (which is going to screw up my insurance for a few years), find someone decent to fix it, get it fixed and make sure everything goes smoothly with the insurance.

I was hoping to go to an aircooled show in Hicksted on Saturday and that's out too.

Frankly: shit!

Featured Sites area for Farm freelancers

2005-07-08T17:32:00.000+01:00

We've now got a 'Featured Sites' area on the Brighton freelancers site.

A group effort between me, Simon and Nathan.

Hopefully the area will get used by plenty of members, but as less than a third of members even have profiles, I'm not holding my breath :-)

Sand sculptures coming to Brighton

2005-07-02T17:49:00.000+01:00

Now my workload has dropped a bit I'm running away from the computer a bit to make up for the many weeks I've been tied to my desk. I walked down to the Marina today and saw an enormous amount of sand has been dropped in on the Black Rock area, and workmen are packing it down in to pyramids and banks with Kangol hammers. Apparently we're having the "Biggest World Sand Sculpture Exhibition" starting on July 14th.

The Times has the story and 'KnavishRichard' has some pictures

During the walk I was listening to Radio 2's coverage of Live 8, which has been very good. Chris Evans is presenting but he seems to have grown up a bit and is just choosing good music to fill in the gaps between live bands and hasn't degraded in to being a childish tosser at all, which is great.

Ian Turner is missing (update: found)

2005-07-01T18:32:00.000+01:00

Ian Turner of Romsey Associates went missing last weekend just after the WebmasterWorld Conference. If you know where he is, please contact his family and the Police: Threadwatch has the details

I realise it's a slim hope that this will help, but I don't think it can hurt either. If I could have had a chunk of the world's SEO community and various mates looking for my Dad when he went missing a few years back, I would have used it. Happily, my Dad turned up none the worse for wear apart from having sore feet, and I very much hope Ian quickly turns up and all this has been because he's got stuck somewhere without good comms.

NB: America, grow up and accept the European standard in cellphone systems, then he would have had his mobile with him and switched on and all this wouldn't have happened.

Update, Sat 2nd July, 12.00

Ian's turned up, Threadwatch has the details again, and no doubt some more on the story when the explanation comes out.

Given how competitive a lot of the SEO community is, it's nice to see lots of people in it coming together over something important like this.

Collapsing the waveform

2005-06-29T23:32:00.000+01:00

Work is decreasing as projects finish, or at least phase ones complete. The Essential Business Guide is up, although I have some more work coming up on it. The p2b Brighton and Hove search engine has just gone up, so if you look now you can get a sneak preview before the formal launch tomorrow.

I got the CUHP links pages up today, and some amends for another project that should soft launch tomorrow or on Friday. In fact I managed to get a hell of a lot done today, and make the full Farm meeting. I'm just hoping I can get some decent relaxing in over the weekend... War of the Worlds has opened and I haven't seen Batman Begins, so it looks like some Hollywood stupidity might be on the cards, and some bike riding if I can get my damned gear cable adjusted properly (thanks for the advice, Alex)

Tomorrow is another full day, with a load of work booked, the p2b launch, and a Brighton Bloggers meet in the evening. I think what I'm doing is not so much burning the candle from both ends, but melting a nice new dent in the middle as well.

Biting off more than I can chew

2005-06-27T18:01:00.000+01:00

The month has been a bit of a mess, work-wise. I've been working on three major projects and several minor ones, which is great, but I've both mis-managed my own time and allowed it to be mis-managed by others extending what they want, which isn't.

Added to this, due to lack of cashflow from previous months work (partly due to them over-extending, and one project that has fallen to bits because of others working on it) I wasn't able to go to my friend Nick's wedding, which was no doubt what's known colloquially as "a fucking blast" and I'd have loved to go to partly for the massive party afterwards and partly to see Nick and meet his fiance/now wife.

Instead I'm working through weekends, not getting enough relaxing in, and not getting to bill on projects that haven't quite finished yet. Over the next couple of weeks I need to clear off the work that's hanging around, exert some control over clients who keep extending briefs, and generally sort my life out so I can get a break in and enjoy the sun.

Normally, I'm not too bad at balancing what's happening in projects. Hopefully having a break will let me catch up on my sleep and re-exert some sensible behaviour on what I'm doing, and also what I can and can't do for the people I'm working for.

One reason why Google is better than Yahoo

2005-06-27T17:53:00.000+01:00

A few minutes ago I was trying to look up an odd term which describes how the eye adapts to low light conditions.

I knew it was called something like the 'pkunje shift' but I couldn't remember the exact spelling, and I couldn't find it in the index of Bruce & Green's 'Visual Perception', so I searched for the rough spelling...

I tried on Yahoo and couldn't find anything, no doubt due to my bad spelling. On the off-chance I tried on Google and up comes the correct spelling as a suggestion: 'Did you mean: purkinje shift'

Now that's a pretty damned good spell checker tool, picking up on an obscure phrase from neuroscience and matching it with my badly spelt version. Yahoo is a good portal, but it's still got a way to go with all the little things that help make searching easy.

Glastonbury will have wi-fi

2005-06-20T19:42:00.000+01:00

I'm not off to Glastonbury, but my landlord is, and he's taking the internet with him...

Moving Edge are wiring the festival to the internet, and local free wi-fi group Pier to Pier are connecting up the fields with wi-fi so concert goers will be able to access the internet from their tent / mud warren (delete as applicable.) Richard's part of both and I'm sure he's fitting in looking forwards to it between equipment tests and running around getting baby-sized tents.

Personally, I'd rather leave the computer at home when going to something like Glasto, but for internet addicts it'll be a boon, and I'm sure something cool will come out of having a connection in a relatively anarchic area.

Online petitions

2005-06-20T19:05:00.000+01:00

The earlier online-petition-against-online-petition is a great comment on how pointless most online petitions are. I think they have no affect on the people they are trying to influence as it's too easy to sign up to one multiple times, and two minutes out of the day of someone sitting in front of a computer for nine hours isn't exactly a lot of effort.

However, I hope the on-running pledge against ID cards in the UK will be taken seriously. It is trying to show how many people do not want an ID card, and who will also resist it being brought in, both by passive action - not signing up for one - and also positive action - donating to a legal fund to fight the cards.

They have 4,034 people signed up at the moment. If you live in Britain, don't want an ID card and you feel strongly enough to donate to the cause, I urge you to sign up. You do not have to have your name on the public list if you don't want to. This is a way to help convince politicians to think again about voting ID cards and centralised databases in to being, a plan that has many faults and few positives for the British population.

Clarkson

2005-06-20T18:55:00.000+01:00

Apparently Oxford Brookes University want to give outspoken car journalist Jeremy Clarkson an honorary degree. Someone has set up a petition against this on one of the proliferating petition sites out there. This is apparently because of Jeremy's views on "social responsibility and stewardship of environmental and public resources"

Someone posting this to the BNM list has caused Olly to set up a petition against the petition

Having looked at the signatories of the original petition, you could hardly call all of them serious, but I've still put my name down on the petition against the petition. I may not agree with everything Mr Clarkson says, but I like the way he thumbs his nose at the politically correct brigade and is happy to say that, yes, driving V8s is fun!

F1 at Indianapolis 2005 = farce

2005-06-19T19:07:00.000+01:00

The Formula One race in Indianapolis has just started, with fourteen of the twenty race cars pulling off in to the pits to retire at the end of the parade lap. We have Ferrari, Jordan and Minardi still in the race.

This is because Michelin, who provide the tyres for all the cars that have retired, brought a batch of tyres for the weekend that turn out to be dangerous on the high speed corner which is a feature of the lap. They wanted to either use a different batch of tyres, or have an extra chicane added to the track - or at least that's what's being reported. They sent a letter to the teams saying not to race on the tyres, so the teams now can't, partly due to the highly litigious nature of America - if there's an accident due to the tyres and someone gets hurt, the team will be liable for the accident.

So... three teams 'racing', two of them by far the slowest on the grid. Good for Minardi and Jordan's advertisers, not good for all the fans in the stadium who've paid a lot of money to be there, and not good for the TV advertisers, as people will be turning off all over the world.

Although Michelin should be punished due to their poor engineering, apparently partly due to the new 'diamond cut' surface of the race track, this has made the whole sport look silly (well, even more silly than the silliness inherant in twenty grown men risking their lives racing each other in souped up cars.)

All that will happen now is F1 will be slated in America, and lots of fans have missed out on entertainment. It seems many of the people involved have forgotten what pays for the sport, and what makes it a sport to begin with. The word 'farce' is being bandied about in the interviews, and that sums up the situation perfectly.

Client mention on telly

2005-06-13T19:49:00.000+01:00

Whilst watching Top Gear last night I was surprised to hear Jeremy Clarkson mention one of my clients, a hotel in Chipping Norton which used to be owned by Keith Moon.

Being waved at by a tall, hairy journo as he scoots past in a fancy car might not be the best endorsement in the world, but I'm sure they won't have minded the mention.

Apples goes Intel for Macs

2005-06-07T19:42:00.000+01:00

As mentioned all over the place (e.g. news.com) Apple is doing a deal with Intel to use Intel's processor chips in Macs from mid next year onwards.

This has caused quite a bit of fuss with some people. Lots of people seem to think this means OS X will run on any PC. This ignores quite a lot of the difference between a PC and Mac. The Mac has a different motherboard, and it can continue to have a custom motherboard in the future, including chips that OS X will need to be there before it will work.

One of the great advantages to owning a Mac is that it is a locked platform. When I was younger I thought this was a disadvantage, and it was. I could mix and match parts from many different manufacturers to get the cheapest deal possible and still get a modern PC at the end of it. Macs all came from one manufacturer, which meant the maker could keep the price relatively high.

But once I could afford one and tried it, my attitude changed somewhat. A locked platform means no real driver problems - the people writing the drivers know exactly which hardware (or range of hardware) is inside the box. They don't have to support dozens of different chipsets, they only need to handle two or three. The programmers creating the operating system know exactly what to expect as responses from the hardware, because they know what it's going to be. You can control the quality of the various bits of hardware, which should mean a more stable computer.

I don't think Apple will want to give this advantage up. It's part of what brings the stability to their system - majoritively they control what's in the box, so they don't get to driver conflicts. They can continue to do this in the future by requiring custom motherboards only they make, which means basically the world doesn't change much. Future Intel Macs will be quicker than Apple think future PowerPC Macs would be, and that's about it.

(Of course, if OS X can be run on any old Dell or white box PC in a couple of years, I'm going to look back on this post and groan.)

[Update:] I seem to have leapt straight to stage five.

Monster art

2005-06-06T17:38:00.000+01:00

Dave Devrie draws scary pictures from children's drawings

I particularly like Dave and Brendon's monster with something trapped inside it - has it been eaten, or is it some parasite that's just being carried around?

Prevarication at terminal levels.

2005-06-03T17:35:00.000+01:00

Cuteness and horrific ugliness in one small link

BBC Backstage

2005-06-03T15:58:00.000+01:00

In yesterday's mass post / brain dump I forgot to mention BBC Backstage which is a way for the BBC to share it's information with others, mainly through XML of their recent info at the moment.

I've been dealing with XML through several scripting languages recently for a local project and while I'll be glad to see the back of that particular lump of nodes, I'm pleased I'll be able to re-use chunks of my code to do some things with the BBC feeds. Now I just have to find something interesting to do (or take one from the Backstage mailing list.)

Minor podcasting thoughts

2005-06-02T22:43:00.000+01:00

Matt talked about podcasting a few weeks back and I've had his page open in a tab since then because I'd been meaning to write down a couple of thoughts I'd been having about it.

First off: Matt's Quoteplay is a bloody good idea - a way of linking to particular bits of podcasts / audio files. If you're interested in this stuff, check it out. Go on, do it now, you can always come back here later.

(Welcome back...) Generally, a couple of other thoughts:

I put MP3s of our news / entertainment magazine on tape on our website when I worked for Brighton Society for the Blind five years ago (NB: the current design is nothing to do with me.) If I'd realised it could be seen as a revolutionary thing to do I might have made more fuss about it and managed to get it named after me, 'silvercasting' has such a nice ring to it ;-) However, it just seemed like an obvious thing to do at the time - an example of the service we provided for visually impaired people by members and volunteers. I find it odd that there's a bit of a fuss made about podcasting now, but then again not a lot of people had broadband back then, and no one had iPods.

And the other thing: I think the next good thing for podcasts is: a way to speed them up.

This I learnt whilst working for the Society. They had speech synethesiser that some people would use to read what was on the computer screen to them. When you got proficient in using them, you could turn the speed up, and up, and up. Like learning to read fast. One student had his up so high no one else could understand it at all, it was like a bag of rabid gerbils, but he could understand it fine.

This seems like a good thing for podcasts - a way of fast forwarding through the dross, without jumping through it in case you do miss the one gem in there. OK, it won't work for all 'casts, but it would mean you can get through a load of them much quicker.

Big Brother back on

2005-06-02T22:35:00.000+01:00

The latest series of Big Brother has started up. I watched quite a lot of it last year, partly because I was up in Leamington contracting so I didn't have a lot else to do when I was knackered.

I've either ignored whole series of BB or I've been caught by it about half way through and kept watching. I couldn't get in to the early stages last year, and now I think I understand why...

Currently all the most irritating personalities are at the fore. I thought for a while it was because they'd managed to jam together thirteen really objectionable people, to avoid a nice chap winning as happened a couple of series ago. However, I think it's more that the show is dominated by the most irritating people. Whenever I've flicked over to it in the week it's been Craig whining his head off, or lots of squeaking or shrieking. Craig seems very much an opera singer... Me me me me meeeeeeee

Hmm, maybe I'll try again in a few weeks.

EU treaty

2005-06-02T21:48:00.000+01:00

(Random rambling that should probably be ignored:)

So the French and Dutch have voted not to accept the new EU Constitution, but no politician wants to come out and say it's stuffed.

OK, so several countries have accepted it, including Germany, but the thing is there's no way us Brits are going to say "yes" in a referendum to anything to do with Europe at the moment, and there's no even a decent "Yes" campaign over here to explain why it's a good thing and we should vote for it. With two of the three most powerful countries in Europe not ratifying, this treaty is a dead duck, but apparently the first European politician to point this out is going to get blamed for it failing, so none of them want to.

Well, there's a good reason for not voting for it - it appears the people in power in the EU are actually a bunch of school children, not serious politicians interested in helping out the member countries and more involved with who they should blow raspberries and who's in the right gang.

One problem I have with going deeper in to Europe is I can't see why it's necessary, at least at the moment. We've got a strong trading union of a bunch of countries close together, that makes sense. Deciding all these different economies should jump together seems rather mad. I tend to feel the 'European project' is trying to rush forwards too fast. It wasn't that long ago that Europe was at war, and just before that, we were at war again.

I feel taking it easy and seeing this for the long-term project it must be is the way to go. I don't see why we have to have a single currency now or a common economic policy across the whole of Europe now. Rushing towards central governance seems to be a way for certain politicians to get in the history books, which is not a good reason for doing it, which may be a reason people are reacting negatively to the treaty, even though it seems to have many good parts.

Anyway, this post isn't really going anywhere. I'll probably need to re-write it or zap it at a later date.

Mac Mini has a PC copy

2005-06-02T19:29:00.000+01:00

The Register reports on an AOpen copy of the Mac Mini. It's amazing how the minimalist Mac Mini design is ruined by slapping a dirty great button in the middle of the front, and adding a company logo to the bottom right. The finish doesn't look as good, at least at the top, as the Mac, but it could just have been a demo version in their picture.

Niche search engine for open source code

2005-06-02T19:17:00.000+01:00

The relatively new search engine Koders indexes open source code, and you can search for the particular language you need.

This is good, but the problem is it doesn't give an indication of what sort of state the code is in or how easy it would be to work with, perhaps it could do with a feedback mechanism like the experimental Rusty search.

Travel research

2005-06-02T18:47:00.000+01:00

Just some more linking research with UK travel.

News 24 typo

2005-05-05T00:10:00.000+01:00

Just seen on BBC News 24: "It's 5th May and in seven hours time Britons go to the polls to choose who they want to govern the county."

Political interviews

2005-04-28T21:23:00.000+01:00

The election has a week to go, so the television and radio are full of political interviews. Now the legal advice about going to Iraq has been leaked, and then released rather more officially (more with links at The Guardian) I've noticed Tony Blair today went from being rather huffy about questions about why he wanted to go war to now being rather shrill about it. That's not a word I ever thought I'd use to describe the Prime Minister.

Tonight there is a special Question Time with questions from the audience to the leaders of the three main parties. So far I think Charles Kennedy has come across relatively well, Michael Howard has done all right but got a bit more of a battering by the questions and came across a little slimy. Now Tony Blair is answering the same questions he's been asked over the last several weeks by the public - why did you take us to war? At the moment he's holding back the huffiness quite well, but he's got another 25 minutes to go and I expect him to be a little more ragged by the end of it. However, he's a very seasoned interviewee so it'll be interesting to see how much leaks through.

Work-o-mania parts and getting there

2005-04-23T23:42:00.000+01:00

So this month I'm doing / have done:

CSS templates for a publishing company

Various search engine optimisation/marketing for three clients, one involving converting HTML and Javascript over to slimmer HTML/CSS and Javascript

ColdFusion and HTML work for an access hire company

ColdFusion / CSS/HTML work for a local search project, with a splash of PHP as well

Perl CGI work for a design company

ColdFusion work for a recruitment company

I was posting about work on the Freelancers Forum mailing list earlier this month and realised how much of my work was coming from referrals. Nigel and Alex have referred work to me this month, and some of the rest of the work has come from people in The Farm, the network of freelancers I'm in.

So, a big, public "Thanks" to Alex and Nigel, who are both buried in their own work at the moment, and I hope to return the favour in the future.

Work-o-mania

2005-04-23T23:23:00.000+01:00

Things have been and still are very manic work-wise this month, in fact I haven't been able to do much apart from work recently, so everything else has had to take a bit of a back seat, including updating my websites and this blog.

I'm working for eight clients this month, which is a bit more than usual - the last couple of months I've been working for around six across the month, and in January it was a more normal three.

It's difficult to find a balance of clients when freelancing. On the one hand, it's lovely to have a large project I can get my teeth in which produces a great site; on the other, if I have several smaller pieces of work it means I get more variety, more chance to help more clients, and better cashflow. The downside of one large piece of work is if I don't get paid on time it's a real problem, whereas it's unlikely several clients won't pay out and having to chase one company for some of your money is a much more relaxed task than chasing one company for all of your money.

The last point is a little moot, I haven't had a client not pay since December, and I'm still chasing them for the small amount they still owe me. This is partly because I've got a better contract than I started with, i.e. I've got a relatively short written contract that I make sure I get signed, rather than working on verbal contracts. However, I've got two friends who have been caught by this recently: doing lots of work, and then not getting paid for it. One now has his money having had to pursue it and the other is in the early hassling stages before solicitors get involved.

I've been ripped off in the past, although not since I've been freelance this time, and it has made me wary of working on verbal contracts for anyone I don't trust completely. Finding a time to slip the contract under someone's nose can be very awkward, but it is a very necessary part of business and if a potential client won't sign a contract, especially a one that is balanced both for the client and freelancer, then it's time to walk away from any deal they're offering. I've never found anyone I've enjoyed working for has had a problem signing my contract, some have even asked if they can copy some of the clauses from it, whereas it tends to be the people who are hassle or unprofessional during the work are also the ones who resist agreeing to a contract. Sometimes it's better to have a thin month and find more work than it is to agree to do some work for someone under just a verbal agreement, there's no point having the work if you're not going to get paid for it.

Pasta / pizza

2005-04-23T23:15:00.000+01:00

Pinocchio (Grid / Google) is a nice, low-cost pasta/pizza restaurant in Brighton near the theatres and the Pavillion. The Chilian Merlot is rather fine, and the chocolate truffle gateux desert is excellent, and was enough even though the two people with me kept nicking bits. Admittedly, my opinions might be affected by the company from the couple of times I've met there.