October 2004 Archives

It used to be simple to put the clocks back at the end of October. I'd just go round the house putting everything back by an hour. Now it's more confusing. We have a number of clocks that deal with the time change themselves. So I have to work out which ones need changing. It's just adding extra complications.

And how did it get to be the start of NaNoWriMo so soon. I was planning to have a good go at it after last years disaster, but I just don't have the time to write almost 2000 words a day for the next month. I'll just have to put it off until next year.

According to a story in today's Guardian, The Times is planning to go tabloid-only within two weeks.

A later story (warning: Media Guardian site requires registration) claims that it will be happening from Monday and there are a large number of advertising spots booked for this weekend which will inform readers.

No-one else seems to be carrying this story.

Interesting times in the newspaper business.

No, of course he wasn't. But the cover of the new National Geographic cruelly gives a second or two of hope to the religious fundamentalists. Actually it seems to be an article about how most people don't understand the concept of a scientific theory.

Nice piece about it here (which I was directed to by Dadblog)

Longer excerpt from the article here.

Like many of us, my friend Dave has a number of photos on his web site. Recently he started to see a large number of requests for this photo.

On further investigation he discovered that this forum was using it as a background image. Without asking permission and without taking the obvious step of taking a copy and hosting it on their server. This means that everytime someone visits that page, his server gets an unnecessary hit.

He retaliated by changing that image. If they've fixed it before you read this, he's put a snapshot here. And his (very polite) comment on the forum is here.

Remember boys and girls, just because something is out there on the internet, that doesn't mean you have the automatic right to steal it.

The Radio Times web site got a bit of a makeover a couple of days ago. It looks a lot nicer now and feels a bit faster.

What it needs now is some nice RSS feeds. "What's on now" or "On Channel 4 tonight" - things like that. And. of course, a web services API would be really cool. It seems a shame to have all that luvverly data and not to be able to access it programmatically.

I've emailed them and passed on my opinion. It's radio.times@bbc.co.uk if you feel like doing the same.

Michael Cross (no relation) reports on the announcement of a shift in the UK government's attitudes to Open Source software.

The Treasury's Office of Government Commerce (OGC), set up to get better value from government procurements, will today announce that open source is a "viable desktop alternative for the majority of users" and that it can generate "significant savings". Interoperability with other systems is "not now a major issue". The report also found potential "green" benefits because open source software can prolong the life of computer hardware.

Whitehall is likely to use the new policy as a stick to negotiate better deals from Microsoft, which is expected to sign a new three-year discount deal across the government.

The actual report is here.

According to a report from Netcraft it appears that Dubya's campaign web site is refusing connections from servers outside of the US.

I just tested it and they seem to be correct. From a machine in the UK I get a "connection refused" message. But from a machine in the US I can connect without problems.

Is there something he doesn't want us to know?

This will be all over the blogsphere within hours I expect.

I don't know anyone who appreciates good music that didn't spend their teenage years listening to Peel's late night radio programmes. He was immensely influential.

Tom Coates rounds up the news links so I don't have to.

Synchronicity at work. Yesterday I posted a comment on Simon Waldman's blog which included a link to a Wikipedia article.

Today the Guardian publishes an article about Wikipedia written by Simon. It's an interesting article, it mentions Wikipedia's roots in the Open Source movement tho' it stops shop of discussing the whole wiki phenomenon. Simon talks at some length about how Wikipedia is self-correcting and points out that pretty much the only people who are criticising it are the traditional encyclopedias - the ones who have the most to lose.

If you're reading this thru some kind of RSS aggregator thing (and if you don't know what that means then you almost certainly aren't) then you might be interested switching to my new feed from FeedBurner. It combines elements from davblog, my Flickr photostream and my links page at del.icio.us.

The address to use is http://feeds.feedburner.com/davorg.

Enjoy...

This weekend I was lightly taunted by my step-daughter as she found a copy of Elton John's Goodbye Yellow Brick Road in my CD collection. You can understand that when an artist has produced nothing but crap for all of your lifetime (and more) then it can be hard to see that they ever did anything worthwhile. It's hard to explain what a good song "Candle in the Wind" was before it was mutated into that terrible tribute to Diana (actually, it's hard to even remember what a good song it used to be). My explainations were helped when I remembered that "Tiny Dancer" is in the soundtrack of Almost Famous (one of her favourite films).

But it's incredible to think that Elton has produced almost nothing of value for almost thirty years. When I was first listening to him he was producing singles like "Daniel", "Your Song" and "Crocodile Rock". That now looks like a pitifully small percentage of his total output.

I remember reading something years ago which made a similar point about Rod Stewart. It claimed that in about 1975, Stewart had been abducted by aliens and replaced by a clone with no musical talent. Perhaps the same thing happened to Elton John. And at about the same time.

Hmm... thinking about it, several previously talented people took a bit of a nosedive at about that time[1]. Maybe the aliens were organising some kind of intergalactic rock festival. Can we have our artists back please?

[1] Personally I can't listen to much that Queen released after Sheer Heart Attack.

In today's Guardian, Mark Lawson previews an interesting-sounding documentary that will go out on Channel 4 next Saturday. With God on our Side looks at the role of christianity in the lives of US presidents with particular emphasis on George W Bush.

This quote raised a smile:

The religiosity of American politics tends to be a problem for British journalism because we find it hard to believe that they really believe it.

It seems that Pret have stopped selling the stilton and walnut sandwich that I'd been enjoying so much for the last few weeks. Perhaps I've eaten them all.

But in better news, they've reintroduced their Thai Chicken sandwich.

Got back from the "speaking tour" late last night. I'll backfill some details over the next few days (and, hopefully, fill in some more about the Egypt trip).

In the meantime you can look at my photos from the trip.

Today we travelled to Venice to pick up the boat for the Geek Cruise. I keep calling it a boat, but it's probably a ship.

All of the Perl speakers from the Italian Code Jam were also going on the cruise so Randal Schwartz and Allison Randal travelled on the same train as Dan and me. From the railway station we got a taxi to the cruise terminal, checking in our luggage and went to the waiting room to... well... wait.

We waited about four hours before we could board. In that time we picked a handful of other Perl geeks who were coming on the cruise with us. As we boarded the boat we had our first experience of what was to become a bit of a recurring theme over the following week - people wanting to take our photograph and then charging us large sums of money for prints. Needless to say we didn't buy any of them.

Dan and I were a little surprised to find that our cabin contained what seemed to be a double bed, but our steward assured us that he could convert it to two singles while we were at dinner.

The boat was amazing. It was probably ten times the size of one I was on for the Nile cruise. And it had been decorated by someone who thought that Las Vegas was the epitome of taste. Check the photos if you don't believe me.

One downside of the cruise for me waas that the geek party had all been assigned to the second sitting for dinner. This meant that we didn't get to sit down for dinner until 9:30pm every night and usually didn't finish until after 11:00pm. This meant that I usually needed a substantial "snack" at about 7:30pm. Of coruse I could have skipped the formal dinners, but that's part of the whole cruise experience.

So today I spoke at the Italian Code Jam in Ferrara. My colleague Dan and I flew into Bologna yesterday where one of the conference organisers met us and drove us to our hotel in Ferrara. Then in the evening all of the organisers and speakers went off to a local restaurant for dinner. There were five (or was it six) courses. All of them very good.

Then this morning we were driven to the university where the talk was taking place. I was on second (following Randal Schwartz talking about Perl testing) and I gave high level introduction to the Template Toolkit. Other talks followed on various topics. Some were in English, some Italian. There was at least one where the talk was in Italian but the slides were in English.

And in the evening there was another dinner. This one also had far too many wonderful courses. And at the end of the evening, the organisers presented all of the speakers with a signed copy of a book about the city of Ferrara.

This was certainly one of the nicest conferences I've ever been to. The organisers were all very friendly and eager to please. And I've never eaten so well at a conference. The organisers are hoping to do it all again next year and, if they do, I certainly plan to join them.

Well, I might be overstating the case a bit, but for the first time I'll be speaking at two completely separate events as part of the same trip. And as a bonus I'll be visiting four countries that I've never been to before.

Here's the itinerary.

Tomorrow I fly to to Bologna in Italy and then travel to Ferrara.

On Saturday I'm speaking at the Italian Code Jam.

On Sunday I take a train to Venice and join the boat for a Geek Cruise around the Eastern Mediterranean. Over the next week we visit Greece, Turkey and Croatia. During that time I'll be giving a couple of three hour tutorials.

Then on Sunday 17th, I'll be flying back to London.

Busy. But it sounds like fun.

I'm not very happy with my online photo album. I've been thinking of rewriting it for some time. But then I saw that a lot of people had started using Flickr so I'm going to give that a try instead.

Seems pretty good. Has all sorts of RSS/Atom goodness built in. And I can email my existing photos directly from my web server. Expect that to happen over the next [unspecified time period].

But I've already made a start. I've copied the Hawksmoor church photos over. The rest will be here... eventually.

One of the best things about text on the web is the way you can link to other stuff. When I'm writing here I always try to link words and phrases to more in depth explaination or examples. Mainstream news sites like the BBC (see, there's an example) don't do that. The BBC often have a few external links to the right of the main story and they've just started linking to the same story from other (approved) news sites, but the body text is always untouched. Which is a shame.

At EuroFoo earlier this year I heard Stefan Magdalinski talking about TheyWorkForYou.com. After the presentation we had a brief discussion about some things they were thinking of adding. One topic that was discussed was the possibility of recognising proper nouns in text and automatically linking to a relevant web page. I mentioned Simon Cozens' Perl module Lingua::EN::NamedEntity which would be a first step along this path.

And this morning, the blogsphere is full of reports of Stefan's latest project. It's a proxy front end to the BBC news site which searchs the text for proper nouns and makes them links to the relevant page on Wikipedia. For example, see this page about the Pitcairn Islands rape trial.

Stefan says he's been learning PHP so it doesn't look like he's been using Simon's module. It would, of course, have been easier in Perl :)

As every student knows, a liking for the Smiths, Radiohead and Pulp can be a badge of pride, confirmation of your status as a romantic intellectual loner. If you're a Tory MP, however, it rather suggests that you're either not listening to the lyrics properly - what do you make of all that stuff about class resentment - or view listening to music as a slightly disturbing form of self-flagellation.

In an attempt to appear more human, the Tory party has released information about the musical tastes of some of its better known members[1]. Alex Petridis muses on the effects this might have on the artists' careers.

Oh, and whilst we're talking about Tory music. Roxy Music won the lifetime achievement award at last night's Q Awards ceremony. In his acceptance speech, Bryan Ferry dedicated the award to his "brave son Otis" (one of eight pro-hunt protestors arrested recently for invading the House of Commons). He was booed and jeered by his fellow musicians.

[1] This is all relative of course. There's hardly anyone left in the Tory party that anyone has heard of.

It's on the BBC so it must be true. That's good news.

Only EMI, BMG and Universal to go now...

This month's Total Film will feature the results of a poll to find the best British film of all time.

Get Carter[1] came first. It's good to see The Wicker Man doing well (it came 6th).

[1] The original version. I hope that's obvious.

I've just realised why Tony Blair is so determined to serve a complete third term. That would mean that he'd been in power longer than Thatcher.

Wasn't that also Francis Urquhart's target in The Final Cut?

"You may well think that..."