Simon Waldman points out this very positive article about RSS in yesterday's Sunday Times. It's ironic, of course, because none of time Times online news sites have any trace of an RSS feed.
They'll work it out eventually.
Update: I sent an email pointing out the irony to webmaster@timesonline.co.uk, but it bounced back as an unknown address.
You know, I admit to being a bit sceptical when I first set up my Tada lists, but I have to say that it seems to be working.
Over the weekend, despite one of my servers crashing completely and me spending far too much time running fdisk and changing DNS records, I managed to tick off an impressive number of tasks.
All this and I still found time to catch up on a lot a TV (Desperate Housewives looks pretty good, but the new seasons of Judge John Deed and 24 both look pretty disappointing) and go on a two and a half hour walk around Clapham and Wandsworth Commons.
This being organised lark might have something going for it after all. Now where did I leave my copy of Getting Things Done.
We have a rich and expressive language and therefore it annoys me intensely to hear people using it inaccurately. Two recent examples.
Firstly, the woman from Kent who was interviewed on the BBC news this morning. She has flown to the USA to support Michael Jackson in his hour of need because "I know he is innocent". No. As someone who has never met or spoken to him, you cannot know he is innocent. You can believe it very strongly. You can hope desperately that it is true. But you can't know it.
And secondly, our mightly leader trying to scare people again by talking about the dangers of terrorism. "They will cause death and destruction on an unlimited scale." An unlimited scale? Unlimited? Think about it. That's just nonsense.
According to today's Observer senior members of the campaign to bring the Olympics to London in 2012 are admitting that their bid has failed.
Many Londoners (myself included) will see this as very good news. I don't remember anyone asking us if we wanted the Olympics here.
I climbed on the back of a giant albatross
Which flew through a crack in the cloud
To a place where happiness reigned all year round
Where music played ever so loudly
Jim Capaldi, founder member of Traffic, died earlier today. One for Dadrock perhaps.
I've never seen U2 live. I'd like to see them. But no live concert (especially one in stadium) is worth £55. For that price I'd expect an all-day festival.
When are music fans going to say "enough is enough" and stop paying such ridiculous prices for concert tickets?
Watching Them : Watching Us is on top form today, pointing out the ironies in today's Daily Mail front page.
We'll never forget this.
Today's Guardian has an article about the relaunched BBC Radio Player. It also mentions their experiment last year when they made editions of In Our Time available as MP3s.
As part of my eternal struggle to organise my life, I've started building lists at Tada Lists. I've even made some of them public.
(Oh, bit of an inconvenient little bug in the system. I originally linked to my public lists at http://davorg.tadalists.com/lists/public/, but it seems that the site doesn't like the existance of that final slash - it gives an error message. I've fixed the link above.)
An interesting example of how the internet is shrinking the world.
One slight irritation with Movable Type is that when you've been running a blog for some time, the list of monthly archives that (by default) appears on the index page can get a bit long and take up too much space.
So I've written a bit of Javascript that addresses that problem. I'll package it up nicely and release it later, but in case anyone is interested, the code is here.
What you need to do is to put that code in the <head> section of any template where you want the abbreviated list to appear. You then need to make two other changes to the template:
<body onload="show_yr(max_year, 'years')">
<div id="years">
</div>
And that's it. When you rebuild the site, you'll get an abbreviated list of the monthly archives. There's an example on this page. Clicking on a year will open out the list to display the months for that year.
Any comments and suggestions are welcome - particularly on my Javascript as I know it's not great.
It even seems to work in IE6 - which is a bonus as I wasn't aiming at that at all :)
It is, of course, gratifying that whenever a senior Perl development contract comes on the market in London I get calls from what seems to be most of the recruitment agencies in the UK.
It would just be nice if for once it happened when I was actually looking for work.
Simon points out this press release from the BBC. It seems they are going to make a lot more of their radio output available through an improved version of their Radio Player application.
I'll be taking a look as soon as I can to see if and how this effects my BBC streams page. Expect more updates later in the week.
Update: Well I've had a quick look and the news looks very good. They seem to have completely rewritten their HTML so the current version of get_streams will almost certainly no longer work, but it looks like they've made the HTML a lot cleaner so that it'll be far easier to parse. I may have time to start looking at this in detail tomorrow.
(Apologies for all the MT-related posts. We'll get back to our usual bollocks soon I promise.)
There's a problem with the Movable Type email code which allows unscrupulous people to potentially send emails to anyone they like and leave the blame firmly at your doorstep.
Everyone running a Movable Type installation should upgrade to version 3.15 as soon as possible.
As I mentioned in passing last week, I've upgraded this site to the latest version of Movable Type. But it looks like the upgrade wasn't as successful as it could have been.
I first noticed problems with the comment features. MT3 gives you the ability to moderate comments from not-registered users. This is all very useful, but as all my comment templates were from MT2 the site didn't have any support for people wanting to register and therefore I was having to approve all comments.
So I found this page which tells you all the changes that you need to make to MT2 templates to enable all the MT3 features. Well I'm sure I followed all of the instructions, but it wasn't a major success.
Then I had a brainwave. It was only really the main index template and the stylesheet that I'd changed so I could overwrite all of the other templates with the real MT3 ones and it would all just work, right? Well, wrong as it turns out.
Oh, I got all the new features but it looked horrible. The way that the pages interact with the stylesheet has changed completely in MT3 (it's got a lot simpler) so my stylesheet no longer had the right selectors for the new pages. And if I used the new stylesheet it would break the look of my front page.
So in the end I decided to go the whole way and use the default MT3 stylesheet and main index template as well. Which explains why this page suddenly different and a load of stuff has gone missing from the front page. I took copies of the old ones before I did it, so I'll be adding stuff back over the next week or so.
I was planning a major redesign at some point soon. I just wasn't expected to be forced into it like this.
But the site now all works as expected. If you have a TypeKey login then you can now comment without moderation.
According to the front page story in today's Times there are people inside the Tory party who are secretly admitting that they have no chance of winning the forthcoming General Election.
I'm surprised that they ever thought they had any chance of winning. In my opinion they should be more worried about whether they come second or third. I know that many former Labour voters will be registering protest votes this time (and who can blame them), but I strongly suspect that the majority of these votes will be going to the Lib Dems rather than the Tories.
This is book five in my attempt to read fifty books in 2005.
In many ways this is a lot like Slaughterhouse Five. Henry DeTamble is adrift in time in much the same way as Billy Pilgrim but although she starts with a similar premise to Vonnegut, Niffenegger's novel turns out very differently. Vonnegut uses the concept to rage against the Allied bomobing of Dresden and Niffenegger writes a love story.
Not that I'm saying that's a bad thing. Vonnegut's book will always be considered a classic whereas I suspect that Niffenegger's will only enjoy a transitory success. But that's fine. It's a well-written and enjoyable book and it's nice to see a book that discusses the grandfather paradox (tho' admittedly, not in much detail) on the bestseller shelves in the bookshops.
One image that I couldn't get out of my head whilst reading it was one of the actual mechanics that Niffenegger went through to write it. I picture her sitting in her study with two timelines pinned to her wall. One is Clare's boringly linear life and the other is Henry's more confusing history. I also imagine many lines between the two indicating where Henry was coming from at the times he met Clare through time-travel. It must have been a lot of fun to write.
I predict you'll see a lot of people reading this on the tube over the next few weeks. You could do worse than to join them.
The BBC web site has the first part of an interview with Bill Gates. He talks in vague terms about the future of home computing and the importance of the Media Centre in that. One answer is very telling. He's asked "It is a tricky area though. Digital rights management. Are you sure that you are not worried that it could trip you up?" and he answers
Well certainly, you want the convenience and yet you want people who create things to have some ability to be able to charge for those things.And we feel very good about the dialogue we have had for many years with the content industries. How we have struck the right balance there and that is why you see an explosion in digital music.
Do you see that? "The dialogue we have had ... with the content industries". That's what he sees as most important, the requirements of the content providers. Not a mention of the requirements of the content consumers (i.e. us).
Nice to see where his priorities lie. Of course, any consumer that doesn't agree that the content providers know best is probably a communist!
I've just realised that the feed from Bloggerheads had fallen of my Bloglines reading list so I've just put it back and have enjoyed catching up on a lot of what Tim has been writing recently. A couple of good examples:
The latest news from Jesusistan (includes American conservatives attacking a cartoon sponge)
A roundup of stuff about Bush's inauguration (including a call for googlejuice for empty rhetoric which I'm happy to give)
All should read Bloggerheads - it's fun.
I was trying to work out why I was vaguely uncomfortable about Google's "nofollow" tag approach to preventing comment spam, but now I don't need to as Ben has worked it all out for me.
I love it when I don't have to think :)
Mind you, I've just installed the MT plugin anyway. You know, just in case it's a good thing :)
Actually I upgraded this site to MT 3.14 recently. And all the comment spam gets moderated away. So no-one (except me) sees it anyway.
Just got back from a Wandsworth Stop the War Coalition meeting. I don't usually go to these things but is was in my local pub and their guest speaker was our MP, Martin Linton.
You have to have a bit of respect for Linton for coming to the meeting. He was one of the MPs who voted for the the war and he still supports it. So it was brave of him to come along to a Stop the War meeting. He didn't, however, consider the meeting important enough to mention it on his web site.
The meeting went along predictable lines. Linton repeated the usual government line and the anti-war group members laughed at him. There were, however, a couple of interesting points.
Firstly, Linton agreed that if it wasn't for the hunt for WMD then the war would have been illegal (tho' he doesn't agree that the subsequent failure to find any WMDs affects that legality). But he went on to say that he wishes that wasn't the case. He'd like to see a change in international law which would entitle one state to invade or attack another simply to act as international "policemen" rather than having to give reasons of self-defence. This makes it harder and harder for me to vote for him in the forthcoming election.
Secondly, someone asked what he thought of the suggestion that George Bush decided to invade Iraq very soon after Sept 11th 2001. He replied that he had heard that Tony Blair had suggested that Bush should invade Iraq even before that date. Linton said this was in someone's political memoirs. I think I'll email him for more details of that reference.
It was the first time I'd heard Linton speak at any length and I really can't say I was impressed by what I saw.
This is book four in my attempt to read fifty books in 2005.
Here's a good rule of thumb for choosing true crime books. Anything that is endorsed on the cover by Patricia Cornwall has a very good chance of being almost unreadable.
On the front cover of this book Cornwall is quoted as saying "John Douglas is one of the most exciting figures in law enforcement". That may well be true, but he certainly hides it well in his writing - which is some of the dullest prose I have read.
The book was bought for me because it is about crimes committed over the internet. Or, rather, the criminal made initial contact with his victims over the internet. He was a S&M fan who contacted women over the internet, convinced them to move to his home town, made them his sexual slaves and finally (when he was bored with them) murdered them.
If it wasn't for the internet connection (which is loudly advertised all over the cover) this would have been a book that I would never have picked up. I'm just not interested in reading about these crimes. And the author clearly knows very little about the internet. The book is written like one of those internet scare stories that you'd expect to find in the Daily Mail. It's full of phrases like "the darkest corners of the internet".
Yes, there are nasty people out there. Yes the internet makes it easily for them to communicate with both thmeselves and potential victims. That does not make the internet a hotbed of crime and debauchery. It makes the internet somewhere where you interact with other people and need to take the same amount of care as you do in your "normal" life. If you move halfway across the US to be with someone you've only ever met online then... well obviously you don't deserve to die, but you're acting very stupidly.
This book made me very angry. Please don't read it.
This is book three in my attempt to read fifty books in 2005.
Now this is more like it. I was getting a bit jaded after the first two books, but this is much more to my taste. Strong hints of transexuality (or is that transexualism) in the first sentence followed by incest in the first few chapters :)
Actually it turns out that it's not transexuality, but rather hermaphroditism - but that doesn't make it any less interesting.
And in case anyone thinks that I have really weird tastes in books, I should point out that backing up all this sensationalism there is also a very interesting and well-written story. The book tells the story of three generations of Greek immigrants from their arrival in the USA in the 1920s.
Don't read it for the sensationalist aspects. Read it because it's a very good novel.
I like to think that I'm pretty laid back when it comes to dealing with other people's coding practices. I really don't care where you put your braces (as long as it's consistant) and you can indent things as far as you want.
There are, however, two non-negotiable and invarient rules of code formatting. If I ever have to edit code that breaks these then I get very unhappy. Here are the rules:
The increasing use of "modern" IDEs (and I'm looking at you, Eclipse) seem to encourage people to break these rules. And that makes me sad.
Update: Bah! It seems that just about everyone where I'm currently working likes the idea of tabs in source code. Philistines!
Not that I'm watching Celebrity Big Brother you understand, but something interesting has come to my notice. The "official" biography of Jackie Stallone gives her age as 71 which means she was born in 1933 or 1934. IMDB shows that her son Sylvester Stallone was born in July 1946.
Now it is, of course, possible that she had a son when she was 13. But it seems far more likely to me that someone has been telling porkies.
In the past I've been quick to use this site to rant about bad customer service, so I'd like to take the opportunity to redress the balance slightly and mention some good customer service that I recieved yesterday.
I was browsing the Jessops web site looking for information about digital cameras when I noticed that there was a section containing details about the operating systems that each camera was compatible with. And, of course, Linux was never listed.
So I emailed them asking them about this. And I got a reply in less than an hour. The reply pointed out that the site was just republishing information that the camera manufacturers were giving them and therefore until the manufacturers started to list Linux compatibility, the Jessops site wouldn't be able to do that. All of which is quite acceptable if not particularly useful. They're already ahead of a number of PC World (to pick an example at random) employees who often don't even know what Linux is.
But the reply didn't stop there. It went on to point me at this page about using gphoto and suggested that I ask for more information about particular models on a site like linuxforum.
All in all, pretty much as useful an answer as I could expect. So thank you to Richard Bradford of Jessops Customer Service for being clued up and generally very helpful.
So Lloyd wrote something pointing out this piece by Jon Udell about the Lazlo Soundblox which is a Flash front-end to a server for streaming MP3s.
I'm not completely convinced by Soundblox. You can either run it from the installation hosted on the author's server (and I don't know how stable that installation is guaranteed to be) or you can go to the effort of installing a Tomcat application on your web server (and I'm not keen on installing Java application servers on my servers). Also it only seems to serve MP3s and most of the content I'd want to serve is in Ogg Vorbis files.
But anyway, the input file it takes is XML and it sounded like a fun thing to play with for the evening. So I reached for Perl and the Template tookit and whipped up an application that generates an XML file that describes the MP3s in a given directory together with a web page that uses that to display the Soundblox application.
And here is the result. It's not perfect yet. The XML parser seems a little picky and I can't get it to recognise artists' names pulled from the MP3 file. But it proves the concept works. If I want another file to appear on the list, I just drop it into the directory.
If you're interested, the raw XML is here and the template that does most of the work is here.
And while I'm posting links from today's Guardian, Victor Keegan is very positive about the Open Source movement.
In recent months, as readers of Online will be well aware, open source has entered a new era with the arrival of a browser (Firefox) that is better and more secure than Microsoft's Internet Explorer and an office suite (OpenOffice.org) that is an impressive alternative to Microsoft's Word, not to mention Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia written by volunteers that already has more than a million entries.
Nice piece by Jack Schofield in today's Guardian about the damage that pointless email chain letters do.
Everyone should read it and then STOP SENDING ME CHAIN LETTERS BY EMAIL!
I've been enjoying the BBC programme Dragon's Den. In the show a group of entrepreneurs describe business ideas to a group of "dragons" (potential investors) in the hope that the dragons will give them some money. Most of the investment requests are in the order of £100,000.
The dragons question them on the details of their business plan and (in most case) explain why they won't invest.
Last night I was particularly interested in the chaps from MusicControl.com. They claimed to be a business that allowed any musician to become a record label and take control of the distribution of their own music in digital form. What they actually had was a "template" web site that contained features to upload, display, sell and download MP3s. This could then be customised for individual artists.
On further investigation, it turned out that they didn't own the software they were using to do all of this. Instead they were re-selling something that BT had written. The idea of a software company without any software astounded the dragons and they all declined to invest.
Now it strikes me that the software to do what they were talking about is actually pretty simple. A bit of Template Toolkit with a database and a bit ot of Perl at the back end and you'd be done. The only potentially tricky bit would be interfacing with an online payment system - but having done that a couple of times in the past I can't see it being very difficult.
I bet that's not how the BT software does it tho'. I bet it's some over-complicated piece of Java or ASP. I'd be very interested to see how it works.
So I'll be watching the MusicControl web site over the next few weeks to see how they do.
About half an hour ago I spotted Ben Hammersley wandering around on the fifth floor of the Guardian Unlimited building. I know he writes for the Guardian, but we don't often get writers slumming it over this side of the road :)
This is number two in my attempt to read fifty books this year.
It was certainly a very simple read. The prose is very plain. I'm told that this is part of its charm, but I find it hard not to see it as a limitation of the author.
It's not that I didn't like it. I don't feel that I wasted the few hours it took me to read it, but I really don't understand why it's as popular as it is and I'm certainly not tempted to read any of its (many) sequels.
Actually, I think the large number of sequels also puts me off a bit. It reminds me of Terry Pratchett and the Diskworld books - a series that I gave up on after reading about four of them because the rate at which they were appearing made it clear that Pratchett was putting very little effort into them. There are now five (or maybe six) books in this series. And Smith is writing other books as well. This obviously isn't very hard for him. I much prefer to read books by people who put a bit of effort into their writing.
Who remembers concept albums?
In the 70s we all listened to them. There was no shame in it. But then punk rock came along and opened our eyes. We all realised what a pile of pretentious nonsense they were all and they were all consigned to the back of the wardrobe with all the other pre-punk records that we were all so dreadfully embarassed by. Pink Floyd's The Wall was pretty much the last of dying breed.
Over the years, of course, most of the albums have made their way back out of the wardrobe. Or actually, in many cases they were re-bought on CD. We're no longer embarassed by the records that we bought before 1977. But I don't remember seeing any new concept albums released.
Until last year. Just before christmas, a friend lent me a copy of The Streets' A Grand Don't Come For Free and as he gave it to me he told me to make sure that I listened to the songs in order. "They tell a story", he said.
And he's right. It's a concept album. Finally, 25 years after punk killed them off, the concept album has re-emerged as a valid musical form. And it did it in style by also being an album that made many critics' "best albums of the year" list. Ok, so it's not covering deep concepts like The Wall, but it _is_ a concept album. It tells a silly little story in much the same way that Quadrophenia did. It's nice to have them back.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm just off to dig Tales from Topographic Oceans out from the back of the wardrobe.
I'm still slowly working my way through ripping all of my CDs to .ogg files. Yesterday it was the turn of Lou Reed. I've got some really good Lou Reed albums (Transformer, Street Hassle and New York) but I've also got some dross that I bought in the late 90s when I had too much money and just automatically bought new albums by people who I once liked. I doubt I'll ever listen to Ecstasy again for example.
And then there are a couple of very good albums that went in the great cassette massacre of 2003 - Songs for Drella and Magic and Loss. So we're straight off to Ebay to see if we can track them down...
Update: Well I found copies. And I've won the auctions :)
I wondered last night about searching for "informational" photos of Balham in Flickr. So this morning I decided to look for all the photos on Flickr that had been tagged with "balham".
All I found was a set of photos of someone's halloween party that seems to have taken place in a pub somewhere in Balham. Now it's really bothering me that I can't recognise which pub it is.
Guess what? Life in Afganistan under the Taliban was a bit shit. Particularly if you were a woman. And since the Taliban have gone it's only got a little bit better.
Seierstad spent a few months living with a family in Kabul soon after the Taliban were removed and this is her interpretation of what she saw. It's interesting stuff but Seierstad is at pains to point out that this family are far from typical, so it's difficult to draw any conclusions about the country (or even the city) in general.
And something about the translation into English seems a bit stilted. I've noticed the same problems with other books translated from Scandinavian languages (I particularly remember Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow) so maybe it's an intrinsic problem with translations from those languages.
It was a pretty interesting read, but I'm not sure I'll be rushing off to read any of her other books.
Here's an interesting article from the Guardian which includes some details about how the author and the bookseller argued after the book was published.
Last year, the number of books I got thru was appallingly low. I read more X-Men comics than I had in any year in the last twenty years, but I doubt I read more than fifteen or twenty books.
So one of my resolutions this year is to read more. I've set myself a target of reading fifty books this year. That's about one a week which really shouldn't be too difficult.
And I'm going to track how I'm doing here. So my next entry will be a quick review of the first one which I finished on the way home tonight.
Interesting discussion in the pub tonight about how people use cameras now that everyone[1] has one in their phone and therefore in their pocket all the time. It seems that people are using them as a photgraphic memory. Want to remember the opening times of your local supermarket over the christmas period? Don't write it down, just take a photo of the sign. In an important meeting where a new system has been sketched out on the whiteboard? Take a photo of the diagram.
The next step (which admittedly no-one said they had seen yet) would appear to be to combine this concept with the social photo sharing of a site like Flickr. That way if I need to know if when my local Sainsburys is open I can just search Flickr with the tags "balham sainsburys times" and find someone else's photo of the sign.
Mark my words. It's just a question of time :)
[1] Well, not quite everyone. I still don't have a camera in my phone.
Whisper it softly, but I've turned comments back on. Actually, they were only off for about twelve hours. But it seems to have done the trick. Since I turned them back on I've had one piece of comment spam (as opposed to hundreds every hour). If you get overwhelmed by comment spam then simply removing the comment facility for a few hours seems to be a pretty good solution. A few hours of not responding to the comment spammers requests seems to get you removed from their lists.
Of course I'm not saying for a second that this will be permanent. I fully expect to see things creeping back up again soon. But it's a nice break.
And I like having comments turned on. My site returns surprisingly high Google results for a number of strange things (try googling for naughty teenagers) and people turn up at random and add interesting comments. A good example of this was my piece about the Anna in Wonderland programme on vampires. That programme was shown on RTE yesterday and three new comments appeared soon after it finished.
So anyway, my fingers are crossed. Let's see how it goes.
Lucy Mangan makes a plea for greater intolerance in the world.
Now that the season of goodwill has passed, let's make a plea for greater intolerance (carefully directed) in the world. The next time a woman (and it is always a woman - men have many flaws but at least they prefer to seek the answers to their problems in Top Gear and Abi Titmuss rather than the waxings and wanings of the moon) asks you what star sign you are, swears by essential oils, magnet therapy or talks about realigning anything but shelves, make a stand. Back her into a corner and talk at her about Galileo, Darwin, Einstein, Crick and Watson and Jeremy Paxman until she admits the error of her ways. For astrology and the rest to flourish it is only necessary that those with an IQ in double figures do nothing.
It makes me happy that there are grumpier people than me in the world. It makes me even happier that they work for the same company that I do (did I mention I was working for the Guardian again?)
She's right tho'. astrology is bollocks. I had an interest in astronomy when I was growing up and I used to get seriously pissed off by the number of people who couldn't tell the difference between astronomy and astrology.
Last night, this site came under a massive comment spam attack which effectively crippled the server. Until I can think of a better solution, I've disabled comments. Whilst I like giving you all the ability to comment on my entries here, it's far more important to me that the other services on this server run properly.
Hopefully I'll work something out and comments will be back before too long. In the meantime, if you meet anyone who admits to be being responsible for blog comment spam then please do us all a fovour and break their legs.
Oh look. Only two days into the new year and I'm already bloody grumpy.
I was going to get a lot done during the christmas break. I finished working at Outcome before Christmas and I start a contract (hooray!) at Guardian Unlimited next Tuesday, so that left me over a week to get a lot of little jobs done.
But I reckoned without the flu bug that was going round. I haven't been this ill for years. For most of the last week it's been a bonus if I've felt able to get out of bed. I'm starting to feel quite a lot better now, but most of the last week has been completely wiped out.
I'm back at work in a couple of days. Hopefully I can, at least, get some of my jobs out of the way.
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