May 2005 Archives

The problem with getting involved with the medical profession is that once they're well on the way to fixing one problem they like to look around to see if there's anything else to work on.

So whilst I the doctors were prodding and poking me in various ways to work out what was wrong with my chest they made a little note to themselves that they weren't entirely happy with my heartbeat and that maybe they should investigate that a bit more closely when they started getting bored with the other stuff. And that time is now.

I was at the hospital on Thursday again for a monthly check-up on the Sarcoidosis. They seem happy enough with the way that's going. They've cut me down to 15mg of steroids for the next month and 10mg for the month after that. And they don't want to see me again for two months. So that's all pretty good.

But yesterday the investigation of my heart started in earnest. They're worried that my heart rate is often a bit higher than it should be so they've decided to monitor it for 24 hours and see how it goes. It's all pretty simple stuff. I have a small ECG machine clipped onto my belt which is attached to three sensors that are stuck to various points on my chest. It all fits under a loose-fitting shirt and no-one need know what's going on. It was all stuck on yesterday at about 2pm and I can take it off at 2pm today. Then I need to drop it all back at the hospital at some point.

Let's hope they don't find anything that bothers them too much.

Oh look. Someone has used one of my photos on a Wikipedia article.

The Gnome people were all very excited yesterday about the announcement of the Nokia 770. Called an "internet tablet", it's a compact, portable device for accessing the internet over wireless. It looks very nice.

The exciting thing for the Gnome people is that all the software for it is based on Linux and Gnome. And there's an Open Source development platform for it called Maemo.

Available in the third quarter apparently. I can't wait.

A small victory in the battle agaist creationist morons in the US.

MARIETTA, Ga. - Workers in Cobb County have begun removing controversial evolution disclaimer stickers from science textbooks to comply with a judge's order.

By the end of the day Monday, several thousand stickers, which said evolution was a theory and not a fact, had been scraped off. The school district had put 34,452 stickers on textbooks across the county.

Oh dear. What a terrible shame :)

A last minute hitch appears to have delayed the introduction of the government's identity cards legislation this week despite the hopes of the home secretary, Charles Clarke, that it would be published before the Commons rises for the Whitsun break on Friday.

We went off to The Bedford last night to see some live music. I was drawn there by the chance to see Andy White for the first time for far too many years, but there were too other acts on too.

First up was Foy Vance. He's obviously heavily influenced by Luka Bloom (which is no bad thing) and he puts a lot of passion into his performance. It's all most enjoyable until you listen too closely to his lyrics - which are all a bit "sixth form poetry". Halfway though his set be brings on a friend to sing a couple of songs and it just gets worse. The songs are called "Welcome to the Future" and "My Father's Son" and the lyrics are about as cliched as you'd expect givn those titles.

Andy White is on next. Since I last saw him he's gained a backing band. She's called Alison Russell and she sings backing vocals and plays clarinet. It all works really well in combination with Andy' voice and guitar. Given that Andy has written ten years worth of new songs since I last saw him, it's not really a surprise that I don't know many of the songs, but most of the new ones have the instant catchiness that I associate with Andy's work.

The final act are called Second Person and they are here to record a live DVD. To make sure the event goes well they have filled the venue with friends, family and fans. I think we were probably the only people there who didn't know who they were. Given that the rest of the evening had been acoustic and a bit folky, it was a surprise when they started playing music that sounded more than a little like Portishead. In fact, at one point, I was seriously wondering if this was Beth Gibbons' new band. They started with a very strange cover version of the Cure's "Boys Don't Cry" which didn't go down at all well with my party of Cure fans. To be fair to them, they got better from then on, but it's like listening to Portishead - one or two tracks is quite nice, but a whole album (or, in this case, 45 minute set) is all too much. Every song sounds too much like the last one.

So if you ever get to watch the Second Person Live at the Bedford DVD and spot a group of three people in the middle looking distinctly unimpressed - that's us.

The BBC has increased the range of its podcasting trial. There are now about a dozen programs available.

If they added links to the podcasts to the radio player pages then I'd include them in the BBC streams page.

A geek friend of mine is currently in hospital and looks like he'll be there for a few weeks. Here's an article explaining how he got his internet connection working. It all looks a bit Heath Robinson, but the post is evidence that it is working.

I wanted to buy some tickets to see The Philadelphia Story[1] so I wandered over to the Old Vic web site. There's a "book online" link there that takes you to the Ticketmaster page for that show.

So far, so good. But this is where it all starts to go wrong. The Ticketmaster page is just a list of dates. I know I want three tickets. I know what price I'm prepared to pay. I know there are a few dates that I can't go. But I don't really care what date I go on. So I choose a random date in a couple of weeks time. I'm asked how many tickets I want and what price I want to pay. When I fill those in and click the continue button I find that the tickets I want aren't available for that date. In order to change my selection I have to go back two pages and choose a different date. Which also doesn't have the tickets I want available. I try this a few more times before getting bored and giving up.

Surely that's not a very unusual way to want to buy tickets. Almost every time I go to the theatre I'm making the same kind of query - "show me the dates where you have x tickets available for less than £y". Don't most people do the same thing? And that's exactly the kind of query that the Ticketmaster site is not set up to support. Did they do any any user testing on this interface before releasing it?

The backend of the site is bound to be a database of some kind. How hard would it be to add some more flexible query facilities?

I was going to report this to the site owners, but I can't find any contact email addresses on the site at all. Which also points to a certain kind of arrogance where they don't care what their users think of them.

So I'm off to the Old Vic to buy tickets from the Box Office. The good, old-fashioned way.

[1] And, by the way, whoever thought it was a good idea to make that page out of images should be banned from ever building another web page.

You'd think that Lord Falconer would be keeping his head down for a while after that little embarassment over the Iraq legal advice. But no, he's on Today this morning saying that he sees no "groundswell" of support for a change in the voting system. Well I don't know who he's been talking to, but from where I'm standing, political discussion has been about little else for the last two weeks.

So much for the "listening government". Though as Nik points out Blair didn't actually say what we all thought he had said.

Update: The stream for the program is here (for the next seven days). The piece on electoral reform followed by the interview with Falconer is about 1:32 into the stream.

There was a lot of important news going on yesterday. Mrs Windsor's speech in parliament for example. Or George Galloway in front of the US Senate.

Not that you'd know that if you relied on the UK tabloids for your news. They've al decided that the really important news is a pop singer's medical problems. If its front page is to be believed, the Sun has extended coverage on pages 1 to 7. The Mail and the Express both use their headlines to rant about the breakdown of society under New Labour but even they both manage to fit in photos of poor, brave Kylie.

Priorities people. It's about priorities. This is not news. Tabloids are not newspapers.

I've been using Backpack for a few days to attempt to organise my life a bit better. It's a very impressive service and I think I'm getting a bit more organised :)

And then this morning I see that they have now released a web services API so that you can access (and change) your Backpack pages programmatically. As an example of what you can do with this, take a look at the O'Reilly Radar books page and Rael's explaination of how it's built using the web services APIs provided by Backpage and Amazon.

Update: I've started work on a Perl wrapper for the API. There's a Backpage page about my experiments.

Update 2: First version of Net::Backpack is now available. It only covers part of the API, but more will be added soon.

Not that it will come to much of a surprise to anyone who has thought about it for more than a second, but the British Educational Communications and Technology Agency (BECTA) has published a report saying that schools could save significant amounts of money by using Open Source software instead of commercial software.

Last summer I wrote about Matthew Somerville, his Accessible Odeon project and how Odeon took offense to it and closed him down.

I've just got an email from Matthew saying that he's written a Greasemonkey script that cleans up the official Odeon site so that it can be used in Firefox. The script can be downloaded from the Accessible Odeon site. You'll need to get Firefox and Greasemonkey from the usual places (but if you've got any sense you'll have them already).

Of course, I've into the habit of going to the Clapham Picture House instead. It's nice to support smaller (and friendlier) cinemas, but it's good to know that the Odeon site is at least usable and that Matthew is still fighting the good fight.

When I first moved to Balham about fifteen years ago, there was a bit of a dearth of decent places to eat. Over the last couple of years this has been changing and new restaurants have been opening all the time.

One of my new favourites is Lamberts. It can be a bit pricy but the food is fabulous and the service is always excellent. And they have a Sunday lunchtime offer where you can get a three course meal for £18. We've taken to going there once or twice a month.

We were there today. It was as enjoyable as ever. I recommend you try it out if you're ever in south west London.

After being reminded of the existence of Andy White on Friday I had a look for some more of his albums in Virgin that evening. They were all a bit pricy (well, standard price and who pays standard price for CDs these days?) so I found a couple I was missing on Ebay when I got home.

Of course, it would be rude to go into Virgin and come out empty-handed. And luckily I found that Eliza Carthy has just released a new album called Rough Music so I picked that up instead.

Also, I'd been interested by the article about Sandy Denny in last Friday's Guardian. I've known about her for years but the only music I have by her is on early Fairport Convention records, so as Virgin were selling a CD called The Collection for four quid I picked that up too.

So it's been a bit of a folk-tinged weekend. Then today I remembered that I had another CD with Andy White on it. About ten years ago he recorded an album with Tim Finn and Hothouse Flowers' Liam O Maonlai. They called themselves ALT (Andy, Liam and Tim - ALT, geddit!) It's a fine album, but it was deleted years ago. I've got a copy and I spent a lot of today enjoying listening to it for the first time for several years.

If anyone is still following the saga of my health then you might be interested to know that I've finally got a letter from the doctor saying that the result from the broncospocy confirm the original diagnosis of sarcoidosis.

Which is good as I've now been taking drugs for that for a month :)

I've just been reminded how much I like Andy White as he's apparently playing a free gig at my local pub on the 23rd May.

For those of you (and I'm sure there are many) who are unfamiliar with his work, Andy has some samples on his web site, but unfortunately they are just extracts and not full songs. I particularly recommend "Street Scenes From My Heart" and "In A Groovy Kind of Way" but you'll need to hear the whole song to get the best effect. Why not buy his compilation album to see how much you like him.

I finally got round to working out what was wrong with my BBC streams program, fixing it and re-running it. So I not have a shiny new and up to date list of the BBC Radio Streams.

I'm hoping that Backstage will release some kind of API to this data so I don't have to continue scraping the data from the BBC site.

I'm also considering making some king of RSS feed and/or search facility available. But I need to think some more about that. I don't want to just make an RSS feed with all the streams in it - there are almost 3000 of them.

BBC Backstage has gone live. It all looks terribly exciting and I'll leave it to far more erudite people than me to pick over exactly what it means.

I'm just more than a little excited that they include a link to my radio streams page.

Update: Bah! They have removed me from the list. Wonder why that is.

Update: It's almost certainly because it's not an RSS feed. Of course, that can be fixed pretty easily. But I should probably fix the HTML parsing first.

A few years ago I wrote a book called Data Munging with Perl. Many reviewers were kind enough to say very nice things about it.

One reviewer who was particularly nice was Gregory Wilson who said things like

I write Python differently having read this book, and expect that the average Java or C# programmer would learn a lot from it as well. It is well written, informative, thought provoking, and will be as relevant five years from now as it is today. In short, what are you waiting for? Go and buy a copy.

Another thing that he did was to write to the publisher and suggest that the book would work just as well in other languages. In particular he suggested that a version targetting Python would be very useful. The publisher was convinced and asked me if I'd be interested in writing a Python version. I agreed and as I know little or nothing about Python we got a co-author on board (who did know Python).

Things didn't work out though. The co-author didn't have enough time to devote to the project and eventually the project was cancelled. It's a bit of a shame, particularly as I was hoping that seeing my code translated into Python was going to be a great way for me to pick up the language.

Then this week I see details of a new book called Data Crunching - Solve Everyday Problems using Java, Python. And it's written by Gregory Wilson. It seems he decided that he'd go away and fill the gap in the market himself.

I've taken a quick look at the extracts on the web site and it looks like it's an interesting book. I'll have to get a copy and take a closer look.

I hope my book at least gets a mention in the bibliography.

Update: I saw a copy of this book in Foyles recently. After flicking through it I discovered that my book isn't mentioned anywhere. Not even in the bibliography. Which, to be honest, I consider a bit rude.

Interesting article from yesterday's Observer about how the Tory party is in danger of becoming extinct.

It points out that while Tory grandees spent Friday morning crowing about how well they had done, the truth is a little different.

Tony Blair had just won an unprecedented third victory in a row for Labour, with a majority over all other parties lower than before, but still substantially larger than Margaret Thatcher's in 1979, while the Conservatives had failed to reach 200 seats (fewer than Labour won under Michael Foot in 1983).

In all the excitment before the election, I forgot to mention this article from the Guardian. They asked a number of psychics and clairvoyants what they thought the result would be. Most of them got something pretty close to the correct result, which wasn't exactly difficult, but I'd seriously recommend that anyone planning to get help from spiritual medium Camilla Ventham Fraser should think again. This is what she said.

I asked the spirit guides and then used automatic writing. The polls are flawed. Blair will be voted out. The Labour party will lose and a May miracle will occur. The Conservatives will return a government with a three-seat majority. Howard is our next prime minister. He will team up with Ukip and the Ulster Unionists. The smaller parties will become important. Kilroy-Silk will win a seat. Ukip and other independents will do well, but I don't see any Greens.

Which is about as far from accurate as you can get. She needs better spirit guides.

A new branch of Pizza Express opened in Balham over the weekend and we went in to try it out last night.

Whilst I was looking around the restaurant, my eyes were drawn to a decoration on the wall which consisted of an apparently random pattern of spotlights that were shining through a wooden panel attached to the wall. Eventually I realised that the patterns weren't random as they were repeated. I started to see them as some kind of code that needed to cracked.

From somewhere deep in my memory I dredged up the fact that Braille characters are represented as 3x2 patterns of dots. And the pattern of lights was three rows deep. By breaking the pattern into Braille-sized chunks I found that the longer repeating sequences contained a much larger number of shorter repeating patterns which were probably letters.

As I was in a Pizza Express, I tested the theory that the phrase was "Pizza Pizza Express" (which is what they often have written on the signs outside their restaurants) and was surprised to see that it fitted exactly - the characters for P, Z, E and S repeated at exactly the right places.

I memorised some of the characters so that when I got home I could check them against a Braille alphabet. And I was right. That is what the lights say.

So someone decided that it was a good idea to spell out the Pizza Express slogan in lights in Braille. Twice.

I wonder if it appears in any more of their restaurants. And I wonder how many other customers have noticed it.

If you want to check your local branch, it looks like this:

**  * *  *  *  **  * *  *  *  *  ** ** *  *   *  *
*  *   *  *    *  *   *  *     *    *  **  * *  * 
*     ** **    *     ** **       ** *  *     *  *

So here's where I'll be posting my thoughts on the election results as they come through (assuming, of course, that I have the time).

It's now coming up to ten o'clock when the polls close and the BBC will be announcing the results of their exit poll. I'm not really expecting any surprises. The only interesting thing will be the size of the predicted Labour majority and how well that compares with the final result.

Here, it's all gone very "quiet before the storm". Hope it stays that way.

10:00pm BBC are predicting a Labour majority of 66 on the basis of their exit poll. Personally I strongly suspect it'll be more than that. I expect it to be more like 100. We'll see.

10:10pm You have to wonder why the BBC try to get politicians to comment on the exit poll results. David Dimblebey has just asked John Prescott, Menzies Campbell and Liam Fox for comments and they've all just said "let's wait and see what the real results say".

10:45pm Sunderland South are the first to declare again. 4% swing from Labour to Conservative.

11:45pm Been a bit busy here as the first few results come in. The talk on the BBC seems to be about Tory frontbenchers who are in danger of losing their seats to the LibDems. Which would be fun.

00:35am First Tory gain of the night. In Putney.

01:05am Oops! Recount in Battersea.

03:35am Just catching my breath for a second and I see that Martin Linton held on to Battersea by only 163 votes.

05:10am Ok, so things were a bit busier here than I thought they would be and I haven't been able to write as much as I had hoped. But, on reflection, it looks like the protest voters have got exactly whatthey wanted. We haven't woken up with Michael Howard (of course, some of us haven't gone to sleep yet!) and Tony Blair's majority has been reduced enough to take away a lot of his power in government. It might even cut short his time as PM.

One downside though. I'd forgotten that having the Labour party losing so many seats would mean we'd have to put up with so many slimey Tories on the TV telling us how wonderful they all are. That bit has been pretty sickening.

The vast majority of the results are in and the day-shift has just arrived so I'm off to bed.

Night all.

A little plug for some of the work I've been doing over the last few weeks.

Guardian Unlimited will, of course, have full coverage of the election results as the come in overnight. Already you can see a map that shows which parties won each constituency in 2001. Clicking on a constituency will take you to a page about that constituency (for example, here's Battersea). There's another version of the map that is currently all white and will fill in with the new colours overnight.

Of course all the stories will appear on the main election page and I'm sure the election blog will be getting lively later on.

There are a couple more goodies that I'll add to this list once they appear on the site.

I'll be up all night monitoring our results feed and if everything goes relatively smoothly I'll be blogging what's going on here and I also hope to be able to join in the liveblogging discussion over at Chicken Yoghurt.

Busy night. Let's be careful out there.

Update: Now on the GU site there's a state of the nation scorecard and a nice little popup version that will auto-refresh for you.

I bin votin'. It's fun. You should all do it too.

I saw The Hitchhikers' Guide to the Galaxy over the weekend. Having read quite a lot of negative stuff about it, I didn't really go in with very high expections. But actually, it turns out to be really rather good. Oh, sure, the plot is different to any previous version (as they all are) and some of my favourite pieces of dialogue had been removed, but all in all I was very impressed.

There were three things that I didn't like.

1. Zaphod. I don't think that Sam Rockwell really understood Zaphod's character. Zaphod isn't as shallow and stupid as he seems. Rockwell played him as just stupid and nasty. Oh, and the flip-top head was rubbish.
2. Arthur and Trillian. I don't mean the characters. I thought that Martin Freeman and Zooey Deschanel both played the parts well. What I didn't like was the romance between them. Apart from anything else, what are they going to do if they get round to filming the fourth book and they have to introduce Fenchurch?
3. The ending. The Earth is back. Everything is restored to how it was just before the Vogons destroyed it. Oh please!

But those are realtively minor quibbles alongside the things I really liked. All of the actors (with the exception of Rockwell) seemed to understand their characters well. Bill Nighy was particularly good as Slartibartfast. The new scenes fitted in well. I enjoyed seeing the Vogons home planet (complete with "scintillating jewelled scuttling crabs"). And the scenes on the Magrathean factory floor were spectacular. It's amazing what you can do when you're not constrained by a BBC budget :-)

So as someone who has been a huge fan of all things Hitchhiker since I first heard Fit the Second[1] in 1978 I can't understand people who say this is somehow inferior to the other versions. As the first version I encountered, the radio series will always have a special place in my heart, but to me this version has as much right as any other to be considered "real" Hitchhiker.

[1] I missed the first part. Sorry. I know that means I'm not a real fan!

Polly Toynbee seems to think that the anti-Blair protest voters will have achieved their aim, even if the Labour party retain a large majority tomorrow.

Even if Labour wins a sizable majority, Blair's time is over as the ground shifts fast beneath his feet; he is yesterday's man. By 2am on Friday morning, after the first flood of results, the only question in the television studios will be: when will he go? It will be the only question in the Westminster lobby, twice a day, every day. Even a very unlikely three-figure majority will make no difference to his own trajectory now. If Labour wins, it will be despite not because of him, and that marks a mighty change in the political weather.

Alexis Petridis getting nicely bitchy in a review of the Cream reunion gig.

Hendrix, rather unsportingly, fetched up in London two weeks after their first gig, and immediately set about making them look a bit stodgy. He has continued to do so after his death; one of the few benefits attached to choking on your own vomit at 27 being that it prevents you from reaching middle age, donning an Armani suit and crooning deadly soft rock ballads about how your wife looks wonderful tonight.

Must remember to add the new Cream compilation CD to my Amazon wishlist.

Gary Younge on Labour's scare tactics.

There is as much veracity to the claim that voting for the Liberal Democrats will let the Tories through the back door as there was that Saddam Hussein was 45 minutes from killing us all.

Buried a few screens down on this page is some interesting news about the BBC's RSS feeds. The key points are:

• A loosening of the terms of use to allow all sites to use the feeds, instead of the current "personal use only" license
• A feed for most recently published stories
• Feeds based on user-defined searches
• A large promotion of RSS feeds across the site

This will all be happening in the second week of May.

They also say that they are aiming to have 10% of their site traffic driven by RSS by the end of this year.

I was starting to think that our road ha fallen off the election map. Apart from a few leaflets we got through the door earlier this week I hadn't seen any sign of any campaigning activity.

Then today, as we get back from a walk on the common, we find that the Labour party have put a copy of their manifesto through the letterbox. And it had a label on it that addresses it to Gill and me so it's obviously a targetted campaign tactic. I thought about buying their manifesto a couple of weeks ago but couldn't find any copies on sale in Balham so it's nice to get a free copy.

And then the image of the Labour party as a well-organised campaigning machine was shattered ten minutes ago when another Labour canvasser turned up on the doorstep with no knowledge at all of the earlier visit. He left us a copy of a letter from Robin Cook which repeats the tired old "a protest vote leads to a Tory government" nonsense.

As you'll see (well those of you who don't read this through an RSS reader) I've given this site a bit of a redesign. I like the idea of going back to something pretty basic. It's still not quite how I want it so I'll be tuning it over the next few days and weeks. If anyone is interested the Movable Type templates that I've used are available here.

I've given a similar makeover to my main site, but so far the changes there are only cosmetic. It really needs a complete re-organisation. It's just grown organically over the six years it's been around and that really shows. Tidying isn't one of my best skills though, so it might take a few weeks to get it how i want it.

Update: I've just noticed that the new design is pretty comprehensively broken in IE. Not sure exactly what IE CSS bugs we're tickling but I'll try and sort it out over the next few days. In the meantime, if you're using IE then you really need your head examined. Switch to Firefox and help make the web a nicer place.