Last night I should probably have been working on my tutorial for tomorrow's London Perl Workshop but instead I was uploading photos of New Zealand to Flickr.
So now there are sets from Christchurch and Fox Glacier as well as a more general set of photos of the South Island. There's also a South Island collection which contains all of those sets.
There are a few more South Island photos to be cleaned up and uploaded, and then next week I'll start work on the North Island shots.
The naming of a teddy bear is a serious business.
I mean, you wouldn't want to accidentally name one after a known paedophile.
Those of you who were reading my blog back in July will remember a number of posts about me buying a digital SLR camera which I was going to take away on holiday with me. You may be wondering why you haven't seen any photos.
The truth is that I made a fundamental mistake with the camera. I didn't check my equipment before using it. And that led to a couple of nasty problems.
I still don't know what to do about the second problem. I have a couple of hundred photos that I just can't read. Any software I use claims that they aren't JPEGs. I'm sure there's a tool somewhere that will fix this. I'll keep looking.
The first problem, however, can be fixed. This weekend I made friends with The Gimp's Clone Tool which seems to be a great way to remove unsightly blemishes from photos.
It's a manual process though. And I have about eight hundred photos to fix. So they'll be appearing over the next few weeks. As a taster I've uploaded some of the photos I took in Singapore as we passed through on our way to New Zealand.
Yesterday I was late getting to the Tube station and unfortunately got involved in this unpleasantness. I arrived at about 7:55am to see a train just pulling out of the station. It turned out to be the last one for about forty minutes.
All of that time, the Underground staff were advising us that service was suspended at that we should use alternative routes. They always say that. No matter how trivial the problem is, as soon as service is suspended for whatever reason, they start to encourage people to use alternative routes.
Now I've been using the tube pretty regularly for about twenty-five years. I've seen a lot of tube suspensions and in all of that time there have been maybe five occasions where taking an alternative route was the right things to do. Most of the time the right choice is to ignore the tube staff and stay put. Usually the service will restart and get you to your destination quicker than any other option. Think about it. If the alternative route was any good you would probably have taken it in the first place. And now it's just going to be overcrowded from the people who are talking TfL's advice and switching from your original route.
And that's how it worked out again yesterday. Yes I had to stand about for forty minutes. But there's no way that either getting a train to Victoria or a bus to Stockwell would have been any quicker. They would have both been massively overcrowded.
So that's my advice. Always stay put. Of course, it would be nice if we could get a bit more useful information from the tube staff. But they always seem to think that the current problem could potentially drag on for ages. And, to be fair to them, sometime it can. But on more than one occasion I've been on a tube that has finally been given the signal to move on when the platform announcements are still saying that they can't say how much longer the problem will last.
There was something else that struck me yesterday. And this might be a bit more controversial. Yesterday's incident was caused by someone banging their head on a tube. We were told that some had been taken critically ill which might be overstating the case a little. The tube was held up for over half an hour whilst they got medical attention for this person. All that time there were thousands of people waiting for a tube to take them to work. In that situation do you leave the person on the tube waiting for medical attention that might take some time to arrive. Or do you get the person off the train as quickly as possible in order to minimise the effects on the rush hour tube service? Maybe they need platform staff who are better trained to make that judgement call. Personally, I think you need a really good reason to bring the kind of chaos that we saw yesterday to one of London's main transport routes.
But maybe I'm a bit of a heartless bastard.
This site (together with a number of other sites that I run on .uk domains and many domains run by other people) returned to life sometime this morning having fallen off the internet some time on Friday evening.
I use 123 Reg to handle the DNS for all of my .uk domains. It seems that this was a bad idea. They had some kind of DNS outage. It took them twelve hours to acknowledge the problem on the their status page and somewhere between another twelve and twenty-four hours to fix it.
Of course, this shouldn't happen. All domains have at least two DNS servers. And they should be on different network segments. So it's currently unclear how both of the DNS servers for my domains could be broken at the same time.
I've been using 123 Reg for the past few years because Gandi, my preferred DNS supplier didn't support .uk domains. They recently added that support and this weekend's problems have galvanised me into making the switch. My .uk domains will all be moving over the next week or so.
But I'm sorry if you've been unable to read any of my sites this weekend. And whilst the outage was short enough that any mail should still be queued for delivery somewhere on the internet, if you've sent something that I haven't replied to, then please resend it.
Update: I've just received an email from Pipex (who own 123 Reg) in response to this blog posting. It's interesting that they respond (in private!) to a public blog posting before they respond to the support mail that I sent them on Friday.
The email doesn't add much useful information. I was going to ask for permission to quote it here, but I see it's almost identical to the statement from 123 Reg quoted in this story on The Register covering the outage.
123-reg experienced intermittent performance issues on its DNS servers between late afternoon on Friday 16 November and Sunday 18 November. This meant that some customers have encountered difficulties with their domain names during this period.This problem was caused by a combination of excessive loading on the DNS servers and a rare hardware failure. During this time, 123-reg engineers have replaced the hardware and full service has been resumed.
We apologise to our customers for the inconvenience that the outage would have caused and we have begun an investigation to identify the cause of the failure, and any necessary actions required will be implemented without delay.
They still haven't explained how they managed to lose all DNS capability, despite the redundancy that is built into DNS.
And if anyone from Pipex is reading this and is thinking of sending another mail, why not leave a comment instead. That is, after all, how blogs are supposed to work.
Update: Tee hee. I just replied to that mail to see if I can get some more information. But the mail bounced back. Apparently that users mailbox is over quota. I wonder why?
Two weeks ago I wrote about how the new, "improved" RSS feeds from The Sun are, in fact, completely broken. In that two weeks nothing has changed and the feeds are still broken.
Much as I enjoy seeing the Sun web team making a fool of themselves like this, I would actually like it even more if they would acknowledge their mistake and fix the problem. To that end, I've emailed them about it three times in the last two weeks. But all my mail seems to have been ignored. I've had no response and the problems haven't been fixed.
I'm pretty sure that the most critical problem (the broken URLs that are included in the feeds) is something that could be fixed in two minutes by someone who has access to the right template files on the Sun's web server.
So, given that I can't get any response from the contact address advertised on their web site, does anyone have any other suggestions? Do any of you know anyone who works in the Sun's web team or do you have any other avenues that I could try.
Or shall we just all sit back and laugh at the Sun for getting it so wrong?
I mentioned this when I signed it a year ago, but I've just noticed that today is the closing date for the petition to abolish faith schools.
There are currently 19,063 on the petition. It would be great if it could get to 20,000 by the end of the day.
So if you're the kind of sensible person who doesn't believe that children should be taught fairy stories as fact and you haven't already signed the petition, then please get over there and sign it today.
On Saturday I went to see the Sex Pistols at the Brixton Academy. Don't really have a lot to say about the Pistols themselves (they've become a pretty tight band over the last thirty years I enjoyed them a lot) but there were a couple of things that interested me.
Firstly the support acts. We arrived just as the Cribs were finishing, so I can't really comment on them. But the other support act was Goldie. I confess that it was me who said "let's get there in time to see Goldie, he might be interesting". And I'm happy to admit that it was a huge mistake.
As soon as the Cribs finished, the PA started playing some terrible drum and bass music (Is that a tautology? Is there any other kind of drum and bass music?) Initially we assumed that this was a bad choice of background music whilst Goldie was setting up, but after twenty minutes or so (of what sounded to our untutored ears to be the same record) we realised that there was a DJ deck on the left of the stage and this was actually Goldie's set that we were listening to. This torture went on for about an hour. At one point there was some slight relief when he played Public Image's "Public Image", but immediately afterwards he went back to (the same?) drum and bass. We obviously weren't alone in our opinions on the entertainment. Towards the end of his set there were two or three gaps between tracks. And those gaps were filled with the loudest boos that I've ever heard an act get. The Sex Pistols fans were not enjoying Goldie one bit. But he ignored our obvious dissatisfaction and continued to the end of his set.
Whoever decided that Goldie was a good choice of support needs their head examined. I've seen some crap gigs in my time, but this was by far the worst.
The other thing that I wanted to talk about was the way that Sex Pistols fans have grown up. One of the friends that I went with is the same age as me and we were joking about how we've become the blokes who stand at the back at gigs and wondering whether the venue would be full of blokes who wanted to stand at the back.
It looks like the Sex Pistols fan base these days is largely drawn from the same gene pool as the people that Lloyd met at the faux Black Sabbath gig he was at on the same night. They were all "fat, bald and a mite grumpy". But here's the difference between the old metal fans and the old punks. The old metal fans all wanted to sit down and enjoy the gig. The old punks still thought it was 1977 and they wanted to pogo the night away. We were standing about three quarters of the way to the back of the hall. Far enough, we hoped, to avoid any moshing that might happen. But as the Pistols came on and played their first song - "Pretty Vacant" - the crowd around us erupted in a way that I haven't seen for thirty years. People were throwing themselves (and their friends) around in a manner that sixteen-stone men shouldn't really be thrown around. We let as many as possible of them push past us and positioned ourselves about ten feet nearer the back wall.
Of course after three minutes of these intense exercise, age, weight and fear of a heart attack caught up with these people. Most of them spent the rest of the gig standing still, pointing at the roof and singing along at the tops of their voices.
I first became aware of the new advertising campaign for Oxfam Unwrapped in Balham tube station a few days ago. There was a picture of Helena Bonham-Carter wrapped up like a christmas present with the slogan "say no to crap christmas presents".
To be honest I was a little confused for a second or two. I couldn't for the life of me see why anyone would see Helena Bonham-Carter as a crap christmas present. Then I realised my mistake. You're supposed to think that she's just been given a crap christmas present and that she's gagged (by a christmas bow that represents politeness) into not saying what she thinks about it. And the way to avoid being seen as someone who gives crap presents to people like Helena is to buy them from Oxfam Unwrapped.
I like the idea of Oxfam Unwrapped a lot. You give Oxfam money and they buy something useful and send it to the developing world. The people who you bought the present for get a card telling them what you've bought and where it's gone. I used it a couple of years ago. I bought a goat for a couple of friends. It was much appreciated.
If you want to avoid the traditional commercialisation of christmas, then you could do much worse than buying your presents from Oxfam
The story so far:
The people behind the films based on His Dark Materials decided to remove any direct references to god in order to avoid offending religious people.
However, the Catholic League decided that the cuts weren't deep enough and called for a boycott of the film.
Christian groups such as the Catholic League have criticised the movie and charged the intentional removal of anti-religious themes as a ploy to encourage kids to read Pullman’s pro-atheism books.
So you remove the church from the films (wrongly, in my opinion) only to be accused of doing it to encourage more children to read the books. There's no way to win in this situation.
And anyway, since when was encouraging children to read such a bad idea? And if christianity is such convincing view of the universe why would you worry if children came into contact with alternative points of view? Sounds to me as though some people are worried that children exposed to alternative explanations of the universe might just see through the nonsense of religion and start thinking rationally.
Which would never do.
The BBC Backstage mailing list has briefly turned its attention from the iPlayer's DRM and Ashley Highfield's estimates of Linux usage and is actually having an interesting conversation about URL schemes.
This was all set off by an email sent out to participants in the BBC archive trial. The mail used TinyURL to shorten a couple of long URLs that it mentioned. The URLs in question were
Long-time readers might remember that I'm interested in the problems that people have with URLs, so you won't be surprised that this discussion piqued my interest.
The first interesting point that was raised was that URL-shortening services like TinyURL can be used to disguise dubious addresses in a phishing attack. When clicking on links in mail it's always a good idea to ensure that you know which site the link is taking you too. URL-shortening services prevent you from doing this as the URL you see it is to, for example, tinyurl.com. It's unlikely, of course, that anyone wants to get your login details to the BBC archive trial, but it's certainly a bad habit for an organisation like the BBC to be encouraging.
The main point, for me, of a URL shortening service is that it's an easy way to share URLs from sites that have nasty addressing schemes which lead to unmanageably long URLs - like the URLs created by most e-commerce and content management systems (or, at least, most of the ones that I see being used). It's just a fact of internet life that you often want to share a URL which is far too long for sane people to deal with. And URL-shortening services are perfect for cases like that. You can shorten a long URL to a short link that won't get broken by your friends' email program.
But I see that as a solution to a temporary problem. As some point in the future, we will no longer have unmanageably long URLs. Everyone designing URL schemes will understand how they should work and no-one will encode session information in URLs. Well, I can dream can't I?
More practically, URL-shortening is a solution to the problem of sharing problematic URLs when you have no control over the URL scheme in question. In other words, the problem of sharing other people's URLs. If you're trying to share one of your own URLs and you find yourself wanting to use a URL shortening service, then perhaps you should be reconsidering your URL scheme.
And that's why I don't think that the BBC should be using things like TinyURL. They shouldn't need to as they control the URLs that they are sharing. Personally I think that the two URLs in question are pretty good URLs. They are both easily readable and they aren't too long. Oh, you can make picky suggestions for improving them (I'd want to lose the '2' from 'login2.shtml' at least) but they are a vast improvement over most of the URLs you see out on the web. But if however composed the email thought that they were too long to include, then they should have fixed the URLs rather than resorting to TinyURL. I realise that in an organisation like the BBC getting the relevant web server configuration in place might take time, but that's just another argument for getting your URL scheme right from the start.
Your URLs are your address on the web. They are how people find the information that you want to share with them. It's well worth putting some effort into them.
As I mentioned yesterday, I've made some fixes to my UK newspaper RSS feeds page. The fixes include
The Independent section is currently broken. They have re-organised their RSS links page into a hierarchy and I need to put a bit more work into parsing it. Hopefully I'll do that tomorrow.
I also need to revisit all of the other papers' sections to ensure that all of the feeds are being extracted.
When I started this project a couple of years ago, each paper published a handful of RSS feeds. And only the broadsheets even bothered. Now the tabloids are in on the act too and with typical tabloid fervour they have gone completely over the top and are publishing huge numbers of feeds. It's clear to me that my single page format is only barely manageable at this point and I need to rethink how this site is going to work.
But anyway, today's version is an improvement on yesterdays. Hope you find it useful.
It's been a while since the "sensational soaraway" Sun started publishing RSS feeds of their stories. I'm subscribed to a couple of their feeds (it keeps my blood pressure up) but I noticed a couple of hours ago that the feeds I was subscribed to no longer exist.
It seems that at some point in the last few weeks they have completely revamped all of their feeds. The details of the new feeds are on their site. Unfortunately the new feeds have been designed by someone who apparently knows very little about how RSS is supposed to work. These best example is that the links within the feeds are all relative instead of absolute - by which I mean that they don't include the server address. For example, one story in the current news feed contains the URL:
where it should be the full URL
Relative links only work for links within the same site. RSS feeds are (almost by definition) supposed to be displayed on other sites and therefore relative links won't work.
Having discovered this, I decided to check the feed with the online web feed validation tool (something that the developers really should have done for themselves) only to find that they really haven't done very well at all.
Earlier this week, Martin pointed out that the Daily Star have also started to publish RSS feeds, so I was planning to do some work on my newspaper feeds page this week. Looks like I'll have to do some work on the Sun section of that site as well.
Update: I was just looking at Martin's post about the top 100 UK newspaper web feeds and I noticed that the most popular Sun feed (their news feed) had 12,000 subscribers (and that's just in Google Reader). The figures are for the old feed. As the old Sun feed now just returns a 404 error, the Sun have just potentially lost 12,000 readers. RSS feed addresses are as important as any other URL on you web site. It should be as permanent as you can possibly make it. If you change feed URLs for some reason then you should put redirections in place so that your old readers can still find you.
This change gives every impression of being carried out by a complete amateur. I hope the Sun didn't pay too much for it.
Nadine Dorries is the MP for Mid Bedfordshire. On her web site she has something that she calls a blog, although it only really resembles one superficially. Up until a couple of days ago, the biggest problem with it was that it didn't allow linking to a particular entry, you could only link to a page containing all of the entries on a particular day. A couple of days ago things changed and the site became even less blog-like.
You'll have seen the recent news about the Commons science and technology committee's report on the abortion law. Dorries was one of two members of that committee (the other was Bob Spinks) who didn't agree with the report's findings and issued their own "minority report".
In that report they say this:
We were greatly concerned to read in the Guardian on 27 October an article clearly aimed at undermining the credibility of Professor John Wyatt, which contained detailed information about Wyatt’s evidence, which was passed by him to the committee after his oral evidence session, and which could only have been passed on to the journalist concerned by a member of the Select Committee. There should be an enquiry about how this information got into the public domain and as to whether such a personal attack represents a serious breach of parliamentary procedure..
The author of the article in question was Ben Goldacre of the Bad Science web site. In a blog posting, Goldacre points out that the information that Dorries and Spinks are so concerned about him having access to is all in the public domain.
Readers of Goldacre's blog tried valiantly to post comments to Dorries' blog explaining her error, but none of these comments were published. Eventually Dorries posted another entry on her blog explaining that she would no longer be publishing any comments on blog. She claims that it's because she doesn't have time to moderate the comments before posting them. A cynic may well think that it's because she doesn't want to run the risk of people pointing out her errors.
And this is, of course, where Dorries' web site loses all right to be called a blog. Too many politicians are deliberately misunderstanding the point of blogging. A blog is a great way to build up an interaction with your audience (in the case of an MP, your constituents) but too often these days we see blogs just being used as a monologue rather than a conversation. Even when sites allow comments, too many people prefer to remove (or not publish in the first place) comments that show them in a bad light or try to hold them accountable for their mistakes.
Of course, people should be free to publish or not publish whatever they want on their web sites. but if you're not prepared to have a decent conversation with your readers, then don't call it a blog. It's just a marketing tool.
More on this from several other blogs. And Tim has set up an alternative place for people to comment on Dorries' output.
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