Some folk from a project I'm distantly involved with are looking for ad management software for a web site.

Any recommendations from the folk out there? It'd be good to hear what's good and what horror stories people have had.

I don't have many details of what they want, but I suspect it'll be banner and side bar management with some AdWords integration as well.

Thanks!

"It's like watching a RAID array rebuild".

(29.4% Complete, Time Remaining 399.8 Minutes)

A 1927 navigation device. Scroll the map through the viewer to guide you on any of 20 or so pre-set routes.

Yes, I know, it's a link to the Daily Mail. And from a Guardianista like me, too. Sorry...

The house NAS is slowly on its way back to health.

One of the four drives in the RAID array lunched itself a while back, and I received a replacement this afternoon. Fitting it was a snap, the Buffalo Terastation Pro uses quick release drive caddies, so all I had to do was unscrew and replace the drive. The folk at RL Supplies had the right drives, and they delivered the replacement pretty quickly.

(Actually, the first thing I had to do was find the key to open the drive bay door, which in my usual efficiency I had "filed". Once that panic was over I could get to work.)

Once it was in I powered up the NAS to discover that the crash had also lunched its firmware. Luckily I could download some replacement code, and fire it off at the box. Of course the firmware updater needed me to turn of the firewall on my desktop PC so it could actually see the NAS. Still, updating the firmware was pretty straight forward, so I didn't have to much to worry about there.

Reflashed, it booted, and I could finally see the web UI. The three remaining disks were OK, and all that remained was clicking the "rebuild array" button. Oh, and waiting. And waiting. It's looking as though the process will take about ten hours. At least I was running RAID 5 and could do the restore, so waiting for the data to come back is really not too much of a hassle compared to not having anything.

And then I'll be able to get back to the house music collection - as I've ripped everything we have and stored it on the NAS. And, err, the wedding photos.

Phew.

4.6% done.

A nicely atmospheric shot of Fort Ross, a 19th century Russian trading post on the Northern California coast, between Bodega Bay and Fort Bragg. It's a really rather beautiful, but very isolated place - but the sea otter pelts were tempting.

The day we were there, the whole of the place was being used by several families worth of Russian re-enactors, all in a mix of historical and modern dress. It was slightly odd watching a group of peasant children singing modern pop songs while using toy guns as air guitars.

Fort Ross, California
April 2008

According to El Reg, the servers have been stolen from the data centre where they've been running both his and the WOMAD sites...

Maybe someone was listening to this song as they walked off with the hardware...

I know something about opening windows and doors
I know how to move quietly to creep across creaky wooden floors
I know where to find precious things in all your cupboards and drawers
Slipping the clippers
Slipping the clippers through the telephone wires
The sense of isolation inspires
Inspires me
I like to feel the suspense when I'm certain you know I am there
I like you lying awake, your baited breath charging the air
I like the touch and the smell of all the pretty dresses you wear
Intruders happy in the dark
Intruder come
Intruder come and leave his mark, leave his mark

Still, the site is slowly coming back - so score one for data recovery.

Oddly Gabriel is keynoting at Salesforce.com's European DreamForce event in London this week. I don't think this makes him quite the poster boy for SaaS!

It's starting to warm up in London. The birds are singing late into the evening, and the windows are starting to open all along the street. People are wearing shorts, and there's a definite scent of barbecue charcoal and paraffin on the gentle breeze. The cats have rediscovered the catflap

And me?

I've had my bi-annual haircut and no longer look like the slightly hairier-twin of Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall. In fact this time the barber seems to have been even more drastic than I expected, and I've ended up with the closest thing I've had to a short back-and-sides since, ooh, since I had my first job. Still, it's a definite weight off my shoulders...

News has just come out that Microsoft is walking away from its bid for Yahoo! after raising its offer to $33 a share.

I'm not really surprised at this result. As much as he's like to think so Yahoo! isn't worth the $37 a share that Jerry Yang was holding out for, and I really don't think Microsoft wanted to go hostile considering the damage it would have done to the Yahoo! engineering teams it wanted. More than $33 a share, and Steve Ballmer would have been risking an awful lot of additional gearing that would have ended up diluting Microsoft's control of its own destiny.

So what's next? One option is to for Microsoft to take the same approach it did with Borland in the 90s - so recruiters in the Bay Area can probably look for a bumper year as Microsoft starts to cherry pick the talent it wants from Yahoo!'s engineering teams. That'll be considerably cheaper for Microsoft, though any results will take time to filter through its product pipeline. It took nearly 10 years for .NET to get to where it is today...

The other option is, I think, going to depend on how the Microsoft and Yahoo! stock prices behave over the next quarter or two. Monday should see a steep drop in Yahoo!'s price, and an equivalent (but not so dramatic) rise in Microsoft. The spectre of a hefty gearing has depressed Microsoft's stock, and the prospect of a payday has pushed Yahoo!'s up. If Yahoo! continues to trend down, its board is going to come under considerable pressure from institutional shareholders as to why it didn't take the $33 offer. Yahoo! will end having to approach various suitors, but there won't be a white knight until Microsoft comes in with a bid at around $28 (or possibly even lower) a share, which the Yahoo! board will be forced to accept.

Either way Microsoft gets the people and skills it wants for less than it was originally planning to pay, though the second option adds a few additional properties and the trauma of a merger...

Originally posted as a comment to this entry by major_clanger

It's surprising how quickly you can knock these things up in Google Docs...

What is it with me and card readers today?

The ATM at my bank ate my card, and then the ticket machine at the local supermarket refused to return my ticket. At least the bank manager was able to retrieve my plastic from the depths of the ATM, where it was jammed into some subtle piece of machinery, and the parking attendant reset the ticket machine so it eventually (with some assistance from marypcb) disgorged the sliver of card...

But still, what is it with me and card readers today?

I'm of the age where chocolate selection boxes were a staple of Christmas. My grandparents would give one each to myself and my brother, and my mother would ration the confectionery out over the next month or so.

Today's discovery came as a bit of a surprise. While wandering around Waitrose I spotted a rather different sort of selection box, from the Clarence Court traditional-breeds free-range egg folk. Instead of chocolate you got a selection of seasonal eggs - one goose, two duck, a brace of pheasant, and a handful of quails' eggs.



It's an interesting idea, bringing back some traditional eggs that most people don't actually eat. I know I've not had goose egg or pheasant eggs - though I do think duck eggs make for a much better fry-up than hens' (they crisp just right on the bottom when cooked in a fresh extra virgin olive oil)...

And if you want to check up on the birds, there's a hen cam!

marypcb at the Chandelier Tree in Leggett, California.

And yes, I did drive a car through it. And through another tree further up the Avenue of Giants. Yet more trips to Roadside Americana so you don't have to. Actually driving through a tree is pretty cool, and remember, P.J O'Rourke applies^*.

^*"There's lots of argument about what kind of car drives best. Some say a front-wheel drive car. Some say a rear-wheel drive. I say it's a rental car. There are things you can do with a rental car that are just impossible with any other kind of vehicle."

Recently I blogged about Evernote, part of a suite of tools I'm using to try and improve my notoriously faulty memory. I've also mentioned Dopplr, and I'm connected to quite a few of you out there on there too.

Since then I've found a handful of extra sites and services that help me organise myself.

First there's Tripit. At first glance it's something of a competitor to Dopplr, but in practice it's quite different. I'm using it as a place to organise all my travel itineraries - flights, car hire, hotels, whatever. You just forward the site any confirmation emails and it builds a complete itinerary for you, with access to additional information about your destination. It's an excellent personal companion to the more public Dopplr trip sharing tool, though I can give people access to the actual details of a trip on a trip-by-trip basis.

Next there's ReQall, which is a simple reminder service. All I (or anyone I've let connect to me) need to do is IM, email or phone the service to give it a task I need reminding about. I can send it notes too. The phone side of it is especially useful - there's a UK number - and it uses voice recognition to take my message and stick it on the service, and when it gets to my deadline it'll email, text or IM me with the reminder I've left. of course there's a web option, and there's also a dedicated Firefox toolbar...

Another tool I've been looking at, but haven't used in anger, is Presdo. It's a scheduling tool that aims to try and find appropriate places to meet. I have a lot of meetings where I need to find "somewhere in the West End" or "somewhere near San Mateo", and I often have no idea what's good, quiet coffee shop, or a place to eat breakfast, or... Well, you get the picture. Anything that helps with that's got to be a winner...

Then there's Microsoft's Live Mesh which mixes device-to-device synchronisation and an online store. I'm currently using it to keep my working set of files in sync between desktop and laptop, but as Mesh adds features (and I've seen some of the internal stuff that MS will be rolling out as the beta gets larger), it becomes a framework which starts to be an implementation of David Weinberger's Small Pieces Loosely Joined, where application endpoints share information over the net.

So what are you folks out there using? Is there something I'm missing that'll make my life easier?

It may be a little blurred, but egads, it's in the sky, and it's coming for me!

San Francisco, California
April 2008

Hobbiton USA is a very very strange place, and we stopped there to save you all from the experience of seeing an unconvincing blue Gandalf outside a decaying hobbit hole.

(Un)fortunately the attraction was closed for the season, and we were able to avoid the wrath of Smaug.

sbisson and marypcb: visiting roadside Americana so you don't have to.

California
April 2008