Technology, Books and Other Neat Stuff

Daily Twitterings

Wed, 14 May 2008 23:07:32 GMT

15:19 Booked a night in a hotel that looks like something out of Logan's Run. The skiffy geek in me is secretly delighting.

15:29 Played with a Blackberry Bold. It's a very smart, very fast device. It's also clearly only the first of a family of devices.

20:55 Fascinating machine translation demo from Ray Kurzweil.

Daily Twitterings

Tue, 13 May 2008 23:07:11 GMT

14:34 HP + EDS - not good news for IBM. This one is going to be very interesting to watch.

14:38 At RIM's conference in sunny, hot, Orlando. Thank goodness for air conditioning

16:26 Interesting session on how RIM run their Blackberry infrastructure. Lots of real world tips and considerable transparency.

Daily Twitterings

Mon, 12 May 2008 23:03:52 GMT

01:45 Last of the copy done. Time to hit the sack before flying out to Orlando for WES tomorrow!

11:32 Free wifi in the Virgin Lounge at Gatwick. Of to Orlando for WES!

Daily Twitterings

Sun, 11 May 2008 23:05:07 GMT

16:24 Hot and sticky. But he spare room is ready for the house sitters...

17:17 S3 article nearly done. That'll be the third tutorial this week. Necxt - packing for flying tomorrow.

You can't keep the good ones down for long...

Sat, 10 May 2008 17:41:00 GMT

First there was The Register, then came The Inquirer. Now Mike Magee is back with a new experiment in online IT journalism, The IT Examiner.

The first cut of the site is up, and it's looking interesting - especially as it blends western and eastern news in one place, with journalists based in Bangalore doing much of the writing. I suspect the outsourcing section of the site will be worth following. The site only went live yesterday, so there's not much there yet, but as with all online writing the value is in the corpus, and things should grow pretty rapidly now.

Bit of a theme going on with the site names, Mike!

Open Space Invader

Sat, 10 May 2008 17:33:38 GMT

Parakeet flying over Richmond Park. The aliens among us squawk and screech their torrid affairs from the tree tops...

Richmond Park, London
May 2008

Daily Twitterings

Fri, 09 May 2008 23:06:36 GMT

15:46 Another thing I like about Mesh - it's easy to mesh something just in case I might need it while on the road.

19:22 Finishing off some more words. And then about to start others. Ah, the life of the wordsmith. Working all day over a hot word anvil.

22:18 About to put my 3000th picture on Flickr

Photo 3000

Fri, 09 May 2008 22:58:18 GMT

My 3,000^th image on Flickr comes from a walk through Richmond Park's Isabella Plantation at the height of the azalea season.

The park is one of my favourite places for photography, so it's fitting that it's the source of a milestone image.

Richmond Park, London
May 2008

Asking a subset of the LazyWeb: Ad Management Software

Thu, 08 May 2008 23:36:15 GMT

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!

Daily Twitterings

Thu, 08 May 2008 23:06:54 GMT

10:02 NAs recovered itself overnight. Whoo hoo!

13:03 Lunch at Roast in Borough Market. Ah! The aromas...

Daily Twitterings

Wed, 07 May 2008 23:05:41 GMT

11:45 Another sunny day in the City. So a good day to spend delving into source code and writing about it...

12:10 New version of TinyTwitter. Very pretty.

12:29 Blue butterflies in London - the air really has improved. Score another for the congestion charge!

13:39 Just been up on the roof - what a lovely day it is...

16:54 NAS array rebuilding... 7.1% down...

New aphorisms for our time

Wed, 07 May 2008 18:11:02 GMT

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

(29.4% Complete, Time Remaining 399.8 Minutes)

RetroGPS

Wed, 07 May 2008 16:01:25 GMT

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...

10 hours and counting...

Wed, 07 May 2008 15:48:12 GMT

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.

By the Russian walls

Wed, 07 May 2008 14:55:59 GMT

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

Daily Twitterings

Tue, 06 May 2008 23:04:21 GMT

18:23 Wondering if anyone can send me a BrightKite invite?

19:21 Hooking BrightKite to FireEagle... Will my kite catch fire? Or will the eagle just get dazzled?

Someone's stolen Peter Gabriel's web servers

Tue, 06 May 2008 20:27:31 GMT

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!

Signs of summer (one of a hefty series)

Tue, 06 May 2008 20:16:10 GMT

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...

Daily Twitterings

Mon, 05 May 2008 23:06:53 GMT

11:28 Yahoo! down 17% in Germany... tinyurl.com/5fxr6r

12:09 Riding the Fire Eagle at last... (and signed up for Google App Engine, too)

15:49 Trader Joes Everything Mini Crackers FTW

16:04 Reading Cory's "Little Brother". A damn fine book that everyone should read if they believe in personal liberty and privacy

19:50 Download link for the CC of "Little Brother" - tinyurl.com/569vuv - If there's one book you should read this US election year, it ...

21:20 I'm testing Yoono !

21:26 Nearly done with this DeepZoom tutorial. The new build of the Composer is really a big improvement.

22:52 How to get 100M of project files to my editor?

23:10 YouSendit and Alzip save the day!

Daily Twitterings

Sun, 04 May 2008 23:06:58 GMT

13:09 New version of Deep Zoom Composer out...

14:13 Listening to KFOG while at my desk in London. At, the wonders of the intertubes and a decent rock station...

21:24 It's that time of year again: fox sex! There's one barking a call at the bottom of the garden right now...

No (for now) Microhoo

Sun, 04 May 2008 00:43:42 GMT

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...

Graphing classic 80s records.

Sat, 03 May 2008 23:39:30 GMT

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...

Daily Twitterings

Sat, 03 May 2008 23:03:28 GMT

17:14 You know you live in a middle class area when your local Waitrose sells selection boxes of seasonal eggs

20:54 Delving into an interesting SDK. I like companies that open as much as they can to developers

21:30 Sad that I'm missing MakerFaire this year... Still, w00t for WES, FIRe, (possibly Baycon), Google I/O and two weeks of TechEd...

21:35 We had a cracking start-up idea last night. Now to work out what to do with it...

Having a bad technology day...

Sat, 03 May 2008 20:29:27 GMT

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?

Not your usual selection box...

Sat, 03 May 2008 17:48:09 GMT

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!