HMV gift voucher
I have a dilema. To thank me for fixing their computer someone today gave me an HMV Gift card with £15 on it. I’ve had a look on the HMV web site and I can’t find anything there which I want which won’t be me giving money to the RIAA. Added to that is the fact that if I buy online there’s no way of opting out of spam going to my email address and Real Life(TM) address. The dilema is that if I buy something I will probably be giving money to the RIAA. If I don’t buy something, they’ve probably already got the money, I just don’t have anything in return.

So, the next time in Peterborough I think I’m going to buy The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy soundtrack, so at least it will be worth it 😀

Physical Exercise!
Having not run anywhere for about 3 years I did the Dyke Village Fun Run last Friday and ran 2.5km (1.5 miles) without stopping! I’m so proud. It took me 15 minutes but I was 131st out of about 350 😛 There’s hope for me yet (tummy is currently slowly approaching massive proportions!)

My legs still ache.

GTDTiddlyWiki

Lifehacker points to this blog post about how people are using GTDTiddlyWiki to get things done. I might not have spotted thi s were it not for mchicago‘s blog posting on the topic, but it’s very interesting. I’m quite impressed that so many people are doing this kind of thing as it’s something I thought of completely independently. I am in tune with the rest of the human race after all! Well, the extremely geeky minority of it perhaps.

GTDTiddlyWiki is a little different of course, in that you can edit it locally or even carry it around on a USB stick. That’s cool. What would be even cooler would be if you could sync an offline version with an online version. I’d rather have it online and most of the time I’m a few feet away from an internet connection, but for the times I’m not it would be great to have a local cached version. Perhaps a hybrid of GTDTiddlyWiki, an online TiddlyWiki and rsync would work. Perhaps even a client to run on a PDA or a java-enabled mobile phone… or am I going mad? Hey, it’s late.

Amazon used items

If I buy something second hand from Amazon I feel good about buying it because a) I’m recycling (well, reusing) and b) I’m spending less money. So when I was browsing Amazon (looking for David Allen’s book which inspired the uses of GTDTiddlyWiki) and came across a little box on the side that said “Used and new items from your wishlist” I went “ooooh! clicky clicky, go to checkout”. To see second hand items at very good prices which were on my wishlist was just too much to take and I went on a (very rare) spending spree:

Weaving the Web: Origins and Future of the World Wide Web [Paperback] by…, £1.75
Code 46 [2003] [DVD] (2005) Tim Robbins; Samantha Morton; Om Puri; Jeanne…, £6.99
The Day After Tomorrow – Two Disc Edition [2004] [DVD] (2004) Dennis Quaid…, £6.74
A Beautiful Mind [2002] [DVD] (2002) Russell Crowe; Ed Harris; Jennifer Connelly, £3.99
A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes [Paperback] by…, £1.80

The only disadvantage is the postage costs involved in buying second hand items, and of course that it costs money at all, but other than that these are all items that I’d really like but probably would otherwise not have bought.

Congratulations Amazon, you beat me this time.

In other news…

Both lauperr and I washed our cars today, but this was no ordinary wash. For me, it was the first time I’d washed my car since I’ve owned it. Because of this, I was feeling guilty and gave Milliwig the whole works.

First shampooed, then rinsed, then wiped with a damp cloth, dried with a dry cloth, polish applied, left to dry, polish rubbed off and left sparkling, applied glass polish to all glass areas, made windows shiny and nice, applied alloy wheel cleaner and polished, used special blackening cloths for black plastic areas.

It looked so sparkly and nice (apart from the bits of rust) that I took photos for if/when I sell my car on eBay in a few months 😛 Hey, I may even get around to cleaning the interior before I sell it!

Edit: cool, APIs for the BBC

The Microsoft Short Film Competition

Can (or should) thoughts be owned in the same way as physical objects, or are all thoughts ultimately the product of “standing on the shoulders of giants” and therefore belong to noone but the human race itself? Discuss.

Trying to see the positive to the former half of this question, I would feel pretty annoyed if a big corporation (or even a small one) saw the ideas I’m currently working on and created something from them that I considered evil. Especially if I didn’t have the resources to create a non-evil version and theirs was the only one which survived. The only way to prevent them using my ideas would be for me to have some power to prevent them using them, i.e. ownership.

I guess it’s how Einstein felt about Nuclear weapons.

I commented in my blog a while back that I’ve been using a wiki as a brain extension, to organise my ideas and projects. Well it’s now reached 87 pages and 280 links and is really proving very useful. It sounds like I’m not the only one who’s doing this kind of thing either 😛

I’m currently using PHPWiki which is simple and functional. In the future I may upgrade to MediaWiki or one of the wiki modules for the Drupal Content Management System which I want to use for my homepage.

Recenty 37 Signals (who make the popular Basecamp project management software for the Mac) released a commercial personal wiki called Backpack. It’s essentially a wiki + to do list + image gallery + online file store but I think this could be suprisingly useful (examples). Limited features are free but you don’t get much before you have to start paying a subscription.

So I thought I’d have a quick look to see if there’s a similar project which is free and open source and I can run on my own server.

At first I failed, but found another hosted service which is possibly even better than backpack, JotSpot which is very cool. It comes with a list of ready-made “application templates” to utilize the wiki for a wide range of tasks. It has other useful features like being able to email the wiki and a WYSIWYG for the pages. But again, not something I can run on my own server.

About the closest I found was XWiki, but it only seems slightly more powerful than your average vanilla wiki out of the box. It has optional hosting, but I’m not really interested in that.

Moving wiki

As wikis all use similar but different markup and different storage structures they’re not quite compatible with each other. I think that an export as XML feature for wikis would be useful, perhaps even in DocBook format. This may already have been done, I don’t know.

http://www.catmosearts.co.uk was launched today, it’s the web site I’ve been working on for a long while at work (alongside my other work) and promotes the Theatre and Gallery.

Events
This is the clever bit which I’ve described here before I think. A calendar application which uses the iCalendar specification and supports WebDAV is used to add an event. The calendar is published to the web server where it is stored as a .ics file. On the web site the .ics file is then parsed by a hacked version of the phpicalendar parser and a section of it is turned into an RSS feed of sorts, which is then used by some functions I’ve written in conjunction with magpierss to generate the final web pages based on templates. It all amounts to a web site whose content is managed using a simple calendar application on someone’s (hopefully not my) desktop.

Directory
This is a simple MySQL database of local arists and arts groups.

Standards
The site is XHTML and CSS validated. The only minor thing I haven’t done yet is write a text only version of the front page, because (usefully) that’s really the only bit which doesn’t transform gracefully into text only.

In other news…
I got 10 Ubuntu CDs through the post yesterday (mixture of x86, AMD64 and PowerPC), and I’m very impressed with Hoary. I did try and do a day’s work using the Live CD on the eMac I use at work, but I soon ran out of RAM 😛 I especially like the simple view of the Synaptic Package Manager and the “Search for files” functionality but there’s a lot more going for it than that.

I’ve ordered a Dual 2.8 Xeon (yes, 64 bit) Dell rack mounted server at work to be my new testing web server with 1Gb of RAM. Mmmmm. As sarge is now finally frozen I think I’ll stick that on it, but I’m still very tempted to try out Ubuntu on a server platform. We’re rackmounting *everything* in the server room this summer (so there’ll be Windows, Mac and GNU/Linux servers all in the same rack), hope they get along OK, especially as they will all be sharing a 12-way KVM switch for when VNC breaks 😀

The Film (there are no real spoilers here but you might want to reserve judgement until you’ve seen the film for yourself)

lauperr and I went to see H2G2 (the film) last night.

If you’re one of those people who get’s annoyed when you go to see a film which is based on a book and it turns out to be very different to the book, then you’re probably not going to like it. However, I don’t think you can really apply that logic to Hitchhikers because it isn’t just a book, it’s a radio show, a book, a TV show, a video game and now a film.

Each version tells the story differently and the film is no different in that respect. It doesn’t ruin the experience for me at all, it’s almost like you’re just watching a parallel dimension which callously disregards all other dimensions and does its own thing. It’s great 😀

I wasn’t particularly impressed by the liberal sprinkling of American accents, but the British humour was left well and truly intact. I can’t help but think that the film would have been better had Douglas Adams still been around, but it was still good enough to be a fitting tribute to him and his work.

If you’ve read the books you’ll probably think that the involvement between Arthur and Trillian is too much and the Vogons pop up in places they shouldn’t, but the storyline generally worked well.

Some of the settings were exactly how I imagined them, Arthur lying in front of the bulldozer and the air lock on the Vogon ship were spot on. The big planet-making factory floor was quite good, Marvin didn’t look how I expected but the voice and personality were perfect! Zaphod and Ford were nothing like I imagined, Trillian was OK, Slartibartfast was played well (though he didn’t look how I imagined) and Arthur was very good.

I’ll be buying it on DVD. Just don’t go into the film wanting it to follow the books religiously and wanting to hear all of your favorite quotes because you’ll be disappointed. The only thing that caused me great disappointment is that I want to see more! I do hope they do the rest of the books, but I suppose that will be determined by ticket sales this time around. So go buy some tickets.

The Audience

When the credits started rolling and the lights came up I noticed all the smiling people who had just watched the film and I thought that would make DA happy. I also noticed that the audience seemed to comprise of two main groups – mothers and children, and geeks. In fact, we managed to follow a huddle of 7 geeks (what’s the correct collective noun for geeks?) to Franky and Benny’s where we’d planned to have a meal.

Hello all
Firstly, hello to my new readers. It’s a weird feeling when I keep hearing that people who I know but would never expect to look at my web site have been reading my blog.  This includes elderly relatives, people I’ve not seen for years and people from work who I don’t know that well.

It’s silly that I’m publishing my thoughts to the entire world yet I’m suprised when I hear that someone I know is reading them! I’d say that I’ll have to be careful what I write from now on, but that would also be silly.

“New ALUG member”
Congratulations to quinophex and wildduck on their new baby girl. They’ll make great parents 😀

Google Goes Local
Lastly, Google Maps, Google Local and related SMS services have gone live in the UK and I’m extremely impressed. They found the closest place I can order a pizza from and my nearest computer shops as first hits, I’m almost sure there was a half-built bypass down the road from me on Google Maps and the SMS stuff is really very useful. Oh and I think it’s tracking where taxis are in real time.

IEE Magazine
It must make me a real geek but I’ve just been reading the Electronics, Systems and Software magazine the IEE sent me and I found it really really interesting.

If this counts as a meme, it’s the first one I’ve ever done. I was curious…

Who should I vote for?

Your expected outcome:

Green

Your actual outcome:

Labour -22
Conservative -38
	Liberal Democrat 62
UK Independence Party -1
	Green 39

You should vote: Liberal Democrat

The LibDems take a strong stand against tax cuts and a strong one in favour of public services: they would make long-term residential care for the elderly free across the UK, and scrap university tuition fees. They are in favour of a ban on smoking in public places, but would relax laws on cannabis. They propose to change vehicle taxation to be based on usage rather than ownership.

Take the test at Who Should You Vote For

Web Development Woes

At work the plan was to launch the new site after Easter. Following a hardware failure over Easter, last week we ordered a new motherboard for the web server only to find out it was the CPU that was faulty.

On Monday I learnt lots of things about why design-by-committee doesn’t work, which lead to my first real conflicts with anyone in my job so far. It was comforting to find that some developers I met in Birmingham last night had just had a very similar problem, wasting 4 months work.

Last night the hard disk in the web server died and I spent a large portion of the day today transferring the entire Debian installation and data to another hard disk. Now I find out that an entire extra database and front end needs writing before the launch, which is supposed to be this week.

This project is cursed.

OpenAdvantage Seminar

Last night I took a train to Birmingham for a free seminar on Open Source Content Management Systems which was really very good. The work OpenAdvantage are doing in the West Midlands is brilliant and there was lots of interesting discussion going on.

I find the intricate process of geek mingling at these types of events very amusing.

Private wiki as a brain extension

After installing a wiki for LLUG, In a kind of paradoxal move I’ve installed a private wiki on my home web server which I’ve been using as a kind of open canvas project management tool. It’s been especially useful for putting some structure into my personal research which has otherwise been rapidly filling a dead tree notebook in a very messy fashion. Wikis seem to be good for situations where a more formal structure for data is too restrictive and prohibits the flow of ideas.

I’ve got to have one of these to ride to work on.