Ben Francis

Illness
That was horrible. I started off with the flu, almost recovered, progressed to a secondary chest infection, then got a funny tummy… I’ve just finished my antibiotics. I was off work for two weeks and probably still shouldn’t be there. I’m kind of sort of nearly better, just in time to go to Morocco at the end of the week and get thoroughly ill again when my stomach disagrees with their food and water.

My Car…
has been a bit of a pain recently, more specifically the battery. But I’ve got a new battery and Milliwig is back to his full health too (no jokes about acceleration here please lauperr).

Overactive Mind
It has been confirmed by several others who shared the same flu bug as me that one of the symptoms is an overactive mind. This means sitting in bed, not being able to sleep because of the constant flow of thought; pictures, ideas and in my case programming. When I first got ill I literally didn’t sleep all night but planned out an entire web site in my head, including a php templating system, navigation and most of the content. When I got up I put it all down on paper and the content of my head filled several pages. It’s slowly being digitised.

I also had a flitting romance with a world domination plan which faded into delerium as I regained my grip on reality. But I did come up with a cool idea for a MMOG…

IEE
I’m now a member of the IEE, although they are trying to deny it. Seems a very cool institute to be a member of, although djkoa tells me changes are afoot.

Work
My chums at work have complained I don’t write about them on here. Most of today was spent on yet another concept for the design of a new Arts web site, these arty types are hard to please. It’s been a team effort really, which I have mixed feelings about. Usually when designing I like to be left alone to experiment and work at an idea until it’s brilliant, without human contact for the duration, but being in the same room as two other people means I get constant input from them. I guess this is what working as part of a team is and it’s good for my… chi or something.

I played with a BEAST of a graphics tablet and spent a large amount of time tracking down all the digital cameras which I’m supposed to be responsible for, as well as the usual answering the phone and fixing things and being rude to people.

Gary has stolen the monitor from my Debian web server so there’s been little progress on that front recently. I know I know I should be using SSH, but there’s an annoying bug in the OS X terminal which sometimes stops you using backspaces, and it really really really annoys me. But that side of things is going well, SSL is finally working properly, WebDAV is up, phpicalendar is working, as is phpmyadmin. The next step is probably rsync and some gallery scripts, then I may venture into mail servers, if I dare.

There was an amusing moment when one of the sparky electrical guys fell through the ceiling in a classroom full of students today, he seemed OK except for his ankle, but he didn’t half get wound up for it. There’s also now a rather large hole in the ceiling.

We have sucky new ID badges, which… suck. So we’re designing some better ones! Yesterday the marketing meeting was cancelled which makes me happy, meetings are boring 🙂

Gary’s been having fun with barcodes recently. He found a very cool program which uses an iSight camera as a barcode reader and can retrieve the details and a picture of any book, CD, DVD or game we threw at it. It didn’t know what hob knobs were though 🙁 It has serious uses for the development plan though, which btw is very cool. Lots of new kit and networked CCTV cameras on the cards. New servers, 30″ flat screen, rack mounted web server for me, lots of new iMacs (mmm).

In other news, we’ve run out of sugar again and the place we usually steal it from has gotten wise to our antics.

tolatech
New web site is coming and work is currently a constant trickle.

Morocco
Here I come…

Hmm, what’s happened since 7th January…

Birthday
My birthday happened, that was very cool. I got 30 cans of  Guinness and the Ultimate Matrix Collection amongst other things.

Laura took me to Franky and Benny’s for the most huge and expensive meal ever, after which I swore I would never eat again! We went to see White Noise at the cinema and drove home in the pouring rain in the dark. All in all it was fantastic day!

Farscape
They finally gave in to the campaigning from the fans and released two, two hour episodes to finish the story, what a great birthday present!

The episodes were a little… odd. They seemed to use earth words rather than Farscape slang in places and one of the actors was replaced, which I didn’t notice until the second episode! The ending was a *little* bit corny, but I enjoyed it none the less. And the good news is that the war between peacekeepers and sebacians is now over so John’s baby can be raised in peace time. There seemed to be a hint at one point that the peacekeepers originated from a planet that sounded very much like earth, or I may have imagined that.

Wireless
Due to asherfrancis getting a new laptop, I bought a wireless router for home so we now have wireless network access which is cool for my iBook (or would be if the wireless worked in Ubuntu). The Linksys ADSL Gateway (WAG54G) is very good and easy to configure with WEP encryption and NAT.

Bandwidth
According to my stats on PlusNet, during December my household used 20Gb of bandwidth. Is that a lot?

Illness
I’ve been off work with the flu since Tuesday which sucks. But lauperr has been an angel looking after me 🙂 🙂

“Will LiveJournal stay open source?
The parts that are open source now will of course remain open source… And some new stuff that’s infrastructure-related will probably also be released open source. We’re all definitely pushing for it, and Six Apart “gets it” when it comes to open source. Of course there will be some closed parts… there are already some now. What I personally feel is important is making sure the infrastructure guts are available, so other people building new, creative websites will be able to focus on the fun stuff and not shelling out lots of money to commercial vendors for basic things like storage and load balancing.”

What do people make of this?

The rest of the deal sounds fine, but this bit sounds very much like bad news. I’ve been considering moving my blog to my personal server for some time now, but we’ll see how this pans out first.

I had a fantastic holiday.

First my new cousin Alfi was born (I suggested the name!)
 He can be seen below with the teddy I bought him 🙂

Then I got some very cool presents for Christmas
including my iRiver H340 and this fridge from lauperr

Then I had a fun New Year in Loughborough.
This is the New Year party after we’d climbed a very
large hill on New Years Day to clear our heads.

And now I’m back at work and everything is breaking. Printers are the bane of my existence and we were having severe network problems yesterday. Managed to isolate the problem to a fibre link between two switches which was replaced today and now everything is running smoothly again 🙂

Currently addicted to…
1) WebJay a kind of blogging for music playlists
2) newstudent.org forums for university applicants
3) UCAS Track I keep refreshing the page, but nothing changes!

Currently thinking (out loud) about…
1) Server-side aggregators to centralise my daily reading on a web page.

Read More…

Busy
Today has been busy, busy, busy. I have finished my Christmas shopping, helped Grandma move into her new bungalow and have gained *another* cousin, congratulations Aunty Kazzy on your beautiful baby boy! The best part is that I kind of suggested the name, Alfie!

epic
This is a flash animation which discusses the future of the media in a fictional form set in the year 2014. Artistically I love the style of this piece and as long as you remember it’s *meant* to be fictional, it’s very interesting too! Something about it reminds me of the Animatrix, not sure why.

Currently my body and bank balance are having a hard time recovering from three nights in a row going out for meals.

Friday was Laura’s staff do in Spalding where we found the warehouse where they store all the OAPs overnight.
Saturday night was the BGS ICT department and quiz team Christmas do in Hacconby in a pub which now has two less Guinness posters than it had previously… Much drunkenness.
Sunday was my staff do in Greetham which was hilarious. Anything that wasn’t nailed down became a projectile, including balloons, paper, paper aeroplanes, gifts from crackers and truffles. I’m not sure the non-vcc guests really appreciated us though. Especially the man in the moustache with the amusing dance who became the target for our paper aeroplane competition. I hit him.

The rain outside looks distinctly snow-like. Now, off I go to negotiate the ice rink between here and lauperr‘s in my car.

May you rest in peace
My 12 inch iBook, Fahrbot, died today. He slipped away quietly after a system crash and refused to boot despite ressucitation efforts with a Firewire drive and a disk image. He did show signs of a pulse after a PRAM reset and exhaustive imaging, but was pronounced dead at approximately 3:00pm with a blank blue expression on his face.

Inspectors out in force
I was in town earlier and in both Woolworths and Blockbuster there were inspectors checking the shelves had been arranged properly for Christmas. I guess they get smart psychologists like lauperr to draw them out a plan then everyone has to follow it.

Sod’s Law
Why does everything always break when the Network Manager isn’t in?

Unconditional Offer
Someone once told me I would never get an Unconditional offer to University. I may have cheated slightly, but I proved them wrong. CSE, UEA, and in time for Christmas.

I was interested to find out that not only does Piracy fund terrorism but it also goes towards drug trafficing and illegal immigration now as well! The things you learn in Blockbuster! It’s only a matter of time before Piracy is linked to global warming and the spread of the AIDS virus.

Is it sad to play hide and seek with your girlfriend, in cars, in a village? Come to think of it, that probably contributes to global warming…

Why do all the christmas lights go out when one bulb breaks? isn’t it about time people figured out parallel circuits?

Bug report to Epson

At work we have several Epson Photo R300 printers. If you put compatible cartridges in them rather than genuine (expensive) Epson cartridges it reminds you of this fact *every* time you print. It does this in the form of a ‘nagware’ dialogue box which asks you if you’re sure you want to print because your printout might look “different” to what it would look like with a genuine epson cartridge.

I was feeling particularly evil so decided to give Epson a call. I navigated through their lengthy phone system to narrow down my query and was put on hold for around 15 minutes. Someone eventually answered and asked how they could help.

Me: I’ve got an error message in my Epson Software and I wondered if there’s a bug fix you can send me
EpsonGuy: What is the error message?
(I read out the error message in its complete form, very clearly.)
EpsonGuy: [pause]
EpsonGuy: Have you tried re-installing the printer since you got this error?
Me: Erm… no. But I doubt it will really help.
EpsonGuy: All I can suggest is that you buy an Epson cartridge as the current one isn’t working correctly.
Me: So you don’t have a bug fix? Surely one of your software guys could stop this message coming up?
EpsonGuy: I’m afraid there’s nothing we can do, the cartridge isn’t communicating with the printer properly so it thinks it isn’t an Epson cartridge.
Me: That’s because it isn’t an Epson cartridge. I think as an adult and computer user I am quite capable of deciding whether to install an Epson cartridge or a cheaper compatible.
EpsonGuy: I completely agree Sir.

Hmm. Well I insisted that my complaint was noted down so that Epson could be made aware that nagging their customers to the point of irritating them and affecting their productivity is not the best way to promote their brand.

I felt a little sorry for the guy on the other end of the phone though 😛

Google Suggest

Google has a new BETA feature called Google Suggest. It’s a bit of JavaScript with some very clever algorithms sitting behind it which autocompletes your search terms based on previous searches stored in the Google database. Seems like a useful feature but I would have thought it has large overheads on their servers.

Amusingly all obscene words are filtered out (they must be, “sex” doesn’t autocomplete!).

I wondered if it would autocomplete my name and if it had stored anything someone may have searched for including my name! It came up with my name, but on its own. I was suprised to find that Googling for my name these days points you to my homepage as the first result. I’ve been a little freaked out at how many of my general Google searches have had results pointing to my homepage recently actually. I must be a very narrow minded person 🙂

Music Recording Software

I’ve been playing with music recording software today, including failing to get Ardour to run under Ubuntu, apparently it can’t connect to the Jack server. I really wish I could find time to record some of my songs and write some new ones, my musical side has been badly negelected this year.