Bagel Belly Blog

Eden

While we were on holiday, we got the chance to go and visit the Eden Project. The pictures really don't do it justice - those domes are HUGE.

One of the most amazing things is that you can really feel the different climates as you walk around inside the domes. From tropical humid to dry mediterranean to arid desert... given what a depressing damp day it is here today, I'd happily be back in the mediterranean part right now, smelling the olive groves and the herbs whilst basking in the sunlight.

A great place to go and visit if you get the chance. Go early to avoid the crowds!

Travel worriers

Reading about Matthew's travel concerns reminded me I was going to post about my journey back from Cornwall. (I actually blogged at the time, with a rather long entry that unfortunately crashed blogplanet. Bah.)
When we travelled down to Padstow, the journey took us approximately 6 hours. Our return journey took closer to ten - because we encountered 4 crashes, one of which happened in front of our eyes.

The first crash was while we were waiting to turn left at a t-junction. On the other side of the road we were turning in to, a red car was trying to turn right, into the road we were on. An ambulance came up behind the red car, also wanting to turn right. The red car panicked, and pulled forward - before noticing a jeep coming down the road at about 60mph. The red car hit the brakes, the jeep swerved and missed it, but fishtailed and clipped the queue of cars behind the red one. It then bounced and rolled to a stop.

Neither the ambulance or the red car stayed around to see if the driver was alright.

The second accident was shortly after that, and looked like a head-on collision. We then got caught on the M5, where a multiple car pile-up closed the road for two hours. The pictures on the right are the bizarre scene of three lanes of cars parked, and people walking around waiting for the road to re-open.

The last accident was an overturned carivan on the hard shoulder - an unhappy end to someone's holiday.

I was extremely glad to get out of the car when we got home.

A pox on mailman!

Mailman appears to have fried itself for no apparent reason, making it impossible to admin a number of luminas' internal mailing lists. Argh! Why do things always go wrong when fixing time is at a premium?
It's also spurred me on to look at filing a bug against the debian libapache-mod-jk package, which has an annoying dependency on apache (rather than depending on apache or apache-ssl ... guess which package we use?). Thankfully someone has already beaten me to it.

Update: oh great. The libapache-mod-jk bug is marked wontfix and "apache-ssl is deliberately not supported", with a cryptic note to see the tomcat changelog for the reason why ... but as I'm not using tomcat (I'm using tomcat4) I don't have the changelog to hand. Time to file a bug anyway.

End of the holidays

Well, I'm back in Cambridge (and back on a high-speed connection, as you can probably tell from the flurry of blog posts as I clear my mental outbox), and to round off the holiday, we spent the afternoon punting on the Cam with two of the boss's friends. It was a thoroughly civilised event (except for my occasional swearing as I nearly fell in, nearly lost the pole, or both), with champagne and strawberries to refresh us.
If you've never been punting in Cambridge before, it's well worth doing -- but beware the people that crash their punts in to you at full speed!
Tomorrow, Norwich.

Anyone seen "The Birds"?

Seaside resorts in the UK seem to be increasingly struggling to control the problem of seagulls. They've given up all pretense of following the fishing trawlers in favour of scavenging off the (mostly willing) tourists who contribute to the problem by ignorantly feeding them. The bird on the bin in this picture didn't even flinch, even when I stuck my phone's camera in his face.

Later in the afternoon in a scene reminiscent of Hitchcock's The Birds (which I recently bought), a whole flock of gulls swooped down on some kid who was just getting a pasty out of a paper bag - they nearly bit his fingers off. Scary, and not surprisingly the kid was in tears.

Surprisingly good food

On Thursday, we went to St Ives (Cornwall) for the day. The friends we were on holiday with recommended to the boss and I that we should go to the Seafood Cafe, so we did. It looked like any regular rundown seaside chip shop from the outside, but when we got in we were amazed by the great food! From top to bottom, we had Chicken & Bacon Club Ciabatta, Fillets Of Local Mackerel, Hazelnut & Pistachio Torte and Rich Chocolate Pots. Delicious! It's also interesting just how good the quality on these pictures was. Taken with my 3650, but in good well-lit interior setting. It seems the camera struggles with distant objects and brightly-lit exterior shots.

Checklist for a great holiday

Sunshine - yes
Pub - yes
Good beer - yes
A wonderful girlfriend - yes

Looks like I'm all set!

Padstow, Cornwall.

This is the view I wake up to each morning, of the Camel estuary and the sea beyond. It's a tolerable way to spend a week's vacation!

Holiday!

In just a few hours' time I'm off to Cornwall for a short break, staying in a cottage in Padstow. It'll be nice to get away for a while, and the cottage apparently has an outdoor heated swimming pool! Unfortunately the weather forecast is currently not looking too favourable.

If I can put up with blogplanet for a while longer, you may get a few blog entries while I'm down there ... try and contain your excitement :-)

Incubators and bluetooth

Two exciting pieces of news today! The first is that, as you can see from the pictures, David and I went to visit the biotech incubator at the Norwich Research Park. Ok, so we're not strictly a biotech company, but they are willing to give us space until they complete building the new IT incubator out there.

The place looks pretty good, although it's a bit pricey compared to other places like the Royal (where I used to be based). We're still waiting for final numbers though, so we'll see how it works out.

The second exciting thing is that all of a sudden, gnome-bluetooth is working! This is a really sweet bit of software that lets me upload files from my phone to my laptop via bluetooth. So I can finally give you the benefit of the 640x480 pictures that the native camera app takes, rather than the postage-stamp versions from blogplanet! :-)

Ye gods!

All this talk of gods and religions has reminded me of some early Luminas history -- when we were trying to put a name to our ideas. So I just took a delve through the Luminas archive and dug out the file on the right.

Actually, naming the company was one of the hardest things we had to do. Hours spent sweating over dictionaries (multiple languages), thesauri, and the domain name registries. All the cool names seemed to either been registered as companies, as domain names, or both.

Some of the names we came up with in the early days included Clear, Industrial Digital Dynamics, and Alchemy. Deity was the front-runner for a considerable amount of time, and even made it into one of our business plans.

So it's quite pleasing to see that orixo has some (unintended) roots in african religious traditions! It feels like we've gone full-circle. (And for the record, I actually think Luminas was the right choice for us, and thus far it has stood the test of time!)

Blogplanet thoughts

So, here's what I think of blogplanet after a few weeks of using it.

First, the likes. I like that I can blog from my phone, and send pictures with ease. That's it.

The dislikes are rather more extensive! Blogplanet is slow to start. This I guess is because it's a java application and none of them are exactly speedy. Next up: menus. Most of the menus are completely daft with nonsensical options. Take for example the exit menu - if you click on exit, you get a choice of "No", or "Options -> Yes / Options -> Exit". Other applications let you exit immediately, or have Exit under the options menu, which feels more intuitive.

Pictures taken from within blogplanet suck. The quality is really low and so is the size. I read somewhere that this is because java apps don't have direct access to the phone's camera or images directory. Well, if this is the case, time to write the application in native symbian if you ask me (easier said than done, I know, but still - mobile picture blogging is a killer app, so sort it out!).

There's no way to set the title in a blog entry, that I have found. But then, I have that complaint with mozblog too.

You can't upload an image and a blog entry at the same time. You have to take a picture, upload it, then link to it in your blog. Not great if you decide that you want a picture after you've started to blog. The only way to add images after the fact is to send the entry, then edit and send again.

All in all, too many annoyances. I won't be registering the software, I'll just delete it and wait for a better mobile blogging tool.

Guess what? Another trip

Guess what?

Another trip on a train. Back to Norwich this time.

So, I've been using blogplanet for some time now and I have to say... big disappointment. Full review when I fire up the laptop.

Home (sort of)

Made it back to the girlfriend's house without too much incident other than a scorchingly hot train ride. Now catching up on the news of the day, and trawling through email.

One interesting bit of news is that Russell Beattie has just bought an Advent laptop. Interesting, because my first laptop was Advent (sold through PC World in the UK, originally as PC World's "own brand" but then under the Advent name).

On the whole, I found the Advent to be a lovely bit of kit once I got used to the quirks and managed to get Linux running happily on it. I still miss proper suspend-to-ram and suspend-to-disk done by the BIOS (so it "just works") rather than the OS (guaranteed pain in linux as it's extremely vendor-specific and proprietary).

My Advent lasted me for three very hard-working years (think 24/7 operation, trekking round Europe and America, and generally being thrown about a heck of a lot). I only replaced it because I needed more than 1024x768 and more than 450mhz. It's now in retirement as the girlfriend's machine, so I still get to see it a lot ;-)

Russell also complains about the heat the laptop kicks off. What can I say? Welcome to mobile computing in the 21st Century! My P4/2.4Ghz is almost uncomfortably warm to type on right now, and the hardware monitors regularly report it's running at around 60°C inside. The curse of modern computing ...

On the road again!

Back down to london for a meeting with the HP Labs guys.

Cambridge station is a dull place to wait if you're an irrepressible early bird like me. At least peterborough station has adverts (usually of cool sony gear). Here all you get is abandoned freight.

Early start

Crawling out of bed earlier than usual this morning (6am ... ouch) so that I can get the prerequisite caffeine into my system by the time that I need to be in sync with our European colleagues.

Time to prepare the luminas web site, check the clocks, batten down the hatches, and slip on our kimonos!

In other news, finished the front garden yesterday ... pictures coming just as soon as I upload them!

Welcome Gianugo!

Gianugo has boldly leaped (been pushed?) into the blogosphere. Welcome! I expect to see lots of interesting gossip and not a little discussion of such disparate subjects as music and law on there ;-)

In other news, I've just been chatting with PR bunnies. Once again, I'm reminded of just how little I know about marketing!

More link chasing!

Reading on http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/library/j-xp052703/?ca=dnt-421 about XP tools, more specifically Eclipse, Ant and JUnit. I tried Eclipse a few months ago when I got the new laptop (one powerful enough to run a bulky Java IDE), and whilst it was pretty good, I found the basic text-editing support really weak in comparison to something like jedit. But I'm getting more and more fed up with jedit's memory grabbing (40mb for an editor?!), so perhaps it's time to give Eclipse another go.

In other news, mozblog seems to munge my posts badly :-( I can't set a separate title reliably, and I can't put my own links in the text as it converts them to <a href="foo"></a> etc. Grrr!

Catching up on reading

It's a quiet night and I'm too tired to work, so I'm catching up on some reading and browsing. Basically, this means going through the various mails I've saved for a rainy day (or at least a day when the boss isn't around).

First up: Common XML design mistakes and how to avoid them. "The only good solution for searching XML documents is to introduce some sort of indexing mechanism -- either a relational database index or some sort of native XML indexing tool" ... yes, but it's hard to find a good native XML indexing tool :-( Sadly, Xindice doesn't seem to quite cut it at the moment.

From there I got to Eleven rules for moving a relational database to XML. Unfortunately talks about DTDs, but some sound ideas nevertheless. Good to see we've been following most of them already. Self-evident best practice, perhaps.

To back me up on "unfortunately talks about DTDs", how about Why XML Schema beats DTDs hands-down for data? Although surprisingly, they completely miss out on namespaces, which has to be the killer app for Schemas.

Pain

In substantial amounts of pain this evening after 1.5 hours of taiji. Not so much the taiji as the sprinting there (due to a late-running meeting) and the jogging back (had to meet someone at home at 8).

But still ... I feel tons better for it, even though it hurts. A good way to get rid of the stress of a looooong day of talks about bids and incubators.

Getting excited about weaving the future too!

Too cool!

Oh my oh my oh my! WirelessIRC!
Now all I need is WirelessSSH and my life will be complete (or at least a lot lighter - I could throw away the laptop!)

We would like to apologise

We would like to apologise for the late running of this train... ... but you're in England so did you really expect anything different?
Apparently there's a slow train in front of us. So much for the punctual arrival!

On the move again

On the train down to London, for the launch of another quality Luminas web site - fineart.ac.uk. Here's hoping the launch event goes smoothly ....

New kid on the block

David's now got his weblog up and running. It'll be at http://www.davidcasal.com/blog/ just as soon as the DNS propagates, but until then you can sneekily view it here.

It's going to be a long weekend ...

I get to spend the weekend shifting a tonne of gravel around the garden. Fun! Still... I need the exercise ;-)

Linux security: The seven deadly sins

This just in by way of web-support, one of the mailing lists I'm subscribed to: http://searchenterpriselinux.techtarget.com/originalContent/0,289142,sid39_gci904844,00.html

In short (go read the article for descriptions):
- No. 1: Using weak and default passwords.
- No. 2: Leaving network ports open.
- No. 3: Running old software versions.
- No. 4: Running insecure and badly configured programs.
- No. 5: Having insufficient resources and misplaced priorities.
- No. 6: Failing to delete stale and unnecessary accounts.
- No. 7: Procrastinating.

I've just recently been reading up on securing Debian boxes, so most of this rings true. I've also watched customers' boxen get busted wide open, particularly because of point number 3: but it's a difficult choice. Do you pay out significant money to upgrade, or hope you never get cracked? Which is most costly in the long run?

In one particular case, we notified the customer they were running an old version of sendmail and needed to upgrade as exploits were out there. A little over a year later, they lost their machine. Now I've seen it happen, I try to be MUCH more careful.

If you're a Debianista, this should be essential bed-time reading.

Impatience

Planted seeds at the weekend for a new herb garden. Still no sign of life from them. I'm too impatient for this gardening lark!

Back in the garden!

Moblogging

Whoop! Looks like I have mobile picture blogging working!

David and Adam are busy working in my lounge this afternoon after rain forced us in from the garden.

I found the problem with blogplanet whilst playing with kablog: I was using an access point I defined myself, which doesn't seem to work any more ... switching to the "Vodafone Live!" access point cured it. Which is a shame, as the Live! access point is slooooooooow.

Mobile bloggers

There's foneblog, which is cool because you can blog via sms/mms. Unfortunately, it's not integrated into your existing blog, so that's a no-go. But it does raise interesting questions - what's involved in setting up an mms to xml-rpc gateway?

There's moblogger, which seems to do more or less the gateway job, but for email rather than mms. Unfortunately, no software releases yet!

Next up, kablog, "a tool for mobile phones and PDAs that allows you to post new blog entries to blog servers" ... much slicker-looking, but couldn't load my blog list in order to set up. Next!

Frustration

I just can't seem to get BlogPlanet to work with my MovableType install, which is deeply frustrating - the lure of being able to blog (with pictures) from my phone is great, and it's so "almost there"!

Argh!

Time to go hunting for alternative moblogging software.