Bagel Belly Blog

Crossed wires

"Come in, Sky Captain - this is Stargate SG1..."

Someone got their music muddled up.

{christ|gift}mas, web platforms

An article in the Telegraph talks about parents reining in spending on Christmas presents. At last! The whole festive season thing seems to be more about consumerism than anything else, so it's nice to hear that some are trying to "keep celebrations traditional". Interestingly, the Telegraph is light on details on what exactly constitutes "traditional" these days.

I was also wondering what platform the Telegraph use for their site - I'm not familiar with the .jhtml extension, but according to WebMonkey it's ATG Dynamo. It seems to be the same platform that several big sites use, such as Reuters, Network Solutions, Handspring, and the NHS Direct site apparently were using it:

... but are now using ASP. Which fills me with confidence for the health of our nation.

Back to the Christmas thing. Following on from the Send Them Back meme, we now have CDs make crappy presents. I couldn't agree more - I don't like the recording industry - but rather than blank CD-Rs, I'd really love to give the gift of iTunes. Two things I wish for by next Christmas: the iTunes Music Store available in the UK, and a UK version of the iTunes Music Store gift certificates. Oh yeah, and peace and goodwill to all would be nice, too.

Offline Christmas Shopping

I did all of my Christmas shopping online this year at the start of December. Unfortunately, it looks like Amazon isn't going to deliver the goods, so I'm going to have to redo my shopping the old-fashioned way.

This happened to me last year, so this year I decided to place my order much earlier, but it doesn't seem to have helped. Amazon's website currently says:

Not Yet Dispatched: 4 items - delivery estimate: Dec 20, 2003 - Dec 28, 2003

Needless to say, I'm not particularly confident that those four items will get here in time.

It sounds like my case is not particularly unusual. David got an email telling him some books wouldn't be in stock for a couple of weeks. My mum has had half her order cancelled due to incorrect shipping address (with the other half being delivered to the same address just fine). Not good. How have others got on? Is it the same story for everyone?

While I'm doing my offline Christmas shopping, I may have to pick up a copy of Halo. I finally got to see an XBox on Saturday while helping David move house, and had a quick play of Halo on it. Amazing game, amazing graphics. The Mac version I've just tried is almost as good - but suffers without a console controller. The keyboard isn't quite the same. Maybe I should buy a controller too...

Update: Amazon's hiccup cost me an extra £12 from buying on the high street. If they'd been honest about their delivery times, I would have gone elsewhere. I feel a consumer complaint is in order ...

Elvis on vacation

Alex has joined the ranks of the unwashed masses, becoming unemployed at least temporarily. Longer-term, I believe he's becoming yet another pond-scum entrepreneurial capitalist like myself. Best of luck to him.

I feel like I should offer him some advice for the long and difficult road ahead, some pithy nugget of wisdom on how to be your own boss, how to survive the tough world of 21st century business, something that will stand him in good stead for the future. So here goes: Alex, dude, don't do the PHP thing! It's not like eating your greens. It's like trying to grow them in really unfertile soil, trying to cook them in a pan with only a single match as a flame, and then eating them with one chopstick. You know what you should do ;-)

Mobiquitous 2004

This just in: the first ACM Annual International Conference on Mobile and Ubiquitous Systems: networking and services (Mobiquitous 04) takes place in Boston Massachusetts in August next year. Sounds like it could be fun:

The combination of mobile and ubiquitous computing is emerging as a promising new paradigm with the goal to provide computing and communication services all the time, everywhere, transparently and invisibly to the user, using devices embedded in the surrounding physical environment. In this context, the communication devices, the objects with which they interact, or both may be mobile. The implementation of such a paradigm requires advances in wireless network technologies and devices, development of infrastructures supporting cognitive environments, and discovery and identification of ubiquitous computing applications and services.

Very much the sort of thing we've been working on recently. Time to write a submission...

Powerpoint meme

For some reason, all the blogging world is going wild for Edward Tufte's essay on Powerpoint again. This was a big thing shortly after the Columbia shuttle disaster, when it emerged that key facts were obscured by bad Powerpoint slides.

Tim Bray presents an interesting opinion from the point of view of a frequent public speaker. He summarises by saying: As Bob Foster said on this subject: "The best speakers I have seen use slides like singers use pianos; they don't play the melody."

... and the very best speakers use slides and a piano ;-)

Falling Apples

What's going on?! Two stories about Powerbook failures today. Ovidiu writes about a broken screen, and Brian writes about his power supply failure. Yikes. Time to sort out the (long overdue) backups.

Elsewhere, Steven mentions Audioscrobbler which profiles the music you play and makes recommendations based on it. Could be interesting, although it disturbs me to see that Radiohead are way more popular than everyone else. This guy has far too many geek toys. And finally, MobileWhack is fast becoming one of my favourite sources - some excellent articles this week, including Nokia 3650 OS X bluetooth GPRS connections and MIDP on OS X.

"Standard"?

What's the point in creating a standard if you make people pay to see it?

RELAX NG is now an international standard, according to a recent post on the relaxng-user mailing list. You can get it from the ISO web site, but it costs 120 swiss francs (that's 78 euros or £55).

I'm sorry, but I can't agree with this. If the W3C can release their recommendations for free, and the IETF can release their RFCs for free, then why would I want to shell out £55 to read about RELAX-NG? It may well have technical advantages over XML Schema, but if it's not free then technical advantages are not enough.

A draft version of the specification is available, but there's no guarantee how long it'll be there or how truly it will reflect the specification in the future.

Where for art though, wifi?

Martin Little asks where the hotspots are in London. I've been slowly collecting wifi links, maps and so forth. Here's my list:

• The Inquirer posted a map, which is difficult to follow but a good starting point.
• The Cloud - responsible for putting wifi in pubs.
• Hotspot Hotel have a search, but expect you to register before you can use it. Yeah, barriers to entry to make it harder for people to find your revenue-generating hotspots. Great idea, guys.
• ReadytoSurf has wireless in Bagel shops ... how fantastic is that!
• BTOpenZoneHasStupidTariffs has a map finder by postcode.
• Wifi Free Spot is a global directory, with a few European entries.
• T-Mobile American hotspots

If anyone else knows of additional directories or maps, let me know.

GoogleBombs and GoogleWhacks

Following on from the miserable failure meme, Marc is a GoogleTerrorist.

A while ago I tried to explain to Gianugo what a GoogleWhack was. I should have realised there is a GoogleWhack website. (How much GoogleJuice does Gianugo have?! He's the first search result returned when searching for his name.)

MovableType

James says: "If you're a MovableType blogger, please take pity on us offline-news-readers and enable your full posts to be in your RSS feed.".

Done. Been wondering how to do that for a while, now.

Open up and say "ahhhh"

Tonsilitis is back. It was last here at the end of February. Twice in one year is slightly more frequent than usual. Urgh.

Time to visit the Doctor.

Powerbook redux

More Mac stuff, partly to try and convince Marc and Sylvain to give in and buy themselves Powerbooks. Come on guys, you know you want to!

Today: what's on my Mac. A stroll through the essential utilities and applications that have been installed and kept rather than being thrown in the trash. In no particular order:

• Age of Mythology - great game, had it on the PC, just trying to get back to where I was before I switched.
• Anacron - I used it on Linux to make sure the important tasks happened even if the laptop was suspended. Now on OS X.
• BitTorrent - great for speedy downloads. Useful for grabbing "evaluation" versions of stuff ...
• Clutter - useful for getting pictures for my iTunes collection. Also kinda nice having CD cases scattered across my virtual desktop.
• EV Nova - fan of Elite? Get this game.
• Huevos - faster access to Google.
• MenuMeters - lets me see at a glance what's going on with my laptop. It's responsible for the Tx/Rx, pie chart of memory and the blue and red graph of processor usage:
  
• OpenOffice - it's so much lighter to run than Microsoft Office.
• VLC - video player supporting unusual formats.

There's also half a dozen perl modules I've compiled and installed. I'm trying to figure out a neat way of making them available as disk images or downloadable packages. I've made a Xindice 1.0 package already ... if you're interested, let me know, as I could do with more beta-testers.

Scam Spam

I got the notorious bank scam spam this morning. This thing is scarily realistic. It's easy to see how so many people are fooled by it. And the most worrying thing is I don't see how any of the banks can properly defend themselves against this sort of trick. The only way they could do so would be to tell their customers that they will never email them. Which is great for us - less commercial spam from the banks - but will the banks really be brave enough to take that step? I don't think they'll have much choice.

In Apple's Mail, there's no way to see where the url will take me (it actually leads to an address using the http://username:password@site/scheme, with a username of www.nwolb.com followed by lots of spaces - so it actually looks like the real thing in the address bar). I tried to visit NatWest online banking to find an email address that I could forward the mail to - they may be able to get some useful information from the headers - but NatWest have hit the panic button and shut down their site. And here's one of the scary things about the spam - it gives a different support telephone number to the official NatWest one. Presumably there's some fraudsters at the other end of the line waiting to assure me that it's ok to type in my login details and password. Ouch.

And here's where it gets really worrying. If you actually visit the url, you get a page that looks almost exactly like the NatWest online banking service. There's a few giveaway problems with the page - weird character encodings meaning "4"s appearing in the menu on the left, the url containing %20 (which will be displayed as a space in Internet Explorer, so the user doesn't see the real site), the site is not loading securely with https, and the date is wrong - but other than that, it's impossible to tell the difference. And most of these things I suspect you'd only understand or notice if you're a geek.

The only irony is that these fraudsters appear to support Safari, whereas the real NatWest redirect me to a page telling me my browser is not supported. I can see a lot of Windows users with Internet Explorer as their default browser being caught out by this one.

Bluetooth

One of the things I was most excited about when first pondering moving to a Mac was the idea of not just joined-up applications, but joined-up devices. I'd been told wonderful tales about a piece of software called Salling Clicker, which made the Mac controllable from a mobile phone. There were also other benefits - with the phone and the Mac joined by bluetooth, you can get the Mac to react when the phone is nearby or the phone leaves the vicinity. The only downside - the phone had to be a SonyEricsson.

This evening, finally some good news. With two applications - Romeo on the Mac and Veta Universal on the phone - this is now possible using Nokias such as the 3650 that I own. Hurrah!

If I'm carrying my phone about, my laptop now turns off the screensaver when I walk into the room, and turns it back on when I leave the room. When a call comes in, it mutes any music playing on the Mac. I can also use the phone as a remote pointing device in Powerpoint or Keynote.

Fantastic!

The Beach

Yesterday was spent celebrating Paul's 25th birthday. A group of us headed over to Wells on the North Norfolk coast. It was an unusual but enjoyable way to spend the day.

December is not really the best time to visit the seaside, and it could best be described as "bracing". I was lucky in that I've visited the coast plenty of times in the winter, so I had gloves and a thick coat. Some of the others had to huddle together to preserve body heat.

The wind made it ideal for kite flying, which was handy as Paul had brought one along.

John and Thom were more interested in proving who would make the better rugby player.

iTunes

212 artists, 66 albums, 927 songs, 2.7 days, 3.75GB.

Getting there, slowly. Melting my laptop in the process.

Microsoft Waste of Space

Microsoft Excel in Office X is a joke. You can't round-trip your data via CSV...

Try this: open a .xls file, save it as .csv, close the original, and then open the .csv file. Assuming you have the same Microsoft experience as me, you'll get the following error:

SYLK: file format is not valid.

Great. Thank goodness I have OpenOffice installed. It may not be the latest version, and it may have to run under X11 rather than natively in OS X, but at least it works.

End of the road

On 6th September 2000 I met a wonderful woman, and three years later after meeting her twice more, I finally plucked up the courage to ask her to meet me socially. We spent a fine afternoon at the Orchard in Grantchester. This was to be our first date, on 22nd June 2002. What followed were 13 months of happiness, some of the best times of my life.

Blog posts like this usually end in marriage proposals and suchlike, don't they?

In July 2003, the shit hit the fan when my brother-in-law died. I was really thankful to be in a strong relationship, and it was this relationship that got me through what were probably the worst weeks of my life so far, and several pretty grim times since then.

Unfortunately, it's times like these that relationships are really tested, and it seems that this one was not meant to be. This evening, the woman I love sent me away. So this story doesn't have a happy ending. Sorry about that.

I won't be blogging for a while. (I probably shouldn't have blogged this, but, well, fuck it. I can't sleep, and maybe writing about it will be psychotherapeutic or something.)