Bagel Belly Blog

iTunes Ouch

Whilst importing a CD, my laptop hung. After rebooting, iTunes failed to start, reporting "The iTunes Music Library file cannot be read because it does not appear to be a valid library file" (described in this Apple article).

I followed the Apple website advice on recreating my iTunes library and playlists, but iTunes crashes every time I try to import my original file. In the end, I had to resort to dragging and dropping the folder containing the music back into iTunes. All the files are back, but I've lost my playlists, ratings and play counts.

So - if you're an iTunes user, save yourself some pain. Make a backup of ~/Music/iTunes/iTunes Music Library.xml right now.

There's something about iPhoto

A while ago David said "there's just something about iPhoto that makes you want to take lots of pictures", or words to that effect. I'm starting to see what he means. I've been carrying my digital camera around with me for a few weeks now (not sure why I didn't before), and I'm using it more.

Now all I need to do is buy a copy of Photoshop and brush up on my graphics skills (or lack of), so I can do things like remove the annoying telegraph wire in the photo above. I also wonder how many photos I can take of sunrise and sunset before the CCD burns out and I'm forced to buy myself a Digital Ixus I :-)

You dig 16 tons

Mounting debt was nevertheless a "credible" threat to the economy which could increase over time.

Spending on credit and debit cards showed few signs of slowing early this year, according to figures from the Association of Payment Clearing Services.

Taxpayers could pay off tax bills with their credit cards if proposals being discussed get the go-ahead.

I wonder if these people actually talk to each other?

See also BBC News | Business | Credit card spending reaches high, and BBC News | Business | MPs angry at credit card firms. I got rid of my credit card at the end of last year. I have to say, they rate as one of the most insidiously evil things ever in my book.

You load sixteen tons, what do you get?
Another day older and deeper in debt
Saint Peter don't you call me 'cause I can't go
I owe my soul to the company store

The more things change...

It's funny. My first real job after graduation was working for UEA's Development and External Relations department (now the Communications Division). My job was to transfer the university's alumni records from a bespoke mainframe application onto a Windows database. I started developing the data munging application on a Digital Alpha, but quickly moved to running linux on my office desktop instead, which with a 486 processor and 64mb of RAM could easily outpace the Alpha. I remember downloading slackware onto a stack of floppy disks...

Fast-forward to today. The Communications Division's alumni database is a bespoke mainframe application again. What job am I doing? Data munging to rescue someone else's legacy database and to convert it to a more modern solution.

Funny how the more things change, the more they stay the same.

Currently listening to Never Gonna Come Back Down (Timo Maas Mix) from the album Rare & Remixed (Disc 2) by BT

Whitelists

I implemented basic whitelists yesterday morning, as I was getting fed up with the flood of W32/Netsky.p@MM, W32/Bagle.n@MM, W32/Bagle.p@MM emails pounding my inbox.

Since then, 289 emails (that's a slow day) have dropped into the "I probably don't want to read this" mail folder, along with a couple of false positives I've since added to my address-book. I'm still getting a couple of virus mails reaching my main inbox as they appear to come from people in my address-book, but I think I can solve that by discarding unsigned emails from those people.

I don't quite understand how there can be Windows users out there without virus checkers installed at this point.

We're doomed

A very good article on software development and the point where developers say "We're Doomed".

I'd say it can be extended outside of simply software development: over the last three or four years, that's been a theme several times. The other option for us was "It's all crap" - the point where you realise it's a lose-lose situation, at which point you stop worrying and just get on with stuff. Later on, you usually realise it's not so bad, after all. There's always gardening.

Currently listening to La Boheme Act 4 from the album Puccini - La Boheme by Callas di Stefano Panerai Moffo Votto

Masculine intuition

Apropos of nothing, from Mark, via Daniel:

Men may not be the brightest bulbs in the bunch, but we can sense one thing: when we are being introduced to our girlfriend’s next lover.

Unrelated, having "one of those" weekends. Still looking for the light at the end of the tunnel. Funny thing, life: the worst year is not the one where all the shit happens, but the year(s?) where you try to get over it. Go figure.

Gonna quit whining now.

Currently listening to The Sky Is Broken from the album Play by Moby

Kill Bill volume 2

For anyone sat on the edge of their seats wondering whether I got it to work or not:

That'll be a no, then.

Kill Bill

Warning: long tedious rant about the unbelievably useless Microsoft Windows XP follows.

At 18:52 this evening, my dad asked me if I could fix DVD playback on my parents' Windows XP machine. I didn't think it would be a problem - hey, I have Remote Desktop Connection, and it should just be a case of installing an appropriate player, right?

Wrong.

It's now 21:30, and we still aren't seeing stuff on screen.

After recovering from the horrible shock of finding Microsoft don't bundle a DVD player with Windows XP, I looked around for alternatives. My first choice was to try VLC for Windows, since I use VLC happily in Linux and Mac OS X, and it's free. It didn't want to play DVDs. Having seen the interface to it in Windows, I figured it was also a bad choice as it's a bit unfriendly.

My next choice was Cyberlink PowerDVD SE, since I used to have their player on my old laptop and it worked fine. They appear to offer a simple codec which integrates with Windows Media Player, which seemed like a good idea from a parental usability point of view. I installed it, but now I keep getting this:

Strange. I installed the codec bundle on my WinXP laptop, to see if I was missing something, and it worked fine. First time. No problems. No reboot required or anything. It just worked.

So. Two machines, running the same operating system and the same DVD playback software, and one works whilst the other doesn't.

My final last-ditch solution is to upgrade anything in sight on the machine via Windows Update. It already has all critical security updates, but hey, I guess there might be a codec update in the Advanced Networking Pack or something. Yes, I'm getting desperate.

What really annoys me is that I'm a supposedly advanced computer user, and I'm having a hellish nightmare making this work. How the heck is Aunt Tillie supposed to deal with this shit? Why on earth did Microsoft not include a DVD player? I hope they are happy that they are losing customers because of their cheap attempt at further gouging money out of punters ($20 in this case). I'm off to buy my folks an iMac.

I think I'm gonna go get me a beer now.

Currently listening to If Things Were Perfect from the album Play by Moby

Killer App: National Gallery

So, I was playing around with the National Gallery web site, after reading Ben Hammersley talking about birds and air pumps. It turns out the pictures on the site all have a "Send to Mobile" feature - whereby your chosen artwork gets sent by MMS to your phone! This is a killer application of joined-up Web and MMS.

Taking a look at the terms and conditions, it seems like a reasonable amount of "fair use" is built in. So I now have a masterpiece as my phone background.

The whole site is very nicely put together and easy to get into. There are several ways of finding artworks - beginner's guides, a keyword search, by century, and a very usable drill-down full index (not unlike the Mac finder in "Columns" mode). You can view the image at a decent size, or use a nifty java applet to view details. Outstanding!

Finally, a word of warning before you go sending hundreds of pictures to yourself: it only works in the UK, and there is a charge: Orange (£0.10), O2 (£0.13), Vodafone (£0.25) and T-Mobile (£0.25). (From the look of those charges, I think I may move to Orange for my next contract.)

Currently listening to Porcelain from the album Play by Moby

Presentations

While preparing to deliver training at the BBC last week, I was confronted with the far-too-frequent problem of what package to use and how to store the content.

I want to store all content in XML (aside from binary images, movies, sounds, obviously), and to transform them into whatever presentation package I want to use - be it an in-house solution, or one of the major desktop packages. The benefits of using XML are clear - it can be put under revision control, multiple different format output can be created from it (HTML, PDF, etc), and more than one person can edit it at once using SubEthaEdit. We can also keep content separate from presentation methods.

It transpires that Keynote uses an XML file format to store content, which is good news. OpenOffice.org has made information on their XML file format available for a long time. So that just leaves Microsoft Powerpoint for Mac and PC. Finding details on the file format used is difficult. The glossy MSDN office web site has no useful information. In the end, the mighty Google helped me out: this Microsoft Knowledge Base Article tells me all I need to know:

Microsoft does not provide technical support, or any other type of support for the Microsoft PowerPoint binary file format

That seems pretty straightforward to me. I think it's finally time to give up trying to work with Microsoft products.

Imperialism by stealth

I just realised I can add birthdays to my address book entries. So I merrily typed in one, 06/12/1978 (for here in the UK we do DD/MM/YYYY), and Address Book now says: 12 June 1978.

In the "Formats" tab of the International Preferences, it says:

Friday, 2 January 2004
2 Jan 2004
02/01/2004

My region is set to United Kingdom.

Why oh why oh why oh why oh why oh why oh why oh why can't Apple just GET THIS RIGHT? I'm forever finding irritating bugs like this in the core applications they ship with OS X.

On the plus side, I'm finally able to sync with my Nokia 3650 now, having completely erased everything that was on it and done a clean sync. Now I just need to tidy up the address data that I merged with David using Address-o-Sync - which, by the way, rocks.

Currently listening to Smile to the World from the album On Your Side by Magnet

Phone usage

I'm just about to nuke my mobile in the hopes of curing the problems I have with syncing my contacts and calendar. Before I do, I thought I'd make a copy of useful settings. While doing this, I noticed the following scary statistics for a little under a year of usage:

• Time spent on calls made: 38 hours, 33 minutes and 1 second.
• Time spent on calls received: 45 hours, 6 minutes and 17 seconds.
• Total of all calls: 83 hours, 39 minutes and 18 seconds.
• GPRS data received: 56.17MB
• GPRS data sent: 4.00GB

I can only assume it includes text messages in sent data. Wow. Good job I'm on a "pay up front, free allowance" tariff for GPRS.

Dear Gordon ...

Don't do it. It's tough enough running a small company as it is.

"Accountants believe that Mr Brown will start taxing dividend payments made by all small companies."

"The implication for most small companies is grim."

Happy happy happy.

Weekend escape

I'm on my way back from a weekend in London, where I went to escape for a bit and relax (in a "doing something completely different" kind of way; the number of miles walked would indicate it wasn't in a restful way!). It was, on the whole, a thoroughly cool weekend. The photo on the right is the view from the hotel room. Absurdly good.

In the course of the weekend, Paul and I got to catch up with Thom, hit Wagamamas (still nothing quite like it in Norwich), misread maps on my phone to double the distance between points A and B, get culture with the wobbly bridge and Tate Modern (good to see how many exhibits had changed since I was last there), drink disturbingly expensive but thoroughly decent wine, take pictures of the London Eye and then find out how it was built in the Science Museum, and take in a film in Leicester Square.

Alas, I'm now subject to public transport at it's very best: surly staff, delayed trains, and a coach rail replacement service for the first leg of the journey. Just to rub it in, there was a crash on the motorway, so we're now running even later. The journey to Norwich normally takes around two hours. Today's journey time: four hours.

On the plus side, I used my mobile to grab the latest blog news in NetNewsWire this morning, so now I'm back on a train I can catch up on what I missed over the weekend. I'd been trying to decide whether to sleep on the way home or whether to do stuff on the laptop - this trip was so long I got to do both. Hurrah! For the record, it's impossibly uncomfortable using a laptop on a coach, and motorway lighting plays havoc with the laptop's ambient light detection. At one point, the keyboard lights and screen were literally strobing ...

Currently listening to A Higher Place from the album Melody A.M. by Röyksopp

Hasty montage

java.net rant

I stumbled across migratosaur as a possible solution to migrating database content when using hibernate. It's a tool written by Brian McCallister.

It looked like a useful tool, but there's no official releases so you need to download it from CVS. No problem - I do this for lots of projects from Apache, Sourceforge, Savannah, Codehaus, and of course Orixo's and Luminas's repositories.

Unfortunately, unlike any of the other hosting facilities listed above, java.net insists that you register and log in before they will show you the details needed to download from CVS.

Even more unfortunately, the registration process broke (and told me about a servlet error - fine, you're cool, you're using servlets, I don't care, get implementation crap out of your error messages, ok?). To cut a long story short: my account appears broken, I can't register a new account because I'm logged in, and there's no logout button. I can't even view the migratosaur web site now, because I don't have "the 'User - View - Self' permission needed", and I can't view my permissions without being logged in, which I am .... sigh.

So. Sun, come on, sort it out. Why do I need to be logged in? Why can't I log out? Why are you telling me about permissions and servlet errors? Why does your error page ask me to send you the date and time, the screen name, field input, and action, the version and build number 2.6.2.4? Shouldn't you be detecting all these things and giving me a nice feedback form?

Not a very good showcase site, is it? It's supposed to be "a common area for interesting conversations and innovative development projects related to Java" - fine, so get these barriers out of my face so we can have conversations and innovate, ok?

Meanwhile I'll email Brian privately and ask for a copy of the code (and probably recommend he puts it somewhere usable).

Update: within half an hour of submitting my bug report to java.net, I got this back:

Hi Andrew -

Let me know what happens!

It seems to have done the job. Begrudgingly, kudos to java.net Site Administration people for fixing my login ... I'm now happily playing with migratosaur.

Open Source policy

Hot on the heals of the Swiss, the UK government published the second draft of "Open Source Software Use Within UK Government". Find it here. The key points (emphasis is mine):

• UK Government will consider OSS solutions alongside proprietary ones in IT procurements
• UK Government will only use open standards / open specifications based software for interoperability
• UK Government will seek to avoid lock-in to proprietary products and services
• UK Government will consider obtaining full rights to bespoke/off-the-shelf software
• OSS licencing will be the default (if no other route is specified)

It's a good start.

Mac Backup

I know lots of people out there are relatively recent switchers, so I thought I'd do a quick poll to see what backup solutions are in use.

I've been using a hand-built backup script from my linux days, but this isn't working too well any more since it relied on features of the ext2 disk format that aren't present in the Mac's HFS. And it seems, well, frightfully gauche to be using a command-line backup solution on a Mac.

Suggestions?

iPain

So, I just found out iPhoto doesn't like any format other than JPG.

I just spent the last two hours importing and annotating a large collection of PNGs. I discovered the JPG issue when I noticed a photo at the end of the collection looked a bit "odd". Look closer at the one on the right. I've applied no filters or effects to it. That's as it appears in iPhoto. a 16.7 million colour picture reduced to trash.

GraphicConverter is now batch-converting all my PNGs to JPGs, but needless to say I'm not best pleased at having to repeat the last two hours.

How about a big warning sign on the front of iPhoto saying "this program is braindead and has been hard-wired to only support one graphic format"?

Bug report submitted to rotten Apple.

Update: yeah, yeah, luser error. For some reason, HP's scanning software decided dark photos deserve to be done in 256 colours, not millions. But my problems with manipulating them in iPhoto remain, so I'm still having to redo all of them as JPGs, copying and pasting comments. So far, I've submitted three bug reports to Apple:

• The text information fields are broken. If I enter a title, then tab down to date and start typing, my text gets replaced with the original date. If I paste comment text into the comments box, it gets erased the first two or three times.
• JPG support only should be highlighted whenever you try and import non-JPG formats.
• Date support. My locale is UK, my preferred format is DD/MM/YYYY. In the photo rolls screen, dates are listed as MM/DD/YY.

Ethiopia

One of the things that prompted me to start scanning photos was the recent string of articles from BBC News talking about Ethiopia (Ethiopians 'rely on food imports', Fears over Ethiopian resettlement, Soldiers demobilised in Eritrea). In 1999 I had the amazing luck to visit Ethopia to run a week-long course on HTML for the British Council, as part of a continuing skills trading programme between UEA and Addis Ababa University. The photos from that trip have languished in a drawer for far too long.

I've just scanned them all, and over the next couple of days I'll go through them and add what details I can remember from the trip before uploading them. Until then, I've uploaded my favourite photo of the lot: Addis Ababa at dawn. My poor photography skills (and old scanner) don't do it justice: the smell of wood smoke, the sharp morning air that already carries a hint of the day's heat, and the call to prayers echoing over the city.

Trusting iLife

I'm finally taking the leap of trusting myLife to iLife. I've already got my entire (ahem) music collection in there (1310 artists, 416 albums, 5223 songs, 16.1 days, 22.72GB), and now I'm putting my photos into iPhoto.

I'm starting off with the digital camera shots, and then I'm going to digitise the huge pile of analogue ones that are currently taking up drawer-space. Once I'm done, I'll box them up and put them in the loft, or something. This is great news, as it means I can try out ecto's integration with iPhoto now, and include even more boring esoteric badly-framed shots here.

I'm gonna need a bigger hard disk.

The man rocks

I just discovered that the CD I'm listening to is mixed by John Peel. Nothing remarkable, you might say ... but the CD is in the Live series from Fabric, one of London's superclubs. I'd never have thought the venerable Mr Peel would be accepted within such a bastion of youth culture and trendy young things.

From the amazon.co.uk review: "With music culled from deep within the archives, Peel effortlessly transcends genres and decades with carefree abandon. Fabric 07 may well confound the feet but it's sure to rock the soul and warm the heart." Hell, yeah!

Go buy it. I also recommend for your listening pleasure the excellent Home Truths.

Good grief, the end of the world is nigh. Here I am talking about Radio 4, and using the words "trendy" and "young" in the same sentence. Is old age calling me? Good job I lost my hearing as part of the ageing process :-)

Currently listening to Mr Pharmacist from the album Fabric Live 07 by The Fall

The number you have dialled ...

While reviewing my bank details I noticed two extremely suspicious transactions on my credit card. Large round numbers, to a company with which I have no dealings with. I figured the smart thing to do would be to call my bank. Sadly, they are experiencing technical difficulties. After four phone calls and 28 minutes on hold, all they could recommend was that I call back in an hour.

Gosh. If someone is fraudulently using my credit card, I wonder how much money they can spend in an hour?

Update: I finally managed to talk to someone in the credit card call centre. Apparently the fraud department consider it "disputed transactions" rather than fraud because only one vendor is involved. They'll do an investigation, but they suspect it's caused by someone mistyping the card number at a point of sale. Twice. Riiiiight ....

Meanwhile, they've got my card on "high alert", so if the spending pattern deviates from normal (i.e. it's used for something other than curry and beer), they'll call me.

Carriers and content providers

Joi Ito writes that carriers shouldn't be content providers: "I'm thinking more and more about how I think it might be a bad idea for the carriers to get into the content business [...] The main value that always-on provides is presence information, short messages and time sensitive stuff like news.".

Well, without giving too much of the game away, it seems like at least in the UK this is what's happening. The content providers are tooling up to serve up content themselves, rather than just delivering it to the mobile network providers (often in scarily archaic ways).

At the same time, some of the mobile network providers are doing the re-engineering necessary to become conduits - which makes a lot of sense: content creation is not their core business, and they are always going to put priority on investing in network infrastructure. They need cheap ways of channelling other people's content. They are also shifting focus of the stuff they do provide to "high refresh" content ... exactly the time-sensitive stuff that Joi talks about.

Currently listening to Finished Symphony (Hybrid's Soundtrack Edit) from the album Dreamstates (Disc 1) by Hybrid

Twisted

I have a great idea for a new reality TV show. Move over Endemol, here comes "BidMania".

The basic premise is this: you put ten people in a room and get them to write bid documents non-stop. The last person still writing wins. Automatic disqualification if you start giggling hysterically, or if you have a brain haemorrhage.

There'll be special bonus rounds, where you have to stay quiet and not scream when a series of entertaining challenges are thrown at you, such as "sections you forgot to write" or "semantically nonsensical requirements".

This is how my day is going:

I think there's actually blood leaking from my eyes and ears.

That picture ....

So the picture of us working in the office the other day caused some consternation and confusion, and it was hard to describe how it was taken. So here's a diagram that hopefully makes it clearer:

Basically, David stood in the corridor on the other side of the atrium, and not about 30 foot in mid-air outside as it may have appeared. The office we were in has a window looking in on the atrium...

Here's a couple more pictures from inside the room, looking out.

If you look closely at the one on the right, you can just about make out David taking a power nap!

I guess that's taken all the excitement out of it now. I still think it's a cool photo, though :-)

Taking the .... water

This lovely story from The Telegraph confirms what I've long suspected: bottled water is a waste of time.

Coca-Cola, the soft drink giant, has confirmed that it is selling purified tap water in a bottle.

The company said the source for its new Dasani bottled water was the mains supply to its factory in Sidcup, Kent.

So, next time you want a bottle of water, just fill a bottle from the tap, eh?

New baby

During all the excitement over the past few days, I completely forgot to mention the birth of our new company:

Orixo was born on the early hours of Thursday morning, and is a collaboration between us and several other companies across Europe. It's been a long time coming - we announced the Orixo initiative way back in June 2003 - but these things take a while to work out. From first impressions I'd say this is the start of something beautiful.

Not blogging this

Looks like The Onion STATshot. Snapshot of faith.

Heaven holds a sense of wonder

Hungry still for more

In other news, I'm also now occasionally here.

Currently listening to Silence from the album Classic Chillout (Disc 2) by Delerium