Bagel Belly Blog

Happy Tax Freedom Day

Today is Tax Freedom Day. From today, every penny I earn is for me and not the government, in theory. Interesting to see that in Europe, this day doesn't arrive until the end of next month. I wonder how this will change as the UK moves into Europe? I bet it will be used as ammunition by UKIP (pronounced you-kip) and other Europhobics.

Thanks, Apple

A new update to OS X, version 10.3.4, hit the streets yesterday. Eager to take advantage of the "enhanced functionality and improved reliability", I installed it first thing this morning before hopping on a train for a long day in London.

Being a true roadwarrior, I figured I'd take advantage of the two hour train journey (yes, the train was late. Again. Three times in three journeys. Great batting average. But I digress.) to write up some notes and email them to the people waiting for them.

Can you imagine my joy - nay, sheer ecstatic exuberance - when I found out one of the things Apple "fixed" was bluetooth GPRS network connections? Yes, that's right, they've improved and enhanced it beyond measure.

I can no longer get an internet connection via my mobile phone. A few times this morning I managed to connect for precisely 60 seconds, but this afternoon all attempts ended in the useful and informative error message above.

I tried rebooting the laptop. I tried rebooting the phone. I tried getting a connection just on the phone - works fine. I tinkered with the myriad settings that I'd finely tuned last November in the mystical usability disaster that is OS X's Internet Connect application. Nothing worked.

I thought this sort of frustrating crap only happened to Linux and Windows users?

Time to spend a fun evening tracking down the problem, so I don't get the same problem when I'm on the road next week :-(

Cocoon article

Google news alerts just pointed me at a Cocoon article on internetnews.com. It's mostly a fluff piece, and contains several mistakes (that's Cocoon 2.1.5 guys, not 2.15. And it's Stefano, not Stephano). Quite a nice bit of publicity though.

Hot hot hot

Working from home this morning, while I wait for the post to arrive. The wonders of having a degenerating postal system that only delivers around noon :-(

Anyway. One downside I've found about shiny powerbooks is they are a nightmare to work on in sunshine - too damned bright! The light reflecting off the aluminium is a bit intense. It's a choice between glasses and being able to read the screen by squinting, or sunglasses and not being able to read the screen because the contrast isn't great enough.

They have snow blindness. How soon before powerbook blindness becomes a recognised condition?

Alright. I'll stop grumbling about the hardship of being out in the sunshine now. Besides, Cocoon's finished recompiling so time to do something productive ;-)

That's enough, thanks.

Comments are now off by default. (Just gotta figure out how to retrospectively turn them off, too.) Score 1 to the spammers.

Seems there's a new exploit for MovableType with MT Blacklist. To get round blacklists, spammers are using entities for parts of the URLs they are linking to. I just got hit by 20 or 30 spams in one go. I don't have time to keep despamming. I don't have time to upgrade to the new version of MT, or switch to a new blog system, or whatever.

It's a shame, I've enjoyed some of the comments and discussions that have occurred through the comments.

As Matthew said, communication forms are becoming unusable. Next step: I start blocking all my email.

Coo, pretty

From watching Designer of the Year 2004 tonight on BBC 4: play/create. I particularly like noodlebox.

tcpsound and peep, NetNewsWire and ecto

Ted Leung talks about tcpsound and peep, tools which play sounds in response to network traffic.

In a recent bid we put in to a large mobile phone network provider, one component was aural feedback on network status, using a similar idea. Imagine, if you will, the sounds of a tropical rain-forest, on a calm Sunday afternoon. Peaceful, relaxing. All is calm ... then slashdot links to your website's front page, and suddenly the tropical harmony is disrupted as a monsoon hits. The sound of the downpour is the sound of your network traffic.

I really only posted this to try out the link between NetNewsWire 2.0 and ecto ... it does indeed work as advertised, and makes me very, very, happy!

The good life

During the last couple of weekends, I managed to steal back the odd half an hour here and there for myself (difficult, when the working week includes weekends and 48 hour days). It was well past time to tend to my ailing back garden, which has been pretty much neglected since last summer. The grass was desperately in need of a trim, as it was well over a foot deep. My mower takes cheap replaceable plastic blades, and I got through 24 of the suckers before it was close to respectable again. Of course, now the grass is a scorched brown mess, but I trust that some feeding and watering will restore it to some approximation of life.

This afternoon, it was the turn of the conifers that line one side of the garden. They'd grown by over four feet since last I trimmed them (around February last year, if memory serves), and many of the branches were beyond the realms of secateurs, and had to be attacked with a saw. Unfortunately, some kind person ran off with my stepladder last year (carelessly left in a corner of the garden - yes, if it's not chained to the ground, they'll run off with anything round here), and so I will have to wait until I've bought a new set before tackling the bigger branches further back.

I've now got a pleasant ache in all my limbs, blistered hands and scratched arms as proof of my exertions. Yes, I'm sure this is far more satisfying than relaxing on a beach with a good book and a cold beer ;-)

Quackers

(via stega)

Dark side of the moon

Eclipse 3.0 M9 is out .... grab it while it's hot. It doesn't show up on the main download page just yet, but it's on the American download site.

Update: it's also on some mirror sites, for example the UK one. Release notes are also available.

Now it's public ....

Pier writes:

From this morning at 8:32 AM (BST) http://www.vnunet.com/ is running off a standard 2.1.5 (head) distribution of Cocoon, Apache 2.0.49 w/ mod_cache, Jetty 4.2.19

We are absolutely knackered, and relieved to have had the help of our Orixo friends at Pro-netics. It was fantastic just watching from the sidelines as Jeremy and Pier worked their magic, and helping as and when needed.

I'll sort out a more formal announcement when I've finished catching up with my life!

Open standards

JSR 170 (Content Repository for Java Technology API 1.0) is finally available for public review. About time too ... I was beginning to wonder if I'd live to see it become public. Anyway, you have until 19th July 2004 to review. It took them 2 years to come up with the JSR, and they are allowing 2 months for review ... hmmmmmm. I hope it's still relevant. 2 years is an awfully long time to put together a standard in the fast-moving industry.

Tickle me, Elmo

Last night I decided to convert one of the various laptops sitting round the house into an audio jukebox, plugged into my stereo, so I can listen to music in the lounge or garden when the powerbook is upstairs.

It was surprisingly straightforward. Firstly, I needed to get my music collection shared off the powerbook. Luckily, OS X has Samba built-in, so this is really trivial. In /etc/smb.conf, I added:

[music]

  comment = iTunes files

  path = /Users/savs/Music/iTunes/iTunes Music

  browseable = yes

  read only = yes

  writable = no

  locking = no

  public = yes

  oplocks = false

  level2oplocks = false

Next, the intel laptop. I installed Debian stable, and in particular the autofs package. This will automatically mount the powerbook's music collection whenever it is needed. I added the following line to /etc/auto.misc:

music        -fstype=smbfs        ://Irvine/music

Now, whenever I do ls /var/autofs/misc/music/, the samba share is automatically mounted if it is not already available.

Because I've encoded everything in iTunes' m4a format, I'm using mplayer to play them. Debian packages are available from Christian Marillat's site.

All I need to do now is figure out how to get sensible playlists. I could do with a fancy GUI so I can run the laptop through the TV, and I guess that means an infrared pointing device would be useful too.

And yes, I am aware there's java clients such as AppleRecords that save all the hassle of sharing disks, that use the iTunes sharing facility instead. I discovered that about 5 minutes after configuring samba.

The laptop is called elmo, by the way.

Separated at birth?

Steven's entertaining rundown of the Eurovision songs makes me suspect that he's actually the long lost brother of Simon Cowell, the evil star of Pop Idol and American Idol fame. I almost wish I'd watched Eurovision now! (But only almost.)

(Sorry Steven, no offence meant by the comparison!)

Old git

Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you, happy birthday dear David, happy birthday to you!

He's one of only a few friends that are older than me, so I take great delight in making fun of his advanced years (until I catch up in 5 months' time).

Nature rocks

On my way to work yesterday, I met this freshly minted mini horse. How cool is that?

There's actually near enough a dozen horses in the fields I walk through. Some of them have been abandoned; others are left there by their owners who are taking advantage of rights established over a thousand years ago with the principal of common land. This is something there's quite a history of in Norfolk - in 1549, Robert Kett led a march of 20,000 people to win back common land. The Virtual Norfolk web site has more information on Kett's Rebellion. That site runs on Cocoon, by the way ;-)

On the ball, city

Those that have met me will know I'm not the world's biggest fan of football, and I certainly wouldn't say I support any particular team. However, even I couldn't avoid hearing that Norwich City Football Club have just made it into the Premiership. To celebrate this auspicious occasion, the entire population of Norwich (well, 50,000 of them anyway) took to the streets yesterday for a huge party. I managed to avoid most of it, but was very amused to see a bloody great canary perched on top of city hall.

San Francisco, CA (May 11,

San Francisco, CA (May 11, 2004)
The Apache Software Foundation today announced that its HTTP Server platform has reached a milestone of eight consecutive years of World Wide Web technology leadership. [...] In an April 2004 Netcraft survey incorporating roughly 50 million Web sites, Apache again rose to the top for the 96th straight month, with 69.01% market share and 15,747,757 active servers. According to Netcraft, the number of sites deploying Apache has grown by over 30 percent in the last twelve months, from 25 million to 33 million. Apaches growth has outpaced that of competing products, as the overall number of deployed Web sites increased by 25 percent over the same twelve month period.

'nuff said.

MySQL sucks

(Warning: too much wine makes Andrew rant.)

It seems I was a bit too charitable about MySQL back when I said "I'm firmly convinced PostgreSQL is the better database".

What I should of actually said is "MySQL is a worthless piece of shit that doesn't deserve to be dignified by the moniker 'database' and should be eradicated from this earth".

An example:
mysql> drop database foobar;

ERROR 1217: Cannot delete or update a parent row: a foreign key constraint fails

mysql> drop database foobar;

Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.01 sec)

The explanation is in the user comments for the DROP DATABASE documentation:

DROP DATABASE seemingly drops each table, first, in arbitrary order. Since the ordering is arbitrary, it may drop them in the 'wrong' order. In this case, you'll get the message ... and half of your tables will be gone, the other half remaining. You can repeatedly execute "DROP DATABASE" commands and each time (at least for me), MySQL gets closer to an empty database, at which point, the database itself is dropped.

The bug report and subsequent thread have an official response from the MySQL developers ... basically, foreign keys could link to other databases. So why not check for links to foreign databases, and only screw up in those cases?

This is yet another example of the difference between a proper database (Postgres, Oracle, DB/2, etc) and a pile of scrappy code that has gained prominence through canny marketing and a few high-profile sites using it because they don't know any better.

Sorry, Jeremy, but I don't believe it comes down to a misunderstanding of how the database works, or of unfair comparisons with the competition. The example above is just one of the many ways in which MySQL is half-arsed, obtuse, and dangerously broken.

*sigh*

Currently listening to Aerodynamic from the album Discovery by Daft Punk

Think globally, act locally

An interesting article from John Porcaro on Ten Ways to Torpedo International PR (via Frank). Well worth a read. From there, I got to another good article on global markets:

" There are lots of new things that you can do for your company to remain competitive in the global environment. People in all parts of your company must be encouraged to become more proactive, more globally oriented. Global customers must be met at their home locale, to find out specific local requirements and pricing. And the company must respond by adapting products to meet those local needs. "

I then found a reference that explains where the phrase think globally, act locally comes from: "This phrase was originated by Rene Dubos as an advisor to the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment in 1972". I think environmental issues and open source have a lot in common - they can both be boiled down to the principal of "play nice". More on that later.

Form

This morning I'm aching all over. Despite having had a lot of exercise from running around over the last few days, last night's Tai Chi class still managed to leave me wincing every time I move.

The photo is from the two-day intensive course: on the left is our regular teacher, who I don't think would mind being described as a typical bruiser. On the right is Jin, our diminutive 60-something teacher. Jin spent the weekend throwing Pete and several other far bigger guys across the room with no perceptible effort or movement. Very strange to watch.

Still alive

Yes I'm still alive. No, I don't have time to blog.

NetNewsWire: 1198 unread articles.

Mail: 17165 unread messages. (Yes, that's right. And it grows by around a thousand a week.)

Customers, projects, tasks to catch up on: hundreds.

Argh!!!!