Bagel Belly Blog

Who, me?

iChatUSBCam has just been updated, so I took the opportunity to see if it works any better with my Creative USB webcam. Seems to - hurrah! This led to me trying out evocam, a very nice package for taking snapshots, videos, etc. Combined with a little bash scripting magic, I now have the hideous picture of me and desktop screenshot over on the left-hand menu of my blog.

Of course, if you aggregate this, you won't be able to see it, so here it is - or rather, here I am:

When the madness next takes me, I think I'll write this in Applescript so that it's more in line with the Apple gooey GUI ethos. Meanwhile, if you feel the urge to do the same, take a gander at the following. It'll only work on a Mac, by the way.

#!/bin/sh

# Get the screen
/usr/sbin/screencapture -x -m /tmp/screen.pdf >> /dev/null 2>&1
/usr/bin/sips -z 60 80 -s format jpeg /tmp/screen.pdf -o /tmp/webcam_screen.jpg
rm /tmp/screen.pdf

# Copy images
# Do whatever you want here ... ftp, rsync, scp, ...

Bung that in a cron job, or run it occasionally, or whatever. Freaky stalker types can also find me here.

Busy Busy Busy

It's been a busy week.

On Monday, it was down to London to meet up with the accountants to deal with some outstanding paperwork (more on that at a later date). An opportunity to meet up with Jeremy and, later, Thom, and to indulge in a few pints before staggering back to Norwich in a tired alcoholic haze.
On Wednesday, I dashed over to Cambridge for the afternoon to catch up with Steven, who was over for the XMLOpen conference. I gave him the typical tourist tour round Cambridge, trying desperately to remember the snippets of history I learnt whilst living near there as a kid, from working there in my student days, and more recently. The weather wasn't brilliant, but we got a few brief moments of sunshine. Naturally, we had to do the punting thing, and we also climbed the tower to the top of Great St Mary's, from where you can look out across the whole city. My legs still hurt. It's higher than you think.
On Thursday was another mad dash to London Town, to drop off Jeremy's new powerbook. I got to visit his amazing flat, and his more amazing local pub. Within minutes, David was of course chatting to someone from Brooklyn and then another person from Italy. The guy somehow attracts every foreigner within 5 miles toward him, and usually the ones with a strange story to tell, too.
On Thursday morning a surprise package arrived, containing an early birthday present from the family. Good timing, as my willpower was just about gone and I'd almost completed the online order form. It's good to finally have them in a format that I can watch (never having owned a video recorder since the taped-off-tv betamax copy I owned). Still, I do think the originals were better, before George Lucas monkeyed about with them in 1997. This feels like a good time to link to Penny Arcade.

That's useful

If you're keyboard-oriented, go into System Preferences | Keyboard and Mouse | Keyboard Preferences and Turn on full keyboard access. Now you can deal with dialog boxes the way you're used to...

Island mentality

The Telegraph reports that pupils are dropping out of language learning. As a result of changes in the law, they are no longer required to take languages at GCSE level. This is a terrible thing for this country, where we are already embarrassingly ill-equipped for the global marketplace, and even fail to grasp our own grammar sometimes.

Our clueless schools minister pleads: "We do not want to go back to the old days when we tried to force feed languages to 15-year-olds who had no aptitude or interest". Oh, that's just great. Does that mean we'll drop science next because the students aren't interested in it? How about we abandon teaching them history - it's a dry and dusty subject after all, and surely not going to catch their attention. Come to think of it - why make them go to school at all?

Content management and content consumption

Two great bits of news:

• The board has approved Lenya's graduation to be a top-level Apache project
• NetNewsWire 2 public beta has begun. Go get it - it rocks!

That is all.

Sloppy journalism

From an article in The Telegraph, "Born in the Sewers":

Bucharest's vehicle-choked main streets, darting between ageing Trabants, buses and trucks that spew out so much exhaust the air is barely breathable.

Uh, no.

The trabants aren't trabants, they are Dacias. They are everywhere, and the name is written on the back of almost every one.

I was there in late summer, and I didn't find the air any less breathable than central London at that time of year. Sensationalism and stereotyping. Urgh.

Congratulations...

David and Elise, two of the loveliest people I've had the pleasure to know, tie the knot today and become Mr and Mrs Plains. Congratulations and best wishes to them ... may they have many, many happy years together.

Can you dig it?

So, remember back when I was digging the garden over the bank holiday weekend? I finally finished the border from hell this afternoon, getting rid of the evil flowers that were threatening to take over the garden. Seriously, that green stuff in the top right of this picture is insanely lively stuff, and has been threatening to take over since I first planted a clump of it a few years ago. It sent runners right across the lawn ... and survived being buried under a ton of soil.

This is what it looks like now. The top corner is a bit of a mess where the grass was killed off (told you those flowers were evil), but I think I'll round it off like the other end of the garden. Now I just have to work out what to plant in this border ... I'm not a natural gardener (my fingers are anything but green), so it's time to start reading some gardening web sites.

Oh yes - as Annie says, definitely a healthy garden. Three more frogs popped up during the dig-a-thon today, including the fellow in this video clip. Say hello to froggy. The only unhealthy thing in the garden would be me ;-)

flickr iphoto plugin

There's a plugin for iPhoto that lets you export photos directly from iPhoto to flickr - fantastic!

Only problem is I just exceeded my upload limit. Ooops. Guess I shouldn't upload full-size photos...

(via Patrick)

Adrian's trip to Korea

IMG_1594
Originally uploaded by aid.

Bauhaus

teachers in schools of design should be men who are in advance of their profession rather than safely and academically in the rearguard

--Bauhaus: Philosophy

via web-support

Vic and Bob's favourite distro

This would be another late-night fever-fuelled blog post.

Now that it's all public and stuff, I'll write a bit about the new linux kid on the block, ubuntu ... possibly the first linux distro to be inspired by Shooting Stars? Thom assures me that it has nothing to do with eranu and uvavu, though I remain unconvinced.

I got a pre-release version through my association with Thom - possibly something to do with grumbling at him to let me have a copy every time I meet him. I installed it once a while back when I was playing with Suse as well, but back then the comparison was not too favourable. Since then, I've watched a heck of a lot of traffic on the mailing lists, evidence of Herculean exertions by the Ubuntu development team.

So, what is it? A really quick install of Debian, essentially. Let me show you. Or rather, let me make tedious notes whilst it installs, and you can go look at the pretty pictures of ubuntu.

I started this at 01:05am, on a P4 2.4ghz machine with a slow 30gb hard disk. Let's count the keystrokes ...

• Hit return once to boot.
• Hit return to select English.
• Up arrow and return to select United Kingdom.
• Down arrow and return to select the network interface. Holy cow, it's asking me for a WEP key! I'd better type it in ... (That's a first. I've never had my wireless card work out-of-the-box before, and usually I have to at least enter the SSID of my network before it's found. Three gold stars to the ubuntu guys.)
• Type in a fancy hostname and hit return, 'ubuntu' is too obvious a name for me. The temptation to call the machine Ulrikakakakaka was too much for me.
• Down arrow and return to select which hard disk. (Bye-bye, Suse!)
• Left arrow and return to confirm disk partition options.

(Round about now I'm starting to miss the Debian-style "select a partition type", "mount a swap partition", "insert a module" fuss. I'm bored with the return and cursor keys, let me type some technobabble, damn you! I want to prove I'm a l33t linux hax0r like everyone else.)

While I type this up, my linux machine is cheerfully filling up the hard disk with packages ... it's been going 10 minutes and it's 50% done. With a better CD-ROM drive and a less scratched CD, this might be even quicker.

• Hit return to install the boot loader. Here's hoping I can reconstruct the entries for Windows and Debian at a later date, if they aren't auto-detected.
• Hit return to reboot.

The major bug I found and forgot to report when I did the install last month was with X: it didn't know anything about 1400x1050 resolution screens. This meant things broke horribly when I tried to select the correct resolution, and I got bored real quick and went back to Suse. Hence never bothering to file the bug ...

Ok, it's booting. The boot sequence looks distinctly RedHat style (in a good way), with messages in the style:
foobar [ ok ]

• Hit return at the welcome message.
• Hit return to select my timezone.
• Enter my name.
• Enter my username.
• Enter my password, confirm my password.
• Hit return to confirm downloads from the internet. Look vaguely surprised that the wireless network card is still working correctly.

Lots of packages being installed ... without continuously bugging me to pick options. Not sure I really want to watch all the "selecting / unpacking" messages though ... where's Tetris on this thing?

I think I've got time to get a Lemsip. I wish all cold and flu remedies didn't taste disgusting.

Ah-ha! It's back to flexing my cursor and return key skills, asking about X server configuration. And lo! My resolution of choice, 1400x1050, is listed. Another bevy of gold stars to you, Ubuntu dudes! I really shouldn't get so excited about this. I blame the decongestants.

• Hit down arrow 5 times and space to select my preferred resolution, and then return.
• Hit return at the final message.
• Make appreciative "oooh, sweet!" noises as the crisp, clean login screen appears.

It's 01:48, so 43 minutes for an install, with virtually no interference from me along the way. That's about the same time it takes me to get a Debian base install up, but a heck of a lot less work, and I'm guessing most of the packages I need will already be installed, whereas with Debian I would need to spend another hour or so getting everything "just right".

Time to kick the tyres and take this thing for a spin. Eranu!

Vitamins and the Common Cold

While I was visiting the parents at the weekend, I was warned about a cold that my dad has, and told to take extra vitamin C to prevent catching it.

Yesterday afternoon, the cold began to kick in, and so this evening I bought extra orange juice from the supermarket.

I was sat working this evening with one eye on the television, when BBC's Horizon came on, and I was amused to note that contrary to common belief, vitamin C does nothing to prevent a cold - though it can help to recover from it once you've caught it - shortening the duration of the cold by up to 20%. So, forget vitamin pills on a daily basis, except when you're ill.

Time for another glass of orange juice.

NatWest online banking team don't know HTML, browsers

I've complained before about how much NatWest online banking sucks and NatWest online banking stupidly requiring broken browsers, so I really should just STFU and switch banks ... the difficulty is that it's not just me that would need to switch, it's also the business and the work colleague. Too much inertia.

For a while I was happy, when I discovered that Firefox amazingly was now supported. Life was good. And then, Natwest did something unbelievably stupid - they broke their HTML by removing the hrefs from their hyperlinks.

Let me say that again, slowly. NatWest stopped using URLs in their hyperlinks.

Ok, fair enough, I've done that before, using the old onClick trick on my hrefs to do something in Javascript instead of making a simple link. But no, NatWest have gone one step further. Those inane half-wit morons have removed the anchor tags completely! Take a look at this:

<td width=162 class=MenubgOff onclick="showNav('account')" onmouseover="this.className='MenubgOn';showMenu('accountmenu')" onmouseout="this.className='MenubgOff';" title="Access Information about your accounts such as account balances and statements" valign="middle">&38;38;nbsp; <SPAN class="arrows">4</SPAN><SPAN class="Menu">Account Info</SPAN></td>

I am in awe of whichever idiot decided this was the way they should do their links. It seems like it's written in a deliberately obfuscated and flakey way to ensure it will break on as many browsers as possible.

I decided to make a stand, and called NatWest's read-a-standard-fault-resolution-script-helpdesk, to see if I could get them to understand the sheer incomprehensible enormity and stupidity of what they'd done. Their response? "I'm sorry sir, we don't support Firefox because it has not been released yet, it's still only at version nought point something".

They don't support Firefox because it's only at 0.9, not 1.0.

They do support Internet Explorer, because it's at 6.0, even though everybody and their dog are recommending you abandon it because of the security holes in it. I am aghast.

ecto 2 beta ...

Still got some teething troubles with ecto 2 beta. Too much line spacing, and I've lost the popup windows for images. Hrmph. Might have to revert to ecto 1 for the time being.

CVS archives

It seems that one of the UK's funding agencies is going to get some pretty good basic rules for software development projects soon, under the guise of an Open Source policy. I don't want to be too specific since it's still being circulated internally for comment, but one thing caught my eye.

In the draft, as well as insisting that source control systems must be used for software development, it explicitly states that archives of the source control repositories should be a deliverable along with the more traditional bundle of sources and documentation.

This isn't the first time I've seen this as a requirement - three years ago, we developed a series of internet-based games for yet another dot.com startup, and at the end of development they unexpectedly demanded a copy of our CVS archive along with the defined deliverables. We refused. The main reason was that we felt we'd have to clean up much of the archive to make it more "commercially acceptable".

I have no problem with "release early, release often", or with open development of projects within a community. I do not, however, believe that private development projects should provide CVS archives as a deliverable. How we get to the end product in a closed development environment should be of no concern to the customer, provided we meet all requirements along the way.

Why do I think this? Several reasons:

• Not everyone understands the need for a developer to work through the night when the coding bug bites. When you're on a roll, it sometimes makes more sense to just keep truckin', but commits at 2, 3, 4, or 5 in the morning do not necessarily look good when taken out of context.
• Secondly, despite the best intentions, rules, and regulations, commit messages can occasionally be inflammatory or unsuitable for public consumption.
• A third reason is "proof of concept" or trying something to see if it works - this sort of experiment can lead to some hideous ugly code that you wouldn't want to be seen as a commercial deliverable, but that are perfectly acceptable in a closed development environment.

So what is the big difference between a closed development environment and an open development community, such as that of the various Apache projects? Well, I think it's one of perception.

A "commercial" product (i.e., coming from a private company) is expected to meet and be judged by a certain set of criteria: every 'i' must be dotted, every 't' should be crossed, and it should have a gloss and a spin on it that will portray the company positively. We make mistakes, but we make them in private. The final deliverable is expected to look good, and be polished.

"Open Source" solutions have long had a reputation of being "sub-standard", or "developed by students in their free time". We all know that the reputation is unfounded, and that in fact Open Source solutions are often higher quality and developed by some of the best professionals in a given field. But, the perception and criteria by which Open Source is judged is still different: people evaluating it expect to find those unsightly blemishes, late night coding sessions, rude commit messages, and curious proofs of concept. It's accepted, and even welcomed. Heck, there's even counters for swear words in that poster child of the Open Source world, the linux kernel.

This, perhaps, explains the culture of "abandonware" - commercial companies dumping code in places like Sourceforge at the end of development, when most of the blemishes have been removed. By dumping final releases onto Sourceforge they get rid of all those embarrassing commit messages and the evidence of late-night hacking. They still get to say "look, we went Open Source", even if there's no community around it. This is also perhaps why even successful Open Source communities (such as Apache Cocoon) still see discrete chunks of functionality donated en masse, rather than being developed from day one within a public context.

A better model would be to try to do all development in a community-centric way - but really, this is just another way of saying we have to change the rules of business to make these methods and ways of working more acceptable. Do we criticise the artist who gets drunk and then creates a masterpiece at 4am? Do we criticise the journalistic hack who submits several sub-standard pieces to the editor before finally hitting gold? I guess I'm asking for programmers to be given the leeway we give creative types, rather than considering them a nine-to-five commodity. In industry, it's unlikely that someone would pop down to the forge at 4am and churn out some award-winning metalwork, but that's because of the nature of their jobs. Inspiration doesn't knock off at the end of the working day.

Hmm, I seem to have gone off on a bit of a tangent here, and lost my way a bit. I guess that's what 9 hours on a train does to me. So, what do others think? Should revision control archives be a project deliverable in commercial contexts?

Bristol, 5.15pm

Bristol's Temple Meads station, as I head back to Norwich.

Bristol, 5pm

If you look closely at the row of houses in this picture, they are each painted a different pastel shade. In real life, it looks fantastic. I would have whipped out the digital camera instead of the phone, but I was rushing to catch a train at the time.

Paddington, still too early for me

Two and a half hours, and I've only got to the other side of London :-/

Steven asks about booking UK rail tickets. Good question ... there's thetrainline.com, but it's probably easier (and safer, given the state of the British postal service) to buy tickets when you get to King's Cross.

The providers screwing us again

Russ has an interesting commentary on the increasing adoption of mobile phones, and how the "all you can eat" bandwidth tariffs of the States put them in a prime position to overtake Europe in mobile services development.

He makes a good point, and one that really pisses me off. The high density of people in places like the UK mean that the mobile networks can get huge numbers of subscribers for comparatively low infrastructure costs, and yet they still feel it is necessary to gouge customers on a daily basis. Ludicrously expensive tariffs, over-complicated calling plans, and outrageous costs for data services (don't even get me started on the unrealistic and frankly disgusting pricing for 3G services).

It's a hare and the tortoise story. We started off with a mad sprint and a great opportunity, and we're going to be overtaken by the slow and lumbering US of A because our mobile networks got greedy. Shame on them.

Norwich, unspeakably early

Bristol-bound.

iTMS

Albums that iTunes Music Store doesn't have:

• Green, by R.E.M.
• Lost in Translation soundtrack
• The Road to Hell, Chris Rea
• Dvorak: Piano Trios nos 1 and 3: Vienna Piano Trio
• Medulla, Björk
• Blues in Orbit, Duke Ellington

Hrmph.

Currently listening to Smells Like Teen Spirit from the album "Nevermind" by Nirvana

Windows XP makes me physically sick

Trying to get my parents' machine updated and protected in the usual monthly health check, I installed WinXP SP2. So far so good.

Using Windows Update, I then updated the drivers for their USB wireless network interface, and now the network is dead.

I tried disabling the firewall, in the vain hope that would cure things. Guess what? Windows forgets the firewall settings - I turn the firewall off, Windows turns it back on after each reboot.

After an hour of fighting, I eventually got everything uninstalled, tracked down the original installation CD, unplugged the device, plugged it back in, and everything is working again.

Microsoft strongly recommend turning on "automatic updates" in order to keep this computer safe and secure - but with experiences like this, it makes me think it would be "automatic disasters". Urgh.

Shrek and Donkey off on another whirlwind adventure!

On the road again ... heading home to celebrate my nephew's 10th birthday. Which means it's 10 years since my second year of university. Yikes, where did that decade go?!

Partial Album

What's with the whole "Partial Album" thing on iTunes?

I want to replace my tape collection from 10-20 years ago, but many of the tapes I have are coming up as "Partial Albums" on iTunes Music Store.

If I want to buy them, I have to buy them track-by-track, missing out some tracks from an album. Paying more over all, as well.

This is presumably due to artistic differences between the licensing agents, but come on. The only person getting screwed here is the consumer.

Testing ecto beta

ecto version 2 is in beta. It's by far the best blog client I've ever used, so it'll be interesting to see how good the next version is ...

Flow debugging

I've just been tracking down a problem with one of the Cocoon sites we're developing, and for the first time I had to use the flowscript debugger in anger as I couldn't work out what was going on.

I have to say, I was amazed at how well it works. Simply enabling it in the Cocoon configuration and restarting Cocoon means you get a debug window when your flow begins, and you can step through what's happening and monitor what's going on with your variables. It allowed me to narrow down the problem to one function, and then some wise words from Upayavira gave me enough information to resolve it. Very, very cool.

Let's GetTogether

Registration for the Cocoon GetTogether is now open. Already people from 8 countries have signed up - so there should be a truly international feel to it, like in previous years.

I can't wait for those ribs. The excellent talk line-up is a bonus, too ;-)

MyTunes - how to remove the DRM on iTunes Music Store tracks

One thing I forgot in the excitement yesterday of buying music online was the whole DRM issue - dubious restrictive munging, or digital rights management. One of the tricks that the recording industry use to make life difficult for the honest punter, under the disguise of protecting their interests.

I like to listen to my music on my hifi in the lounge, and I have a linux laptop set up for the task. I muttered some rude words when I realised the track I bought yesterday can't be played under linux because of the DRM.

Well, actually, yes it can, if you remove the DRM. Here's how to do it on an OS X machine:

• Download and install Mono from the go-mono web site.


• Download FairKeys from Jon Johansen's web site


• Compile FairKeys by running the make.sh script


• Run FairKeys by typing: mono FairKeys <AppleID> <password>. You should now have your keys in a directory .drms


• Download DeDRMS from Jon's web site


• Compile by typing: mcs -out:DeDRMS.exe *.cs


• Run DeDRMS by typing: mono DeDRMS.exe file.m4p (where file.m4p is the name of your DRMed music file)

That's it! You can now play the music on other platforms. Note that although the DRM has been stripped, your Apple ID stays in the file, so don't go uploading it to file-sharing networks. Fair use, not misuse.

Oh, and if you're one of those lucky people that have an iPod, you can use hymn instead.

Clean up

Ok, things seem to be working again.

When I moved from MT 2.661 to MT 3.0 and back again, I lost a few duplicate entries during the import/export. This meant that for the last month, all the posts had incorrect URLs and broken links between them. I've now cleaned that up, and everything should be back to the correct numbering.

That also means more recent posts have higher numbers in the urls, so any links over the last month are going to be broken now. Sorry about that. I was more worried about the 300ish old urls than the dozen new ones... blame it on SixApart!

Oh no

I held out as long as possible. It's the beginning of the end:

Dear Andrew,

Welcome to The iTunes Music Store [...]
Your account is set up and enables you to purchase and download immediately.

TV Guide

I was planning a quiet night in last weekend after a day of digging up the garden, so I thought I'd take a look at what was on television. To my frustration, I found that the Radio Times web site was out of action.

Radio Times has been for some time my TV listings site of choice, as it allows me to select which channels I'm interested in and then view them all in one page (though only showing a window of about 2 hours, which I can tolerate). This latest downtime is just one in a sequence of recently reliability glitches: I'll frequently get "unable to handle request" type errors, and then some time in the last week or so, they moved the URL of the listings page without any kind of redirect.

I did a search on google to see if I could find a viable alternative, and the closest was that provided by This week's UK TV. It allows me to specify what channels I want to view, but frustratingly I can't see everything in one go, narrowed down to within 2 hours of now. The best I can get is 8 channels at a time. Well, GRRRRR.

Turns out the data is in XML. Hmm. I wonder how long it would take to hack together an alternative in that Swiss Army Chainsaw web application framework, Apache Cocoon?

In total, it took about 4 hours. I got it working tonight after tinkering for a while - processing the XML was not tricky, but working out a sane way of getting the current date and time into the pipeline made me think a bit.

It's rudimentary and needs quite a lot of work on presentation, but I can at least view all my channels in a decent format. When it's a little cleaner I'll put it on a public server ...

Comment spam

Latest anti-spam measure:

UPDATE mt_entry SET entry_allow_comments = 2 WHERE entry_blog_id=1 AND entry_created_on < date(current_timestamp) - '7 days'::interval

... turning off comments on posts older than 7 days. I just need to work out how to get this into a cron job now ...

browser-fu

I was testing a site this morning in Windows XP, and it took me 5 minutes to convince Internet Explorer to behave. A while back I did the SP2 upgrade, and all seemed to be fine. This morning, Internet Explorer was trying to connect to the internet via a dialup connection.

Urgh.

Firefox did the right thing and used the pre-configured wireless connection, just like before. I've no idea why Internet Explorer picked this morning to stop working: I guess this is the joy of running Windows. Unpredictability. The only thing you can predict is that stuff will be broken in new, horribly unusual ways every time you try to do something productive.

Then Gregor J Rothfuss points to a Channel 9 Wiki of Internet Explorer bugs. A terrifying list of problems.

Last week my bank told me they didn't support Firefox because it "wasn't a final release of the browser, it's still at 0.9-something". My bank are a bunch of clueless morons. They should go look at the CERT advisories and IE bug lists.

Update: Browse Happy.

JCR is a go

The proposal to split the Content Repository API for Java reference implementation out of the Apache Slide project and into an incubated project of its own has been accepted by the PMC. This is good news for anyone working in the CMS/Repository space, and will hopefully allow the reference implementation to grow into the definitive method of interacting with large repositories.

Cool stuff.

Footprints

IF EVERYONE LIVED LIKE YOU, WE WOULD NEED 4.6 PLANETS.

My cycling everywhere is offset by too much flying :-/

(ecological footprint quiz)