Bagel Belly Blog

Whither charts?

For a long time, the Top 40 Singles Chart on Radio 1 has been the metric of what's hot and what's not in the world of music. Sure, there are other pretenders to the crown, but they aren't generally considered definitive. But all these charts are hideously biased because record sales are no real measure of the true popularity of a track - it simply reflects the playlists of the radio stations, and the marketing muscle of the music industry.

So, enter last.fm, and audioscrobbler, which are tracking not what people buy, but what people actually listen to. This is powerful stuff - a true measure of the popularity of a track, rather than of the commercial potential. It's no secret that the audioscrobbler clients register what country they are in, so suddenly we have a way to do global and local popularity charts with ease. (Caveat: I don't know what, if any, measures the audioscrobbler guys take to prevent spoofing ... in theory hacking a client has to be easier than going to ten different music stores in each town and buying up all copies of a single.)

Now, let's think about where things are going with portable music players like the iPod. I hope it won't be so very long before they all have built in networking - either because they have taken on a mobile phone dimension, or because they ship with wifi as standard. Suddenly, the music you play on your PC and the music you listen to on the move can be charted. How long before hard disk-based music players replace CD players in the lounge or bedroom? Hook 'em up to the network and scrobble them, too.

If P2P and iTMS weren't the nails in the coffin of the traditional music industry, this surely will be. Suddenly the word on the street and the recommendation of friends will carry more power than any amount of advertising dollars, and the truly successful musicians may be the ones that are best at viral marketing campaigns - or just maybe, the ones with the best music.

Incidentally, The Sad Song by Fredo Viola, is both a lovely piece of music and a truly fantastic video (via Gizmodo).

dichotomy

Strange.

An evening spent with old friends (old in both the worldly-wise and the time) sense.

Chased up with a night with the youth. Also valued people, but a very different perspective. Talk isn't of responsibility and pregnancy and future plans, but lust and fast love and another pace of life. Yes, I'm being harsh.

So depressing.

I don't want to be a part of the pubby clubby worthless dancy culture any more. I'm done with that, I moved on. So tired. So impatient. So unsatisfied. It's not wrong, I'm just worn out on that (and so many other things).

How do I meet my Guinivere?

I'm excruciatingly conscious that my life's love won't be found in a pub or a nightclub (never mind the nagging feeling that I found it and misplaced it). It's tenuous at best to hope it will be a friend of a friend, or someone I happily meet through lucky acquaintance. So I stare out of the window at a familiar scene of the last 12 years of my life, and wonder where I've gone.

And then the cab journey home, and suddenly life and faith is restored with the merry tales of one guy trying to make a living, by ferrying drunk people around late at night. Humanity hits home in a dozen different homilies, and all is almost right with the world once more.

What's up with that?

John Peel

"I don't plan to retire before I die. I don't like the idea of retirement. I don't want to play golf. I just want to keep doing what I'm doing."

-- John Peel

One thing I didn't get a chance to comment on this week was the death of John Peel.

It's a great loss, but somehow I feel less sad knowing that he will live on through the recordings of his Radio 1 show and Home Truths.

It gets better

Having real fun with the whole error message thing.

Check this out:

saslpasswd -c -u `postconf -h myhostname` foo
Password: 
Again (for verification): 
saslpasswd: generic failure

Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha arghhhhhhhhhh

Almost there

Oh god, what a nightmare.

Courier's IMAP server was working, but that failed this afternoon. So as well as switching to Postfix MTA, I've also switched to Dovecot.

What have I learned?

Life sure is quiet without email ;-)

Serious things I learnt: IMAP is a standard but everyone implements it differently - on the server and on the client. Documentation for seemingly common requirements (non-system user databases) sucks. Most important of all, mailservers that output meaningful errors and debug statements are a rarity. For example:

Oct 24 19:18:54 grover courier[27651]: Terminating child processes after a SIGCHILD
Oct 24 19:18:55 grover courier[27651]: Terminated child processes after a SIGCHILD

Oct 26 19:11:58 grover dovecot: Dovecot starting up
Oct 26 19:11:59 grover dovecot: Auth process died too early - shutting down
Oct 26 19:11:59 grover dovecot: child 4693 (auth) killed with signal 11

This was the thing that held things up for the longest - not being able to find out what was actually failing. Urgh.

Anyway, IMAP is back now (and as per usual with any change of IMAP server, Mail.app is resynchronising all my email to a completely different local set of folders ... *sigh*). A couple of short tests seem to indicate Postfix is behaving as expected, so once my local mailbox settles down I'll be able to open the floodgates.

We wouldn't be even close to up and running again without the help of Gianugo, Thom and Paul. Thanks, guys - I owe you many pints!

Still no mail

The Debian stable version of our authentication database does not work on our hybrid mix of some stable, some testing, and some unstable debian packages (which is practically the mandatory way of running a Debian server these days, since the gap between releases is measured in aeons). All accusatory fingers currently point to Berkeley DB, which also blew away David's MovableType database.

The upgrade from stable to testing packages of the authentication database has a flaw, and is not guaranteed to work. After 2 hours of trying, I finally managed to use the stable package and a command-line tool to export from the db files without the authentication database running, do an upgrade to testing, rewrite the export file, and re-import it.

Our database is now up and running. I can browse it as before using the gui tools, and all the data appears to be there, in the same shape as before. Authentication works just fine for Apache and SVN. Of course, the business-critical email is still dead in the water - courier is outputting incredibly useful 'Terminating child processes after a SIGTERM' without any further debug information.

Did I mention what a rancid pile of festering camel droppings courier is?

I'm reserving the rudest words of all for the sysadmin that installed courier in the first place, failed to add courier to the init scripts so it won't start when the server boots, and failed to install the debian package of it so it does not stay in sync with other software on the system. Not to mention many other configuration abominations caused by "short cut" tools.

More generally it makes me think we're starting to see a new breed of "sysadmins" that think webmin (and gui or web-based config tools in general) is the way it should be done. Sadly this seems to lead to an ignorance of the server's inner workings and a lack of professionalism (point-n-click-n-look-it-works and never mind testing eh?). I don't mean to be elitist (well, I do ...) but kids that installed RedHat on a desktop once do not automatically qualify to manage enterprise services.

All this boils down to one thing. If you want something done properly, do it yourself :-(

There's a lot of it about

It's reassuring in a "we're all victims together" kind of way to see stega having RAID troubles. I've just had 24 hours of "fun" with our (usually rock-solid) server.

Yesterday was, at least in theory, mail server upgrade day.

For some time now we've been limping along with a crippled implementation of Courier, which was most definitely not installed in 'the Debian way'. (Never let a new sysadmin near your kit until you have a dozen written references and oaths signed in blood.) Lately we've seen all sorts of weird problems with it - high server load, deleted emails returning from the dead, emails inconsistently saved in the Sent folder, ridiculously long delays when sending, etc. So the plan was to switch back to the SMTP and IMAP servers were were using before, but to retain some of the features of the new setup that were working satisfactorily (common authentication database, spam and virus filtering).

The first step in this Sunday afternoon adventure was a minor tweak to the authentication database to support connections from the new IMAP server. Yes, I'm being deliberately vague here, and not mentioning specific implementation details. I don't think it'd help our security to tell the whole world how it works ;-)

Anyway, so I restarted the authentication database after the change, and found that connections to it were silently failing. I rolled back the change and restarted the database, but connections were still being dropped. I turned up debugging to full, and tried again. No joy. Connections refused, the daemon died, and no error messages available.

After quite a lot of time poking and prodding and testing, at a loss for what to do next, I tried rebooting the server.

... and it didn't come back up cleanly.

It looks like at some point in the past few months a rogue update of the boot loader had fried the disk's boot sector. So first thing this morning, I raced down to London to tend to our sick box, since we couldn't get it back to a workable state via the serial console.

Anyway, the box is up again now, but email and other authentication services are still fried. As soon as I hit Norwich I'll be able to retrieve the required bits and pieces from our backup disk, and hopefully we'll be back in action. Fingers crossed :-/

Semantic, social, fun!

I've been playing around with Flickr for a while now, and marveling at the sheer flexibility of it - particularly with the RSS feeds and arbitrary tags. I've also been a viewer of del.icio.us for some time, and recently set up my own social bookmark account there. I'm still in awe of how powerful such a simple idea can be.
On an RSS high, I decided to sign up to Last.FM / Audioscrobbler, and have been giggling madly at the power of it all. My poor taste in music is now available for all to see.
Paul pondered syndicating his audioscrobbler RSS feed into the sidebar of his blog. Sounded like a fun challenge to me. If you look at the bottom of user pages on Audioscrobbler, you'll see the tasty goodness that is an orange RDF button. So forthwith and without further ado, there's now a feed of the latest tracks I've listened to on the front page of my blog.
Because my site is not running dynamically, I have a cron job on the server which retrieves the latest RDF, passes it through xsltproc, and writes to a separate HTML file, which is then included in an iframe in the MovableType stylesheet. It seems to work.

Mobile phone networks miss the point

How many phones do you carry around?

Do you make business calls on your personal mobile phone, or vice-versa?

How do you handle billing business and personal separately?

We've been trying to find a solution to running up huge personal phone bills by making business calls. Here's the problem: most phone networks these days offer inclusive free minutes as part of the packages they offer consumers. This makes it impossible to accurately reclaim the cost of business phone calls from the company. I can't guarantee my first 200 minutes of calls will all be personal, and if a business call appears in the first 200 minutes, it is not priced so I cannot reclaim it.

These days, it's not practical to make all business phone calls from the office, since we spend a lot of time traveling. "Sorry I didn't call you back, I was on the train" does not really cut it. We have an 0800 number we can call from land lines which will charge calls back to the business, but 0800 numbers are not free from mobile phones, so using that means double charging.

David called up all of the major telcos last week to try and find a solution. It seemed obvious to us: if we could somehow 'mark' each business call by having a dialing prefix, we could either easily identify them on the bill, or even better, get a second phone bill for these calls. It's not that easy - only one tariff (O2 Best For Business) supports this. And it's not the cheapest.

It turns out you actually need a degree in Convoluted Deceptive Accountancy to make sense of what the bottom-line costs actually are. When I first did a spreadsheet of the numbers, Vodafone came out the most expensive, with O2 ludicrously cheap. After some peer review from Paul, I decided to factor in a random month's calling of about 400 minutes. Suddenly, Orange looked most attractive.

The full breakdown of costs is available as a PDF:

I guess the next thing is to factor in 5mb of data usage, and to look at personal phone packages too.

Incidentally, if technical prowess is any indication of how good a given mobile network is: Orange's site is the fastest, followed by O2, with an incredibly sluggish Vodafone way behind (like, over a minute behind on some page loading). If Vodafone's content was worthwhile, it would be less painful to wait. But when you have to navigate through dozens of useless pages searching desperately for simple information, it's simply frustrating. Go and try to find GPRS costs, for example ...

Roma review

(Note: this post was written several months ago, but for business reasons it was inappropriate to post it at the time.)

This weekend, I finally got to achieve one of my life-long ambitions: travelling to Rome, to see some of the sights I learnt about at school all those years ago. It's funny, I hadn't realised how much I'd wanted to do this until I was actually stood in front of the Colosseum, jumping up and down and shouting to my long-suffering friends, "look! It's the Colosseum! I'm in Rome! At the Colosseum! Look!".

If I'd known how happy and excited I'd be to do this, I might have done the trip a long time ago. But there was a certain satisfaction to fitting in a day of tourism on what was otherwise a business trip, which is something I've not really been able to do before.

I was travelling with Paul, Lauren, David and Elise. Given the amount of time available, I think we did a pretty good job, thanks in no small part to Gianugo, who provided us with an excellent set of directions, and a lightning tour the following evening by our fantastic hosts. In a few short hours we saw the Colosseum, Foro Romano, Piazza Venezia where Mussolini used to give speeches (wow, I remember that from GCSE History lessons), Capitoline Hill, the Fontana Trevi where you're supposed to throw coins and make a wish, the Spanish Steps, the Pantheon, Piazza Navona, and so much more.

I've been home in a wet and windswept UK for a few hours now, and I'm still buzzing from the experience. I am definitely going to become a Ryanair weekend tourist from now on.

How do you spell that?

Via Jeremy, from ars technica:

If you are typing in a cocoa app and don't know how to spell the word you've started, hit option-escape and you get a pop-up list of words.

Works great here, but not for Jeremy. Useful, if it works for you.

Also, command-` will rotate windows in the foremost application. Nice.

Been a long time

Well, actually, it's only been a week and a bit, but if feels like eternity since I last blogged. Hold on to your hats, there's a flood of stuff to come over the next few days.

More travel

So, finally home after four and a half hours on trains, and got the network running again. My wireless routers provided the infrastructure for the GetTogether, and I always forget to make a note of the NTL configuration before I go, and always end up zapping that configuration when hooking up to the Het Pand network.
Time to catch up on the emails and news I missed whilst on the road, before packing my bags for tomorrow's trip to Oxford. I'm going to be at the OSS Watch "Migrating to Open Source: interoperability issues" workshop, which should be pretty interesting. Looks like the journey is almost four hours long - I'd better get the laptop batteries recharged (not to mention my own).

GT wrap-up

So the GetTogether is over for another year. I'm completely exhausted - partly due to the sheer intensity of the last few days of information overload, but predominantly because of the amazing social side of the Ghent experience. I don't know of any other gathering (whether conference, hackathon, informal talks or whatever) that feels quite like the GetTogether - like a group of old friends gathering, where the community truly is more important than the code.
From new friends like Antonio with whom I was immediately sharing jokes about the notorious andrew@ spams, or Arje who can't drink as much as the English, to old friends like Marc (yeah, alright, I'll diet now!) and the Aussie contingent (let's sort that stammtisch thing out guys)... and so many others too numerous to mention. I can't wait to eat more ribs and learn more cool things about Cocoon next year!

Switcher

No, I wouldn't switch back to i686, even if you paid me.
I spent some time during the GetTogether being the typical sadistic Mac advocate, trying to convince my friends in the Cocoon community to become switchers. I thought it might be useful to set down my reasons here, in a slightly more cohesive fashion than could be delivered at 2am after a skinful of Belgian beer.
So what's so great about life on the Mac?
The first, most obvious thing has to be how little time I now spend worrying about system configuration and maintenance. Yesterday, I saw someone with a linux box struggling to get a wifi connection because they didn't know the SSID. I haven't had to worry about how to get wifi working for almost a year now. I open the laptop, and if there's a connection, I'll be online before I realise it. If it's a new open connection I haven't used before, I'll be asked if I want to connect first. No configuration. No hassle. It just works.
Everything looks much better on a Mac. Outrageously high-quality LCD panels really help - the narrow profit margins on i686 machines seems to lead to cheap, washed-out displays in comparison. And the excellent font handling, the carefully-crafted Aqua eye candy, and the user interface design craftsmanship of just about all Apple developers all add to the deal. I'm staring at this screen for 10-12 hours a day, so it may as well be a pleasure to look at, right?
The biggest killer feature of the Powerbook is the excellent suspend and resume. This single thing has saved me maybe 5 minutes a day, every day, because I don't have to wait for my machine to boot, shutdown, or mess around with a software suspend linux swap partition. And it works - because it's in firmware, it would work whatever I ran on this machine. PC vendors really shot themselves in the foot when they failed to come up with a workable standard or firmware support for this. My oldest laptop from 2000 suspends better than my newest machine from 2003 - because the BIOS handles it and doesn't rely on the operating system. I think this is how it needs to be for it to be reliable.
Power. It's actually a realistic option to stay unplucked from the mains for a couple of hours (right now the status bar says 2hr 34 left), and if you do need to swap batteries, you don't need to shut down. Just suspend the laptop, swap, and carry on. And because of the killer suspend and resume, this really takes under 30 seconds.
Dual monitors. This is actually an area where Windows firmly trounces linux, though obviously the Mac is ahead of them both ;-) Plug another monitor into the Mac, and it just works. The OS is predictable and easy to use with the second monitor, and menus and windows are usually aware of what's going on. Unplug the monitor, and anything on the second desktop is automatically moved onto your main desktop for you. That's how it should work - transparently and obviously.
Speaking of work, the whole Mac GUI has changed the way I do things. I used to be a stickler for having separate tasks on separate desktops - so editor in one, mail in another, browser in a third, etc. These days, I feel perfectly happy with a cluttered desktop covered in windows - exposé and the Dock let me find what I need as quickly as switching desktops. I do still keep 4 desktops open - but I'm slowly coming to find I don't use them.
Software. Two types of software ensure I never want to go back to the linux world. Firstly, I have all of the unix / freeware stuff that I ever used on linux, so there's nothing I'm missing. Secondly, I have professional software like Office, and killer applications like SubEthaEdit. Life without them would be so much poorer. And then in a category of its own is Quicksilver - a true paradigm shift that makes it feel archaic using any machine without it.
Attention to detail and hardware quality is the last thing I'd like to rant about. Yes, there's only one mouse button, but so many other things make up for it. The keyboard on the powerbook is just about the best in the business. The ethernet socket does crazy things like auto-sensing whether it needs to be crossover or not. That's just crazy! It makes other vendors appear stupid and lazy for not including it. The magnetic catch on the lid seems so obvious. The power brick with slot-in sockets for different countries. The heartbeat light on the front that pulses when the machine is asleep. The backlit keyboard. The lights on the battery that tell you the charge, whether it's in the Powerbook or not.
Folks, I'm telling you - the grass really is greener here. You can have this Powerbook when you wrestle it out of my cold, dead hands. Go and buy your own. Now ;-)

Jeremy takes the stage

We're drawing to the end of another great GetTogether, and Jeremy's fielding questions on Cocoon Best Practices - a collection of hints and tips gathered from our Orixo colleagues, that cover not just Cocoon but open source development in general. Hopefully of use to anyone working in the field.
After this, there's one more presentation followed by an open discussion, and then it's off for a meal before we all head our separate ways for another year. Hopefully we'll get the videos processed quickly so those that couldn't make it can see what they missed - and then book their tickets for next year ;-)

Hackathon afternoon

Pier talking about blocks

The Cocoon documentation discussion

GhentTogether

Day one of the Cocoon GetTogether - the hackathon. This should be fun ;-)

And I thought yesterday was bad ...

(Caution: petulant ranting follows)

Yesterday I spent nine and a half hours on trains for a one hour meeting. It's just the way it goes sometimes, and I got a fair amount of work done on the trains. On the return journey, I was delighted to get on the fast train from London to Norwich, which usually does the journey in 1 hour and 35 minutes: "Welcome on board the 18:43 service to Norwich, due to arrive in Norwich at 20:15". Excellent! any time saved on such a marathon journey is an advantage.

A word about the rail system in the UK. The quality of the trains and the tracks varies wildly depending on the popularity of your route, the investment by the train companies, the distance of the journey, and a whole range of other factors. So the quality of a journey will range from terrible to ... an absolute bloody nightmare. To be fair, some trains are reasonably new, clean or relatively comfortable. But they don't compare favourably to, say, the trains in Holland or Belgium. Oh, by the way: "We apologise for the late running of this train, now due to arrive in Norwich at 20:20".

The Norwich to London line is a great example of how we do things wrong. The rolling stock is on average about forty years old. This isn't such a bad thing: in the olden days, they were built to last, and relatively spaciously and with comfort in mind. Of course, the comfort has worn away over the decades, but there's still a hint of it. There are also a few newer trains running along this line - bought in the last four or five years - and these are not too bad although they take the airline-style approach to "cramming people in" over the space and comfort of former years. Less tables, for example. And, of course, being shining examples of modern engineering, they break down more often. "... now due to arrive in Norwich at 20:30".

The track between Norwich and London is in a similar state of disrepair. For years, it was traditional for any journey on a Sunday to involve a bus replacement service whilst they repaired stretches here and there, but despite that, at high speeds you often wonder whether the train will actually stay on the track, as you are thrown from side to side as speeds approach, say, 10 miles an hour. Other tracks aren't so bad - particularly the long-distance routes - but in general, prepare well if you get travel sick. Seriously - the journeys can be rougher than travelling in a car at comparable speeds. There's gotta be something wrong with that. After traveling through Belgium and Holland, where you could barely tell the train is moving, the UK rail system seems most unsatisfactory. "... now due to arrive in Norwich at 20:35".

And then, finally, there is the planning of engineering works in this country, which is what I'm really pissed off about today. A word on how to get to London from here: there's the direct route to London, through Ipswich and Colchester, or you can head over to Cambridge and pick up the main-line routes from there. In terms of travel time, they are approximately equal, assuming a perfect connection at Cambridge. The average journey is about 1hr 50 minutes.

Tomorrow, I have to travel to Belgium. Both the Norwich to London and the Norwich to Cambridge lines are closed due to engineering works. Journey times are either 2hr34 or 3hr35, depending on when you want to arrive. Yes, my arrival time dictates the 3hr35 journey. So:

Norwich - London: 3 hours 35 minutes.
London - Brussels: 2 hours 20 minutes.

Sigh. Oh, and last night I eventually reached Norwich at 20:40. Certainly not the worst journey I've ever had - and better than tomorrow, for sure.

Hi-tech timetables?

So, I'm standing at the bus stop waiting for a bus that never came, when I noticed this interesting poster where any sensible bus company would have put a timetable. It seems First Group, the incumbent incompetent service provider, are dabling with mobile tech. These are the geniuses that only let you buy tickets and not look at timetables on http://www.firstbus.co.uk/ and who hide timetables at least four clicks from the home page on their usability-challenged corporate site, so you can bet it'll be good stuff.

Here's how it works: every bus stop (I presume) has a poster containing a unique code which references that stop. By texting the code to their mobile number, you get a text message back with the times of the next buses. For example, at 17:51 this evening, I sent a text and got this back:

@ 18:00
Colney, Colney La John Innes Institute
25 to Costessey 18:00
25 to Norwich 18:03
4 to Swanton Morley 18:07
Thx 4 txting traveline

So far, so good, right?

Not for grumpy me! Here's the problems with this scheme:

• The short code is horrific to have to type in - especially if you have predictive text enabled. Russ has expounded on the merits of short addresses, and he's not wrong. For the code above, 'nfoajmwm', there's 24 key presses if you have predictive text enabled. This could be a fiendishly clever ploy to get mobile phone users so engrossed in texting that they fail to note the passage of time, and are then delighted when a bus turns up unexpectedly. Or it could just be a really dumb-ass decision by the implementation team. How about using a location-based methodology, or numbers?
• The information sent back is presumably straight out of some static database - probably the same MySQL database that displays it's knickers to the world if you pass invalid parameters to the flakey PHP web site. It'd be great to see something more useful, like:

  @ 18:00
  Colney, Colney La John Innes Institute
  25 to Costessey 18:00 (due 18:25)
  25 to Norwich 18:03 (cancelled)
  4 to Swanton Morley 18:07 (replaced by donkeys)

  See? Already I've got warm fuzzy feelings about it. I'd know from this message that there's no chance of a bus this side of Christmas, and I can get on and walk without waiting around feeling naive and stupid for 10 minutes first.
• Next on my list of gripes: cost. If you look closely at the picture, you'll see the inevitable words: messages will be charged at 25p from 16 October 2004. Hold on a minute! These guys can't be bothered to make timetables available either at bus stops or in the buses, they charge more to travel 10 minutes down the road than I've spent all day on buses in more clued-up countries, and now they want to charge premium rates to give me information that's only adequate at best? I know you can bulk-purchase SMS messages for in the region of 2p a message, depending on volume. So that's a markup of 23p to maintain a service - which, assuming they're hooked up to the database they already use, should be a minimal cost at best. Factor in the savings of not having to put up timetables everywhere. And they want me to PAY to find out where my bloody bus is?
• The last problem of course is the less about quality and more about quantity. The window of information they give: 7 minutes. In the UK, it's normal to wait for 45 minutes to an hour in the vague hope of seeing public transport. That should, in theory, be a lot more buses than these text messages are listing ...

So come on First Group, sort it out. We're not talking rocket science here - in Finland, you get tickets, timetables and route planners via mobile. And I bet the buses actually turn up.

Up above the streets and houses...

Norwich's monsoon season kicked in this evening on my way home from work. I was forced to walk as the bus was AWOL, and I didn't like the look of the skies. I don't want to turn into a rainbow-obsessed psycho or anything, but the display today was too good not to snap a few badly-framed photos of - at one point, an incredibly clear double rainbow was visible. Wow.
Meanwhile, I was extremely glad of the neoprene case my laptop is in. Without it, I probably wouldn't be writing this on the Mac right now ...

Subverting Subversion

Dearest lazyweb ...
It looks very much like Subversion doesn't handle Mac OS X "bundles" ... collections of files that certain applications output as their saved format. For example Keynote's saved files are actually a directory containing individual images, pdf files, and XML. When these applications save the bundles, they remove the old directory and replace it with a new one, thereby destroying the .svn directory that holds all the source control details. (See Things to Watch Out For on making the jump to subversion.)
I want a script or a modification to svn that will handle this ... surely someone out there has already fixed it?

Back in the day

We had a whole red thing going on when we first started up the company. Awww, bless. Seems like a millenium ago.

Blackmail material

Oh dear oh dear oh dear. Partying like it's 1999, indeed.
Adrian, Si, and all the others - the rest of the pictures can be purchased for a very reasonable price ;-)
Perhaps I should have just burned this hard disk...

Hard disk archaeology

Oh yes, let this be a lesson to all you foolish folk that undertake the task of decommissioning that old hard disk.
I'm trying to get rid of old PC junk, but need to clear off the disks first - some ancient mail archives still lurk there, and other memorabilia.
And then I uncovered this horror.

A pint to whoever first guesses what this is from, other than the person that sent it to me in the first place. Offer not open to family and friends. More hideous heinous stuff to come no doubt.

Revelations

OMFG.

Apple-Alt-left-click on a dock icon.

Swiftly followed by Apple-tilde. Yum.
Via What's your favourite key combination?

Space!

In case you just missed it ... SpaceShipOne successfully made the second trip into space. Here's a hasty montage of a few snapshots from the BBC News Online realplayer stream of the event ... fuzzy and indistinct, at times it looked like the craft was inverted. Later, it appeared to be in a dogfight with the White Knight launcher and a random fighter.

All incredibly cool ... and suddenly Virgin Galactic doesn't seem like a crazy idea after all.

Hungry?

The savory Pool.

iTunes Music Store Questions

Maybe I'm missing something. (Wouldn't be the first time, I hear you say. Yeah yeah, very funny.)

In iTMS, why:

• can't I bookmark a page? Yes, I know I can copy a URL, but that's not the same as keeping it within the application. Be interesting to see how well the urls in this post work...
• can't I create a wishlist (or even a playlist of albums I want to buy)
• doesn't iTunes flag tracks that I already 'own'. I've been looking at the various iMixes - which seems like a killer feature, by the way - but I don't want to randomly buy all the tracks on a given iMix if I already own versions of them. Of course Apple wants me to buy them, but c'mon ... would they like 70% of an iMix sale or nothing at all? Something for the weekend is a nice mix. So is John Peel's Festive Fifty 1980. Not to mention History of Rock - which really shows the gap in what's available on iTMS. Beatles, Led Zeppelin, AC/DC, ... thank goodness I already have all those in my collection.
• isn't there a feature for arbitrary smart RSS feeds - new tracks by an artist, new playlists by a person, etc? I think there's "recently added" RSS feeds. Not enough though!

I've been looking for Natasha Bedingfield's album, but it seems to have gone AWOL. I know it was there a month ago when I bought the single. If iTMS was a little bit more consistent, Apple would have most of my salary by now.

I stumbled across a remix/re-release of War of the Worlds. It sounds surprisingly good. I own the original on vinyl, and I was looking to see how much it would cost to replace it. Answer: £7.11 for "highlights". Damnit Apple, quit with this partial album thing, it's really really stupid.

Currently listening to Immigrant Song from the album "Led Zeppelin Remasters (Disc 1)" by Led Zeppelin