Bagel Belly Blog

Lies, damned lies, ...

Here's a funny thing. I don't usually bother with statistics, at least for my personal site. But this evening I was playing with the new version of Visitors, and wanted some chunky log files to throw it at. I seem to have stats for about the last year of the bagel, so I thought "why not?".

Seems nearly half a million unique visitors have shuffled this way in the last 358 days, somewhere between 30 and 60 thousand a month for the last few months. Blimey.

It looks like late afternoon towards the start of the week is when most people stop by. So hopefully I can sneak this in ahead of the flood of weekend posts, and no-one will notice ;-)

I'll have to start posting some more deeply personal introspective stuff (i.e., drunken rants), that's bound to drive people away.

(Actually, things in the pipeline include Maven and Cocoon, more DRM gripes, iTunes podcasting, and yep, more travel.)

who am i?

Am I Bagel Belly Blog? Am I Bagel Belly Bubble? Am I savs @ flickr? Am I savs @ last.fm? Am I Andrew Savory, MD? Am I Andrew Savory @ google? Or asavory @ apache? And where am I, anyway?

Maybe I'm all of those and none of those. It just seemed important to mention that (someday I may explain why). Don't believe everything you read about me here, there, or any other place (unless it was direct from me to you, of course). This is a great big Andrew-shaped Fresnel Lens, my friends. With that monster disclaimer out of the way, we return you to the normal programme.

Cameras

Due to what we'll call "an unfortunate incident" on holiday, I'm in the market for a new digital camera to replace my Kyocera Finecam S3. I'll be limited to what I can get from Jessops due to the nature of my insurance, and we're probably talking in the region of the £250 mark ... though if I'm allowed to, I may contribute my own cash toward it. The Kyocera was worth around £350 when I bought it four years ago, but it turns out that individual items are capped at £250 in my policy. Thankfully, camera prices have tumbled since 2001.

The restrictions: I ideally want good optical zoom, and MMC/SD Card storage. It should also be as small as possible, as it's likely to travel most places with me. Being able to use conventional batteries is a bonus, but not essential.

Likely options so far:

• Konica Minolta DImage X60S (fast startup, fugly)
• Nikon Coolpix S1 (small++, no viewfinder--)
• Canon Digital Ixus 50
• Sony DSC W15 (Memory Stick downside, rechargeable AA upside)
• Canon Ixus i Zoom (ironic use of zoom in name, 2.4x optical is not as good as finecam's 3x!)
• Pentax Optio SVi (5x zoom!)
• Canon Ixus 55
• Canon Digital Ixus 700 (yum...)
• Canon Powershot A620 (4x zoom! 7mp! also bloody huge!)
• Canon Powershot S70 (3.6x zoom)
• Konica Minolta DImage Z5 (12x zoom! huge!)

Any recommendations?

38,000 feet

With 16 million dollars' worth of airplane strapped to my ass ... and the next generation radio content in my ear ...

Swiss Airlines - huge comfy seats and space to stretch out a laptop. Only missing the wifi now (feel a little uncomfortable selecting the "Turn off AirPort" option in the menu....). First time I've felt at ease working with laptop on a plane. Must get one of these seats for my lounge .... wonder if it comes with a stewardess to feed me chocolate and beverages? ;-)

Ooops

Get back from holiday. Upload 650+ photos. Point everyone at the Barcelona photo set. See flickr crash:

It's just coincidence, right?

links for 2005-09-25

• Magical Macintosh Key Sequences
  (tags: apple mac osx reference)
• Macintosh Accent Codes
  (tags: apple mac osx reference)

Five go to Barcelona (and one meets us there)

The five of us (Nic, Martin, Nick, John, myself) left for Barcelona just after 2am on Wednesday morning, travelling to Luton to pick up our EasyJet flight. We arrived in Barcelona just after 10.30am, grabbed a cab and headed over to the apartment. The apartment was our first pleasant surprise of the trip - it was beautiful, clean, and well-appointed. It was located on Carrer de Independentia, near Hospital de la Santa Creu i de Sant Pau, and just a couple of blocks from a Metro stop.

Not long after we arrived, the sixth member of our party arrived. Steve had been in Valencia for a few days beforehand. We all headed out to explore, and ended up at Sagrada Família, the famous Gaudï cathedral that's still under construction. Between us we took several thousand photos of every conceivable angle of the cathedral. It was breathtaking, though it was only later in the week when we were looking out over Barcelona from a mountaintop that it was really possible to appreciate the scale of the thing, dominating the skyline and rising above the rest of the city.

That evening we went out to eat and find the nightlife. We were lucky with our choice of restaurant, picked entirely by chance, and it turned out to be the second-best meal we had. We were far less lucky with the club afterwards, "CDLC" or Carpé Diem Lounge Club, which was almost completely empty and horrendously overpriced (€32 for six drinks). We didn't stay for a second drink. The only other nightclub we could find on the beachfront near the Olympic Village was hosting a student night, which we decided to avoid.

The following morning we headed out to explore more of the city, making our way to Parc Güell, "Antoni Gaudí's most colourful creation". Lots of breathtaking designs and buildings. We then headed down toward the waterfront, and walked through the Gothic Quarter to the Picasso Museum. From there we headed home for a quick siesta, before heading out to party. We hit La Ramba just as a drum band were walking through, as part of La Mercè celebrations. We walked through a seething mass of people, many dancing in time to the drums. In the distance we could just make out a large dragon in the procession, with green flares generating an atmospheric glow and veil of smoke.

That evening we made a disastrous choice of restaurant (€102 for tasteless rubbish), and then spent a long time wandering the streets looking for somewhere to get a drink that wasn't already full of people. In the end we gave up, hopped in a cab, and headed over to the Apolo nightclub, recommended by David. We got there around 1am, but when we went in, we were surprised to find it almost completely empty. This was definitely not Norwich, where many of the nightclubs are starting to wind down around 1am. We sat and had a drink, and slowly the place began to fill up. The music wasn't to our taste (tending toward a constant beat all night, rather than the peaks and troughs of a UK club, where the DJs work the crowd more). Somehow in a nightclub full of Spanish we ended up talking to some incredibly cute Irish girls, which contrived to keep some of us there til six in the morning. As we left the Metro, the sun was just starting to brighten the sky.

On Friday we took a more leisurely trip around the city on the tourist bus, stopping off at Montjuïc and several other places. We headed back to the apartment and then ate at a restaurant just a few doors down the street, at a place where they hand you a Spanish-English dictionary rather than print English on the menus. This was definitely the best restaurant we went to, hardly surprising given it was packed with Spanish people. The meal was almost the same price as our tourist-trap-fodder of the previous evening, despite us all having three courses instead of one.

After the meal, we headed round the corner to a bar that also became packed with locals (but only around 2am, a couple of hours after we first arrived). We settled in for the night, Nic and Martin practicing their salsa with a local guy who played the TomToms, while John and Steve practiced their Spanish talking to the gorgeous bar staff. We left around 4am, though the exact time seems to be a bit hazy...

The following morning was a mad rush to get packed and out of the apartment by 10am, followed by sandwiches and lots of water at the café around the corner. With some sense of life restored (or at least the hangover under control), we headed into the centre of Barcelona to stroll along La Rambla. We then headed over to a Tapas bar recommended by another local, before moving on to the beach to relax and enjoy the last of the sunshine before heading over to the airport and back home.

Back

Travel

It's going to be quiet round here. I'm off to Barcelona (early) tomorrow morning, then next week I'm headed to Zurich, then obviously the GetTogether in the second week of October. Still unsure about EuroOSCON - a lot of money, though lots of great talks.

Time to pack my bags and get some sleep.

Insanely great

I know it was only a couple of days ago that I was cursing Tiger, but I'm a fickle guy so bear with me as I do an about-face and rant for a while on how great Tiger is.

More specifically, Quartz Composer. This thing had me giggling hysterically all Friday afternoon, as I point-and-click-and-dragged my way through insanely fun graphics programming to create something I reckon is just absurdly cool. Interface Builder was good - this is better.

And the best thing? You can use compositions in lots of different places, for example as a screensaver, or as Paul suggested last night, you could create a CruiseControl build status screen (it would need to be a 30" plasma TV and use the bump-mapped gaussian blurry thingummy, of course). If you haven't tried it, give it a whirl right now. If you're not giggling inside of five minutes, well, maybe you're just not mentally unbalanced ;-)

Mobile phones

I recently switched my mobile from Vodafone to O2, moving from a personal contract to a business contract. In doing so I needed to register on the O2 site, and as I did so, I encountered a convoluted nightmare process to handle lost or forgotten registration details, including poorly-designed error messages, pointless automated email interactions, and decidedly ropey browser support. I was on the verge of writing yet another "sucks" rant, but in the end I was so depressed by the entire experience that I simply couldn't be bothered.

Having stepped back and thought about it for a while, I think the real story here is not about any one telco's inability to grok the web and implement a decent, usable site that doesn't drive their customers mad. I think it's more about how so many of the telcos are getting it so dramatically wrong. It seems these businesses are succeeding not because of outstanding (or even adequate) implementation, but because they have a product that everyone needs. This is also reflected in the hideous price-gouging they indulge in.

Meanwhile, I got an email from a guy at Vodafone:

I saw your comments on Deeplinking into Vodafone Content
(http://www.andrewsavory.com/blog/archives/000588.html)

It is something we're working on. I completely agree with you that huge URLs do nothing but cause grief - for us as much as our customers.

I would remind you that browsing Live is free - so if you do ever lose something (or we screw up) it won't cost you anything to find it again on our portal. The link you mentioned (http://vodafonelive.mytrains.kizoom.co.uk/index#main) should be working again - I'm not sure why it disappeared back in February (before my
time).

... I only discovered the email yesterday, as it had been sent to a mostly-defunct email address that I hadn't checked in a couple of years. So, maybe they do have a clue, but it's simply lack of any real competitive need that's preventing them from doing anything about it with any speed.

The good old days

Marcus writes about his brief history with computers, and brings up something I remember from my early days, too:

The Amiga was another catalyst for me, and I can still remember quite vividly the first time I turned it on, and a friend of mine put the game "Lotus Turbo Challenge" into the disk drive. I was *completely* blown away by the graphics, sound and riveting attraction of the system. *Absolutely* amazed.

Curse you, Marcus, curse you! I shall have that music echoing around my head for days now. And because I'm such a generous guy, so can you. Lotus Turbo Challenge in-game music. Sorry about the quality - I had to cheat by recording in audacity while a mod player played it, as it was taking too long to find a mod to mp3 converter. If you want it in full glory, grab CocoModX and ask Google for the lotus turbo challenge music.

Keynote and fading images

I've been trying to work out how to nicely fade images into slides in Keynote, like in this example. Unfortunately, there's no simple way to do it with just Keynote. You can add masks to an image to crop the visible area, but you can't fade the edges.

One workable solution I've found after some experimentation (i.e. hours of cursing) is to use The Gimp to doctor the images before I add them to Keynote. I found a tutorial on making a faded frame with quickmask which does the trick, though it misses out one all-important step: if the image you load does not already have one, you need to add an alpha channel before the transparency will work.

So, now everyone knows my GetTogether slides will have some faded images.... ;-)

Tiger tiger, burning bright

I'm seriously considering downgrading my laptop to Panther. Mac OS X Tiger is proving to be unstable and unwieldy on my Powerbook G4.

The most-hyped features of Tiger I'm simply not using:

• Spotlight is too slow for most tasks (5-6 seconds to find what I want, typically, in which time I can usually track it down in a Terminal). It is a usability nightmare - the "Show All" window does not appear in the Apple-Tab open applications list. The regular indexing tends to lock up my machine for several seconds at a time and push CPU usage through the roof. The list of drives Spotlight should ignore seems to mostly be ignored.
• Dashboard widgets are lovely, triffic, great, and totally useless. I have to wait 3-4 seconds for them to load and update when I hit the hotkey, and not being able to place them on my desktop is a pain (I'd like to see them without having to hit a hotkey). They also consume too much memory - even though my machine has 1GB of RAM, I find it pages to VM too often with Dashboard running. I have it turned off now. Konfabulator does everything I need, without the Dashboard performance penalty.
• Automator is, I'm sure, very cool - but I just don't use it.

Meanwhile, my machine has been plagued with stability problems. The screen occasionally goes blank, the machine will occasionally pause and ignore all input for 30 seconds or a minute at a time, it feels slower than under Panther, and the latest problem is applications randomly quitting. Today, the machine set a personal best - nine applications all quit, right in the middle of some important work. Interestingly, two apps didn't even report crashing - Mail and TextMate silently died.

I hope the imminent 10.4.3 update fixes the stability problems, but I'm not holding my breath.

The joy of public transport

No traffic chaos as bus strike starts, says the EDP.

What bollocks.

This evening I waited 30 minutes at a bus stop, where a sign advertised diversions earlier in the week and the electronic information system advertised the next three busses that were due. Eventually I gave up, assuming that something must have happened to all the buses, perhaps related to the previous diversions, and that it would be quicker for me to walk.

I tried to call the local taxi firms, but none of them were replying, so I walked the three miles to my destination in the city through light rain, passing queues of traffic at a standstill. I then made my way to the nearest taxi rank, but it was empty. I headed over to the next nearest rank, and joined a queue of damp and miserable people waiting for black cabs. When a cab finally arrived, I quizzed the driver about the cause of the traffic and the missing busses. He explained about the bus drivers' walkout, and how much of the city had been chaos and gridlocked this evening.

Two things are puzzling me: firstly, how a bus company that suspected strike action would take place apparently more than a week ago (bus drivers plan seven-day strike) failed to put any signs up at any of the bus stops throughout the county (or even update the electronic signs). Clearly the news of the strike hadn't got out enough - I saw many people stood at bus stops as I walked through the city. Secondly, how the media are failing to mention the chaos caused, and are not reflecting how pissed off most people are that such critical travel infrastructure has been allowed to fail.

This is particularly unfortunate timing - the string of balmy summer days we were having this week changed today to wet, autumnal weather. The prospect of going anywhere on foot or by bike is not at all appealing.

Backwards

I have to use Apache Tomcat to test a legacy site, prior to upgrading it. I just grabbed the most recent release of Tomcat, unarchived it and ran it, and got:

This release of Apache Tomcat was packaged to run on J2SE 5.0
or later. It can be run on earlier JVMs by downloading and
installing a compatibility package from the Apache Tomcat
binary download page.

Must. Resist. Urge. To. Rant. About. Tomcat.

Sometimes I really appreciate how communities such as Cocoon focus heavily on supporting older JDKs by default.

Update: From the README:

Tomcat 5.5 requires JRE 5.0 by default. Read the RELEASE-NOTES and the RUNNING.txt file in the distribution for more details.

From the release notes:

Tomcat 5.5 is designed to run on J2SE 5.0 and later, and requires configuration to run on J2SE 1.4. Make sure to read the "RUNNING.txt" file in this directory if you are using J2SE 1.4.

So I suppose I can't complain, though I think this sort of information might be more useful on the page listing downloads - who actually reads README files? ;-)

links for 2005-09-13

• FoodieView Recipe Search Engine
  (tags: recipes cooking)

links for 2005-09-11

• XP architectures: grown not given | The Register
  (tags: development xp)

Cocoon GetTogether 2005

Forgotten passwords

What do you do if you're migrating a user from Outlook Express to Thunderbird, but they don't know the password to their ISP mail account?

If you're me, you might do:
sudo tcpflow -i en1 -c port 110

Fire up Outlook Express on the relevant desktop machine, hit the "Get New Mail" button, and watch the all-important details go flying by in the terminal of my laptop:
tcpflow[4477]: listening on en1
081.103.221.014.00110-192.168.001.100.01816: +OK POP3 server ready

192.168.001.100.01816-081.103.221.014.00110: AUTH

081.103.221.014.00110-192.168.001.100.01816: -ERR An authentication mechanism MUST be entered

192.168.001.100.01816-081.103.221.014.00110: CAPA

081.103.221.014.00110-192.168.001.100.01816: +OK Capability list follows
TOP
USER
RESP_CODES
PIPELINING
EXPIRE NEVER
UIDL

081.103.221.014.00110-192.168.001.100.01816: .

192.168.001.100.01816-081.103.221.014.00110: USER foo

081.103.221.014.00110-192.168.001.100.01816: +OK please send PASS command

192.168.001.100.01816-081.103.221.014.00110: PASS bar

081.103.221.014.00110-192.168.001.100.01816: +OK foo is welcome here

Extremely useful, and also a reminder of why you should put as much encryption as possible on your communications. This stuff is just too easy to get at if you don't. It's nice to see that Google are setting a good example by enforcing TLS on POP connections to their servers.

Printer woes

Fresh from my success with my sister's wifi-loathing XP install, I was confronted with a printer that refused to print at my parents' house (I swear they save these problems up, to make for an extra special visit home).

The printer itself seemed physically ok - it did all the right things when power-cycled, fed paper, moved the print head when you opened it, and so on. The printer cable seemed secure enough. Windows could see it, but kept telling me it was offline.

I did the uninstall / reinstall driver dance. And lo! the printer started printing, and the people did rejoice. Score 2 for the gardeners.

So two machines randomly forgetting how to use peripherals in two separate installations. Not looking like coincidence any more, looking more like Windows is unstable crap. Anyone care to donate to the "buy the family Mac Minis" fund? ;-)

Seriously - assuming this pattern is being repeated across the country and across the world (I'm damned sure it is) - how many man-days are lost each year to Windows' eccentricities? How many more years can this really go on?

Now that I have the family using Firefox for browsing, and webmail or Thunderbird for email, I just need to get them onto OpenOffice and then I think I'll be safe to switch them over to Linux. Last time I tried them with OO they were screaming within hours for MS Office to return. Hopefully OO has improved enough by now to be a viable replacement.

WiFi woes

My sister has a PC running Windows XP Home (you know where this is headed already, don't you?). I set her up with a wireless network a year or two ago, when she had broadband installed. I used the same hardware that I bought for my parents - a trusty wireless router and 4-port hub, and a USB wireless adapter. A week or two back, she turned the PC off, dismantled it, moved it to a different room, put it back together, turned it on and found the wireless network had become a wireless notwork.

So today I did the usual reinstall drivers game, but was completely unable to make the thing work. It simply couldn't see any wireless networks at all. I grabbed the latest drivers for the hardware version, burnt them to CD and tried them, and nothing. In the end, I managed to get the machine to see the network by hard-coding the ESSID, WEP key and channel in the advanced options tab of the device driver, but it was still wonky (it didn't think it was attached to a network and it couldn't see any wireless networks, but was connected).

I did the mandatory tech support live chat with someone ironically called Dante, who told me to do all the obvious things (sacrifice a goat, stand on my head, find a vestal virgin, etc), none of which helped. In the end, out of frustration, he said "go download all the drivers from our FTP site, and try each of them in turn and see if they work". I did this, and after installing the v2.6 drivers on the v2.3 hardware, everything was back to normal. Hurrah. Score 1 for the gardeners.

First thing I did with a working network was run Windows Update, which meant going through the Windows Genuine Advantage update. For those not in the know, it's a charming procedure where Microsoft now needs to check your license before allowing you to get the required bugfixes and security patches for their shoddy software.

It told me:

To get updates, you must first validate your Windows software. Validation ensures that you are using an authentic and fully licensed copy of Windows.

Or, to paraphrase:

You are probably a criminal, so we want to make you jump through hoops to prove who you are.

Now surely there are more genuine users than illegal users of Windows, so having this message there is insulting the masses of loyal customers? The mind boggles.

So, this morning's unanswered questions:

• How can Windows simply forget how to deal with the wireless network?
• How can a vendor write drivers that don't work for the hardware they developed, requiring you to use the wrong drivers?

More travel

links for 2005-09-09

• sed, the stream editor
  (tags: reference unix development)

Bush reveals prayer day for victims

BBC Creative Archive

It's now possible to download content from the BBC Creative Archive (see Slashdot for the story). Unfortunately when I registered, I was told they think I'm outside the UK.... despite being on a UK academic network at the time. I get the impression their geographic detection is a bit limited.

Curiously, if you click on the "You're wrong, I am in the UK" link and fill out the subsequent form, you're still able to download content. A nice touch is that it's available as Windows Media, Quicktime and MPEG-1.

Anyway, congrats to the BBC for doing the right thing with all that publicly-funded content. Time to break out iMovie!

Lighttpd vs. Apache

For one of the Ruby on Rails sites we're about to deploy, we've been working on getting lighttpd running, as the Apache fastcgi module has caused us some trouble due to high memory requirements and hanging processes.

The big issue I'm struggling with is the decentralised approach that lighttpd takes, compared to Apache's central-and-modular approach. It seems that commonly with lighttpd, you essentially run one server for each user needing a web server. Each user has a complete server config (some basic virtual hosting is also possible, but all in one central file as far as I can tell). With Apache you often run one server for the entire site (or sites, through virtual hosts), and then devolve configuration of sections to individuals through seperate config files or htaccess files.

Most of the documentation and most people I've spoken to in the Rails community seem to advocate running lighttpd as a regular user, rather than a specific service user such as 'nobody' or 'www-data', which is my preferred method. This isn't a webserver-specific thing: it's good practice. Don't give away more permissions and privileges than you need. The WWW Security FAQ has much to say on this, even though it is quite old/out-of-date.

The problem with enforcing a centralised configuration and management policy is that Rails itself seems to expect certain privileges: for example, to be able to write to the 'public' directory of a Rails application. Write access should only be given out when absolutely needed, and should be kept separate from immutable files. Therefore if Rails wants to cache dynamic files (a good thing), the cache directory should not be the same as the static files directory. For added security, static files should not be writable by the httpd - that way, if there's an exploit in the httpd, it's harder to deface static pages. This is all just common sense ...

I think I need some more time to understand the Rails approach to all this.

links for 2005-09-08

• La Chose Interactive - Subversion
  (tags: subversion svn software tools development mac osx)

Confluence

In the last 24 hours, three people in a social context have told me they read this, and another threatened to resume. Oh shit.

Good job I rarely do drunken blog posts any more, eh? :-)

Meanwhile, I seem to have 41 posts in gestation. I reckon about 75% of those are no longer relevant, being quite specific responses to events of the time. The remainder are the more personal posts that have been missing from round here for some time, victims of blog fatigue or a growing awareness that this place is increasingly having repercussions elsewhere. I've never deleted posts, but I've certainly held back from posting them.

Growing to love TextMate

Working on a Mac is definitely making me seek out the fluffier, friendlier side of computing. I've found myself using the gorgeous TextMate more and more over the last few weeks, when I'm not fighting with Java in Eclipse, that is.

There are two really neat features that are making me want to hug TextMate this week. Firstly, you can throw it an entire directory, and it will automatically start a new project with all the files and folders visible in the project drawer. Nothing too remarkable - I've seen it done in BB$$Edit££ before (hmm, where'd those superfluous characters come from?). What's really neat - and I don't know if BB££Edit$$ does this or not - is that TextMate knows enough to ignore SCM directories such as CVS and .svn. That's just so nice. It does exactly what you'd want it to do.

The second feature I'm loving isn't so terribly revolutionary either, but is just so far into cute and fluffy that I'm totally addicted. For years I've done all my SVN commit messages from the command line, for example:

svn commit -m "Fixed bug #123 by doing foo to bar"

David showed me how he was doing it - in TextMate. I've seen editors being used for commit messages before (and used nano or vi(m) myself), but somehow syntax highlighting and the TextMate GUI .... *swoon*

Anyway, I highly recommend adding the following to your .bash_profile (or whatever):

export SVN_EDITOR=/usr/local/bin/tm_wait

links for 2005-09-07

• Wines For Fast Food: The Splendid Table
  (tags: recipes wine)

Of Databases and Keys

I've been working on two sites over the last week or so, doing a review of their structure and implementation prior to developing new features. Neither of these sites were initially developed by us.

I've noticed an interesting coincidence. Despite being written in wildly different technologies (one is PHP, the other is Cocoon), and serving different purposes, they both have MySQL back-ends. The interesting coincidence is that neither of them make use of foreign keys, and not because they don't need them.

From what I can tell, the default storage engine for MySQL databases is MyISAM, which does not support foreign keys:

For storage engines other than InnoDB, MySQL Server parses the FOREIGN KEY syntax in CREATE TABLE statements, but does not use or store it.

... so maybe that's why they are missing.

Foreign keys are available in the InnoDB table type. Perhaps it's because foreign key support was only added to InnoDB tables in version 3.23.44, back in October 2001? Seems unlikely, since both of these sites are newer than that.

Maybe users of MySQL got so used to lacking foreign keys over the years that it became habit to handle this sort of relationship at the application level rather than the database?

Urgh. MySQL, pushing databases into the dark ages since 1995. I wonder if there's a MySQL-to-Postgres-and-fix-the-tables-while-you're-at-it script out there? ;-)

links for 2005-09-06

• Selenium
  (tags: development testing webdev)

Mail sucks

Rumours that this blog is to be renamed "Everything Sucks" are not true, at least this week.

I'm importing a bunch of mail, and it's reassuring to see that "Cancel" button down at the bottom-left, since there are several thousand messages in this import. Unfortunately, all of the buttons are greyed-out and inoperative, so it looks like the only way to cancel an import is to quit Mail. Nice.

Just one of the many ways software is contriving to annoy me today.

links for 2005-09-05

• Cooking For Engineers - Recipe File: Shepherd's Pie (Cottage Pie)
  (tags: cooking recipes)

NatWest Bank suck

Ooops, they did it again.

For the last month or so I've been using Deer Park, the alpha release of the Firefox browser. I don't have any overwhelming desire to be running an alpha browser, but recent versions of Firefox all grind to a halt on OS X Tiger, so I have been left with little choice. And being able to reorder tabs is great.

Up until this morning, I've been using the NatWest online banking site without any problems at all. Well, once you get past the years of pain:

• Natwest online banking team don't know HTML, browsers
• Who you gonna call?
• Accessibility

... but since July '04, it's been working, mostly. And then trying to use it today, I see the fateful message:

The Internet browser you are using is not supported by OnLine Banking. Please use a recent version of Internet Explorer, Netscape, Mozilla or AOL (PC only).

Excuse me? This is a recent version!

So here we go again, back to the fun days of "browser detection" (a synonym for screwing users because your IT staff don't understand how to build a proper web site). Sigh.

Meanwhile, have they actually improved the site? Not really. The default font size is twice as big as before, they've systematically moved parts of the page around (e.g. the area to enter your user number or your PIN), and it's full of delightful glitches such as:

Please select 'Confirm' to complete this request.
(Back) (Next)

Oh well. It's progress, eh?

links for 2005-09-03

• Cheat Sheet Roundup - Over 30 Cheatsheets for developers
  (tags: cheatsheet development reference)

New Orleans

If 25,000 military policemen had been sent in from the beginning, there would have been no looting.

[...]

I'd also heard that when the power had gone out at one of the local hospitals, the backup generators didn't turn on and all the patients on life support died.

[...]

some people became so psychologically unstable that they started a shootout with one another, screaming that they were going to die anyway and didn't care if they lived.
-- Stories from Hurricane Katrina

What can I say? I thought Bush was an incompetent moron, a dangerous fundamentalist nut, a troubling figurehead for a divided country. What's breathtaking about this whole thing is that it was an almost entirely predictable disaster. Maybe they couldn't have stopped the flooding, but they could have done so much more before and after to minimise the loss of life.

There is nothing happening. And they're feeding the public a line of bull and they're spinning, and people are dying down here.

[...]

Don't tell me 40,000 people are coming here. They're not here. It's too doggone late. Now get off your asses and do something, and let's fix the biggest goddamn crisis in the history of this country.
-- They're feeding the public a line of bull

Finder contextual menu grief

Ever since making the leap into the wonderful world of Tiger, I've been plagued by multiple applications being listed in the Finder contextual menu. I couldn't figure it out, and was beginning to think my machine was possessed. Thankfully drunkenbatman has come to my rescue. In Oh, Stupid Finder he talks about the problem, and in the comments is this gem:

here is a solution to repair your system:
Type in your terminal:
/System/Library/Frameworks/ApplicationServices.framework/Frameworks/LaunchServices.framework/Support/lsregister -kill -r -domain local -domain system -domain user

I tried it, and it does indeed fix the problem. It'll be interesting to see if this is a permanent fix, or whether I need to have this run automatically at frequent intervals. Either way, I'm slightly happier about both my sanity and my contextual menus.

Rails pub meet

Yesterday evening, David and I headed down to London to meet up with a bunch of Ruby on Rails folk, for the first of what will hopefully be many Rails social gatherings. There was a great turnout; at one point I think there were about ten of us in the pub, and it was fascinating finding out what people are doing with Rails - from systems administration and platform deployment tools to feedback collection for large corporations.

The difference between this group of people and those that show up for Cocoon meetings was also quite distinct. The Rails folk seemed more ad-hoc, to the point of not even planning how they'd recognise each other in the pub! I think the average age of the Rails folk was also a few years lower. It was certainly a fun evening, and I look forward to seeing how this community grows. Maybe there'll be a Rails GetTogether sometime soon?