Catch up News

So I've been crazy busy recently travelling all over the place, plane, train and automobile. Which has had the effect that I'm incredibly tired all the time and my employer is getting more and more pissed by my lack of attentiveness which I like to try and avoid because I hate dumping on colleagues and they've been kind enough to pay me whilst I've been away finding out how to stop planes hitting stuff. However i start my new job soon and I'm full of beans about it, but also some doubt as to whether I'll actually enjoy the change of role... more DB less Dev... hmmm

This has also taken its toll on my equipment, with some 48 Safari windows open and nearly 80 firefox tabs open... yes firefox crawls at that point. Most of the Safari stuff is old new I at some point wanted to blog about, given that the world has moved on, I'm merely going to link to all these stories here as an indication that I found them interesting.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/04/26/personalized_homepage_malfunction/
Google was bad, but then they fixed it... whilst this was kicking off was the only time it was interesting, when they fixed it everyone breathed again and moved on.

http://www.macworld.co.uk/news/index.cfm?RSS&newsID=17904
This has been superceded by the news that the BBC catch up service is launching in July and the EC is pissed by the lack of platform agnosticism, which might offer some comfort to El Jobs because the EC still want to sue him about the iTunes iPod "Lock in"

http://www.macrumors.com/2007/04/25/apple-board-members-response-to-fred-anderson/
Poor Fred... no one bothered... no didn't think so.

http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/07/05/16/apple_patent_clears_road_for_theft_proof_iphones_macs.html
Quite interesting, merely given how paranoid I am when on the road about my stuff getting stolen. To the point when if I'm going out for coffee, I'll carry the back up drive with me if I'm leaving the laptop in my room - just in case.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/futureofwebdesign/?page=2
I'm tempted to go to this one especially as the US leg of the Future of Web Apps. is delayed until 2008, Future of Web Design is in New York so means I get to visit the East Coast. Early reg begins on the fifth of July.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/04/23/free-city/
With all the rampant hysteria about WiFi recently this was a good news story, my only complaint is that it still costs a ridiculous amount to get WiFi access at places like Bucks.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/05/04/tory_opensource/
This was a pleasant collision of technology and politics, the kind of thing that I yearn for... I just don't have the time to comment. Other than OpenSource is getting bigger and better and more usable... can you spell Ubuntu ? Seriously I can honestly imagine Ubuntu satisfying most peoples needs, e-mail, web browsing and writing the odd letter.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/05/11/satnav_crash/
Purely because I've been living with my SatNav recently, she's called Jenny - the GPS lady. I realised the moment I ordered it that my GPS was merely a driving aid, like the speedo, the rev counter... you can't buy these things and have them do the thinking for you. If Jenny tells me to Exit the highway, but I know that I want to Keep going so I can make use of the Toll I ignore her, sure she sounds a bit impatient when she says "Recalculating" but damn it that's her job. I hardly think it's the GPS' fault that the driver didn't know how to read the signs and operate a none automatic level crossing.

http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/05/02/1352258&from=rss
This story has also come and gone, but it is interesting when taken in light of the more recent article about the social indicators of the different social networking sites, from Digg but also on boing boing and it was picked up by the BBC (Yes you can view that article on a mac)

http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/vimannounce/message/170
I keep saying I'm going to learn the way around terminal properly, I was always gutted that people on my course in the first year of college couldn't do the unix module it was reserved for the computer scientists. Along with Vi I also mean to learn LaTeX which would have been useful before I wrote umpteen papers in pages, which actually copes quite well.

http://www.networkworld.com/columnists/2007/061807-wireless-security.html
Fairly interesting.

In other news the WWDC happened... it was OK - there wasn't much new. Obviously Safari Beta on Windows which was interesting. I think it looks iffy with no controls on the top left... just this empty space.

The fairly abysmal support for developers was ironic given that it was a Developers Conference. They've updated Macbook Pros which is very exciting as I want a new one, I've had this one about 18 months - but this is the first time I've used a laptop as my main machine and I've felt the fact it was a Gen 1 machine. My current reasoning is that as a treat to myself for my new job and that I might need to spend a bit more time in Windows I'd like a more powerful machine, with my added RAM to.

I'm also quite taken with pstam.com's review of his new Dell 30" I've been tempted by one of these for work for a while as recently I've begun to notice that I'm filling up the Laptop Screen and the external 19" rather a lot lately. Now we'll have to see as I move into a different role at work whether that's still the case. However if I'm considering running Windows a but more then it might be nice to have the extra screen real estate. I wasn't surprised by his choice of a Dell because the recent reviews in MacWorld indicated that the higher colour Gamut is well worth it, along with the better mobility of the Dell compared to the Apple offering, yes I know oldmanuk won't agree.

On a final note I like the interface changes that Blogger has received recently mostly the, indication of where the errors are occurring in any html I've imputed, but the auto save is a welcome addition to.

So, what are your thoughts on Gordon Brown?

Someone asked me on Facebook "So, what are your thoughts on Gordon Brown? Was it really time for a change?" below is my response.

Well I'm not a natural Labour voter here in the UK. A lot of people praise Brown for giving us a stable economy, but it is my understanding that's a lot to do with only a couple of decisions he's made, like handing over the control of interest rates to the independent bank of England. There are reports he's done some bad things to our pension funds etc.

"Was it time for a change" Well that one is certainly Brown's doing, there was apparently an understanding some years back that Tony would hand over to Gordon and by some account Brown's people have kinda forced Tony from power when he didn't really want to go yet. Although he was seen as a risk for the Labour party now because he was becoming increasingly unpopular, despite having won them a historic three consecutive terms in office.

There was much speculation about what he'd do after leaving office, we are somewhat more egregious to our outgoing PMs than you are to your presidents so it was widely rumored that he might hit the US lecture circuit, and make a killing like Clinton. I think this Middle East job is right up his street as he loved the world stage, sometimes to the detriment of domestic attention, however it's also a massive risk because he will be viewed by some in the Moslem world to have waged several unpopular wars on their brothers... although he's also been a massive proponent of the two state solution about Israel and Palestine.

A bit longer of a response than they were maybe expecting, I thought their response was highly amusing...

"For what it's worth, Blair's always welcome to move to California and be governor ;-)"

Hmmm

Not what you want to see when reboot your mac mini for the first time in six months.

The oldest pub in britain.

Fold up bike

The weather

Not quite as nice as it could be.

Watch WWDC Keynote

Now available at Apple.com

iPhone smaller ?

I was browsing digg and this article caused me to shout out loud "I thought that"

http://i17.tinypic.com/6617rlk.png

Safari on Windows... Don't ask

I SO don't get it. What is the strategy here, do they think the halo effect is this strong. Seems like a band wagon to me.

BBC Weather Podcast

I was watching my daily BBC news podcast and it always ends with the weather, well imagine my surprise when Cornwall was cited on the satilite image as having a rather chillier than normal 0600 temperature, I know the UK will get colder with Blobal Warming, but sheesh...



then given that only an hour later it was predicted to have temperature of 14, that must be one of the largest temperature change gradients of any naturally occurring meteorological phenomenon.

Roll on the 1st July

I am sat in a club wearing a lovely and quite expensive shirt. Cuff links that were a wonderful gift. Shoes that are comfy and nice and expensive. The reason i tell you all this is not to brag in some horrible manner but then to high light that all these products that i spent my hard earned money on (well someone did), whether you agree with my horrid capitalist acquisitions or not, are being tainted by the second hand smoke of other people over whom i exercise no control. They are admitted without my consultation, they poison the air i cannot filter, they harm the bar staff i pay to serve me drinks. "well i chose to enter" is no defence. All i can hope for is that businesses survive the initial patron drop off post 1 july. Certainly long enough that i might return by then it night be too late for my best threads. The ban also effects my own private members club i for one will certainly be attending more often especially now my clothes won't stink after only one pint.

Ode to kevin rose.

And alex of course.

New battery

After some weirdness with my apple care it was all sorted.

Parallels 3...

This looks ridiculously interesting, but I havn't got time to tell you about it, so you'll have to find out for yourselves.

The Jazz and Optimus Maximus keyboard

I've had a rather good day, despite some minor work stress -research wise I delivered a preso today in my own brand of Dick Hardt'y goodness and it went pretty well.

So I decided to shun the lab this PM and wonder out and buy some music as a treat to myself, as well as performing the chore of taking some footware back that broke... immediately before my standing up and delivering my presentation, leaving me hopping mad.

One of the albums, yup I bought several, was a new jazz album called fairly unoriginally "the Jazz" it is tied in to a digital broadcast radio station here in the UK, also called "The Jazz" - anyhow, iTunes didn't have the track information - to be fair it was only released this morning. So I entered the info for the first disk and went hunting for a decent image of the cover art.

I wandered over to thejazz's homepage, and what I spotted was, well this...



What caught my eye was the logo for the jazz blog... does it look familiar to you... it did to me. I wonder indeed if the the creators of said cool blog actually have permission to use the picture of the extremely cool but still yet to be released and reported as being even too expensive to be cool keyboard.... hmmm....

while(!busyWork && !literatureReview) then

OK So posting has been lacks... sue me. Here is my reason, when I've not been writing the next ground breaking educational web apps, or writing endless literature reviews about emergent behaviours impact on a distributed system of obstacle data validation for aircraft - I have been mainly in the sun.

Soz.

Froozen coke

So I got back from the big smoke last night and I put a can of coke in the freeze, so it would get cold quickly and I could have a nice cold ice coke, just like the advert says.

Roll forward 14 hours and have a great nights sleep, a slow realisation that I never did have that can of coke.

The horror that is facebook.

I am still wanting to write my own beautiful style sheet for this blog, and I will - once all my mucho busy work is done. Then I will link up all my social networking account and have a fully fledged online identity.

However until I was reminded today the horror that social network can bring - a phase of my life I had thoroughly blotted out was cruelly and with malice brought screaming back into my conciousness.