Irregular Shed

Something changed

2009-04-14T23:56:00.001+01:00

There's not been any major developments on the Bleditor front, baring getting a treeware copy of Javascript: The Definitive Guide through work. It's a weighty tome, but it's the, erm, definitive guide. I've been playing with AIR a little bit more at work, but not as much as I'd like. This should change - we're dropping support for Windows 98, and by just targetting XP and above (in the Windows department) we can embrace the loveliness of AIR completely. The two projects I'm on right now are the last ones we're doing that will run on an eleven year old operating system... and we exhale.

Anyway, AIR is the way forward at work, and I'm an unashamed fan. So there.

But to the guts of this post. Something changed. Swurl.com got shut down thanks to some really nasty copyright hoopla occuring, and after a bit of searching I (and several other people I know) discovered storytlr.com. Storytlr is everything Swurl should've been but never achieved. It's so good that I decided to point www.twindx.co.uk to it - for all intents and purposes, my website is now run by storytlr. I'm shortly going to switch twindx.com to match twindx.co.uk and then my world will be completely unified thanks to the work of a pair of top-notch European coders.

Another test entry

2009-03-20T17:57:00.001Z

Not progressed much over the past week or so. Finally got a problem I had with Google authentication sorted - apparently I had to register my sandbox URL with Google, something I could find absolutely no information on for absolutely ages - and then I went and found a reference to this page, elsewhere:

https://www.google.com/accounts/ManageDomains

... where I could register everything, allowing unfettered API access. (How two different installations of Firefox were managing to post using the sandboxed app though, no idea.) Nice of Google to make it so easy to find... by searching on an unrelated website.

No attempt has been made this week to do much more than get this access sorted. And this API access will be moot (m00t!) when it goes from online to AIR, but the first phase was always to get this working in a browser. Something I was desperate to do was get it all going on a WebKit based browser (I'm using Chrome right this second, the Google whore that I am) because AIR uses the same technology.

Next up is to try a different rich text editor (to try and sort out the XHTML output), and then start hitting the harder stuff - the management of the blog, and a more joined up authentication system. And make it look less like a mishmash of disparate bits of code written in snatched opportunities, and more like something I can be vaguely proudish (kinda) of.�I've laid my hands on a couple of highly recommended O'Reilly books to help me along the way - Javascript: The Definitive Guide and CSS: The Definitive Guide.

I'm such an exciting fella.

Coming up soon - my report about the Maker Faire up in Newcastle... but not now. Now I'm going home!

The continuing test cycle... continues

2009-03-11T20:01:00.001Z

Just put the rich-text editor into Bleditor. It's the first third-party code (well, besides the API) I'm using. Need to make sure that it posts something sensible. So...

this should be bold
this should be italic
and this should be a link to the editor's website

Hmmm. Well, immediately I can see that the XHTML support (which the author admits openly is flaky) is flaky. I may have to look at other editors; XHTML is important to me. I read virtually everything in an RSS feed reader and I'd like XHTML for that please. Hmmm.

But otherwise, I'm guessing (as I type this, not knowing for sure) that this has been a success.

Work continues on Bleditor

2009-03-10T21:00:00.001Z

It's a terrible name, I know, but my Blogger editor is called Bleditor. It's Stephen Fry's fault (or should I say @stephenfry) for referring to his long, thoughtful blog posts as blessays. I couldn't help but stick the words together using the finest Fry glue.

I've got a terrible logo for it as well, once again ~~ripping off~~ inspired by the classic Sinclair logo:

At the moment there's no rich-text editor, or any sort of blog management. I need to get more used to DHTML (and find the time to work with it) to get the management in. Work continues, but not with speed.

When there's something I'm not utterly embarrassed about showing, all my odds and sods will turn up on the project page, but the functionality is so basic right now (not quite a million miles away from the polished AIR app I desire, but a good 900,000 miles away) that right now it's just my claim being staked.

Test entry

2009-03-06T18:10:00.001Z

This is just a quick test. Coming from the earliest version of the Blogger editor project thing. Um, so there. Pardon me if I don't stay to chat, it's getting late...

Blog editor development diary thing

2009-02-23T11:34:00.001Z

Okay, so my initial fumblings with the blog editor have failed. But I've learnt some important and interesting things along the way, which should make what I'm trying to do next much better. It means more work for me, but it should make it less like a slapped-together, hacked about bit of sample code and more like something that I'm happy to share.

Having spent a bit of time over the weekend looking at editor components, I've decide I'm going to use NicEdit as the basis for things. Although not as mature as other editor components like FCKeditor, Xinha, TinyMCE et al, it's small, fast and has a couple of neat features that I can use further along the development. Firstly, it has a plugin in development that produces XHTML code (something important to me - I want and tags, not styled tags) - it's not perfect, and the other editors have better ones, but it's incredibly lean and should be good enough. Secondly, and more importantly in the long run, it isn't restricted to replacing textarea boxes with its own textarea-like surface. It can make any <div> editable (or or ), as you can see in this demo, and that would be ideal for snagging the CSS from a site so that the text you're editing appears exactly as it will when it's published. Real WYSIWYG, just like Live Writer does.

So, it's not quite back to the drawing board, because I've got an actual idea of how to develop things now (as opposed to just hacking away with a code machete).

The other thing I need to do is try and figure out how to get an AIR app to provide a valid API key to Google - but first things first, this is going to be an online editor. I'll tackle that further along the line.

A first test of my blog editor

2009-02-19T15:28:00.001Z

A little project-ette begins

2009-02-19T12:41:00.001Z

I've moaned on and on about the lack of decent blog editing software on Linux. Having used Windows Live Writer, I know how good the best is, and the Linux offerings don't even come close. Oh, for a cross-platform blog editor...

Well, it's about time I ponied up and did something. Seeing as I live and work in a flurry of Adobe multimedia technology, I'm going to stick to technology I know - a bit. What I'm going to attempt to do is get Google's sample application, blog.press, working in Adobe AIR. And to add some spice to the top, try and replace the plain text box (that I'm currently typing this into) with something a bit sexier, like FCKEditor or TinyMCE or something.

Note that I say "attempt", "try" and "know a bit" because I'm going to actually be using things I've barely touched before. I'm a Flash developer, but I'm going to be doing all this with Javascript. Mainly because the editor lives in HTML and Google have Javascript libraries for accessing Blogger, but also because I fancy trying doing something different. I've also got a really good (and free!) e-book about AIR from Adobe aimed at HTML/Javascript peeps as opposed to Flash peeps, and it seems to make sense to me.

It might all go terribly wrong, and this might be the last you hear about this experimental project, but this is what I'm going to be trying during my lunchtimes. If it works out, it'll be - hooray - my first open source project. And people with far more experience can point and laugh at my ham-fisted hackings.

Oh Bloody Hell, it's Officially Most Miserable Day time again

2009-01-09T18:08:00.001Z

A vast preamble

Four years ago – I know, in internet terms that's Victorian – I picked up on a story that really, really got my goat. I'm aware (and people who know me are aware) that many things get my goat, but the completely absurd suggestion that a mathematical formula could be used to scientifically identify one specific day in the calendar as Officially The Most Depressing Day of the Year not only got my goat but cooked it up in a curry and rendered the bones down to glue.

It wasn't that some PR company had cobbled together some bollocks to get some free press for Sky Travel that did it. It was the fact that a baffling, incomplete (and, in actual fact, flawed to the nth degree) equation was being used, attributed to a high-level member of staff at Cardiff University to try and attach a veneer of scientific proof to the whole thing.

I tracked down the high-level member of staff and emailed him – not the "Professor of Psychology, Dr Cliff Arnall" that various media outlets referred to; rather a part-time tutor who ran an evening class in relaxation at a night school that happened to be in Cardiff University buildings, common-or-garden Mr Cliff Arnall. Bit of a let-down, that. Anyway, I wanted to know how he came to his conclusions, how to quantify weather mathematically and whether scales were linear or logarithmic, what peer-based review his valuable work had received; things like that. And do you know what? He never replied. Instead his name came up again in June 2005, where this time he was whoring his name for Walls Ice Cream (aka Unilever) with a new formula to prove that a certain day was the happiest day of the year.

At this point I called him out and accused him of being full of shit on my blog. You can still see it here, although where it used to say...

Cliff Arnall is full of shit

... it now says...

Cliff Arnall is full of [redacted due to a request from Cliff Arnall]

... after he sent me a distressed email three years after he ignored my request for clarification. I also removed a part where I jokingly invited him to calculate the best date to shoot himself through the face with a crossbow. (Honestly, all he had to do was come up with a formula proving it's never good to do that.) I'm going to un-redact it sometime soon. Why? Well, I figure you reap what you sow.

What's this got to do with anything now?

I'm glad you asked me that, person in my head. Well, it's coming up to about the same date, and rather than let this PR polyp disappear up its own arse, some lovely fellows at Green Communications PR resurrected it and are running with it, diverting attention from real news (hello Israel, we're all looking at you to avoid looking at our economy) for their own gain. Every year this awful formula is wheeled out to fill column inches with and airtime with sub-standard pseudoscience bullshit. They've started hanging off the coat-tails of charities as well, bouncing around the names of The Samaritans and Mental Health Foundation to try and polish this turd up. Someone at Green described the link they had with the Samaritans last year as 'a bit like being sponsored for the marathon, you can pick a charity and raise money for them but they don't pick you to do this'. It's just a convenient lever into the psyche.

So my problem personally is that something as scientific as a horoscope, bolstered by implied links to charities and founded on an advertising piece for a travel agent, which itself was relying on a dodgy formula, apparently created by a man incorrectly attributed to being a whole magnitude of orders above his station, is still being shovelled out and lapped up by lazy media gobshites. In a nutshell.

I also take issue at the fact that Green have been anonymously rewriting the Wikipedia article on this stupid bloody thing, and are now (under the username Honest Green) desperately trying to turn the article into an advert for themselves.

Also, Arnall has been somewhat threatening (in a legal sense) to the lovely Petra Boynton (a real Doctor and genuine lecturer in an actual university) for daring to call him out (there's some suggestion that his sum contribution to the whole debacle is selling his name and ersatz Cardiff University credibility to a formula actually created by a PR company in the first place). Ben Goldacre (a real Doctor and media luvvie) who has commented similarly has only had a self-satisfied message from him about having been paid for offering himself up to advertisers. From this we can deduce that the rule is to threaten women and brag to men. Classy.

Come on then, let's see your formula

Well, here's a funny thing. It's changed somewhere between 2005 and now. Originally it was published as this unworkable mess:

1/8W+(D-d) 3/8xTQ MxNA. Where:

W: Weather

D: Debt

d: Money due in January pay

T: Time since Christmas

Q: Time since failed quit attempt

M: General motivational levels

NA: The need to take action

... which is so bad that it can't be rendered in any equation editor software. Do note the 1/8 and 3/8 parts though, and now try and find them here:

This is the version now presented as proof at the official Beat Blue Monday website. (Don't miss this brilliant line: The equation calculates that Monday 19 January 2009 is the worst day of the year. Can they prove that it calculated it? No. Just accept it, plebeian!) Anyway, it's changed – what happened to the importance of an eighth of one thing and three-eighths of another is anyone's guess.

It's still complete shit.

For one thing, you're adding incompatible units together. I'm pretty certain weather's not measured in Pounds Sterling, and to then multiply that by a unit of time raised by another unit of time (unknown units, but as this is "science" it should be seconds), and then divide the whole shebang by the result of multiplying two feelings together – giving us feelings squared as our unit – is a utter bottom-dribble. For that to effectively give you a date that you can pin-point is as ridiculous as suggesting that every 1/12 of the population will have, by and large, the same experiences each day. But then I would say that, I'm a Virgo.

It's also still written in non-science. Multiplication signs? Lack of an equals sign? D-, Arnall, see me after class.

Keeping the non-science, how do you measure weather and feelings? Are they linear? Logarithmic? Negative and tending to zero?

Best of all, assuming there's no need to take action – because everything's okay in the world – and assuming (reasonably) that needing to do nothing is represented by zero, the whole thing divides by zero, making infinite unhappiness one would deduce. How could this be missed in a peer-based review published in a scientific journal? Well, it wouldn't be would it. But for some reason Arnall doesn't believe in them. He wants to be People's ~~Poet~~ Psychologist!

Sadly, in a country where 'real' subjects in schools like physics and maths are being eroded, replaced by sexy (and easier to get good grades in) subjects like Media Studies and GCSE Podcasting, things like this go unchecked and barely questioned. It's wrong.

Anyway, be on the lookout for lazy page filler on 19th January. Then, I dunno, wish a pox on it or something. (I've not thought it through properly, I admit.) Also, keep your eyes open for the terms "Professor of Psychology", "Cardiff University", "Dr Arnall", "officially" and "scientific" – see how many of them sneak in from the even lazier activity of pulling some copy from the archive...

Appendix

Yep, a useless little wibbly bit that provides no purpose and could be cut out if it goes bad. Cliff Arnall's website – which I won't link to, so as to not skew the results order – doesn't turn up in Google's first page of search results for his name, whereas my classic blog's Cliff Arnall is full of shit page does. A ha ha ha. (It used to be the first result before other sites were leaned on to remove unflattering articles… hey ho.) Anyway, it's a horrible site that attempts to resize your browser window as soon as you visit, so I'm doing you a favour by merely describing it.

Cliff's now into one-to-one life-coaching, which is clearly a good line to be in, judging by the fact he's flying light aircraft around the Brecon Beacons. He's got a rather nice, big house out of it too, if what I've uncovered is anything to go by. I'm considering a career switch – I'm practising answering questions with questions and encouraging embracing change at every opportunity. Am I jealous? What is it in your life that makes you assume that? =)

Disclaimer

I'm just a cheeky chappie, Cliff, and nobody pays the least bit of attention to anything I say. Same goes for you lot, Green.

The big BNP members list free-for-all

2008-11-20T00:10:00.002Z

News over here that a list of members of the BNP was leaked on a blog came whilst I'm in the midst of some kind of illness. (For the non-British readers, they're the far-right wing 'political' party born out of the thugs of the National Front - I won't link to them, but I will link to Wikipedia instead.) Now, having had 14 hours of sleep today to try and beat this illness off, I'm wide awake at 00:30, so I decided to check the list out; firstly with the rather excellent BNP Member Proximity Search, and subsequently at a website setup solely to host the list (so that I could get more details).

Regarding the membership of political parties, I can say this: it's one thing to vote for a party, it's quite another to give them your cash in the form of membership. These aren't people who've dallied with the vote in elections, these are people who've said, "YES! I subscribe to your views in your pamphlet! I want to carry a card in my wallet to show how like-minded we are!"

Having ties to both Pontypridd and Gloucester I was interested to see what both locations have to offer in racists. I'm pleased that Pontypridd can only offer two paid-up racists, one in the midst of a (former) council estate, the other in a vaguely better area. There are more BNP members around in neighbouring towns, but they are few.

Gloucester offered up a few more shocks though. I was expecting much more there because, from my own experience, Gloucester is a far more volatile place than Ponty, and it's significantly bigger. I wasn't expecting the spectrum of membership though.

A man living two doors away from my grandfather's house (despite having died a quarter of a century ago, I still think of it as his house, not least because the current owners still have the same front door) is a card-carrying member, as is someone a couple of streets away. These people are a white-supremacist's stone's throw from my mum's house.

Also, the foreman of the Crematorium in Gloucester is listed. I'd prefer it if the care of the plaques for my dead relatives weren't in the hands of someone who believes that merely by being white they're better than someone else. If my surname was Patel, I'd be VERY concerned about it.

Shock of the lot was that the former Parliamentary candidate for the Green Party in Cheltenham (Gloucester's more affluent neighbour) is now a member of the BNP. To go from a nice, pro-planet party that my mum votes for regularly to one so unpleasant is just weird...

Anyway, the list is now out of the box and won't go back in - although the BNP would like to think it can, and will try and play European Human Rights legislation (even though they hate Europe) to get their way, but now the list is on Wikileaks, torrents and a whole load of people's computers, they don't stand a chance. Them's the breaks.

More iPlayer shenanigans

2008-10-17T15:45:00.001+01:00

I seem to be obsessed with fiddling with the BBC's iPlayer in one form or another. I admit it, I have a problem. From knocking together scripts to control the rubbish Windows downloading version (preventing it from raping my bandwidth and quietly moving the files as soon as they were downloaded through FairUse4WM so that I could play the resulting files on non-Windows machines) to being the first documented person to limbo past the mechanisms designed to favour iPhone and iPod Touch users over mere mortals, I've been picking at the edges of the stickers to see what's underneath them.

As I previously mentioned, the BBC were pushing out a Nokia N96 application for iPlayer access, and I wondered why they were restricting it to just that handset when there are plenty of other QVGA, Symbian S60v3 handsets. Well, it's out now and I'm still wondering why they're restricting it to the N96 because the application works perfectly well on the N95 – not that the average user would be able to find that out, because the iPlayer team have put access to the app behind a user agent checking script. Visit www.bbc.co.uk/mobile/iplayer on an N95 and you get told your phone isn't compatible, but get Firefox to pretend to be an N96 and you gain access to the application, stored at www.bbc.co.uk/mobile/iplayer/iplayer.wgz

WGZ files are Nokia widgets, and are actually renamed ZIP files chock full of webby things (HTML, JavaScript, images and CSS) assembled with a bit of metadata so that the phone knows what to do with it all. Looking at the code in the iPlayer app is a little tricky in its raw form because it's partly obfuscated (no line returns and variable names are deliberately non-descriptive) but also interesting (because sections refer to other Nokia handsets).

The quality of the streams that iPlayer provides the Nokia phones is significantly inferior to the iPhone version – but then there's a smaller, lower resolution screen. When you're actually watching them they're quite adequate.

Far more details are over at the Beebhack Wiki where like-minded brethren pick over the carcass of iPlayer's chicken: beebhack.wikia.com/wiki/Nokia_H.264_version

More newsworthy to some of us is that the next version of iPlayer will be an Adobe AIR application that will happily run on anything that AIR runs on (basically the big three – Windows, Mac and x86 Linux). Yay – DRM on a Linux box. Anyway, AIR apps are actually ZIP files chock full of webby things assembled with a bit of metadata so that… you get the idea. And with that, there's the possibility of more code to snoop around in.

I did a little w00t on Twitter, mainly because I like AIR (hey, I'm a Flash developer – of course I'm going to like it) and I know what's going on in the industry and how AIR works. But only a little w00t because I'm a fan of open source, and AIR is nothing like that, bringing, as it does, DRM to a nice, open OS like Linux. Anyway, the Beeb's internet blog lists it as a review of the announcement, which is kinda cool – not least because they link to this blog, which includes me describing the Windows-only, Kontiki-based iPlayer as a "foetid turd". Yay me =) (I've got an unpublished draft of a post sat looking at me at the moment describing it as "a foetid turd hanging from the sphincter of technology" which makes me smile each time I see it!)

So, erm, yeah. iPlayer.

Mackerel Anderson, 1994-2008

2008-10-01T11:58:00.001+01:00

If you're someone who keeps up with my Flickr postings, you'll probably be aware that last Saturday (20th September) Mackerel died quite suddenly. She was 14 years old and was being treated for hyperthyroidism.

On Thursday 18th I took her to the vets for a check-up and for blood tests. She's – sorry, keep referring to her in present tense – she was known by the vets for being difficult to get blood from. She would put up a massive fight. The vet said that it would be better to not put her through sedation every month or two because she needed so much to knock her out enough to take blood, and suggested that we left it for a few months and just continued on the medication she was on. There was a vast improvement in her from the medication and she'd gone from being a skinny cat to a less skinny cat who was behaving far more normally than before.

On Friday 19th, Jayney rang me at work because she'd been sick and there was blood in it. Earlier in the treatment she'd had diahorrea with blood in it but that had been cured by medication for her kidneys and the vet said then that there might be bits and bobs coming to light now that the thyroid was being brought under control. I decided we'd keep an eye on her over the next 24 hours to see if it stabilised before dashing to the vets again.

Sadly, between 3:30 and 7am on Saturday 20th, she died.

I'm heartbroken. I've had her – sorry again, I still can't get used to talking about her in the past tense – I'd had her virtually all her life and getting on for half of mine; through shitty houses, a failed relationship, borderline anorexia, the lot. Seven houses, eight cat companions along the way (some she loved, some she hated, some she put up with). Not having her around just feels wrong. As far as Jack's concerned, she's now gone to live with Aubrey, her closest cat friend who we lost two years back, but he wants to see both of them again. We're all heartbroken.

I realised I couldn't continue without a cat in my life. I couldn't even mourn Mackerel properly without having a mewling companion. So, from the Bridgend Cats Protection shelter came Clarissa, a stocky,feisty little thing, in our hour of darkness.

She's lovely and friendly and likes to play; I do so wish we'd met under less fraught circumstances, but there you go. The main thing is she's there for us and we're there for her and, given that she was brought in as a stray with an abscess on her head and hadn't been neutered, she'd been through it all a bit. I can understand how she felt and how she must feel now that there's a bit of stability for her. The sleepy picture sums it up.

Zombies and Economics

2008-09-15T14:54:00.000+01:00

I often mention that my VHS copy of Dawn of the Dead has a brilliant "Theme Description" box on the back. "Themes: Horror, Zombies, Consumerism." In an email brain-dump today, I managed to use the genre in the same way...

From St Shed's Letters to the Gazmatrons:

The global economy is like a zombie, shuffling along based on primal urges, and at the moment it's caught in semi-automatic machine gun fire, knocking it backwards and it's struggling to get up off the floor. The doozy is that it's wearing a bullet-proof helmet, so there's no chance of headshots finishing it off. But that machine gun is going to have to be reloaded, and when it is, that zombie's going to lurch forward, confident that it can reach an ever out-of-reach target and feast on society's sweet, sweet brains. And then the guns start again, and it will falter, but keep going... and even if the guys shooting it manage to finish it off with a rocket-propelled grenade, as it's been staggering along it's managed to infect everyone it came into contact with, so another near-identical zombie economic system will be stumbling forward forthwith.

Ace. I married up Economics with George Romero.

BBC NEWS | Technology | BBC iPlayer offered on Nokia N96

2008-09-08T12:48:00.001+01:00

From BBC NEWS | Technology | BBC iPlayer offered on Nokia N96:

"Users of the Nokia N96 are to be among the first with the ability to run the BBC's iPlayer on their mobile phones.

From 1 October a purpose-built application will be available to download via the BBC website and will also be pre-loaded on some handsets."

Why just the N96? Does it have an extra level of DRM-laden codecs that the BBC simply have to have? Why not all their recent S60, QVGA-screened phones? Or is this a case of pushing out a press release to refer to Nokia's "Latest and best" to serve as advertising for them as well?

You can be sure that there's going to be an effort to reverse engineer this if it really is locked to one handset. I'm hoping they're not that stupid after the continuing demolition of the iPhone's walled garden's flimsy gate.

New phone: a brief review of the Nokia N95

2008-09-01T22:28:00.001+01:00

Having been with 3 for 16 months I was allowed to get an upgrade. This is the first time such a carrot has been dangled in front of me, having been a pay-as-you-go customer of One2One/T-Mobile and Virgin Mobile previously, so I was intrigued to find out what my continuing loyalty was worth.

It was worth a Nokia N95, which I'd heard was a sweet piece of phone pie. Not only did it have a really rather good 5 Megapixel camera and GPS, it also had wifi connectivity. When I saw the quality of its video recording, I was sold.

I've been playing with it for almost a week, pretty much constantly to the annoyance of my family. Here's what I like, and what I think sucks.

LIKE: Wifi. Much of my phone browsing takes place around the house, especially when sitting with Jack as he falls asleep. Going from a paid-for 3G data connection to a free(ish) wifi connection is fab.

LIKE: Browser. The web browser itself is great, supporting Flash and Javascript, and does a great job of rendering 'proper' web pages as well as sites optimised for mobile devices.

LIKE: GPS. It's cool! I know where I am!

LIKE: Media player. I love having the 60Gb on my iPod but I could go away for a few days with just the phone. Its media player is the best I've seen on a phone (admittedly, I've not handled an iPhone) and its built-in speakers are really good quality. If video is more important, it comes with Real Player which supports a load of codecs.

LIKE: TV-out. Yeah, really. You can plug this phone into a TV to look at photos, watch videos, or just use the phone as a whole. This was quite a surprise!

LIKE: Expandability. The basic N95 (not the N95-8GB) has a Micro SDHC which has been tested to accept cards up to 16Gb. That's bananas! 8Gb cards are much easier to obtain (and cheaper) so I've got one en route.

LIKE: Software expandability. There's loads of software available for it, both by Nokia and third parties.

LIKE: Nokia Lifeblog. A nifty combination of on-phone and on-PC software, presenting a timeline of all sorts of everything that the phone has experienced, so that you can blog what you like easily - either from the PC or the phone itself. Nice.

LIKE: The kit in the box. Besides the phone, there's the mains charger, a car charger, a remote control/microphone thing, headphones that plug into that (standard 3.5mm plugs - yay), a USB cable and the TV-out cable (standard camcorder lead). Then there's the DVD of software, and some rather thorough manuals. Makes a change.

HATE: Stiff keypad. At least at the moment - it might loosen - this phone needs a lot more pressure on the keypad than any phone I've had before.

HATE: Keypad layout. This is purely down to coming from five years of Sony Ericsson phones. The shift and space functions on the keypad are on different keys to what I've grown accustomed to. I also think the way that a list of possible words appears on SE phones is much better than stabbing away at a button to change the predicted word without any sign of what comes next.

HATE: Copy and paste... or lack thereof. At least I've not found it yet.

HATE: Re-entering the wireless network key. It seems some applications bypass the cached details and force you to tap in the network key again. And again. And again.

HATE: Nokia Maps subscription model. Nokia want you to subscribe to some key software's key functionality. Bastards.

MASSIVE HATE: No charging over USB. That's heinous in this day and age.

With all this in mind, would I still choose this phone? Absolutely. Even the most annoying oversight doesn't detract from the positives. I reckon with a bit of research I'll be able to find software to paper over some of these cracks, and £3 has got me a combined USB data/charger cable from Hong Kong on eBay.

More reports as I get used to the phone...

A return to Blogger

2008-08-18T14:39:00.000+01:00

After using Drupal for a few years to run my web presence, I'm back to Blogger. But it's augmented with CNAME records, Swurl and Google Sites, resulting in the following link-me-dos:

www.twindx.co.uk - Main Irregular Shed site, for me to populate with things as I see fit - made with Google Sites
blog.twindx.co.uk - The best way to experience the ramblings du jour. Powered by Swurl and sucking in Blogger, Flickr, Delicious (I prefered del.icio.us myself), YouTube, Last.FM and a bit more. The old Feedburner RSS feed has nothing on the Swurl one (when the Swurl one is working)...
blogger.twindx.co.uk - Yeah, a slightly confusing 'other' URL. This is for the Blogger site itself and is the place to head to for comments that matter (Swurl's comments feel a little... lightweight.)

The attentitive amongst you will notice that these are .co.uk URLs instead of .com... well done! I picked up the .co.uk domain so that I could set things up in my time instead of having to take down the existing .com and then muddle something together. In the coming weeks, the .com URLs will match the .co.uk ones, but first I need to come up with a cunning automated way of backing up the important tat on the Drupal site.

Other attentive people will notice I'm putting a lot of trust in Google for my online presence. Yes, I know, they screw up from time to time, and there's nothing like running your own server. There's also nothing like having free time to do it in, something that, as the father of a 2½ year old, I've learnt the hard way. I also know that any company that has "do no evil" as its ethos is 100% guaranteed to end up utterly evil; I can only hope that they don't set up a data centre powered by crushed dreams and unicorn placenta.

That's it for now. I'll continue to tinker in whatever time I get to make it all ridiculously splendid.

A big pre-Winterval catch-up

2007-12-19T15:47:00.001Z

It's not that big, actually. It's just that today is my last day proper at work this year - tomorrow is our Christmas meal, and then I won't be in the office for the rest of the year.

We're all in various states of recovery from the nasty stinking colds that hit the populous every Winterval. Here's a tired, poorly baba to illustrate:

The result of this illness is that we're completely unprepared for Christmas. Tomorrow is the last posting day and we've not got everything sorted, we've not got decorations up... the only thing we've done is get most of the presents sorted. I still have some to do for Jayney... and then it's her birthday a week later, so I need to be ready with gifts for then as well.

The other thing I'm having to deal with is our internet connection - our ADSL has gone all flaky, and most of the time we can't connect to anything outside the house. Great timing...

So, to cheer myself up, I've done the unthinkable once again, and 'bought' downloads to get into the Christmas charts. Lucky Soul's Lips Are Unhappy is gorgeous, and can be bought for 40p from their website; not only that, the luscious indie popsters are doing it all for charity. Hurrah! I'd have left it at 40p off my PayPal account until I heard Malcolm Middleton's awesome indie anti-Christmas romp, We're All Going To Die. Odds of being Christmas Number 1 have been slashed from 1000/1 to 12/1 over the past month - it still won't reach number one whilst fools buy X Factor twattery, but by jingo it feels good to bop to.

Link-me-dos:

Other things? There are a few other things. I wanted to get an Asus Eee PC, but I appear to not have the cash, so that's not going to happen any time soon. Our DVD recorder is playing up - again. By hassling Admiral I've managed to save £160 on car insurance next year. Nibbling a hole in the top of a Mr Kipling mince pie and squirting Courvoisier-laced Anchor squirty cream into the void is amazingly awesome. The BBC's cross-platform, Flash-based iPlayer is better after a couple of months of development than the foetid turd that they spent millions of pounds on.

That is all.

Jack and Dad.

2007-11-08T16:18:00.001Z

Yay!

More salvaged tat

2007-11-08T16:13:00.001Z

Another example of the sort of thing that gets chucked in a skip here...

Picnik: I'm in love

2007-11-08T16:04:00.001Z

A while ago I stumbled across Picnik. I forget how, but I think it was in a post on Flickr. Having played with it on and off for a while, I recently decided that it was one of the best Web 2.0 (I hate that moniker) applications I've ever used.

It's like that cut-down version of Photoshop (is it called Photoshop Elements? Something like that) that gets bundled with some digital cameras and things - it has a whole bunch of fairly simple tweaks (like adjusting colour and things) to photos, and a whole bunch of slightly more complicated ones, without ever going over the top. But it trumps it by existing as a Flash application in your browser, and by blurring the line between online and offline quite well. Where it excels, though, is where there's any popular online repository of photos with an accessible API. I can use the excellent Picasa to upload a whole load of photos to the PicasaWeb online albums, then hit Picnik, grab them from there, tweak them in any way I need (like maybe scrubbing out serial numbers in screenshots) and then save them back in the web album, or save them directly to Flickr, or Facebook, or Photobucket, or email them around, or (amazingly) even back to the hard drive on my computer.

Being Flash-based it's as cross platform as the Flash player is, and I've run it (slowly) on my (slow) Linux box. It's Flash 9, so the chances of open-source Flash player Gnash making it run are slim-to-none, but there's no way you could get the speed and flexibility with an earlier version of Flash. What's really refreshing is that, despite being a Flash app it all works with the Back button as well, by some clever manipulation of the browser history. (In non-geek words - it just works really nicely.)

Other notable things - one of the ways you can get photos into Picnik is by doing a Flickr or Yahoo image search. This is neat. You can even type a URL straight into Picnik and it will list all the images there, for you to choose from. There are Firefox and (ick) IE extensions to make the acquisition easier still, and this is brilliant for another reason - you can grab the whole webpage as an image this way, which is brilliant for screenshots and things. The screenshot in this post was grabbed like that, unremarkably (seeing as I just mentioned it).

I've been using it as a handy gateway to get pictures from (Google's) Picasa to (Yahoo's) Flickr. Picasa is just about the best photo management program available for Windows, and the Linux version is pretty good to boot (although very obviously not a native app) - but it's unlikely to ever talk to Flickr natively. Although there's no batch way of moving stuff from PicasaWeb to Flickr, for five or six photos at a time it's fine, and gives you a chance to get your tags and comments in order!

It's a fabulous application - they've introduced a paid-for version which has a bunch of extra effects, but the free version has all the abilities I've mentioned (and more - I've just not used them!). It ties into Flickr and Picasa through legal use of APIs, so you're not giving passwords to unknown third parties to achieve the interoperability. It oozes professionalism from the offset. It is, in short, really really nice. Nice enough for me to love it; and not in secret, but to profess my love of it.

Test first post

2007-11-08T15:31:00.000Z

Ooh, well here's the first post on my second Blogger incarnation of Irregular Shed (the blog).