Both for me and my blog. Apologies for hosing things good-and-proper last night while trying to watch 21 Grams on FilmFour and not really concentrating when attempting to change to an SVN based Wordpress update system. Some command-line database poking was required in the end. After 10 minutes of swearing and trying to log into Postgres I remembered that Wordpress was mySQL based and managed to get everything up-and-running again.
I was also intending to try and get mod_gzip working to compress all of my non-image files. Again, I soon remembered that I was actually serving pages using Apache2 and mod_deflate was the way forward. A short time later and all of the text files used to generate my blog are delivered at a quarter of their actual file size. This saves me bandwidth and you download time.
This year the office is closed between Christmas and New Year for the first time and as I’m spending them both with my mum I won’t be online much as she doesn’t have Internet access just yet. Usually I get a little jittery after a couple of days without Internet access but I’m looking forward to a bit of an extended break over the next couple of weeks.
The only thing I can see stressing me out before January is trying to actually teach my mum about the Internet. I’ve tried on a couple of occasions before without joy. She’s – how can I put this nicely – not exactly au fait with technology but thinks that she should learn.
Wish me luck.
Published on
December 19, 2007 in
Rants.
While in Dublin the other weekend I happened to be passing the Celtic Whiskey shop where I noticed the following award proudly displayed in the window (near to a bottle of Sheep Dip coincidentally).
I’m resigned to seeing magazines consistently dated for the next month or even further and compilation CDs containing “the best music of 2008″ (f0r example). I’ve never really understood either. But for something to be actually awarded a full 11 months in advance? Baffling. How do the judges of the award know that the shop won’t sell up, burn down, be struck by lightning or befall some other mishap by the time that November 2008 comes around?
Today’s (and probably the last of the year) Edinburgh Coffee Morning was the busiest it has been for a good while. The cryptic promise of some gifts that Ewan McIntosh left in a Facebook message last night turned out to be some really nice signed Hugh MacLeod posters for Stormhoek. The season of goodwill and giving continued with some warmed Panettone and some chilled Prosecco courtesy of our hosts at Centotre. Many thanks to the aforementioned for their generosity.
A couple of stand out things from this morning before the conversations paired off as things are wont to do in group dynamics. Ewan briefly demoed Seesmic which seems to be some kind of video Twitter. I’ve never sent a “tweet” in my life and do have difficulty of seeing the point of it if I’m being honest. At least with Seesmic, there is an element of a two way thing going on.
Via Will Richardson, I found this video of Johnny Chung Lee turning the tables on the light sensing aspect of the Wiimote to produce an interaction whiteboard for around £40 much more interesting:
Published on
December 13, 2007 in
Cool.
Google just posted their annual review in terms of what people are looking for online. The Google Zeitgeist goes back to 2001 and I always find it a fascinating snapshot of the year. Plus I usually learn some extra stuff too as there does tend to be something of a United States bias.
This year, Google have placed little introductory snippets of information about their various tools that you maybe didn’t know about at the bottom of each page.
Published on
December 13, 2007 in
Humour.
Scientists have found the key to controlling the human body clock. Suffering from transient insomnia (sporadic bouts of sleeplessness) myself I am hopeful that this will soon develop into new viable treatments.
From the linked BBC article:
“The gene CLOCK and its partner BMAL1 control the body’s internal clock.”
Now, I’m no expert in genetics but I would have thought that a gene called CLOCK would have been one of the first places to look for clues about defective circadian rhythms.
