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.
With some prompting from Jamie Clague I thought that I’d give the Mystic Meg thing a try and throw out some ideas of what we’ll be seeing in the coming year.
Some things, like the second generation iPhone (my money is on it being sometime around June), have been all but confirmed and enough evidence is floating around for detailed speculation on other things.
Continue reading ‘What does 2008 hold in store?’
Flying back from a long weekend in Dublin I was delighted to find a vacant seat on an emergency exit row with extra leg room, which I always appreciate being quite tall. The seat was between two middle-aged people, a woman on the aisle seat and man on the widow seat. I asked the woman if the seat was actually free and if she would mind if I sat there or if she would move across — which she did. I noticed that both of my co-passengers were wearing marriage rings and by the way she nervously held his hand during take-off and landing, I assumed that they were in fact married to each other. Having personal space is one thing but being married and not wanting to sit next to each other confuses me.
This is not limited to flights and is something I notice a lot on the bus and train. People trying to reserve a seat for their bag so that they don’t have to sit next to anybody is bordering on just being anti-social in my opinion. The worst offender was a man who happened to be in my reserved table seat on the train and had his jacket across the two opposing seats and his bag next to him — that’s four seats for a single passenger! I made a point of sitting down with him despite the train being relatively quiet. Having sat down, the majority of travelers will also tend to automatically plug in their headphones to further isolate and protect themselves from any human interaction.
Weirdly, the elevator effect (as this phenomenon is called) is also apparent in Second Life.
It has to be said that I’m a little indecisive at times. For instance, I’m always happy to “go with the crowd” when it comes to suggesting somewhere to meet friends and very rarely propose a venue myself. This can be a problem when everyone that you are trying to meet up with is of the same non-committal mindset.
I was struck by an idea while strutting to work yesterday morning. Later that afternoon I remembered that it was actually a redux of an idea that came about a couple of years ago: using Google maps to work out a central point twixt your location and the location of those you want to meet.
To this end I knocked up Whithr over the course of the last couple of evenings. Click on the map to indicate the location of people you plan on meeting (and obviously your own location too) and a marker will be placed at the most mutually convenient midpoint. By default this point is weighted toward being beneficial to the majority of people but you can change this to get a fairer average by selecting the “Needs of the few” option. You can remove a location marker by double clicking on it or move it around by clicking and dragging.
Next, either type the kind of place you want to meet at (like “pizza” or “sushi”) in the search box below the map or click on one of the predefined options (“coffee”, “pub” or “restaurant”) to get some suggestions.
It’s still a work in progress with a few bugs and issues remaining but also some interesting ideas emerging for future enhancements.
Mad props to DN, Alex and Simon.
“It’s Christmas!”
St. Andrews day serves as a very handy demarcation, much like the American Thanksgiving holiday. I can start to think about Christmas and not get angry now that it’s actually December. Of course it has been pretty much inescapable for the past few weeks so I have a pretty good idea of what I’m going to get people for presents and have made all my travel plans well ahead of time. Yay me.
At Whitespace (the design agency I work at) we’re once again taking care of the website and promoting the Bethany Caring Christmas Trees scheme in aid of the homeless. The idea is simple: buy your Christmas tree from them and that will give a hot meal and a bed for the night to someone who ordinarily would not have one.
