as days pass by, by Stuart Langridge

Just implemented hCards on the development version of the firm’s website, due for deployment soon. It was pretty easy, too. Cool.

The other day, Niamh and I went down to London (to see the Science Museum with the Britpack and Molly Holzschlag) on the train. We first drove to Coventry, and I bought a ticket there from one of the QuickTicket machines where I can just drop my card in. An adult return to London, and a child return to London. Cost me £36.00 for the two (£24 for me, £12 for Niamh), which I didn’t think was too bad. We had a great time at the Science Museum, doing such fun things as electrocuting ourselves, admiring the Difference Engine, and stealing Meri’s Jaffa Cakes. And then we got on the train on the way home, going back to Coventry. On that trip on the way home, a ticket inspector asked for our tickets. I unveiled them, to be told that they weren’t valid on Virgin Trains (the exact comment was “we couldn’t do a ticket as cheap as that!”), and so I had to pay again. Sixty-six pounds worth of again, to be precise. Put a bit of a damper on the whole thing, I can tell you.
The key point here is this. The privatisation of the rail services, splitting it up into loads of different companies, seems design to force a market on us where no market needs to exist. Virtually no-one I’ve spoken to actually cares which train company is running the train they are travelling on. The train companies are desperate to make us care, but no-one actually does. Would you watch a train heading to your destination go past because it was run by the wrong company? And so we are suddenly forced to care when you discover that your “return to London” is actually a “return to London on Chiltern Trains only”, and you have to pay a hugely inflated price for a second time. The same situation has arisen with power companies; no-one actually cares or even really understands the difference between nPower and Powergen and all the others. The electricity I get from one isn’t somehow better than from the others; the price difference is minimal, and a labyrinthine collection of “special” offers and complex pricing schemes makes it difficult even to compute a pricing difference anyway. Mobile companies used to be like this; if you were on Vodafone it was difficult to ring people on Cellnet, or to send text messages. In the end, they all got together and made it easier. I’ve got no problem with having separate companies, but they need to understand that the ordinary punter does not care about the difference, and model their business based on that fact rather than trying to steal customers from another company.

LugRadio Live 2006 is happening, and we now have the official LugRadio Live 2006 website to boot. Thanks mainly to Jono, who will, I am sure, shortly be writing up the process by which you take a MediaWiki and make what looks like a normal (but not publically-editable) website out of it.
In further LugRadio news, episode 3 of season 3 is out, too, and it was great.
I’m really looking forward to LRL2006. If you’re interested in doing a talk (web people, I’m looking at you here), contact us on show@lugradio.org.

I have Voice over IP working! Using LinPhone on my Ubuntu 5.10 Breezy laptop, with SipGate UK as my provider. Instructions as follows:

1. Sign up for a SipGate account.
2. Once you’ve got one, sign into the SipGate website and click “My Account”.
3. Under “Connection Information”, it will list your SIP-ID (a 7-digit number) and password, which you need for the next steps.
4. Get LinPhone.
5. Start it up, and say Go > Preferences.
6. On the Network tab, set NAT traversal to “Enable”, and enter your network’s external IP address, which is the IP that you’re connected to the net with. Find this out by going to What’s My IP.
7. Under RTP Properties, set “RTP port used for audio” to 5004.
8. On the SIP tab, set “Run sip user agent on port” to 5060.
9. Under Identity set your SIP address to sip:[username]@sipgate.co.uk, where [username] is your SIP-ID from step 3.
10. Click “Add proxy/registrar”. In the Proxy/Registrar configuration box, set Send Registration to on, Registration Period to 120, SIP Identity leave as “sip:”, and “SIP Proxy” to “sip:sipgate.co.uk”.
11. Apply, Close.
12. Quit LinPhone.
13. On your firewall, forward these ports to your machine: 5060/udp, 5004/udp, 10000/udp, 8000-8012/udp, 3478-3497/udp, 3478-3497/tcp. (These might not all be required.)
14. Start LinPhone again.
15. You should have a “Proxy to use:” dropdown, which should be set to “sip:sipgate.co.uk”.
16. Test it all works by calling sip:613@fwd.pulver.com, which is an echo test.

All done. Hooray for VoIP!

Stephanie Booth’s Batch Categories for Wordpress is an invaluable help, theoretically, for setting categories on lots of posts at once. However, it doesn’t work properly in Wordpress 1.5.2. I’ve updated it so that it does work properly, and you can download the new Batch Categories 0.92. Installation instructions are in comments at the top of the file.

Right, here it is: I need a new phone, and I’m looking for your advice on what to buy.

I have a set of requirements:

• A flip phone, or in some other way not have the buttons on the outside (it can have a slide, for example)
• SyncML support
• Enough Java support to run Opera Mini
• Looks nice
• Cost me nothing to upgrade to it
• Available on Orange in the UK
• Decent UI
• Decent battery life
• Bluetooth

I’d like a phone that does all those things: none of them are negotiable. If you were about to suggest any of the following, know that I have rejected them: the Motorola V3 (no SyncML, crap UI), the Samsung E720, Z500, D500, E530 (horrifically ugly), the Nokia 8800 (very feature-poor). I didn’t think I had that difficult a set of requirements, but apparently the conjunction of “nice looking”, “flip phone”, and “SyncML” is the empty set. Please prove to me that I’m wrong.

Ha!

http://www.tecspy.com/loveslugradio/

Everyone’s a comedian. :)

I would like to occasionally download music. Not often, but occasionally, I’ll think of a song and feel a hankering to hear it. Today, it’s “Feeling Good” by Nina Simone. I would like to download this legally; I don’t want to just google for a ripped version of it. To that end, I’d like to find a good music downloading service and pay them my money, to reward them for being a good music downloading service. Good music services fulfil the following criteria, all of which are non-negotiable:

• I can download one track, instead of a whole album; I don’t want ten Nina Simone songs, I just want the one I’m looking for
• No DRM. None. I don’t mind what the format is, if there’s no DRM, as long as it can be played on Linux (which is pretty much everything). Bonus points for oggs. Half a bonus point for just plain mp3.
• A track costs a pound or less. I’m not paying more than a quid for one song.
• I feel comfortable putting my credit card number into the site. This means, in practice, that if it’s called something like mp3downloads.haxx0r.ru, I am not interested.
• I can just buy a song by putting my credit card number in and getting it for download. I don’t need to sign up for an account, give them all my details, none of that.
• My music tastes aren’t very eclectic, so I’d expect the service to carry most of what I’d want to listen to. This means that a service for one label alone isn’t really what I want. I don’t want to discover new music with this; I want to get the stuff I already know about and want to listen to.
• I’ll get, probably, about five songs a year. So a subscription service is out, especially since with most of them your music stops working when you unsubscribe.

Does anywhere like this exist? Tesco Downloads ships DRM-encumbered WMA files, which I’m not interested in. Yes, I could convert them to mp3 myself, but that’s not the point; I want to encourage a firm doing the right thing, and I’m interested to know whether it’s actually possible to download music legally without jumping through DRM hoops and giving away all my marketing information. Let me know.

I am now back from d.Construct ‘05. It was great; the clear:left guys did a good job putting it all together. I have learned a number of things:

• If you’ve got a widescreen laptop, change the scren resolution so that it’s not a widescreen resolution when you plug it into a projector, otherwise some of your presentation gets cut off and people laugh at you. I hasten to point out to people that it wasn’t a problem with S5 (or with Linux, for that matter, although apparently Macs can auto-sense the projector resolution? That’s really cool if true.)
• It is possible to drink so much that you wish you were dead the next day. Superb evening out drinking; mAd respec’ to Budd, Rutter, Hammond, and Amy.
• People are doing open-source Flash development stuff; it always seems weird to me to be proud of developing open-source code on a closed platform. Windows and the Mac are the same here.
• My head still hurts a little bit.
• There is a web community in the UK. We need to do more with it.

The talk I gave on DOM Scripting and Ajax is available.

Well, I’m at d.construct. I’ve done my talk, and I’m now watching Simon Willison demonstrate some really cool Flickr stuff. I had no idea that all the Flickr site tools (Organizr and whatnot) actually use the Flickr web services API! This means that those tools can’t do anything magic that punters can’t do; openness gone rampant. Cool.
Both Simon and Andy Budd have (rightly) hammered on about how part of the whole “Web 2.0″ phenomenon is openness in data; your data on someone else’s server is still *your* data. Flickr are obviously trying hard here, but lots of people seem to be doing it, what with web-service APIs and RSS feeds and whatnot. No more lock-in — it’s a pipe-dream, but it’s a good pipe-dream, and we’re closer to it than we used to be.
Biscuits are nice here too, I have to say.
This is weirdly different from LugRadio Live; they’re both “grassroots” events, but this is *like* a formal conference — there’s one talk track, everyone’s sitting down and watching the talk — whereas LRL is like an expo where there happen to be talks going on in some of the rooms. Speaking of LRL, we’ve got a date and venue pretty much nailed down. It’s going to be fantastic. You thought last year’s was good? You ain’t seen nothin’ yet.

WAP browsers on mobile phones are all pants. You know this. Sadly, there aren’t any decent HTML browsers out there unless you buy a phone with a browser built in (and they all seem to be XHTML browsers, which implies to me that they don’t work with 99% of the web) or buy a browser. Buying a web browser? What is it, 1995? I’ve been using a Java midlet HTML browser that’s rubbish; doesn’t do forms, for example, which means no Google. Until now. Now, there is Opera Mini, which works fantastically. It’s only available from Opera if you’re in Scandinavia, but numerous people have mirrored it if you were to, e.g., search Google for ‘operalow.jad’. Once you find a URL for operalow.jad, just point your phone’s WAP browser at that URL, and job’s a good-un.
Eric pointed to the release, so cheers that dude Eric. A real browser on my k700i! Hooray!

Ah, another day, another episode of LugRadio. Whether the weather, episode 2 of season 3, is now out. Go get it, and mention it on your weblog or on news sites you read or something.
Slightly disturbing LugRadio news: a bloke has named his machines after the LugRadio team. I think Yonkeltron, the Official LugRadio Stalker, has some competition :)
We talked in the show about how “the world has a memory”: that if someone applies for a job, you can google their name and find all the things that they’ve written on the web. The things they wrote about their last boyfriend, or about your company, or about how they spent time at work surfing rather than working. It’s going to take some time to adjust, I think, to this new world where writing is no longer ephemeral. What I truly hope is that the solution is not that every web writer becomes a politician, where words are carefully savoured and measured for maximum effect and minimum liability potential. Instead, I hope that we get a world where people are still prepared to forthrightly state their mind and then stand by that if called on it. I can’t think of anything I’ve written here that I would deny or feel embarrassed about if questioned by an employer, but that’s not because I avoid writing the embarrassing stuff; it’s because you shouldn’t be embarrassed about the stuff that you believe.
Lots of ranting about “Web 2.0″ in the episode, too. Andy Budd’s doing one of the talks at d.construct this Friday, and he’s going to be talking about what Web 2.0 is. I shall be watching that with interest, because I’m one of the people involved in building this Web 2.0 and I don’t know what it is…

I’m sure that there’s a nice GUI way of doing this, but for when I can’t work it out: kicking off my k700i controlling my laptop is done with

sudo hidd --connect [phone's bdaddr]
sudo hidd --show # to show it's working

Guy Fawkes night is one of my favourite days of the year, as I’ve written about before. It’s the 400th anniversary, too. I see no reason why gunpowder treason should ever be forgot, indeed. This year we decided to not go to Himley Hall again, despite it being excellent, because the queues are too long and the event’s too expensive. We still went to a public display, though, because home fireworks are rubbish; again, it was great, although next year we’re going an hour late so we don’t have to sit for 40 minutes in the cold and wait for the display to start. The stall that sold bread pudding and tea was a welcome diversion, though.
In other news, things have been pretty busy. We’re looking for a developer at work; if you’ve worked with classic ASP, SQL Server, XML stuff, some JavaScript, that sort of thing, and you want to build some nice advanced internal web apps and aren’t going to whittle on about how it’s impossible to be advanced without .NET, then drop me a mail at stuart.langridge@mills-reeve.com to tell me about yourself.

Last Friday Matt and Lynne and Jono and Sooz and Sam and I went to a Hallowe’en fancy dress ball. And it was great. We ate a pig. A whole pig. Between the six of us. (Actually, just between me and Jono, I think.) And we danced to some music:

Separated at birth:

Sam and Cinderella

Me and Prince Charming

I’ve eaten sushi in Japan/But there ain’t no place like Super Mario Land

The LugRadio team new publicity shot (we’ll Gimp Ade in somewhere):