as days pass by, by Stuart Langridge

Four years ago, four guys got together in a room in Wolverhampton and recorded the first episode of LugRadio. Since then, we’ve started running a yearly “rock conference” event in the UK, LugRadio Live, we’ve taken LugRadio Live international with the first US event, we’ve won an award for marketing, we’ve changed two of the presenters and then changed one of the replacements, we’ve gone to Guadec and PyCon and Guadec again, we’ve done nearly a hundred episodes, we were crowned “best open source podcast” by Linux Format, and we’ve built up a really cool community.

Four years, eh? I’m pretty proud of what we’ve done with the show. Thanks, all of you who listen and send in emails and come to LugRadio Live and post on the forums and hang around in #lugradio and make your own podcast about us and help us out with sysadmin stuff and run a mirror and talk about the show and enter competitions and laugh at the show on the bus. Here’s to four more.

That git Steve pokes me with the latest trendy meme (which is not actually latest as I think it got started some time in the Middle Ages), and I do believe I got similarly poked by Matt Revell on the same subject a while back. So, five things you don’t know about me. I ought to note that I don’t think that there are five things that no-one knows about me, so you may know some or all of these.

1. I have ankylosing spondylitis, a “chronic, painful, degenerative inflammatory arthritis primarily affecting spine and sacroiliac joints, causing eventual fusion of the spine”. The painful bit is certainly right; the medical stuff I take on trust. So, y’know, thanks a lot for that, Dad. It’s an autoimmune disease, which is a term you never hear except on House where they say it all the time, although on that programme they all have some kind of horrible serious thing that’s going to kill them in two hours.
2. I’m moving jobs. In mid-March I leave Mills & Reeve, the law firm where I’ve worked for eight years, and I go to GCap Media, who own loads and loads of commercial radio stations. I’m pretty excited about this.
3. I was interviewed on BBC Radio Norfolk once, along with Kam, Natalie, and Urgit, about alt.fan.eddings.
4. I can roll my tongue. Apparently it’s genetic; only some percentage of the population can do it. No idea why this is a useful genetic talent, although Richard Dawkins probably has a theory that it’s all to do with making me more sexually attractive to women to increase my chances of passing on my genes or something.
5. I haven’t seen any of the first three Star Wars films (that is, the last three in creation date but the first three of the nine, if you see what I mean). Just never got around to it. People keep telling me that I should do, and I just can’t be arsed with it.

Is anyone else tempted to just make shit up in these things? “I am really Harlan Ellison.” “I can suspend myself from a ledge by one finger.” “I have a third eye in the back of my head.” “I can haz cheezburger.” It’s pretty tempting.

I’m supposed to tag other people. Don’t break the chain, etc, etc. To be honest I think this stuff gets made up by demons who are determined to make the human race endure the psychic pain of trying to think of things which are simultaneously (a) interesting (b) secret (c) not too secret. I mean, if I was really a Russian spy or had a third bollock or something, am I likely to talk about this on the internet? Nonetheless, it is now my solemn duty to make five people suffer as I have suffered. I think we’ll have Aquarion, Christian Heilmann, Mr Ben, Sam Rowe to see if he’s still alive, and Davyd Madeley.

Jeremy Keith writes about where the fault lies:

If I’m on the tube listening to my iPod—because, y’know, that’s exactly the kind of situation for which the iPod was invented—and somebody steals said iPod, which is illegal, is that my fault? If I publish my email address online—because, y’know, I actually want people to be able to get in touch with me quickly and conveniently—and it gets harvested by scum-sucking spammers who send unsolicted commercial email, which is illegal, is that my fault? If I utter my date of birth or my mother’s maiden name—because, y’know, I don’t believe that information should be a state secret—and somebody uses that information to “steal my identity”, which is illegal, is that my fault?

Nope. None of those things are your fault. In a similar way, another Jeremy, Top Gear presenter Jeremy Clarkson, published his bank details in a newspaper in an attempt to prove that the furore over the UK government losing the personal data of 25 million people was a storm in a teacup. Of course, someone used those details to set up a £500 direct debit to a diabetes charity, so he’s now a monkey out of pocket. That act is basically theft; theft is illegal. Was that Clarkson’s fault? No, not really. He wasn’t at fault. What he was was imprudent, deeply so. (And deservedly so, I feel. Clarkson is one of my favourite presenters, and I have boundless respect for his knowledge of cars and engineering and his personal style; he knows a round brown fuck-all about technology, though.)

Look, it works like this. If you believe that the world should be open (which I do), then you can’t insist that if someone takes advantage of that openness, it’s Someone Else’s Problem. It’s your problem if they take advantage of your data. If you want to be open, to publish, to break down barriers that stop us properly communicating, then that’s a great idea… but each person then becomes individually responsible for their own security. On the other hand, if you want someone else to make the hard decisions for you, to accept liability and take responsibility for problems, to protect you so you can go about your life unscathed, then that someone else gets to make the decisions about what you do with your data, and you don’t.

If you ask your bank “should I publish all my bank details online?”, they’ll say: no, don’t do that. If you ask the police “should I leave my iPod visible on the tube?”, they’ll say: no, don’t do that (and that’s what the “byepod” posters are all about). If it’s the police’s responsibility to keep your iPod safe (by tracking down criminals who steal it) then they get to have some measure of control over what you do with it.

If you demand the ability to do what you like with your stuff, then you have to take on some of the responsibility for protecting it. It can’t work both ways; you can’t have all the benefits of openness (I can publish my email address where I like!) and none of the deficits (someone else must solve my spam problem!). With great power comes great responsibility, as Uncle Ben tells us. It’s not about blame, it’s about prudence. It’s not about taking decisions out of fear, it’s about taking responsibility for life. We’re all grown-ups now. No more hiding under the bedclothes and letting Daddy protect you from the big bad world.

• A head-up display on my glasses (not something like the Lumus Optical ones that make you look like a tool)
• A data projector for my mobile that I can actually buy (everyone currently doing these is (a) still in pre-production and (b) not selling them to consumers (because they want to sell a million of them to Motorola, not one of them to me)
• Memory diamond
• My cigarette-pack laptop

Are we not in the future yet? Where’s my jet pack? What should I be hoping for?

Chai latte is the nicest drink ever. That is all.

Well, not quite all. I have just discovered that Twinings make chai tea bags.

If you buy one of those milk frother things that look like a sex toy then you can make yourself a chai latte for the princely cost of about 5p (really), which is rather cheaper than the three quid I got stung for in Cafe Nero earlier.

This picture from Flickr just got chosen as my desktop background by Webilder:

I had to look two or three times to confirm that it wasn’t a picture of me. In the end it was the presence of the Mac that gave it away. It’s disturbing seeing yourself looking back out of your desktop.

Stone me I’m busy. Bah. Haven’t even had time to write some things up here. However, my collection of kept-unread things in Google Reader has reached high enough proportions that I have to do something about it, so this gets a few things off my list.

A post about the stuff I discussed at LugRadio Live — whether it might be reasonable to make “be permissive about IP” be the default for Linux distributions and make the Americans and others in oppressive IP regimes do the legwork to remove what they consider to be “patent-infringing”, rather than all of us non-Americans suffering for it — is stacked into the holding pattern and circulating over Heathrow, incidentally.

Recent interesting things

Google Reader finally lets you search past posts

Thank god for that. Finally. Finally.

ATI open graphics specs and open source the driver for video cards

This is a pretty big deal, this one. At first blush it looks as if two of the three leading graphics card manufacturers (ATI and Intel)* will now have good support in open source. I imagine someone at nVidia has at least noticed that this has happened. More openness of this sort cannot be a bad thing. Well done ATI, I say.

I should note a couple of small reservations: it’s only for their newer cards (i.e., not most of the ATI cards that are out there), and it’s not as simple as them just open sourcing their existing fglrx binary driver. They’re providing a library to access the BIOS on the card, but most importantly they’re providing specifications for the cards. It’s still down to the open source community to write the driver itself, but we’ve historically not had a problem with that (and ATI are funding the initial writing of this driver!). Phoronix has more detail on what ATI are actually doing — the important quotation is “The aim of this open-source driver is not to overtake the fglrx driver but rather is designed for those who just want a working desktop with 3D capabilities and basic video playback. This new driver is ideal for FOSS enthusiasts” — the point here is that if you want the very best performance from your ATI card you’ll still need to go proprietary, but there’s now enough information that the open source code will be able to provide the things that a lot of people are clamouring for — 3d acceleration, video acceleration, 3d desktop effects. Well done, ATI, I say. Obviously I’d like to see it all being Free, but I’m confident in the open source community’s ability to build a great driver (maybe even a better driver than the binary one?) based on having the information they’ve asked for, and now they’ve got it. Blizzard’s thoughts are informative.

@media Ajax 2007

I’m really looking forward to speaking at @media Ajax this year. The list of speakers is pretty cool, indeed, including some people I’ve never had the chance to meet. As usual, details of events I’m going to be at are on my events page.

Separated at birth

John “jQuery” Resig says that he’s “baffled” by why I referred to him as John “Kelly Osbourne” Resig in an earlier post. Well, the camera doesn’t lie.

On the other hand, John did an excellent Google Tech Talk on building a JavaScript library, so don’t hold it against him.

Convert a physical Linux box into a VMWare virtual machine

Useful, although convoluted. Parallels lets Mac people virtualise from a bootable partition, so you can either boot into your image or run it as a VM inside another OS. Can we do that under Linux? It’d save my dad rebooting into Windows to make his scanner work.

The most popular thing I’ve ever written is the JavaScript table sort library, sorttable. Recently, I got into a discussion with the LugRadio chaps about advertising on websites, and whether it’s a good idea or not. I’ve toyed in the past with the idea of adding adverts to this site; it somehow feels a little distasteful to me, but during the discussion it became apparent that I don’t actually have any reason to back that up; it’s pure prejudice. Somehow it feels less pure to do something if you make money from it: the phrase “filthy lucre” exists for a reason, and the love of money is the root of all evil. On the other hand, I do love money since it lets me buy cool things. So. To ad or not to ad?

On the other hand, I got an email from the Dynamic Drive people asking if they could feature sorttable in their directory of JavaScripts. Now, one of the things that the JavaScript community have discussed (and this came up in this past weekend’s JavaScript pub meet — pics available) is trying to get good, well-coded, modern scripting into these huge galleries of download-and-use plug-n-play scripts. The idea here (and not everyone agrees with me on this, I feel bound to say) is that we are never going to convince some people to actually give a damn about the quality of scripts that they use or write. They’re just going to think, “I want some effect, I googled for that effect, and here’s a script that does it, so I follow the instructions to drop that script into my site, job done.” Since that’s going to happen, we should make sure that the scripts that people find are decent ones. That’s why I wrote sorttable, for example: to ensure that people have a simple drop-in decently-coded way of doing client-side table sorting. One good way of doing this is to talk to the current big repositories of scripts, like Dynamic Drive, and work with them to try and make sure that their scripts are good ones.

But…if I put the script on Dynamic Drive, then some people will get it there instead of from me (even though there’ll be a link to my site) and…that’ll hurt my ad revenue, if I have ads.

So, questions therefore, for those of you out there reading this, whether you’re a JavaScripter or a website owner or just a consumer:

1. Would it be a good idea or a bad idea to have ads on some of my pages? (I’d probably do the browser code and other code pages, and old (not current) weblog posts.)
2. Should I put the script on Dynamic Drive?
3. Should I do both?

Your opinions greatly received in the comment box.

“It’s hard to live up to your principles. If it were easy, your principles probably aren’t worth a damn anyway.”

Mark Pilgrim

GMail and Google are being slow at the moment, and it made me think: imagine if Google went down for a whole day? I mean, it’s unlikely, what with them having four million redundant data centres or whatever their disaster recovery provisions are, but how much would it knock their status as darling of the internet if you spent a whole day trying to get there and couldn’t?

The Yahoo people would do well out of it, that’s for sure.

That’s why they’ve got four million data centres, mind; they’re well aware of this.

Of course, it’s probably being slow at the moment because of my net connection. :)

Bloody hell. Chris Lightfoot of MySociety has died. Rest in peace, Chris. You did some great work.

It occurs that I’ve been all technical recently.

I’m the bike rider, twisted bike rider

Have you ever let someone talk you into trying a different text editor or web browser than you normally use? If you have (and most people have) then you’ll be familiar with the strange sense of disorientation you get when you do this. Someone sneaks in during the night and puts some irremovable mittens on your hands, so when you try and work the next day you flail at the keyboard like that boy from Kid in the Corner on a high sugar day and get nothing done.

I’ve been experiencing this particular blend of confusion, frustration, and the need to stop and smoke a cigarette just to get away from it all a lot over the last week. Nothing to do with text editors (gedit) or web browsers (Firefox), though. Instead, I’m doing something entirely unattached to the computer.

I’ve got a bike. A push bike, no less. And I ride it to the railway station every morning.

Those of you who know me might be a bit surprised at this.

I’ve got all the gear, too. Helmet, bike lock, water bottle, everything. I even tuck my trousers into my socks when I’m riding so that I don’t rip my suit to shreds. It looks a lot like I’m going to have to change my name by deed poll to Norman.

Cyclists are morons in stupid day-glo jackets. Take a brush to your bike, indeed. I’m not a cyclist. Sadly, I’m something worse: I’m a middle-aged man worried that he’s getting too fat. I’m not sure precisely when I stopped being a teenager full of piss and vinegar and started being someone who knows what the Bank of England base rate is, but it’s happened. I anticipate a slow and gentle slide into a genuine appreciation of Volvo’s safety record. Of gardening, and what mulch is. Soon I’ll be writing letters to the newspaper complaining about the dangerous chicanes on the A491 and spending my weekends walking in the rain on a hilltop with a compass and one of those waterproof coats that folds back up into its own pocket.

On the other hand, today for the first time I managed to ride all the way to the station without having to stop for a breather.

Anyone pointing out that my bike has 21 gears and I’m only using the lowest seven can fuck off.

Usability in the real world

This past weekend saw a visit to a local Chinese restaurant by a group of us. All very nice, as ever. On leaving, there was the usual conversation on the pavement — why no-one ever says, look, we’re going to stand and talk for twenty minutes anyway, why don’t we do it in the bar? is beyond the ken of humanity — and then a walk back to the car park. Now, the restaurant is midway along the side wall of this multi-storey, and so there are two entrances back to get your car; one each side of the restaurant. So we spent five minutes — I’m not kidding, five minutes — standing outside in the supernaturally cold weather discussing which door to go through.

When usability people say not to offer the user two ways of doing the same thing, because they’ll spend longer deciding which to use than just doing it, this is what they’re talking about.

Y Viva Italia

Once again, this year’s summer holiday is Italy. Once again, it’s the Veneto. this year, though, the destination is Lake Garda. If anyone’s likely to be near there at the end of August, let me know. I’ll be the one doing his best to eat all the pizza and gnocchi in town and repeating the word “portacenere”. Unless it’s portocenere. I normally let my accent handle the confusion there.

And finally…

It’s my birthday. I was born a prime number of years ago (a Mersenne prime and a lucky prime, in fact). In two years I’ll be as old as Jesus, which is something to look forward to. And the number of my years is also the Turkish slang term for masturbation. No, I don’t know why either. Speak on, Turkish readers. Those of you who are neither Turkish nor mathematicians (or indeed either, which would exclude Paul Erdos, unless he was Hungarian) and therefore don’t know what a Mersenne prime is might find the golden figure easier to work out if you first of all knew that my age is now one less than a power of two and secondly reviewed the 2005, 2004, and 2003 versions of this game. Those of you who are wholly mathematically incompetent should review the 2006 version and add one. If even that is beyond your abilities, then find the nearest person to you wearing glasses and ask them for help. I’ll be busy over here putting candles on the cake.

Overheard during a conversation at work today (don’t know who was being talked about, but it was someone external):

He’s a nice guy, but he’s not really a pro-active engineer.

I think I’d rather be a nice guy.

Jeremy Zawodny is a bit doubtful about a new chewing-gum-based anti-obesity drug. I can see his point, but I think he might be overegging the disbelief a touch. I followed up with the following:

I think it might help more than you’re expecting. There are, I believe, three states you can be in:

• Hungry
• Not hungry
• Full

Everyone wants to eat when they’re hungry. Everyone doesn’t want to eat when they’re full. As you say, though, people who are overweight (like, say, me) eat when they’re not hungry, when it’s neutral to do so (don’t necessarily need food, but don’t dislike the idea). People who aren’t overweight (and aren’t that way through a huge mental effort), I think, don’t eat when they’re not hungry (as you mention). So, what you want is to take someone overweight and poke their brain so that when they’re in the “not hungry” state they actually feel full and don’t want to eat. The impression I got (although this might be wishful thinking) is that that’s what this chewing gum stuff does, sort of. There may be some sort of conscious effort (i.e., recognising when you’re in “not hungry”), but the policy there is relatively simple: whenever you’re not actually eating a meal and you fancy a snack, eat the chewing gum instead of looking in the fridge. It’s no panacea, but if it works like that then it might have some hope of success.

(only posted here because when I try to post it on Jeremy’s site I get “You don’t have permission to access /mt/mt-comments.cgi on this server.”)

It’s pretty foggy at the moment, here in the Midlands in the UK. It’s been like it for two days. Stepping out of work the other day, after dark, with each street light at the centre of a glowing aura, made the street I work on — in the centre of Birmingham — look like something Victorian. Like a woodcut from a Sherlock Holmes book. I wouldn’t have been at all surprised to see a hansom cab pull up and a man with a sword-stick get out.

Of course, I wouldn’t have been surprised to see Jack the Ripper hiding in a doorway either.

It made it feel like it was nearly Christmas, which it is. It was really rather difficult to remember that it’s still the same old modern street underneath.

So now I’m going to talk about JavaScript libraries. You’ll see how the fog is relevant in a bit.

There’s been quite a bit of discussion of libraries recently. Jeremy Keith writes:

There’s a lot of talk about JavaScript libraries, including a lot of hype and cheerleading, but I think that maybe the discussion is disproportionate to the amount of people actually using libraries. Personally, I’m somewhat mistrustful of using other people’s code (I’m a bit of a control freak) and I thought I was in the minority, but having spoken to people like Stuart and PPK who share my feelings, now I’m not so sure.

PPK himself says:

a quick and non-scientific poll @media showed that only a minority of JavaScript developers use a library; the others just code by hand. But JavaScript libraries are cool nowadays and will remain so until the Ajax hype blows over.

Chris Heilmann complains mightily about libraries in general, although about specific details rather than about the concept of using libraries as a whole.

And Roger lays into people who use them, too:

Overuse of JavaScript frameworks/libraries. Back to the 90’s, baby, except they were called DHTML libraries that time around. What is it with people learning a JavaScript library instead of learning to write JavaScript? It’s like learning Frontpage instead of HTML. Yes, script libraries can be great. But not when people use them because they can instead of because they should.

Lots of people are getting into the whole idea of using a JS library. Among the cognoscenti, though, there’s starting to be a bit of a backlash. “Putting guns in the hands of children” is how the discussion was phrased during our JS panel at @media 2006. The idea behind this discussion is that libraries give developers access to lots of cool powerful stuff — hiding and showing areas of the page, Ajax requests, animation — without them having to really demonstrate that they know what they’re doing. It’s an argument with a certain amount of truth in it; it’s used a lot by gun-control advocates as well, because if you have to go through five years of training to become a karate black belt then you’re much less likely to kill someone after leaving the pub, and much less likely to accidentally kill a member of your family, than someone who’s bought a Saturday night special and hasn’t had any training.

On the other hand, it’s a pretty elitist viewpoint. Apparently, you shouldn’t be allowed to use JavaScript unless you’re an expert. New developers, people just looking to get their job done, someone who wants to apply a cool effect: these people are not wanted in our glorious new revolution. Dammit, programming ought to be hard: it keeps out the idiots. This attitude comes up a lot, a lot, in the Linux world, and it’s one of the reasons why Linux is perceived as being harder to use than, say, a Mac: I’m surprised that there are Mac people out there who are highly happy* with the ease of use of their computers and don’t have to understand one iota about how they work under the covers, but still believe that JavaScript developers should be held to a higher standard.

What drives adoption of technology is real ordinary people, people who come in at 9am and clock off at 5pm and don’t think about work outside those hours, being able to use those technologies. JavaScript libraries bridge that gap. I’ve changed my opinions on this quite a bit; I used to hand-code all my JavaScript myself, and now, for quite a few of my projects, I use jQuery. I just got sick and tired of thinking: how do I hook up events in IE5.5? Is it different to 6.0? Where’s that cut-and-pasted code for creating and using an XMLHttpRequest object in every browser? I’d ended up building a tiny library for myself of bits of code I cut-and-pasted into every project, and my library was inferior to others because I don’t do as much testing in every browser. So, why not use a library? I couldn’t think of a reason. Now cross-browser testing is John Resig’s problem, which is handy.

The fog hid the nastiness of Birmingham. Libraries hide the nastiness of cross-browser scripting. While it’s easy to say that you should have to know about the nastiness, this is the season of goodwill. It’s nice to step out of your office into a foggy lit street that looks like a scene from It’s A Wonderful Life. Let’s not take that away from people.

This doesn’t answer Chris Heilmann’s objections, though, and that’s because they’re a damned good set of objections. The libraries we have are in general not well documented; a list of functions that the API provides does not help if you know what you want to do but not how to do it, because you have to guess at what the library might have named this function. Making the documentation available only online doesn’t help either, although this is something that really could be fixed by someone other than the main library developers — most documentation issues, including a proper decent set of examples of how your library can progressively enhance a page, with a case study or two, can be fixed by people outside the core team. So if you really hate this issue, jump in and get involved by building some docs for the library you like the most.

None of these problems are insoluble, though. Part of the issue is that JavaScript developers divide into:

1. People who aren’t hugely experienced with JS; these are at least some of the target market for a lot of libraries
2. People who are experienced and are writing a library
3. People who are experienced and think that you shouldn’t use libraries unless you have the experience to not use them
4. People who are experienced and willing to help

Of those, category 1 people aren’t going to help write documentation very much, or case studies, or browser support matrices, because they’re consumers of that information rather than creators. (Those of you who think “yes! we’ll have a huge army of people contributing!”, take a tip from the Linux world, where we’ve been using that model for code since the beginning; it happens, but not all that often.) Category 2 people are too busy writing a library to build supporting stuff around it. Too many of the remaining: people who could be helping to make the libraries we have better, and better documented, and more appropriate, and less stuffed to the gills with flashy but bad effects, are too busy repudiating the entire concept of libraries. They’re in category 3. If we can collectively, as a community, move from category 3 to category 4, and make the libraries we have great, then there won’t need to be any kind of objection to them. Let’s try and help.

Someone should do this. It’d be me if I had five million quid around the place.

One of the big advantages that Apple have over Linux is that it’s easy to buy a laptop with Mac OS X on it. You can buy them online, and there are Apple stores if you’re near a big city, but the key point here is that there’s a brand. Buy an Apple laptop. If you want a Linux laptop, though, you’re less able to do so. You have to buy someone else’s laptop and put Linux on it. Now, there are places slowly arising from the market that do this; System 76 and Emperor Linux in the US, Transtec and The Linux Emporium in the UK, and doubtless others across the world. What I’d like to see, and what I’d like to buy, is this sort of thing; not a Windows laptop that someone’s installed Linux on for you (and the SD card reader doesn’t work, and nor does the wireless) but an actual Linux laptop. Make a deal with ODMs to build it.

If I had the money, I’d set up a company called mirrorbright. They’d do laptops. There are a few important facts:

The outside of the laptop, the whole external case, is a mirror. Not chromed, not just shiny, but an actual mirror. You should be able to shave by looking in it. This is tricky but not impossible; there are plastics firms around that do mirrorised plastics which you then lacquer. I think this would involve making a case for the laptop bits; you can’t take an existing case and mirrorise it, because you can’t get the surface flat enough to avoid imperfections in the mirror.

The firm should do two laptops. The important point here is that that’s not “laptop ranges”, that’s “laptops”. Call them the “mirrorbright one” and the “mirrorbright two”. A mirrorbright one has a 12″ screen and 1GB of RAM; a mirrorbright two has a 15″ screen and 2GB of RAM. Each has 120GB of disc space (or something like that; lots, anyway). Each does wifi and bluetooth and has a small webcam built into the case, above the screen. You don’t get to choose the spec of it; every mirrorbright one is the same. Twelve months from now, release the three and the four which are updated. Every part on the laptop is supported with free drivers, including the graphics card to do dualhead. This will involve some fairly careful hardware choices but it’s critical. Install the latest Ubuntu on the laptops, with a custom mirrorbright theme.

If these existed I’d buy one tomorrow.

Niamh has started piano lessons at school! And she seems to be able to do it!

This is remarkable. I have the musical ability of a rubber hammer, and Sam is (if this were possible) even worse than me. My parents are utterly unmusical. Sam’s parents are. (Sam’s brother was in a metal band, but (a) he was a drummer, which requires no real musical ability and (b) they were a metal band, which doesn’t require musical ability either.)

Now I need to get the piano tuned, since it’s supposed to sound like a mellifluous and beautiful instrument and it actually sounds like someone’s dropped a load of cymbals when you play it. Niamh is having to practice only on the bottom couple of octaves, which seem to be less out of tune than the rest. Anyone got any good recommendations for piano tuners in the Midlands who won’t charge me a fortune? Bonus points if they fulfil the cliche by being blind.

Leaving university, moving from being a loafing and lazy student to being a paid-up besuited member of the rat race, means a pretty significant change to life. You stop being funded by the government for a start, unless you decide to throw away your soul (what the hell, you weren’t using it anyway) and go and work for the civil service. (Nurses and doctors and so on are excluded here; NHS consultants are not.) You start getting up at seven and going to bed at eleven, rather than getting up at eleven and going to sleep when the cigarettes run out, or possibly slumped against a wall in a nightclub. You stop caring about politics, until you start caring about it again. The amount you actually contribute to society starts an upward turn, just as your beer consumption and the amount you want to contribute to society and the amount you give a shit about contributing to society start their horrific screaming nosedive toward ground zero. And you have to buy your own shower gel for the first time in twenty-one years.

None of this, though, has as much of an effect as the most important paradigm shift between the two states. You stop eating takeaways.

When I was at university, we ate pizza all the time. Babylon Pizza (that’s 0191 386 4004 for those of you following along in Durham, assuming the number hasn’t changed in the last decade, which I’m gratified to see that it hasn’t, although it has changed its name to Pizza King (beware: large jpg! also crimes against typography!)) got so many orders from us that all I had to do was dial the number and say “Hello” to get a 10″ olives-mushroom-sweetcorn and a 12″ chicken-ham-pepperoni delivered to our house. (This is really true.) I’m beaten in this only by my aunt Caroline, who once got a letter from BT saying that she could save money by picking the listed ten numbers as her Friends and Family (a scheme from British Telecom, the UK phone company, designed to offer a discount on the numbers you ring most often); number four on the list was the Chinese takeaway. Caroline, a grown-up, had reached that pitch of adult life when you get to eat food that you didn’t cook (and microwaving counts here) on a semi-regular basis. It took us a while to get there, but we’re there now; in fact, because we’re so rich and so posh and so uncaring, we’ve blown right through the wall of takeaways and into actually going out for dinners.

Those of you in London (or, I imagine, New York or Boston or Sydney or probably Moscow for all I know) will now be sneering into your mochacockachocochinos before instructing your secretaries to book your usual lunch table at Wagamamas like Patrick Bateman, I know. However, out here in the provinces, eating out is still an interesting and vibrant experience rather than just what you do in between 12.30 and 3pm. So we went out for dinner, as we do quite often these days.

Eating out is problematic if you have a youngish child; my daughter, Niamh, is six. Now, she’s approximately the best behaved child in the universe, so just going out to a normal restaurant, sitting, eating, and talking, isn’t a problem. She won’t get restless, she won’t cause a scene. She will, however, get bored, and I think it’s pretty important that everyone enjoys going out. So we normally end up going to a pub with a children’s play area, so Sam and I can eat dinner while Niamh jumps and runs about on some insane enormous room-filling contraption made out of Meccano and covered with foam and occasionally runs out to gulp down some spaghetti bolognaise. Last night was a change: we were going for a Chinese meal. Now, I like Chinese. Sam’s more a curry person, so we argue a lot about that on takeaway days and normally settle on pizzas, but last night was for Chinese.

You may have noticed the increasing trend in the UK (if you’re in the UK) for Chinese restaurants to move over to “buffet-style” dining, where they cook a mountain of different sorts of food and you can eat as much of whatever you want for a fixed price. I, personally, think that this is a good idea on a par with fire, indoor plumbing, and uncapped internet connections, because when I have Chinese I only ever eat sweet-and-sour chicken with egg fried rice. Not for me Beef with Green Peppers in Black Bean Sauce! You can keep your King Prawns with Ginger and Spring Onions Szechuan style! Sweet and sour chicken, that’s where it’s at. Lemon chicken on a good day. Unadventurous, true, but if you want to eat interesting new things go to someone else’s house. Anyway, the buffet concept allows me to eat two or three plates of that and then stagger home barely able to breathe, which is clearly the point of going out for dinner. The restaurant in town is a buffet-style place, so we had it earmarked; we’ve been meaning to go there for five years, so this was a momentous occasion. And when we got there it was closed for refurbishment. That’s poor customer service, that. Admittedly we’ve only been talking about going to the place for half a decade rather than actually venturing across the threshold and proffering money in exchange for food, but that’s not the point! Where’s our dinner?

So we headed onward. Sam had had recommendations for somewhere called Shanghai Fusion, on Salop Street in Dudley. Out to Dudley headed the three brave explorers. Now, we didn’t know where Salop Street was, but we intended to try the time-honoured “drive around until you find it” location technique, what with Dudley not being all that big. Turns out it’s big enough to defeat us, though, and after my griping about how my car has sat-nav (we were in Sam’s) reached enough of a pitch, my lovely wife pointed out that I constantly boast about (and consequently have to pay for) my phone having a net connection; couldn’t I just go and get a map? Well, I have the Mobile GMaps Java app on my phone for just such an eventuality, so I fired it up. I’d looked at it before, at which point I was a bit over-effusive about the wonderfulness of being able to see a map on your phone (”the Google Maps viewer is the coolest thing in the whole fucking world. I am not kidding. It does UK maps as well. Wow. Just, wow. I will never, ever be lost again”). That falls dramatically into the category of “Famous Last Words”. Actually trying to use it taught me two things:

1. It’s really, really, really slow. Phones are such a crappy platform for accessing the net. Perhaps 3G is fast enough, but as far as I can tell you can’t tell your phone “use a 3G connection to just connect to the net”. You can use it for pointless video calls or downloading trailers to movies you don’t want to watch, but you can’t make the Java apps on your phone like Mobile GMaps or Opera Mini use a 3G connection instead of a GPRS one. The slowness was agonising. “OK, I can now see Dudley on the map; I’ll zoom in. Drive around the block again a couple of times while the three map tiles load.” That, however, was enormously exacerbated by
2. It forgets map tiles and sets them back to blank and then reloads them. While you’re looking at them. What you really want when you’re trying to navigate through town with directions like “Well, keep going up this street; I can’t tell you which side-street to take because the map isn’t zoomed enough for that because I don’t want to wait another ten minutes” is for the bloody map you’re looking at to bloody disappear and then reappear again three minutes later when it reloads. Why in the name of Jesus on a one-wheeled bicycle would that ever, ever, ever be a good idea? Don’t do that. Just…don’t.

Eventually, eventually, we got there. After some more fun and games parking, we entered the restaurant. And actually, it wasn’t too bad. The reason it’s called Shanghai Fusion is because it’s not only a Chinese buffet restaurant; it’s an Indian buffet restaurant as well. So you can have chicken tikka with egg fried rice. Beef with cashew nuts and mango chutney. Lamb balti with sweet-and-sour sauce on and a poppadom. Personally, I thought that was weird, and eating it didn’t change my opinion, but I can’t complain about the quality of the cooking. My approach rapidly became “pretend you’ve just come out for a Chinese and ignore all the Indian stuff”, because the culture clash did my head in, but all around me people were eating beansprouts with mint yoghurt dressing with evidence of genuine enjoyment. I have to say the place is recommended, even if they apparently don’t take credit cards and I had to take a break between plates of sweet-and-sour to go out and get some money from a nearby garage.

On the way out, Niamh said “I know why it’s called Fusion. It must be called Fusion because it’s confusing to get there.”

All this leads me, as ever, to two conclusions. Firstly, you should eat out more. It gives you the chance to enjoy great food and not have to wash up afterwards, and it’s really not that expensive. Shanghai Fusion was a tenner a head, which is not bad considering you can eat a hundredweight of chicken tikka and there was carrot cake and gateau and ice cream for dessert and you could smoke too.

And secondly, when you do decide to go out, take a map.

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I wonder if you could build a Linux distro where the only program installed was Firefox? You make it look like an ordinary desktop, with “Word Processor”, “Email Client”, “Web Browser”, etc, but the word processor is Writely and the email client is Gmail, both of which come up in their own chromeless window so they seem like a separate application, and the web browser is a stock Firefox window. You might not even need X for this. Obviously it’d be about as much use as a chocolate teapot without access to the net. File storage is online, and each “web app” you use has been hacked (with GreaseMonkey or similar) to save to your online repository; you get a “file manager” which is probably some Ajax thing to manipulate the files on the remote server and to open them in an appropriate application (where the URL of the remote file gets sent to the local host, which then opens one of its “applications” like Writely and passes it the URL of the file to open).

Not sure how useful it’d be, but it’d be pretty small, and it’d genuinely prove that the web really can be your apps. What’s missing from this picture? Assuming you’re prepared to live with Flash (which I personally am not until Gnash comes along) then multimedia isn’t really a problem. There’s no web-based equivalent of, say, Jokosher, but there wasn’t a web-based equivalent of MS Word either until fairly recently either. Your apps probably wouldn’t be as good as desktop apps, because we’re in an early stage of development of web applications, but that’s only a matter of time, and maybe it’s outweighed by the convenience of having your fully working desktop on a 16MB USB stick. (Look at how many people use webmail, despite its UI being worse than desktop mail apps; even if you think that new webmail clients like GMail or Yahoo Mail are as good, people still used Hotmail in their droves before the whole Web 2.0 thing.)

One more project I probably don’t have time to build…

Apparently, the latest set of Ubuntu updates may break it. That’s really not good. Microsoft would get flayed alive if a service pack broke Windows in this way. Dapper is a supported release; we need to do better than this. I’ve got no idea whether it’s a problem for everyone or just for a few people, and I don’t know how it’s being resolved, but I suspect some internal update-release procedures (as well as “how do we undo an update release” procedures) are being looked at.
Meanwhile, don’t click the upgrade button just yet.

From the topic on the #usability channel on FreeNode IRC:

Remember there is no model user, and if there were: it wouldn’t be you

Anyone who is feeling generous, feel free to buy me this poster, called “Tango with Evil“. It’s my desktop background.

Luis Villa is entirely right in asking where “our” flickr/blogger/online-storage place is. We talked about this a bit at Guadec (and about “gnome on rails” (which has nothing to do with Ruby, but is about being able to build Gnome apps really quickly and agilely, as you can build web apps). I keep thinking about doing something like this, but there are so many other projects that need doing!

I got two pings yesterday from people curious about my IM away message, which said “At Microsoft”. That’s because I was at Microsoft. The Lugradio team were invited down to MS to talk to Nick McGrath, head of platform strategy for Microsoft UK, and a cast of thousands about open source software and how MS can engage with the community. It went…interestingly.
We went on a tour of the building, which affirmed my belief that (if you don’t mind the ethical issue) Microsoft must be a great place to work; free drinks, decent chill-out area full of Xboxes and pool tables, nice outdoor lake with free ice-cream, all that sort of thing. Of course, you have to be OK with the idea of working for Microsoft. That aside, though, they do treat their staff very well. We also saw some demos of new-ish projects, like Vista and Office 12. However, the interesting part (and one I wish had gone on longer) was the discussion we had in the morning. They wanted to know more about how MS are perceived by the community and outline some of the things they’re doing to enhance interoperability. We…kicked back pretty hard on that point.
The view that we put to them was that, for Microsoft, interoperability means one of two things: either “partner agreements” with specially anointed projects, or “we do what we like and you fit in with us” (as Michael Erskine reminded us, “there’s no U in interoperability”). the way to actual real proper interop is to open your protocols; that way, everyone can interoperate with you without you having to do any work. It means that I can choose Exchange as my mail and calendaring server without therefore having to choose Outlook (and therefore Windows) on the desktop. We hammered them pretty hard on this point, and I think the message got through. One chap who was there, Nick Barley (?), seemed to be pretty in-touch and in agreement.
It was all very informal; surprisingly so, I thought. This is obviously a good thing, and as far as I could tell the fluffy clouds of niceness weren’t there to obscure barbed fish-hooks. They seemed genuine. Now, I certainly wasn’t expecting to go down there and convince Microsoft to Free the Windows source code in four hours, and I don’t know whether what we said will actually have any effect, but it was interesting nonetheless. I wish we’d had more time to continue the discussion, though.

Mark Pilgrim: Please take this opportunity to relate amusing anecdotes about your vasectomy.

• There’s nothing like the feeling that you’ve been kicked in the spuds, especially when that feeling lasts for two days. And I don’t mean “there’s nothing like it” in any kind of good way, either.
• When your daughter runs over and jumps in your lap, try and feel suffused with the joy of being a parent rather than, say, screaming.
• The worst job in the world is being the chap who sits by patients’ heads and talks to them while the operation is going on. I mean, what do you say? Conversation is strained at the best of times.
• The last word you want to hear from the dude with the knife is “Oops”.

Because I have an ego the size of Jupiter, I occasionally run Google searches for myself to see how popular I am. I’ve been the top hit for “langridge” and “kryogenix for a while now, but it turns out that I’m now also the second most popular Stuart on the internet behind stuartmodels.com (no link! ha! no google juice from me, usurpers!). Nearly there, then. :)

Today, the learning support assistant in Niamh’s class at school was called away to show someone around the building. One of her tasks is reading out a story — actually, a daily “diary” written by the children themselves — out to the class, which obviously she couldn’t do if she wasn’t present. So Niamh read the whole thing out instead.

In the middle of me feeling immensely proud of my daughter for being chosen as the best reader in the class, she knocked a tub of soapy bubble mixture over on the floor of my study.

I’m not sure I have a message here. But it’s fun having a daughter.

I’d like to think that, now that I’m thirty, I’ve got a handle on life and all its incessant complications. However, I’m forced to a particular realisation: there’s no way I can consider myself grown up until I don’t have to check the milk in the fridge to see whether it’s gone off whenever I make tea.

All my concerns with maturity seem to be related to milk, for some reason.

Amazon’s new S3 online storage service is what I was talking about when I spoke of “online drives” a little while back, a place to store your data. There’s a clone of S3 called Park Place, so the “run your own servers” part is now handled. What’s missing is integration into applications. That’s something that someone should get onto with the greatest of speed; take your favourite web app that creates things and build some integration so it can save data onto your own personal S3 space (whether S3 itself or your own Park Place at an arbitrary URL). Then submit your patch to the upstream people so they incorporate it, or release a GreaseMonkey script to do it in the interim.

And back to a styled website. I need to do a new style; this one’s starting to bore me.

Talking to Sam earlier, she wondered why the Times Educational Supplement here in the UK can still sell newspapers every week. For Americans, non-teachers, and other aliens, everyone who buys the TES in the UK is a teacher, and the reason they buy it is because that’s where all the teacher jobs are advertised. The TES people might believe that everyone buys it for the quality journalism, but they’re kidding themselves; most (or possibly just some) of its readers do read the articles, but everyone buys it for the job ads. And all the jobs in the TES are also available online, for free. So why do people buy the newspaper?

There are three reasons why.

1. It’s easy to read and understand a newspaper. Websites are more difficult to find things in. This is 30% of the reason.
2. Newspapers are a lot more convenient; you can read them over breakfast, or roll them up and throw them in your bag, or read them on the train, and you can write on them, and take just the bit you want, and they never run out of batteries. This is another 30% of the reason.
3. Newspapers aren’t a computer. Computers are basically bad things that annoy you and break a lot. Computers are not useful and not fun. This is the last 40%.

All the work that all the web people are doing goes to fix point 1 only. Point 2 may go away with magical new technology like RadioPaper or similar, but not for ages. Point 3 will go away twenty years from now when my daughters’ children don’t find computers weird. But remember when the next big web thing comes along — Ajax, Firefox, Opera Mini, CSS — that it’s only fixing a third of the problem.

These are dishwasher tablets:

These are dishwasher cleaner tablets:

The first ones are the ones you put in the dishwasher along with all the dirty crockery to clean that crockery. The second ones, although they’re in a pretty similar box, in identical individual packaging, and look very similar once unwrapped, go in the dishwasher when it’s empty in order to clean the dishwasher itself.

They are not the same thing.

I have just had a very stern talking to about this!

Don’t forget the pancakes on Jif Lemon Day. I love today.

I am thirty years old.
Over the last few years (2005 2004 2003) there’s been a little guessing game for you all to play, but not this year.
I am thirty. Blimey.
That’s all grown up, isn’t it?
I mean, I’ve got a mortgage and a daughter and whatnot, so I suppose I am grown up, and I pretty much like it. I drink red wine and everything.
A whole new decade. I barely remember not being in my twenties. Here comes ten more years of doing cool things, except now there’s a three at the beginning. And I’ll probably be doing them in sensible shoes. Bring it on.

I have to say that it’s going to be a lot easier to face the trials and tribulations of middle age from inside my birthday present from Sam, which is a Mercedes-Benz C180 Kompressor sports coupe. So nice. It was a bit of a wrench to get rid of my Fiat Coupe, but, y’know, I’m thirty now, can’t have fast cars any more. I have to be refined and so on.
Actually, that’s total lies and had nothing to do with it, I just don’t want to pay a grand a year for insurance for a car that I only drive to the railway station and back. The Merc’s marvellous, though. Really swishy. I like it a lot.

Happy birthday to me. Hope the rest of you enjoy the day!

I’m increasingly living my life online. I moved from hosting my own mailserver to throwing mail at Gmail and POPping it off right through to just using the Gmail web interface. I may have to start doing more of that with documents and the like. One of the big things missing there is a presentation package which lets me create S5 presentations in a graphical way. No, s5presents is not good enough. I want a GUI, WYSIWYG presentation editor. A second thing that’s missing is a word processor like LyX. I am more and more becoming convinced that the LyX WYSIWYM approach to document creation is better than the Word/OpenOffice/AbiWord WYSIWYG way of doing things. I rambled about this a little more on the LugRadio forums a while back.

The main thing that’s missing, though, is storage. At the moment, every online application makes you store created documents there, or on the machine you’re on by downloading them. What’s needed is the following:

1. A shared storage server. It should be possible to run your own, or sign up for an account with someone else who’s running it (imagine someone setting up the server at onlinedrive.org or something, and charging £10/month for accounts or similar).
2. A JavaScript and server side library which makes it really, really, really easy to save files to a specified shared storage server. This isn’t designed for users; instead, it’s designed for people building Web 2.0 online apps like Writely or Num Sum or s5presents, to make it fantastically trivially easy for them to integrate sharedstorage support into their applications, so instead of saving your files on their server you can save them on your choice of onlinedrive server.
3. Authentication to onlinedrive servers should work very much like OpenID.

This should mean, in theory, that when you go off to your choice of online office app, or anything that saves files, and you click the Save button, it says “where do you want to save it to?” I then say “kryogenix.org”, exactly as I do with OpenID, and it finds my onlinedrive (which might be on kryogenix.org, or might be delegated to onlinedrive.com or online-disc-space.myisp.net or wherever, exactly as OpenID can be), and it then goes through some kind of handshake thing and saves my file to my onlinedrive. This is sort of like .Mac is, as I understand it, except it’s designed to be easily integrable with other people’s applications; you publish the specs and so on.

Allowing people to run their own servers is critical; a lot of people won’t, and there’s then a business model for doing it for them, but if you have to use onlinedrives.kryogenix.org or wherever to do this then it’s a power grab by the people who think it up, and people won’t use it (and it won’t get integrated into apps).

I think this really could work. The OpenID people have done most of the hard work as regards shipping stuff around and how to specify delegation and so on, and everyone wins. Jeremy Zawodny was musing about something similar, but doesn’t mention integration, which I think is the critical part. Note that if the specs are published it would be trivial to also integrate onlinedrive handling into desktop apps; you could do it in the major office apps (OpenOffice, MS Office, etc) with macros. If it’s all open it’d all work. A project for someone to pick up, perhaps.

Here we are in 2006. The year in which I turn thirty, hooray!
Well, maybe not hooray,
Mum and Dad are here today (and yesterday) for a belated Christmas; yesterday was a little bit muted because Sam and I didn’t get to bed until about 4.30am New Year’s Eve, but it was still good. NYE itself was excellent; the LugRadio crew piled round to Jono’s to argue about things and eat Matchmakers. Once again we demonstrated that Jono is wrong about everything, which was good.
Or maybe not. Really good evening, though.
I got to test out my phone by sending a Happy New Year text message to pretty much everyone I know, only to have the sending repeatedly fail because the network was busy. I imagine I am not atypical in this. Nice to discover that you can send one message to multiple recipients, though; I keep discovering that the SonyEricsson phone UI is streets ahead of its Nokia or Motorola competitors in lots of little ways.
I got a set of optics, on which I have now mounted four bottles of spirits. There’s something rather cool about being able to pour someone a drink like you’re in a pub. Don’t know what it is, but it’s cool nonetheless.
I’m also struggling with a threading issue in Gtk for a project I’m working on, about which more news soon.
Happy New Year to all of you; I hope it’s a good one.

I avoided posting on Christmas Day: as my Gaim away message said, I was “Enjoying Christmas with my family rather than being on the internet”. :-)
A good day. Delicious roast dinner, nice beers to drink with Sam’s dad, and I got a Navman iCN 320 sat-nav thing for the car. We went out and tested it, and it pretty much got everything right; it got a bit lost once in a housing estate because it obviously felt that I should drive down one particular road, which meant that when I tried to ignore it it kept sending me back to that road through various enlarging and circitous routes. So I drove a mile in the wrong direction and then it found us a new way to go. Well pleased with that.
The best bit, though, was watching Sam and her dad and Niamh play with Niamh’s train set, with Niamh squealing in excitement every time two trains looked like they were about to collide. I wish I’d taken a little video of it but I was a bit slow off the mark, what with reading How to be Good by Nick Hornby, which seems pretty reasonable in the 80% or so that I’ve read. In other reading news, Tim got me Smax by Alan Moore, which was also great.
I like Christmas, especially when it’s in my house rather than someone else’s. And there’s lots still to go; off to Sam’s mum’s tonight, the LugRadio crew are here on Wednesday, Andy on Friday, my mum and dad on New Year’s Day. Nice.
Hope you all had a merry Christmas, gang. See you in the New Year.

Niamh and I are watching Father Christmas with NORAD Tracks Santa again this year. He’s in India at the moment; not long to go :)

Siemens have come up with really cheaply produceable electronic paper — thirty cents for a 1in x 2in sheet. Great! However, they’re talking about using it as labels on packaging: “When you go in a supermarket today, you might see but hardly notice 15 different cereal boxes…but you will notice when some of them will be flashing”.

Jesus, don’t do that. Think through the implications. Imagine it works. Are all the other product companies going to stand by and watch their sales drop? Not at all. So they’ll all get flashing packages too. Great for Siemens, bad for us. If this happens and everyone gets flashing packaging, you’ll be in exactly the same situation as now — no one product will stand out — but now every supermarket aisle will look like an insane version of the Strip in Las Vegas, and epileptics will have to grow all their own food. E-paper technologies are brilliant, but please, use them to make sheets of paper that I can browse the web with like in The Diamond Age, not to make packaging. Apparently the technology doesn’t react fast enough to support video, but that’s fine; work out a way of putting memory in it and then make it for 30 cents a sheet so I can put a whole encyclopaedia into one sheet and then give it to someone. Do that now.

What with all the performance work that’s been going into Gnome recently, I’ve firmed up a belief that I’ve held for a while: there shouldn’t be “suspend” or “hibernate” functions. There should be no difference between “shut down”, “suspend to disc”, and “suspend to RAM”. If bootup is fast enough, and if your desktop remembers which apps are running and restarts them with their remembered status in the same place they were when you shut down, which your desktop should do, then there’s no need for “hibernate” or “suspend”. Just shut down, and restart when you turn on again.
I’m not sure it’s possible to make booting that fast. But it should be.

At the Wolves LUG meeting last night, we got into a discussion of mathematics (see, I told you these meetings were exciting). Jono took the Luddite position that maths was extremely boring and of no relevance to the real world, a position that I imagine he’s not the only person to hold. So I tried convincing him that maths was interesting and had a point, but didn’t get very far. The attempt to demonstrate its interestingness was by relating a couple of maths anecdotes. Firstly, Euler’s formula, e^iπ + 1 = 0, which relates the five most fundamental constants in mathematics and is the clearest evidence I know of of some kind of underlying order in the universe, since e and π are both transcendental and i is imaginary and yet they combine to make 1. Jono liked that one. Secondly, I talked about Hilbert’s Hotel, since I think stuff to do with infinities is fascinating and the idea of a full hotel being able to accommodate one new guest, an infinite number of new guests, and an infinite number of coaches each with an infinite number of guests on board is just mind-blowing. That one didn’t go down too well, so I abandoned my third attempt, which was to talk about the difference between aleph-null and the continuum (which is handy since I can’t remember how to prove there is such a difference without Cantor’s diagonal proof and you need pen and paper to demonstrate that). So, I throw the question open. Since I’ve had snarky maths comments every year when I play guess-the-age on my birthday (2003 2004 2005), I assume there are some mathematically capable people reading this. Tell me some examples of how mathematics is beautiful and simple and elegant that can be used to convince a non-maths person what you see in the tumbling world of numbers. Note that the last part is important; if you think that Andrew Wiles’ proof of Fermat’s last theorem is elegant and beautiful then I don’t want to hear about it. I spoke a little about axioms, with the intention of then going on to Russell’s Principia Mathematica and then knocking it all down with Gödel, but we never got that far.
The second thing to demonstrate is that maths is really relevant to the real world and has a point. I talked a little about how pure maths came up with i as a pointless theoretical concept and it then turned out to be useful in electrical engineering, but we never got very far into that. So, again, the question’s open. Demonstrate to a non-maths person why maths is important to the real world. Answers involving the phrases “joy of discovery” or “sacred guild of scholars” or similar are not wanted here. These also have to be semi-constructive demonstrations: when Dan presented the argument that “maths describes quantum physics and that’s where computers come from”, there was no clear recognition by our Luddite audience that that actually meant anything. How does maths make quantum physics work? Speak on, maths readers.

Lots of stuff circling over Heathrow. I am pretty much coming to the conclusion that I should write about ideas that I have rather than stashing them away in the black hole that is my projects list, because otherwise they’ll never get done. I don’t like doing that; I’m pretty firmly of the opinion that if you think a thing would be good then you should just write it rather than just writing about it; Ade would say that I do that all the time, because I write specs rather than writing code, but I try fairly hard to not do so. Nonetheless, these ideas should live somewhere other than my head, I think. So some posts should be forthcoming about stuff that’s on my mind.

Before that, though, a few notes on random cool things I know about.

Telewest, my cable provider, have launched a new service called Teleport. It’s very cool indeed. It’s, in fact, the long-promised a la carte TV: you can watch programmes whenever you want, rather than when they’re on. At first, it seemed a bit rubbish: they have a Teleport Films section where you can purchase a film for watching. Now, Telewest already had that with Front Row (now rebranded FilmFlex), but Teleport Films also contains films that aren’t the latest releases; we watched Tango and Cash the other day. After buying a film you can watch it as many times as you like within 24 hours, which is faintly cool. Nonetheless, that’s not all that exciting. We then discovered Teleport TV, which is (again) not all that revolutionary: you can pick TV programmes and watch them, from a pretty limited list. Most of the programmes are rubbish and stuff you wouldn’t want to watch anyway: one exception is Waking the Dead, a BBC murder drama which we’ve started watching and all three series of which are available with Teleport TV. So, again, that’s faintly cool, but the selection’s not up to much. Then we discovered that it has TiVo-like properties of being able to pause and rewind and fast-forward the programmes via the remote control, which was invaluably helpful when Sam and I look at one anotherand say “what did he just say?” or when we want to skip the credits on something. Finally, I discovered Teleport Replay, which has loads of programmes that were on over the last seven days also available for watching (which go away after those 7 days, much like the BBC Radio “Listen Again” service). Including Top Gear, which I shall now never miss again. Well done Telewest. This is a pretty darn good service, although I’d like to see more programmes available for Teleport TV, and the user interface is, as usual for Telewest, dog slow. Nonetheless, nice one.

Jono and I moved all the remaining sites from the old version of our server to the new version. Creating each site was pretty easy. For those unsure about how to use Apache2, a very short HOWTO. To create a site www.example.com, I do it like this (either as root, or using sudo for each command):

mkdir /var/www/example.com
mkdir /var/www/example.com/html

(place all files for the site in /var/www/example.com/html)

chmod -R a+rx /var/www/example.com/html
chown -R username /var/www/example.com

(use username that should own the site in line above)

cd /etc/apache2/sites-available
nano example.com

(place the following in the example.com file you’re editing)

<VirtualHost *>
ServerAdmin email@address.of.admin
DocumentRoot /var/www/example.com/html
ServerName www.example.com

ServerAlias example.com

</VirtualHost>

(now back to the prompt)

cd /etc/apache2/sites-enabled
ln -s ../sites-available/example.com .
/etc/init.d/apache2 restart

(and that site should now be working)

David Morley on the Wolves LUG list is putting together some video tutorials about how to use Linux from a newbie’s perspective. I’d like to see this: I wrote some instructions on how to use vnc2swf for recording a video tutorial (and see the remainder of the thread for corrections). Now, there already is a tool to do this: Gnome’s Istanbul. It’s got a good UI in principle; starting it drops a “record” icon on your panel. Click the icon to start recording, click it again to stop recording. It outputs to Ogg Theora. I think the UI could be improved a bit, though; for one, it should record screencasts and save them as Screencast1, Screencast2, etc, on your desktop, rather than making you specify a name (as the Gnome screenshot tool does). At some point I’d like to hack on it to make that possible, but this is one of those “don’t have enough time” projects. I’d also like to see it be able to output to Flash, as does vnc2swf. However, I don’t want to do that until I’ve confirmed for myself that the GPLFlash project can play such created videos. Being able to just drop Flash stuff on a web page is something of a bonus for stuff like this; I don’t really like in-browser video plugins, mainly because they never seem to work right for me.

We put up our (first) Christmas tree yesterday. Niamh really likes putting up Christmas decorations. It does rather amaze me that it’s come upon us so fast, but, hey, we like Christmas. The second tree will be forthcoming once the new flooring is down in the library, which doesn’t happen until about the 22nd December or something, so bah humbug to that! Anyone want to buy a piano, by the way? We’ve run out of room for it.

Random linkage, from Bloglines’ Keep New. Incidentally, has anyone else noticed that Bloglines is getting a bit more shit recently? Slower, down a bit more, behaving a bit more oddly? People seem to be moving to personal installations of Gregarius, which I might do.

• Jesse has listed some cool ideas for Firefox extensions, a goodly proportion of which need implementing.
• Quim Gil is talking about an events.gnome.org site. We need to get LugRadio Live 2006 on there when it’s created, I think
• Drew’s 24 ways to impress your friends, a web development advent calendar, is really cool. I wish I’d had the time to contribute to it.
• The bloody music industry is apparently claiming that anti-terror laws should apply to filesharers. And in futher help-help-I’m-being-repressed news, the French are apparently going to ban Free Software. Bloody hell. I wonder where in England Bruno is going to choose to live?
• Ed Dumbill talks about XTech: should I go?
• Oh, and I got my copy of Greasemonkey Hacks, with a couple of my hacks in it, admirably fixed and made nothing but better by Mark Pilgrim. Nice one Mark: it’s a cool book.

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.

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…

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.

In an effort to prove that I am not like Jono, I come before you to speak now of poetry. Specifically, jazz poetry. More specifically, the poetry of Vachel Lindsay, and to place our discussion right on the button, his most-famous (probably) ode, The Congo.

Under one’s breath, parenthetically
Actually, it’s called “The Congo (A Study of the Negro Race)”, but we’re here to talk of rhyme and metre, not politics.

Inquisitively, as of a church mouse
How’s your poetry knowledge? Better than mine, no doubt. The world is divided into two categories, those who think poetry is all effete verbiage and those with a favourite poem. My favourites are all epics, by which I mean that they’re long and they rhyme: The Lady of Shalott, with her magic web and now-cracked mirror; Alan Moore’s This Vicious Cabaret, which isn’t even a poem but a song; Hiawatha, and Don Juan, and A Shropshire Lad with its elevation of beer above Milton. Rightly so, since Paradise Lost doesn’t rhyme. Poems should rhyme. Yes they should; you know it in your soul. And why should they rhyme?

Boomingly and with malice aforethought
Because they are to be read aloud! Everyone knows this, too!

No-one does it, though. Unless you’re the sort of wet bleeding-heart sap who goes to poetry readings, that is. (I must go to a poetry reading one day.) As that great orator Josiah Bartlett told us, words when spoken out loud for the purpose of oratory are music; they have rhythm and pitch and timbre and volume [and] these are the properties of music. Which brings us back to jazz poetry, which is both words