Category: Uncategorized

I should have said: last Saturday was an odd one. Very early in the morning I sprayed about a gallon of petrol over the side of my car, thanks to a non-functional nozzle cut-off, and proceeded to have a fairly significant argument with the garage about precisely why they have buckets of sand on the forecourt. And signs reading ‘Report all spillages, however small.’ And ‘out of service’ hoods for pumps.

Not in the best of moods, I next sat on the M6 for rather longer than I’d hoped, thanks to mad traffic in the vicinity of Manchester. Then I got slightly lost somewhere West of Chester.

Next, I got out of the car, and seconds later somebody I’d never met before put a shotgun in my hands and shouted ‘Pull!’ Repeat sixteen more times. After which, I turned around to bid my fellow clay pigeon shooters a cheery good morrow, only to find them stony-faced because I’d just nailed seventeen out of seventeen in about ninety seconds.

Last year was, it seems, neither a fluke nor beginner’s luck. Tragically, I dropped two on the last stand, making my tally of 23 out of 25 merely level-pegging with host Daniel. But still, I am – evidently – a crack shot. My dad tells me that his father was a crack shot in the Home Guard, to the extent that in competitions they handicapped him by making him shoot left-handed. Only, his left eye was better than his right so he still won. Whatever the gene for ‘marksmanship’ is, it seems I have it. Hmm. Still not sure how I feel about that.

<div class=”Alistair Cook”>Goodnight.</div>

Drat. OK, so the hotel bar is still open, but it’s been a long day and the conference I’ve come to Newcastle for starts at some unreasonable time in the morning. A consequence, one suspects, of shoehorning the previous two-and-a-half-day meetings held at the magnificent Herstmonceaux Castle on the Sussex coast into two days in the Life centre. Previous BIG Events have been marvelously bizarre affairs, pitched somewhere between formal conference and hippy retreat. “The Glastonbury of science conferences,” as once described by Wendy. Quite how the bash will change with the new venue remains to be seen. At the very least, there should be more people from the North.

I’ve been theoretically en route to Newcastle pretty much all day. Of course, this led to my not leaving until about 8pm, for a predictable raft of reasons. One of which was: struggling to persuade my new phone that it really can act like a modem. This is something I’ve been meaning to sort since I got it, but… well… I knew it was going to be a nightmare. Orange tech support were extremely helpful, and happily read me all the settings (no username or password, no authentication, just dial *99#). Didn’t work. Some gossip online suggested dialling *99***3#, the ‘3’ being – no, bear with me – the number of the appropriate settings configuration thingy in the data communication list in the phone’s… something or other. Didn’t work, even after I remembered to pick the third-party Sony Ericsson modem scripts.

Yet more blatherings online suggested updating the phone’s software, which turns out to be an hilariously convoluted and not a little hair-raising process, involving the installation of about eight different drivers on Windows (pray you get them all right before you run out of USB ports… no, really), then the updating of Java (complicated by my install’s Java Update being broken, and it not being obvious from java.sun.com that mere mortals are supposed to download from www.java.com instead. Then, finally, one can attempt to update… at which point Sony Ericsson’s server drops offline for an hour or two.

Keep trying until it stumbles back onto the net, then eight dialogue boxes into the process (check this box, agree to this license, approve that action, check all those things, blah blah blah)… the whole Firefox/AJAX/JavaScript/Java applet/driver shebang collapses in a crashing heap. Several times. Lather, rinse, repeat, until eventually getting past that nonsense to the stage where you hold the phone in a very specific Vulcan death grip while plugging it into the USB cable (an action requiring a minimum of five hands), and the phone… turns on normally, completely unaware that the computer is screaming ‘On no account unplug the phone now, it’ll all go horribly wrong! It’ll never work again! Doom!’

Five minutes of total inactivity later, and one’s hands are starting to cramp. There’s little option but to risk thermonuclear meltdown, or whatever’s supposed to happen and unplug the phone. Then force-quit the application, which of course corrupts something, requiring some more reinstallation and using up another precious USB port. Try again. An hour later, when Sony’s website rises from the dead once more, finally, finally, the Vulcan-death-grip-plug-in-heart-in-mouth-will-it-actually-bloody-work combination… works. Joy! An updated phone.

Try dial-up from the Mac… still doesn’t work. Give up, pack bag, prepare to leave. Halfway out of the door, have sudden brainwave.

Change the dialup phone number from ‘99#’ or ‘99***3#’ to – get this – ‘orangeinternet’. It works. It bloody works. To connect to the dial-up GPRS gateway you have to command the phone to dial the name of the service and somehow, as if by magic, some tiny part of the system squirreled away at some stage knows to turn this into whatever mystical incantation actually dials whatever the number is.

AAARRRRRGHHHHHHH!

The fundamentally tragic aspect of this is that somebody, somewhere, is genuinely proud of themselves for having thought to make it that simple for little old me. Haven’t they read Douglas Adams?

There are few things that could move me to violence; modem configuration is one.

Anyway, so, yes – deep breath – if you can read this, GPRS dial-up is working.

Sadly, there are, as yet, no known photographs of me in my new specs. That’ll have to wait for broadband, which isn’t likely until late on Sunday. In the meantime, I have two conferences to attend, blog, video, and generally make myself a nuisance at.

Dear, gentle readers – look away now. I regret that this post it likely to be one of those where Jonathan goes off on one, and most of you have no idea what he’s talking about.

Right. ‘Webby crap,’ as it’s affectionately known. I’ve been more-or-less immersed for a couple of weeks now, and it’s starting to grate (aside: boy, am I glad I don’t really do this for a living). First up – blogs. I’m more-or-less reconciled to Movable Type, now they’re more-or-less posting update instructions for recent versions (though it’s still too hard to discover that 3.17 is a drop-in replacement for eg. 3.15. ‘It just works’ should not be assumed for such things). WordPress, however, continues to impress me – 1.5.1.3, despite having the most ridiculous version number in recent memory, pretty much rocks. I do, however, need to look into anti-spam measures for it. Blacklist isn’t perfect, but it’s better than the default WordPress stuff. WordPress’ Codex, however, is wonderful.

Next: Wikis. Oh, dear heavens. I’ve been trying to resurrect a Mediawiki-based project I started last year, but ran out of time to finish. But I think I must admit defeat, Mediawiki is simply not ready for mere mortals. Administration and customisation is far too convoluted, and even with considerable hacking about it’s still too complex for end users to get their heads around. I shouldn’t be surprised, since Mediawiki is designed to run Wikipedia, and quite rightly, that’s the development focus. Indeed, I’m surprised the developers are so understanding and helpful to other users. But my judgement remains that Mediawiki simply isn’t right for the project I’m attempting. Merde.

Twiki looks like the next-best fit, but they’re obsessed with CamelCase links and there’s some odd terminology for namespaces. Heck, ‘namespaces’ is bad enough, but ‘webs’? Could that be any more confusing for wiki-newbies? Besides, the project I’m attempting explicitly doesn’t want a strict hierarchy like that. I’ll probably install and try anyway, but I don’t hold out much hope that my audience/users will be willing to suffer the learning curve.

The only things that look plausible are JotSpot and Confluence, but they’re both way too expensive for my project. JotSpot appears to do excellent WYSIWYG, but I’ll admit surprise that it’s all gone rather quiet. There was plenty of buzz last November or thereabouts – what’s happened since? Confluence, meanwhile, doesn’t fully solve the WYSIWYG nightmare. I should probably write a Wiki wishlist, but really, that would be a design document for a significant development project. And however much I keep glancing in the direction of Rails, I’m not a developer. Still, I can’t shift the feeling that we’re all missing something when it comes to wikis.

Finally, to finish on a positive note – I just bought Xylescope. I don’t do webby stuff very often, and I forget most of what little I ever learn about XHTML and CSS. Xylescope and CSS Edit pretty much solve that problem for me; the former allows me to find out what my web application is spitting out, the latter allows me to change it. Brilliant.

Oh, happy day! I’ve previously moaned about how rubbish most mobile phones are, then exclaimed about how lovely but crashy the K750i is, and next demonstrated the camera. Since people seem to be finding each of those pages via Google, I should set the record straight:

The Sony Ericsson K750i is a terrific phone. Best I’ve ever had, etc etc.

Some specific notes:

• If you’re having stability problems, the software update might help, but there also seem to be specific hardware problems; my replacement unit from Orange hasn’t crashed since I first turned it on, a month ago. It’s running the same software revision as my first unit.
• Mac OS X 10.4.2 brings full iSync support, so the plist hack that sort-of worked is no longer necessary; It Just Works. Hit Software Update and enjoy, unless you haven’t bought Tiger yet, in which case – really, you’re missing a lot of good stuff.
• The included USB cable not only charges the phone, the phone also presents itself as a camera to iPhoto. Oh, joy of quick importy goodness. Finally, a decent digital camera that just works – expect to see lots more photos here. You lucky, lucky people.
• Bad news: Tiger crashes hard (really hard) when you yank the cable out. Oops.
• Good news: Install this fix and everything’s fine again.
• Salling Clicker doesn’t work yet, but it will with the next version.

By way of a quick review, I like this phone for several reasons. Yes, the camera. ‘Camera’ and ‘phone’ fit together far more coherently than do ‘phone’ and ‘music player’, in my head at least, and this camera is good. Not great, perhaps, but more than good enough for everyday use. Now I just have to remind myself that I’m carrying a camera all the time. My only real niggle about the camera is that it takes the picture about half a second after it plays the amusing synthetic shutter sound, with the result that I have rather a lot of pictures of my feet. But hey, shutter lag is one of the reasons I never bought a compact digital camera, and have been saving for a DSLR.

My earlier fears about the keypad turn out to be mostly unfounded, since the phone is not simply updated internals in a K700 case. The 750 is considerably more solid and elegant, the keys far less wobbly. They’re still too small, but they’re OK. If anything, they’re a bit stiff – this is not a good phone for prolific texters. But the phone feels robust in the way earlier Ericssons did, and some more recent ones haven’t. It doesn’t creak, for example.

My only real complaint is that it’s not a clamshell design, which I still think is The One True Phone Form-Factor. These little candy bar things are all well and good, but having to lock the keypad all the time is a pain, and frankly it’s just too small to hold comfortably, particularly when being used as a phone. I’ll have to suffer the Nathan Barley aspect of a Bluetooth headset and finally take that oh-so-modern plunge, heigh-ho.

Testing heading styles, which I think are pretty nasty at present:

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This just in – in a shocking development, it seems the BBC have unilaterally open-sourced my chum Damien, he of the deletetheweb-hosted Low Resolution and up-and-coming-and-actually-let’s-face-it-pretty-damn-here-now Media Lounge. The BBC’s Media Lounge is different, but heck, it’s GPL’d. How can Damien et al compete with a free version of themselves?

Tune in next time for another exciting installment of ‘Gee, how can you trademark something you disclaim ownership of anyway?’

Almost. I only ordered them today. In a refreshing change from the nownownow! world in which we’re supposed to live, it still takes a good week or so for a master craftsman to lovingly precision-grind a perfectly-judged set of lenses to my exactingly personal specification. Or, more likely, for some oik to push a few buttons on a machine and, scant seconds later, fling the cast-off results into a jiffy bag, but I prefer the former image and, frankly, who’s to know?

In the end, I ordered some terribly marvelous retro-modern objets from a deliriously tiny boutique so chic they don’t even do their own examinations – no no, that would not do, for this place is so specialised they only do frames. They’re so exclusive, their London outlet isn’t even open any more. So so exclusive, the only reference to them I can find online refers to other websites, entirely hidden from my view, supposedly relating that the likes of Kevin Spacey and Elle McPherson shop there (and Ewan McGregor, but I forget – do we like him again, or not?).

Somewhat embarrassingly, the Oliver Peoples frames I’ve ordered come in cheaper than the almost-but-in-the-end-not-quite-right Booth and Bruce pair from my worryingly quiet local high street optician. I’m not sure what’s up with that. Perhaps I’ll multiply the cost by a random factor (say… three), then alude to that in a darkly mysterious fashion.

About a week, anyway.

Oh – I’m sorry – you want to know what they look like, eh? Um… well… they’re… oh, you’ll have to wait and see. If I said they were acrylic, retro, and green tortoiseshell, you’d get an impression that, while technically accurate, doesn’t exactly do them justice. Besides, I’m blind as a bat, so it’s not like I’ve seen them myself. I can’t even pick them out from the manufacturer’s online catalogue.

I started blogging back in 2001. A curious claim, you might think, when the oh-so-imaginatively-titled ‘First Post!‘ on this site dates from April 2002.

Ah, but you see – before Quernstone.com, there was ItLikesYou, a community portal (we were still big on ‘portals’ back in 2001, remember?) where multiple authors could post quick comments about things they stumbled across, that they liked, and that they thought others might like too. Metafilter predated ILY by almost three years, but it was then (and still is now) a clearing-house for pointers to other websites – ILY was intended more for comments on the world beyond the web.

ILY failed, in that it only ever attracted a few dozen posts from a tiny handful of authors. None of us ever had the time to drive it forwards, and it was never anything other than ‘just another group weblog.’ We even failed in the ‘not so much a linksblog’ aim, and eventually, we all drifted away to our individual blogs. Fnally, in late 2003, a database upgrade on the webserver broke the site entirely.

Mysteriously, a further update in 2004 brought it at least partially back to life, though it was still impossible to access the admin functions. Somehow it was still possible to post comments, with the inevitable result that stinking bastard spammers found it, and recently bombarded it. Today I tried to update the software running the site, but two years is a long time in the life of a web application, and the update failed. I had no option but to put ILY out of its misery, and remove the site entirely.

I can’t help but feel a little sad about this, since it’s the first of my own websites that I’ve intentionally retired. But nobody was using it, and its time had passed. I don’t like deleting content, but at least the WayBack Machine has a mirror, so you can see what it looked like, and re-read Martin’s comments about ear candling.

On the bright side, I appear to have a domain name going spare. Anyone want to do anything with ‘ItLikesYou.com’? It’s paid-up through mid-2006.

Of course, the other reason I’ve been quiet is that my humungoparcel arrived from Amazon. As a result, I’ve finally watched a TV show I never got the chance to see, because its idiot US network cancelled it mid-season – Joss Wheden’s Firefly. Now, while I thought Buffy the Vampire Slayer was one of the finest broad-appeal ‘teen’ series ever made (notwithstanding the fact that I simply can’t stand Sarah Michelle Gellar), I rarely actually watched it, and I was never taken with Angel. I know, I know, fans tell me it’s the better series, but… sorry, I couldn’t be bothered. So I was never exactly a Whedon fan.

Why, then, the interest in Firefly? Confession time: I rather like Westerns. The show turns out to be fairly completely brilliant, with some of the finest ensemble performances I can recall. Nathan Fillion and Adam Baldwin stand out, but that’s somewhat unfair on the remainder of the cast – in particular Jewel Staite, whose character Kaylee appears to have been directly lifted from my friend Briony. Music, costume design, set and lighting – all are top-notch too, the whole delivered with an easy humour and style that’s tremendously infectious.

But it’s easy to see why the series failed to find its audience. Notwithstanding what appears to have been idiotic scheduling by the network, the character development and show pacing appear to be deliberately slow. This fits the old-fashioned feel well, and personally I found it a welcome relief from the often over-worked feel of recent series (Doctor Who suffered a little this way, don’t you think?). But it’s not an easy series to jump into.

Reading between the lines of the ‘making of’ featurettes, it sounds like the network execs were worried about just this point. To be honest, I’m not sure they were wrong. On the other hand, the series has spawned a theatrical movie, Serenity, coming this autumn. There’s even talk that a big enough box-office success might spawn a spin-off TV series. Now, wouldn’t that be a thing?

Available from Amazon, anyway, and worth seeking out. Excellent series overview at the Firefly Wiki.