Category: Uncategorized

Comments are working again. I’d tweaked the server to talk to quernstone.com rather than www.quernstone.com, which was upsetting one of Movable Type’s scripts. Fixed. Of course, you might still get a 500 server error – if so, go back and post again after a couple of minutes. This is related to an application timeout with FastCGI on Dreamhost, for anyone who really cares.

Oh, and feeds are still serving raw Markdown, sorry. Will sort shortly.

….aaaaaaan archives are still one huge mess. Darn.

According to one of my entertaining conversations this evening (with a lady I last met at the BA in about 1993), the venerable British Association for the Advancement of Science (founded 1831) is changing its name. ‘BA’ is evidently synonymous with British Airways, so they’re changing to ‘BSA.’

…which is synonymous with motorbikes, via British Small Arms, obviously.

Umm… what?

On my way back from the Richmond schools’ science film festival, a fantastic event opened by the Mayor with awards presented by none other than Sir David Attenborough. Loads of massively excited kids, some terrific films, and a night’s celebration of creativity in a science context. Excellent.

The whole thing started only a few weeks ago with an Institute of Physics SciCast poster, and a chap from the National Physical Laboratory running with the idea. Result: 9 schools took part, entering 25 films, and I spent the evening with teachers and education authority staff telling me how wonderful the whole thing was.

A terrific effort by all involved (particularly Andrew Hanson of the NPL), and for me, an excellent vindication of the ideas behind SciCast: the rules and licensing stuff were directly lifted, which was exactly the sort of thing I’d hoped might happen.

You know, this might all just work.

The short version (since I’m mobbloging): parents are very concerned about factual programmes, but in truth there is no future. It’s clear that even if one gave broadcasters something like How2 for free, they wouldn’t put it out.

No, the future of factual children’s media looks less like tv, and more like the thing I’m off to now: a showing of a couple of dozen SciCast-type films, made by children and facilitated by the National Physical Laboratory.

Science is in a unique position to make this happen more widely. I’m quite excited.

At the Westminster Media Forum seminar on the future of children’s tv. It’s odd to be talking about it when, day to day, I feel like I’m doing it. But this is Big, and Future, and Long Term talk.

I’ll report back.

I like arriving into Kings Cross. It was my first glimpse of London, and hence shall always be, to my mind, the correct place to start.

Damn, I’ve got a lot done on this train journey.

Well, that is to say, I’ve hit ‘k’ (“mark all as read”) in NetNewsWire a hell of a lot. But hey, I’ve also tweaked some Movable Type stuff over at the SciCast blog, with the help of the MT mailing list, and I’ve been fiddling with a few other bits locally. Yes, I have a copy of MT running on my MacBook. Woohoo.

As Vinay has pointed out (in the IM conversation burbling on behind all this), I’ve been having a deeply 21st Century day.

Oi! Blog writers! Yes, you Scoble!

How about you work out roughly how frequently your feed subscribers are snagging your feeds, and make your feeds long enough that there’s overlap? Like a good netizen, I have NetNewsWire set on four-hour refresh, and some blogs (Make, Boing Boing, Scoble. Particularly Scoble) post so much stuff that the feed has churned round completely in way less time than that. result: I miss stuff.

If it carries on like this we’ll start hearing ‘RSS is broken’ stories.

[I’m writing this on the train. Ah, the joys of GNER wifi, power sockets, and quiet carriages]

I’m about to jump on a train to London, to go to a big shindig about children’s TV. Which is odd, because to my mind that should read ‘children’s media,’ and I suspect there’ll be hissing and booing if I say that out loud.

Hence, I was rather hoping to print out a bunch of recent OFCOM documents so I could snuggle up with a good PDF on the train. Sadly, my printer exploded about three months ago, and I’d completely forgotten because I’ve not needed it since.

That’s about it, really. See, you’re not missing much.

Oh – that last post was sent directly from my N95. I managed to convince it it’s a generic European handset, and hence have the software updates Orange have been denying me. Six months’-worth of updates. Result: it’s waaaaay happier. I still think the UI is a bag of spanners, but at least it actually does stuff now. Like, makes phone calls without (so far) crashing.

Mind you, saying an N95 is useful and productive is like saying that DOS was useful and productive. It’s technically true, but remembering which button is ‘quit’, and when, isn’t something that should be inflicted on end users.

[not quite sure why this post has a ‘continue reading’ link. There isn’t any more. Oh, how we long for MT4.1… coming soon to a download server near you…]

[oop! And now it doesn’t have such a link. Durr.]

Test post from phone.

This is body text. Of course, it’d probably be easier to do all this with twitter.