Rarely Updated 2

Prepping #1

2008-01-19T13:27:56Z

So, new machine, new OS - new software purchases! I have very few packages that I rely on on my current laptop, more that I've bought and tried and never used much. So hopefully it won't be too hard to find alternatives. On the other hand if iTunes really is the peak of music management on MacOS then I'm probably going to want to bring at least MediaMonkey with me - it's not perfect but it does the job nicely. So this means I need to be running a Windows VM. Which brings me to a choice between VMWare Fusion and Parallels Desktop. Now I did look at Parallels some while back when thinking about putting a Linux VM onto my Vaio - and concluded that the Windows version wasn't ready - it couldn't handle a wireless network connection for example - however on Mac OS it seems a pretty even fight at the moment. The most in depth comparison I found, from only a few months ago, is torpedoed by making a huge amount of the fact that only Parallels can hide the Windows desktop and mix Windows apps with your Mac apps, despite the fact that it VMWare can do that also (and appeared to be able to do so in the version they tested). In the end a) they seem to be pretty much equivalent and b) the healthy competition seems to be spurring development on at a pace. So I'll probably pick up VMWare since we use this at work which means I can use work VM's easily, which may come in handy. Then all I need to is to find an unused XP license. I looked at Office 2008 which might be handy, but apparently $399 translates to £349 in Microsoft world (cue David Tennant - what!... What!... WHAT!). Turns out that we have unused licenses from Joe's purchase of Office 2003 though so that's covered. I'll have to decide what to do about image management. I'm still on Elements 3 on the PC, there's Elements for the Mac but Joe had issues with it so that's still open.

Joining the mindless throng

2008-01-19T12:56:24Z

So it finally happened - I will finally, in a few weeks, own my first Mac. It will actually be the third Mac in the house after the MacBook I bought Joe year before last and the MacBook Pro he got for work this week. But mine will be a MacBook Air. I actually ordered it (well technically Joe ordered to get the education discount) Tuesday evening straight after reading through the specs and hearing the demo. Unusually hasty decision making whose who know me might say. Well not really - I've been looking around at new laptops since my current trusty Sony Vaio developed a problem with its power connection last summer and when the rumours started floating that Apple might finally launch an ultraportable it deserved serious consideration. For my new laptop I wanted

An ultraportable - both my laptops have been Sony Vaios and I couldn't see myself with something the weight of the standard MacBook
Good battery life - despite not actually being really a road warrior I want that freedom for the times I need it
A larger than 11" screen - I have to face the fact that the Sony's small screen is starting to become tiring if I do a day's work on it
Something where I could do technical work - ie not Windows. A low power laptop is not the place to be running Microsoft Visual Studio (although I have). On the other hand when I reboot into Linux it's perfectly useable for programming in. Unfortunately even the latest Ubuntu can't get power management working on a 3 year old Vaio which makes it unsuitable for a permanent switch.

What I didn't really want were

Vista - I just haven't read anything good about it
A power cable socket that breaks as easily as the Vaio's - seriously this is a design flaw that has always been there on many laptops, but especially Vaios. It's not really a deal breaker but it is a problem that Apple have solved.
Mac OS - let's face it, it's not as clever as it thinks it is, but given that all OSes stink, it's still a million miles from the old Motorola days when we all made fun of it as the OS only for non-techies so maybe I should give it a try.

Anyway so when it was announced I could see that it pretty much met my requirements and had a very reasonable price to boot - despite the rantings of the the horde of ignorant Mac fanboys on Engadget, it is a good price, I was expecting to pay around £1500 for my next machine, and would have done if I'd bought another Vaio. So in that order went. Two and a half weeks to wait. Dum-de-dum.

The alternate reality of Amazon recommendations

2007-10-02T19:38:50Z

Simon Middleton, As someone who has purchased or rated books by Gary Larson, you might like to know that Public Services Inspection in the Uk: Research Highlights in Social Work will be released on October 15, 2007. You can pre-order yours by following the link below. Public Services Inspection in the Uk: Research Highlights in Social Work Howard Davis Price: $34.95

I just can't puzzle the link out here...

More Heinlein than you can shake a stick at

2007-09-24T22:46:15Z

I came across the Heinlein archives the other day and was quite astounded. Basically it looks like pretty much everything Robert A Heinlein ever wrote has been scanned, PFD'ed and uploaded. If you want to look at any of it you can. There's a price of course but at $3 for around 200 pages it's pretty reasonable. It would cost a lot to get everything but if, say, you really wanted to read everything he wrote for the movie Destination Moon then for $20 you get:

Part 1 includes "10 pages of diagrams and calculations about moon flight", "Heinlein’s report on faults and flaws in the script of Destination Moon addressed to George Pal, lengthy with extensive hand-edits", "17 pages, single-spaced by RAH “The Care and Feeding of Spaceships” discussing technical elements for film"
Part 2 includes "Article in Aviation Week about movie", "1957 letter from an attorney to RAH about possible money from the movie (talks about law suits)", "Notes, calculations and diagrams working out the moon flight and landing. Studio call sheets and shooting schedules for the production"
Parts 3 to 6 are 5 versions of the script
Part 7 includes articles about the movie

Alternatively if the history of Stranger in a Strange Land is more your thing then you can get 3865 pages for $38 that include 3 different edits of the book plus supporting articles. Personally I just always thought that Pixel (a.k.a. The Cat Who Walks Through Walls) was a great name for a cat.

Movable Type 4 update

2007-09-23T17:40:45Z

I've upgraded the blog to Movable Type 4. It didn't go entirely without problems - which is pretty much par for the course. Here's a brief run-down of what I did for reference. Installation

Save off a copy of the database using phpMyAdmin to an SQL dump
Upload MT 4.1 to server and unpack to /cgi-bin/mt4 and /mt-static4 (to avoid overwriting the 3.3 installation)
Set the cgi files to be executable
Load mt.cgi which started upgrading the database
Puzzle greatly over the Error 403: Forbidden which I got in the middle of the database upgrade. This happened if I repeated the operation.
Load mt.cgi in IE7 - it worked perfectly!

Configuration

Refresh all the templates from the main blog menu
Go to the Archive Templates and set up archive mappings
Choose a TWT (thin-wide-thin) layout style

Plugins

Install MediaManager 2.0b1
Copy the Amazon details from the system overview preferences into the individual blog preferences

The Northern Lights

2007-05-04T21:57:48Z

Or The Golden Compass as they insist on calling it. Anyway they have a 'what is your daemon' feature. Once you've answered the questions it selects your daemon, and now everyone else has 12 days to comment on whether it accurately reflects my personality before it settles in the way that daemons do. Strangely the summary doesn't really seem to correspond to how I thought I'd answered the questions. But there you go. ]]>

Pride and Joy (Runaways)

2007-02-10T19:29:30Z

Pride and Joy (Runaways)

by Brian K. Vaughna

I picked this up this afternoon in Forbidden Planet since it was, cheap, written by Brian K Vaughan (Y:The Last Man and Deus Ex Machine which are both very good), and I had vague memory if reading that Joss Whedon was going to be taking it over soon.]]> sort out their charitable donations they are actually planning their super-villain activities and sacrificing a young girl. Well whose parents haven't, eh? So the kids end up on the run, framed for a murder they didn't commit and pursued by their parents and everyone they have influence over. At this point I looked on Amazon for when the other volumes came out and discovered that they've actually just released the first 7 volumes (i.e. almost everything) in two hardbacks. Which probably explains why this edition was reduced in the first place. Oh well, in a week I'll be able to catch all the way up.

Shiny new phone

2007-02-05T20:32:30Z

By the end of last year I had had my phone for 2 years and had been thinking about a replacement. I was quite happy with what I had on the whole - a Sharp GX15 - it was very small, had all the important (and not so important features), like a camera, colour screen, GPRS, bluetooth etc. The main problem with it was terrible battery life - it would only just last a day if I didn't make any calls. This had already led to some difficult times expiring at an important time. Obviously it should run for more than that, but when I'd sent it back Vodafone had taken several weeks to do nothing more than put a sticker on the battery saying it tested OK, without fixing the problem so since then I had just been living with the inconvenience. ]]> 3 X-Series website. When you dig through all the flashy stuff you find that what they are offering is something quite new and attractive. The X-Series silver service, for £5 extra on top of your standard contract, gives you 1GByte/month of internet access. They pre-load your phone with various applications and settings to help you use it but what it comes down to is that you can basically use as much data as you like (using 1GB should be quite hard on a mobile at max 384kbits/s) for a fiver. When you compare it with any other network it just pisses all over them. Vodafone is about the best value otherwise at £2.50 per Mbyte, 500 times as expensive. The difference really is staggering. The only limitation is that the only phone they offer this on is the Nokia N73 - but that's not much of a hardship as it's a nice little (well OK not so little compared to the GX15) phone. Apparently if you have another phone from 3 you can talk them into giving you the X-series service if you try hard - not all the bundled apps run but you get the important bit. So I ended up with an N73 for free (well £1.95 admin fee) with

300 minutes
1000 texts
50 MMS messages
50 minutes video
£5 downloads
X-Series silver for £22.50/month for 8 months and £40/month for the next 10. Of course when I transferred my phone number from Vodafone they wanted to know why I was leaving. So I told them. Perhaps if 3 get enough takers for this the other networks will pay attention - although I think they'll need to extend it to a few other phones first before their other customers get too annoyed that N73 owners get a staggeringly better deal than everyone else who's paying £5/month just for an email add-on for example. More posts coming up on my experiences with it.

ELO - Time

2007-02-04T17:33:16Z

Time: Remastered

by ELO

I cheerfully admit I was prompted into buying some ELO by watching Love and Monsters on Doctor Who last year. The reason I bought this one was that I've actually got it on vinyl from back when I was in school and picked it up cheap. It's a very sci-fi album, lots of songs about the end of the world, robots, time, etc with synthesizers, vocoders and other high tech (for the mid-70's) music equipment. But all done in the usual ELO (over the top, singalong) style. A mark of its impact is that the first few times I played it, Joe pretty much ignored it. Then I put it in the CD carousel in the car when we went home at Christmas. It didn't get played then, in fact, but it did a while later when he was on his own and on the way back from Chelmsford and was a big hit. Thinking about it, it is kind of designed for playing in cars, catchy tunes and production that plays well on small speakers and really cuts through the car noise in the way that more delicate music can't.

Swamp Thing: Regenesis

2007-02-04T16:33:32Z

Swamp Thing: Regenesis (Swamp Thing)

by Rick Veitch, Alfredo Alcala, John Totleben

It suddenly came to my attention recently that DC had been not only republishing the Alan Moore run on Swamp Thing in trade paperback collections again but they had decided to continue on into the Rick Veitch set of stories. The previous set of collections included the first few Veitch penned items that wrapped up Alan Moore's run and brought Swamp Thing back to Earth but then stopped. ]]> new stories to be published and is a bit of a bridge, it resolves Abby and Swampie's emotional issues from the previous stories and sets up more explicitly the new story arc about the Sprout - what would have been the new Earth Elemental if Swamp Thing has not returned. It features frequent cameos from John Constantine, I believe just around the time that Hellblazer was starting, who doesn't really look or sound like the Constantine we know these days. That, combined with the colour art (the UK Alan Moore collections were published in black and white) and the script, give it a very '80's feel. I don't think it is bad as such, but it just feels much more comicy than what you get in Vertigo these days (or even more main stream DC universe fare). You also get appearances from the Fluoronic Man and Solomon Grundy for your money. There are two further books published so far, still to be read. The last is quite recent, so it remains to be seen whether they will continue all the way to the end of Veitch's run. Comics old-timers will recall that Veitch famously resigned from writing for DC when they refused to publish the climax to the then current storyline which featured Swamp Thing travelling back in time and eventually meeting Jesus.

Torchwood: Border Princes

2007-02-04T16:12:53Z

Torchwood: Border Princes (Torchwood)

by Dan Abnett

Whilst picking up some essentials from Borders yesterday (guide to North Devon for an upcoming short break there) I spotted that they were doing a 3 for 2 deal on the new Torchwood books. So out of curiosity I decided to pick them up. When paying up the guy behind the till offered up "Bet you a fiver the Dan Abnett one's the best" and when I mentioned I didn't have high expectations of them came back with "well they can't be worse than the series, can they?". ]]> So now we've got appropriate starting point, what of the books? Well they look nice, same hardback style (no slip cover) as the new series Dr Who fiction, but a larger size (bigger means more adult?), around 230 pages with medium type. There's no clever Gallifreyan numbers on the side so it's a bit of a guess which one to read first. I went for this one as it had the lowest Borders code on it, which seemed as good a method as any. Given that these were presumably mostly written before the series aired the characters are reasonably close to their TV versions - Gwen says 'Oi' a lot - and they all spend a lot of time trading quips. There's no swearing or explicit sex. Presumably in case the books get shelved along side the Who books in the children's section. Unfortunately not being covered by the same script editor leads to duplication of series plots. So Gwen is having an affair with one of her colleagues and at one point Jack and Tosh get stuck in the past. I won't go over the plot but I was put off from the start by the fact that Gwen's paramour is a new member of the team called James, who, without the benefit of an on-screen incarnation, seemed insubstantial and difficult to relate to. Mind you, without giving too much away, the way it all pans out does make both that and the fact that Gwen later sleeps with Owen explainable - if you care about joining all the dots in something like this. So, a few nice lines, a plot that borrows from other stories, adds up to not an essential read by any means. It remains to be seen whether they get better or worse from here on in.

Legal CD quality downloads

2007-02-03T20:16:01Z

I stumbled across a new music download store, MusicGiants HD Music Downloads. It's interesting because they sell you albums in WMA Lossless format. So for once it's a download that says it's CD quality and really is. Unfortunately as always the price does not reflect what you care getting. $15.29 is the average price for a single disc album. Now that's reasonably cheap for us given the exchange rate, although I suspect not that cheap for the US. However against that you have to put the fact that the files come with DRM and so will only play on your Windows PC or a portable player. Strangely apparently you can burn the files to a CD - which means you can then re-rip in a sensible format (eg FLAC) without any loss in quality. Unless WM DRM downgrades the quality when you burn it, which is quite possible. So in the end it's still just as easy, and probably cheaper, to carry on buying on CD and ripping as before.

A threat to western civilisation?

2007-01-29T23:23:54Z

So according to a BBC news article on the cracking of some HD DVD disks (including Serenity!).

... the Advanced Access Content System (AACS) Licensing Authority has said the breach is limited. "It does not represent an attack on the AACS system itself," the group said."

A spokesman for the AACS group said the large size of the files and the high cost of writable hi-def discs made widespread copying of the movies impractical.

A large-scale breach of AACS could be a threat to the $24bn DVD industry and dent hopes that high-definition discs would invigorate the market.

There's a bit of a contradiction there surely?

Atlanta - Day 9

2006-12-20T00:09:15Z

So I'm at the airport. Left lots of time to get here so checked in 3 hours before my flight, and now they say our plane is not airworthy. So they're getting a new one from the hangar that came in from RIo yesterday. If it is clean then we will leave half an hour late, if not then add another half an hour to tidy it up (so they don't always clean them when they come in? seems odd). I'm not hopeful, it's after an hour delay when they start saying that we've lost our slot and it'll be another hour, etc. I had a slightly odd taxi ride to the airport. The guy answered the phone every 5 minutes to potential customers. Each time it was the same, he'd ask where they were and then either tell them that he didn't service Atlanta (only Gwinnett County where I've been working) or quote them a price, which they invariably didn't like because it was more than the $49 they thought they were getting. As he says, if the ad says from $49 then you don't expect to pay that if you are on the opposite side of the county from the Airport. I assume he takes jobs from the guy that we booked him through and direct also. At least that's the end of work for the year anyway.

Atlanta - Day 8

2006-12-19T03:05:31Z

I seem to have missed a few days here, but really not a lot happened. The work has been slowly progressing - 2 steps forward, 1 step back - and is not that interesting. Which leaves the evenings, which as before are, get some food, read a little, go to bed early. Friday I went to the Bahama Breeze for dinner which was pretty nice. Sat at the bar and watched the bar tender mix cocktails and listen to the entertainment (man with a bontempi singing old favourites). Their signature cocktail is a Bahamarita (TM). They have a machine that spits out what I think is frozen margarita mix but looks like vanilla ice cream. Saturday we finished a bit early so I decided to walk to the mall. It's 1/2 a mile as the crow flies (or the car drives) but took about 1/2 an hour on foot. I found a route that had proper crossings, but there was the usual problem of lack of sidewalks. The mall was a huge disappointment when I got there, it has it's own entry on wikipedia and people used to drive from miles around to visit it, but it's hard to see why as it's not large or exciting. There wasn't even a cinema. Since I'd had a large lunch (chinese takeout - a huge bowl of Moo Shoo vegetables) I went for a light lunch and so went to the Waffle House and had a plate of hash browns with cheese, mushroom and onion to go. Sunday was a very long day so it was microwave pizza, and then today I went back to the Macaroni Grill for simplicity. Tomorrow I fly home. Yay.