Archive for January, 2005
Launch
Let me introduce you to the first of many new projects from Square Eight this year, whatfilm.
There will also be a whattv and a whatvideogame, but although the sites are complete, the content is a day or two behind. They’ll launch later this week.
All three are following the mantra of release early, release often, so expect a lot of additional features over the coming weeks and months. These include, but are not limited to, user rating of reviews, user comments, the full Gamesplayer games database and the ability to catalogue your own collection of films, videogames, albums and books with recommendations of other items you may like. I’ll also get an RSS feed and a Bearkey Alert service for each one sorted within the next few days.
Now to start work on what I’ve got planned for February. :)
Outside
As I was coming back into the building this morning after walking the dog, she pulled me forward on the lead so hard that I snapped the key in the lock.
Which is just what you want on a Saturday morning.
Thankfully I was able to get the broken part out of the lock without any problems, and I’d also already opened the door, so I wasn’t locked outside. But since that’s the only key I have, I couldn’t go out again without being stuck.
I phoned the estate agent and was told that the letting department was closed until Monday, and that they therefore couldn’t help me. When I asked for any kind of advice for what I should do, the reply came "I don’t know, it’s just sales here." Which was astonishing.
So I waited for the girl upstairs to come back, so I could get a copy of her key. But she’d gone out just before I’d come back and was nowhere to be seen after a couple of hours. Finally I had the idea that my dad could come and get the key and take it to the key cutting place to see if they could still copy it, even in it’s broken state. That way I wouldn’t have to go out and be stuck if they couldn’t.
It turned out to be no problem at all for them, and I’m now furnished with a new key, as well as a copy. Which means once again I can go outside.
Horrible, stinky, people filled, outside.
Torturous
Keeping up my goal of making 2005 the year for actually getting things done and released to the public, I had actually planned on launching some new websites today. Not one, not two, but three of them.
Unfortunately my plans were scuppered when my Internet connection decided to cut off just before 9pm last night, and didn’t return until just before midday today. That’s the second weekend in a row there’s been problems, yet the Pipex status page claims there’s been nothing wrong.
Having no connectivity for almost 15 hours is pretty torturous, I actually have to find other things to do. Like emptying the wash basket, or doing the dishes or hoovering the carpets. You know, really exciting things.
Website launches will just have to wait for a day or two.
Fifth
And on the fifth attempt, it was so. Another attempt to download the 2GB latest Tiger beta, and it finally worked. I switched off the proxy server and tried another browser (the third) and behold, success. Not sure whether or not it was my changes or if Apple did something at their end.
Apparently the BTO upgrade options for the Mac Mini have been lowered in price already, I’m sure that’s going to piss off the early adopters. I can’t see any difference in the UK pricing though, even though the US costs have definitely dropped. Apple share price continues to rise, with some analysts predicting $100. I recommended to somebody over a year ago that they buy them, at the time they were $12.
Of course I didn’t buy any either. I’m not that smart.
Pleasingly
Pleasingly the agonising pain in my hand seems to have subsided. It continued to be sore yesterday, but it really started to feel normal again today. Very, very strange. I can’t think what I possibly did to make it suddenly become sore like that, or what I did to fix the problem. But now that it’s cleared up I can stop typing with one hand and actually get some things done this weekend.
Constrained
I made a complete screw up of the Mailbearer design, so much so that it’s going to need stripped back and re-written. I’m doing too much mail processing at view time rather than receive time, meaning that a page of 50 emails take far too long to come up.
I’ve been reading today about XMLHTTPRequest and the ability to update areas of a webpage by fetching new content from the server, but without the need to refresh the whole page. The live search on the right uses it, but that was just me implementing an existing system, rather than really understanding what was going on. It’s a really nice technology which works on all up to date browsers, meaning I’ll have to start playing around with it.
Got plenty ideas already, new possibilities open up when you’re no longer constrained by pages.
Injury
I’m having to type this post with one hand, so it’s probably going to be one of my slowest produced items. I don’t know what it is I’ve done with my left hand, but it’s completely out of commission. It is in constant pain from my wrist and up two of my fingers, with occasional flashes up my left arm. It is all the signs of repetitive strain injury (probably not a surprise considering how much I type), but there is also the chance that I’ve pulled a muscle or jigged it in some other way. If it continues like this though I’ll have to see a doctor.
I’m not too bad typing with just my right hand, but I’m finding that it very quickly feels strained too because of all the stretching and moving around the keyboard that’s required. This is not much good for somebody who types for a living and I’m not quite sure how to get through work tomorrow the way things are.
Things aren’t much good at the moment, I’m not enjoying things at all.
With
Praise be, for there is heat once more. After two days of freezing my literal ass off, I am once again basking in gas powered loveliness. When I get back to doing Mailbearer tomorrow I’ll be able to do it without the threat of frost bite.
My head is positively bursting with ideas right now, so many different things I want to play around with. I’m eager to make this a productive year and actually get things out for public consumption, so I’m trying not to spread myself too thin and then ultimately produce nothing. But it’s hard to resist the temptation of tweaking Bearscript further, or looking at XMLHTTPRequest, or Cocoa programming in Java, or working on my RPG, or, or, or…! I must simply concentrate on finishing Mailbearer and getting back to the Bearthing admin (and then resist the temptation to re-structure the lot of it once I do).
I did take a diversion tonight after being inspired by the new Google Video search, which indexes the Closed Captioning on TV shows and mixes it with 30 second screengrabs. Since me and Graham have been working on a Friends website (since before the show ended), it seemed like a natural extension to be able to produce something similar to allow episode searching. Graham currently has all the Friends DVD’s, so I turned to Back to the Future II for this particular experiment. The results turned out as well as I hoped, meaning one more feature to add to the insanity that will be The One With.
Mercury
I heard about this film from Edward, who was watching it one night when I was talking to him. Being a fan of NASA and on the lookout for items to add to my Blockbuster list, this found it’s way into my watch queue.
At three hours long, this was a much bigger commitment than I thought it was going to be when I started watching it, but I braved it out until the end nontheless. I have no problems with a three hour film, but it has to justify it’s existence within that timeframe much more readily than a 90 minuter. Sadly The Right Stuff fails to do this, lacking any real punch throughout the whole of it’s running time.
The Right Stuff tells the story of the original seven Mercury astronauts, recruited so that the US might save face against the Russians after the launch of Sputnik. It starts with Chuck Yeager (Sam Shepherd) breaking the sound barrier, shows the recruitment team turning up at the air force base (Jeff Goldblum and Harry Shearer in the films most entertaining roles), some of the tests they have to go through, the ultimate media madness and the eventual missions they get to perform (after the chimp has had it’s shot).
Unfortunately none of this is handled with any particular skill, sense of urgency, danger, peril or excitement. Everything you see largely goes to plan and the things that don’t are so badly directed that it gives them no emotional resonance whatsoever. The whole story comes across as dull and uninspired, and gives the impression that nothing really happened to these people. Apollo was of course where the real action began (including the death of Mercury astronaut Gus Grissom), but I refuse to believe that the Mercury program was as devoid of interest or spectacle as what’s on offer here.
With a title like The Right Stuff you would probably be expecting to see a character drama based on what exactly drove these men to do what they did. What made them risk their life as test pilots and what motivated them to join up as astronauts and push their bodies to the physical limits necessary to pass the tests and get into space. But alas, none of these questions are answered here. At least half the group are completely ignored, so much so that by the end of the movie, I still couldn’t have pointed out who was who.
There are strong performances from the actors involved and some good moments of humour sprinkled throughout, but I have to admit that I’m unable to answer why this film sits at #227 in the IMDB 250 greatest films of all time.
Cold
Everything decided to conspire against me today. I got up to find that the heating wasn’t working, producing nothing more than a clicking noise as it tried to light up. Apparently the gas pressure is low, but I don’t know if that’s a problem with my boiler or some sort of outside influence. Strangely, I think it’s due to have it’s yearly service this week anyway, so it’ll be fixed soon enough. In the meantime however I had to put on a large jumper and wrap myself in the duvet just to stop from shivering too much.
Then there’s my broadband, which has been up and down this afternoon and this evening more than a hedgehog on it’s honeymoon. After a prolonged four hour downtime it then spent the next few hours teasing me with sporadic bursts of connectivity, each lasting about 10 minutes. Thankfully now it seems to have settled down, meaning I no longer feel disconnected and alone.
The only remaining options are fire, flood and plague. And with my oven door currently wide open in an attempt to furnish the living room with some heat, at least one of those has a high probabilty of occurring.
Bucks
MailBearer continues to dance along. I’ve really smashed through the todo list over the past couple of nights, adding in almost all the required functionality. Spam filtering is now in and working a treat, catching pretty much all the spam that has been thrown at it so far, and that’s with almost no training.
There’s a lot of fit and finish still to be done, as well as a few necessities, like allowing the sending of attachments, but I’m almost at the stage where I can start using it.
What I’m wondering is whether or not I should be making this public. I never really planned for that, but everything is setup in such a way that it wouldn’t be too hard to open it up a bit. Are people willing to pay a couple of bucks a month for a fast, simple, ad free, spam filtered webmail system that allows you to import your mail from existing clients like Thunderbird, Outlook, or anything else that does mbox files? What if there was also a calendar, address book and todo list? With Bearkey Alert reminders?
I can’t believe I’m the only one looking for this system.
Architecture
So before too long I’m going to be writing Chatbear in Bearscript, so it occurs to me that it’s probably a good idea to come up with a list of new feature requests. In fact, it’s probably true of all existing services, IRC Bear, Bearkey Alerts… it’s all going to be rewritten, so there’s not going to be a better time to implement even major architecture changes.
I already have a long list of ideas in my head, but since the whole network has always been about the community, I’m throwing this one out there. Post your thoughts in the comments. What am I missing?
Links
This week does seem to be passing swiftly, something I’m all for. I don’t have particularly exciting weekends, but they do allow me to set my own schedule rather than being forced to get up in the morning.
I’m reminded that I relaunched The Links Effect a couple of weeks ago and didn’t actually mention it here, so I’m doing so now. Spread the word, tell your friends, and maybe people will actually use it this time.
Embargo
Now that the laptop was sold, you’d think I’d be more comfortable with the large cheque I have to write this weekend. But nope, I continue to be stressed out, I continue to sleep eratically. And now, having not had any medication to take for the past 5 days, I’m starting to get headaches again.
I’ve looked around to see what else I can sell, but although I have plenty of stuff that I wouldn’t really miss that much, there’s nothing here that’s of a high enough value to really make a serious difference.
Part of it is so daft. It’s not like I can’t afford it in the long run, but having to gather together such a large amount in such a short time is just stressful, and increasing my credit card bills further starts to really freak me out.
I’ll just have to continue with the spending embargo for another month or two.
Incomplete
Despite being the leader in online music distribution, the iTunes Music Store almost never has anything I’m looking for. I got a list from Mark a while ago of tracks I should use in a compilation I was putting together and was only able to find 6 of the 25 or so tracks on the list. He recently mentioned some other songs on his blog that I go looking for, and they’re not all there either. These are chart hits as well, not obscure Norwegian folk tunes.
Just after Christmas I looked for anything they had by Booker T and the MG’s, which turned out to be one track on a compilation. Even music that Apple themselves promote, like John Mayer, who has demoed Garageband at the last two keynotes, is missing or incomplete. They only have one of his albums, and it’s not even the most recent.
They claim to have more than a million tracks, but it doesn’t seem to me like the library is anywhere near it’s potential. I should be able to name any track and instantly purchase it. The way things are at the moment, AllOfMP3 kicks their ass. They managed to give me the John Mayer albums which I’m very much enjoying.
Mail
I spent the afternoon copying everything from my Powerbook to iMac in preparation for listing it on eBay. I just find myself not using it anymore, and since there’s bills to pay, this seems like the best solution.
One of the main functions of the laptop before was being able to have all my email in a single place, and simply carry it back and forth to work each day. But with the advent of the fabulous Gmail, this has become less of an issue. The problem with Gmail however is the lack of an import function, meaning the almost five years of email I have in various mail clients has to sit inaccessible. I’ve looked at other webmail solutions, and I’ve been using Thunderbird at work, but they’re all universally awful. I want to be able to access all my work and personal email in a single place, wherever I am, including all my archives, and I want to be able to search it quickly and easily. I’d also prefer if it was seperated in some way, so that home and office items didn’t intertwine. And of course, I’m a stickler for the clean and fast interface.
So, as is often the case in these situations, I’m forced to write something myself.
I put down Bearthing and that’s what I managed to produce yesterday. Since I’m a fan of the Gmail interface I decided to mirror it first before letting it evolve on it’s own, simply because it allows me to concentrate more on the functionality. It’s already listing emails and allowing them to be viewed, with Exim configured to deliver all my mail straight into a mySQL database for easy searching.
With another few days development it should be doing almost everything I need (I don’t use spell checking or an address book, so I have a fairly small set of feature requirements), which is mostly down to the wonderful set of existing Perl modules for handling email.
As for whether or not I make this available to the public I don’t know. I do have the domains emailbear.com, bearemail.com and the excellent mailbearer.com, but competing with Google isn’t top of my list of priorities right now.
Stairs
I arrived home from my Saturday afternoon stroll to find a man lying at the bottom of the stairs which are just inside the front door to my building. Two of the girls who live on the floor above me were attempting to lift him back onto his feet, which was proving to be difficult since he appeared completely unaware of his surroundings.
I was asked to help, which of course I did. It was pretty clear from the smell that he’d had a few to drink and had obviously taken a bit of a tumble on his return home. Since I don’t really know anyone who lives here, I didn’t even recognise him as a resident.
Though it was a hell of a struggle, we did manage to help him back onto his feet and he regained a bit of conciousness and managed to get up the stairs unaided. It was only afterwards that I started to consider whether we should have been moving him at all. Dragging this poor man to his feet after he’s had an accident is not necessarily the best idea, but you don’t think about taking over an ongoing rescue operation you’ve just stumbled into. He did appear uninjured once he was up, so I guess everything is ok.
One good thing did come of it, I got to speak to people in the building more than I ever have before. They found out my name, and I learned that one of them also has a brother called Richard. Add that to my previous knowledge of the two girls involved and at my current rate of learning, I fully expect to know four facts about them by 2007.
Space
I’m a fan of space. Not the empty room kind, but the black, vast, universe kind. So when a probe lands on remote moon millons of miles away and returns pictures of coastlines, my head just explodes with giddy glee as I marvel at my cosmic insignificance.
Sadly, sticking a 5 megapixel camera or full video equipment on a probe like this is impractical, partly down to the same bandwidth limitations that plague us here on Earth. But the sheer idea that this photo is from a world which nobody has seen before is enough to add an extra 10 megapixels of resolution in my imagination.
Speaking of bandwidth, the probe managed an impressive 8K/sec upload to Cassini, faster than dial-up. That’s a pretty good wireless signal for something that had to cover such a distance through the atmosphere of a moon. Maybe Netgear etc should be taking notes.
Full raw image download and amateur mosaics of those images is available here.
Spend
Unlike Graham, who seems to have turned into the insatiable spending machine, this month I have to spend absolutely nothing. That’s because the bill for my Powerbook is due, and I’m struggling to find the funds to pay for it.
One of my new year resolutions, if you want to label my half-hearted list of things to do in 2005 as something, is to sort out my debts and try and bring them more under control. That means that even after this month, my spending has got to continue under restraint. The money needs chanelled into paying for my previous purchases.
I’m hoping that doing this gets easier with time, because right now I’m desperate to use my credit card number for something more exciting than paying the electricity bill.
Wallet
One thing I forgot to mention yesterday was whether or not these new Apple products were going to make me open my wallet.
I’d swap my current iPod for a Shuffle right now. Purely for the small, light, simplicity. I like it.
As for the Mac mini. I think it’s a great idea from Apple’s point of view and I think they’ll sell a ton of them. But I really can’t decide. I would want one for work more than home, and that’s not a buying decision I get to make.
iLife and iWork ’05 I’m ordering just as soon as I have enough money for food again. This month I have to pay for my last Apple hardware purchase, that’s enough to stop me opening my wallet for anything.
