Oops - it looks like I’ve been having one of my occasional blog hiatuses. My apologies! Since my last post in May, the following exciting things have happened: We (i.e. Clive, with occasional help from us & Claudia) started (and pretty much finished) building the conservatory. Phoebe had her first birthday. After nearly ten accident-free years, we had two minor bumps in the car. First, I pulled into a Cornish field entrance, skidded on gravel and hit a rock. Read more...

I made the 8-mile, 50-minute (walk, train, walk) journey from Bath to Bradford-on-Avon last night for the inaugral Bradford geeks meet-up, organised by Giles Turnbull. The other attendees were: Steve Johnston - Google Consultant (the world’s first, no less; he coined the term). Paul Mutton - Java developer, photographer and penetration tester/security consultant. Runs a free printable lens hoods site as well, when not working at Netcraft. Sam Hastings - Freelance Website Designer. Read more...

I have two requirements in an RSS reader: display RSS feeds in a manner that is pleasing to the eye (reading loads of feeds is hard work, man); use the space bar to both scroll down or go to next unread if there is no more item to scroll. Most Mac-based RSS readers seem to work this way, but I thought that I was out of luck at work in MS-land. Read more...

Lotus Notes: Destroyer of Souls Originally uploaded by t1mmyb. Or: reasons to hate Lotus Notes, number 4,912. “Does it do X?” “if you stand on your right leg, sacrifice a live chicken under a full moon while incanting Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life, it’ll do 20% of what you want” “Sounds great! Sign me up!” Meh.

In my quest to find a finance package for the Mac, I finally capitulated and bought a (genuine) copy of Virtual PC 7 from eBay. I just don’t have the time to learn a new software package’s way of working - I’ve got my work cut out just getting the accounts up to date! Respect to those who’ve made the jump to Moneydance and other packages; I guess I’m not that brave. Read more...

Ben Hammersley wrote a little perl script - Radiopod - a while ago. It uses mplayer and the lame mp3 encoder to create mp3s of RealAudio streams, which are then usable on iPods and other portable mp3 players. I had a bit of a nightmare getting set up on OS X, though. At first I tried installing mplayer and lame using Fink; this didn’t work, so I switched to Darwin Ports. Read more...

“Ten reasons to love Web 2.0” Flickr is awesome! It certainly is… Web 2.0 - kinda awesome… Flickr 2.0 is 2 years old on Tuesday! About 2 million users - many passionate ones The developers are passionate about what they do Passionate developers make for passionate users User wants vs user needs (recurring theme here…) Don’t listen to your users - they say what they want but don’t really want them Give them what they need and they’re more likely to be passionate 10 things: Collaboration. Read more...

Browser inconsistencies Scaling - SQL isn’t great under heavy load Think beyond one web server, one db server Abuse “Idiots are a lot smarter than you” Wait to see what breaks before you fix it Apache Know it inside out Put a proxy in front that isn’t apache - helm? - to add throttling etc etc Images on a separate server RSS on a separate server Use throttling - mod_throttle doesn’t work very well… APIs Built in from the start, because the developer needed it Greatly encourages adoption No lock-in - the user owns their data No API key in del. Read more...