Posts on Personal Site of Tim Child

Smart home alarms in Sweden

Wed, 09 Jan 2019 18:26:44 +0000

Late last year we moved to a house in the Stockholm area. As part of this move we decided that we wanted a monitored alarm system. One that has a 24⁄7 guard response if the alarm is on, or if there is smoke detected in the house. We got quotes from multiple companies working in Sweden. One thing that I noticed was although these companies think their systems are smart, they are not really what I would describe as smart for 2018⁄2019.

Why I removed JQuery

Sun, 02 Sep 2018 11:23:00 +0200

I have removed JQuery and all the scripts that depend on it from this site. The start of this came from looking into site performance for our company websites, checking best practices and using the awesome Chrome Audit tool. For this site I noticed that it was really quite fast already, a time to interactive of 980ms is well below most sites on the internet, and this is somewhat helped by having it deployed on netlify’s CMS.

Don't use Facebook for company support forums

Fri, 24 Aug 2018 08:14:49 +0200

I see this with a couple of tools, but most recently the one that annoys me is framer the designing and prototyping tool. They have recently released a beta of framer.x which is a complete rebuild and allows designing and prototyping with React components (using TypeScript at the moment, but ES6 support is coming). For some ridiculous reason they use Facebook as their support and community forum. A task that Facebook is hopeless for.

Using Netlify, Hugo and GitLab

Fri, 15 Jun 2018 10:39:15 +0200

Now that the site is up I thought that I would quickly mention how this is built. I have been really into static site generators for some time, mainly after having to administrate and maintain a large number of WordPress sites and clean them up after hacking attempts (protip: if you want to use WordPress - just pay for it at WordPress.com so that they keep it up to date).

New Site

Thu, 14 Jun 2018 10:24:24 +0200

New Site I have needed to update the site for quite sometime, and I haven’t updated the blog for about 5 years now. At the same time I also needed to work on blog for iconik.io for which we wanted a static site generator, and then I wanted to have a proper publishing workflow. So I took the opportunity for upgrade this site and learn Hugo at the same time.

UI Design in Hacker News

Tue, 15 Jan 2013 08:43:09 +0000

It seems a week doesn’t get by without a post or two in Hacker News about GUI design or graphic design, often entitled something like “Design for Hackers” or “Design for Developers”. The trouble with all these posts is that they are trying to shortcut the methodology of design by various hacks, even something as lengthy as read 5 books is by-in-large a hack. There is no substitute for practise, for looking and appreciating your world in a different way (this can be self-taught, I will discuss more below) and for in-depth thinking about what either comes down to communication or feedback problems.

2012 to 2013

Sun, 06 Jan 2013 21:19:31 +0000

So another year is gone by and another year where I haven’t really blogged much, concentrating instead of Cantemo which had a pretty amazing year. At the start of 2012 I made a list in Evernote of all the techie things that I wanted to achieve and I am going to review them here. New Website/Blog. Well I have started on this. This site and my portfolio site are now quite out of date, www.

Raspberry PI update

Sun, 02 Sep 2012 20:34:54 +0000

So a while back I got delivery of my Raspberry PI, but I have been so busy developing on our Rough Cut Editor, Annotation Tool and Adobe Premiere support that I haven’t had time to use it. But now I see a project that I really want to try: http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/freshers/raspberrypi/tutorials/os/ – Baking PI or basically build your own OS 101. I have always wanted to do this, but have basically all my hardware in operation at once and nothing cheap to try it on.

Xcode 4.4 and MacOSX SDK 10.6 on Lion.

Wed, 22 Aug 2012 06:30:54 +0000

In XCode 4.4 Apple has made the decision to not ship the MacOSX10.6.sdk that is in use by 100s of apps. The choice is to either not install XCode 4.4 and continue using XCode 4.3 or if you have already downloaded XCode 4.4 you need to get the XCode 4.3 DMG from Apple and then extract the MacOSX10.6.sdk from it and place it with the other SDK versions. If you already have a /Developer/SDKs/MacOSX10.

Open Indiana NTP

Wed, 15 Aug 2012 19:17:26 +0000

I really like OpenIndiana, but finding some documentation for even the most basic things sometimes is difficult. Take NTP for instance, should be easy right.. And it is if you know what you are doing. vim /etc/resolv.conf Setup the search domain above, then copy the ntp configuration file: cp /etc/inet/ntp.client /etc/inet/ntp.conf Edit the configuration file putting in the servers that are near to you. vim /etc/inet/ntp.conf Enable NTP: svcadm enable ntp

Profiling Django applications – part2

Mon, 13 Aug 2012 07:52:59 +0000

Profiling using CProfile. Sometimes it is advantageous to look at what your application is doing before it goes in to production. Using tools like iPDB and PDB we can step through code, particularly in the view that you are working on, but it doesn’t tell the full picture of what is going on up-until that view is called, or after the HTTPResponse is starting to be returned. It is easy to start profiling django runserver using CProfile:

Profiling Django applications – part1

Thu, 10 May 2012 08:09:51 +0000

I have been doing some profiling of a Django application in different ways, and this is something that can be very useful to understand where bottlenecks are, why code behaves in certain ways and where we can trim the fat. There are multiple places where we can profile Django, and many of the pointers and resources from Python at large can be used when profiling Django. Things like Hotshot, cProfile and timeit are available, and there are helper libraries around these tools.

Disqus

Mon, 07 May 2012 14:25:31 +0000

In the battle to stop the hacking of WordPress I have migrated the comments over to Disqus. Looking at the logs over the past few days its quite clear that there is something wrong with the way that WordPress handles incoming comments, probably all it takes is to buffer overflow the comment URL and the hacker can inject code. So I have disabled the comments in WordPress and moved over to disqus, which was something that I have been wanting to do for a long time anyway.

Firefox video performance

Tue, 01 May 2012 06:39:05 +0000

There is not going to be much decided in this post, rather looking to vent. After spending about 7 hours yesterday looking into performance problems with Firefox I can’t but help be dismayed that webm and ogg playback take up so much CPU time. In my tests it is currently using 100% of one of my cores, but what is worse is that it effects anything else going on at the same time, meaning that I have to be really careful running loops, creating JavaScript objects and generally doing anything else on the same page.

Celery ghetto queue

Fri, 27 Apr 2012 06:59:57 +0000

Currently wondering how the ghetto queue might work for smaller installations. I have done larger installations using RabbitMQ, celery’s preferred message mechanism, but for smaller loads and services running straight from django and postgres might be a good idea. I guess it maintains the flexibility of having an upgrade path but is less to install and maintain, thus being kinder to sysadmins and support staff. Going to try it I think.

Cantemo update

Thu, 19 Apr 2012 11:49:39 +0000

Just a quick update to what is happening with Cantemo these days. Firstly we have two main products in the marketplace at the moment, MediaBox and Portal DAM. Portal is our enterprise product, a Digital Asset Management system that can be tailored to suit just about any need or requirement. For instance if you need to build Cloud hosted Digital Asset Management system System that has multiple workflows for multiple user groups A system that integrates with many different parts ( think Business Process Management systems, Transcoder farms, Newsroom Systems, NLEs, Digital Rights Management, Playout servers) and can work as the controlling force for all of that.

Removing hacked WordPress files

Sat, 24 Mar 2012 09:28:03 +0000

The other day someone kindly told me that this blog had been “hacked”. Actually what had happened was that someone had managed to inject PHP code in to the wordpress theme files, the wordpress blog files and all the plugin files. What was particularly interesting was that it only showed up if you haven’t visited the site before, making it harder to spot. In the header of each PHP file there was a php eval base 64 encoded string which contained this redirect code.

Postgres and psql for beginners

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 20:57:00 +0000

Actually I am not sure whether I can put myself in the beginners pot, having run Postgresql for many years and built several products and service upon it. However a round of using PSQL for common use cases is needed I think. So this basically is for that usual situation where you have logged in to the server that postgres is running on and have access to the user postgres or have the rights to use psql.

Going back to Java applets for upload

Wed, 25 Jan 2012 08:53:31 +0000

This is something that I didn’t think that I would be writing in 2012 – we are switching to a Java based applet for our uploader. The problem has been that browsers and their operating systems handle uploads differently. Really differently. Evening using a project like plupload, you can’t polyfill over the cracks. There are new APIs coming out (if you want to call it HTML5, not strictly true though), but to handle backwards compatibility, including IE9, there needs to be a mechanism to make it generic and the only thing is Java.

Javascript MVC frameworks with MVC server frameworks

Sat, 21 Jan 2012 09:24:51 +0000

Really interesting article about Javascript MVC frameworks at CodeBrief. Personally and for work I am totally into backbone.js. It is changing the way that I work with Javascript in my web applications for the better by bringing greater structure and organisation to my code and having a common methodology in the way that I approach server-browser communications. The only problem that I have is that having a MVC stack in the browser is fine, but then we have the same on the server side with Rails (ok not exactly MVC), Django, Node.

The new web stack

Thu, 19 Jan 2012 12:21:02 +0000

There is a really interesting article over on Ilya Grigorik’s blog titled []1. Be sure to read the comments if you are interested in how AOL built a similar system many moons ago. I have been thinking about next generation web stacks, with proper (M)VC in the browser, communication with server using SPDY / WebSockets / SSE or similar with SSL, and then the topology of the stack in the background being event driven and that article has some really nice points.

New year, new workflow improvements

Fri, 13 Jan 2012 08:35:45 +0000

So another new year has started but I continue to improve and refine my workflow and tooling. Firstly git. The more I learn with git, the more I like it, and the more I get into it. I like the fact that I don’t need any other tool, if I was using Mercurial I would still have to use Git because of the amount of excellent code being published into GitHub.

My must have OS X software

Tue, 18 Oct 2011 06:54:52 +0000

I recently had the opportunity to look at what I would install on a vanilla OS X system and its was quite interesting to look at what I depend on and if I didn’t have it, what would be on my Christmas software list. So here goes: Git: Probably not the first thing that I would install, but it wouldn’t be the last. Via the proper GIT installer Python 2.

dotfiles

Mon, 10 Oct 2011 16:35:05 +0000

Having started to change my environment quite a bit by changing from bash to zsh, Textmate (ok I am still using it quite a bit) to Vim and MacVim with Janus, I thought that I would join what seems to be a popular movement and share my dot files on GitHub. https://github.com/timc3/dotfiles

Javascript

Fri, 16 Sep 2011 14:00:05 +0000

Never thought that I would be saying this, but I am really liking Javascript at the moment.

Larger desktop

Fri, 02 Sep 2011 20:58:17 +0000

It seems that no matter how many pixels I have to play with I could always use more. Consider this number of apps that I have open a day: Browser window with debugging pane (1200 x 1200) Skype (220×1000 high) with conversation window (400×600) Mail (1000×800) Text mate or vim (typically 1600×1200) Terminal windows – at least two. One for Git and one for python shell. (1600×1200) 2nd browser window for looking stuff up though I can use tabs for them.

PostgreSQL on Lion

Sat, 27 Aug 2011 06:12:36 +0000

The installer for Postgresql on Lion is supposedly “unsupported”, which means that they haven’t got it working yet. Looking at it quickly is seems to be the way that the postgres user is being created using dscl. To get it to work, manually create a postgres user from under System Preferences: Then run the installer as per normal. I used the Postgres 9 installer. I also upgraded python to 2.7.2 and installed psycopg2 pointing to pg_config under /Library/PostgreSQL/9.

What’s the coolness

Sun, 14 Aug 2011 07:33:11 +0000

Looking back over the last posts I realize that I haven’t been talking much about the software and and code that I have been using every day and some of it is really quite interesting. Python. I use python a lot, it’s my preferred go to language to solve a lot of problems. It has great libraries, an awesome community and the language itself is compact and non verbose. We are using Django heavily in our solutions and its really enjoyable to work with, and I never feel that coding is a chore.

HTML5 audio support

Tue, 09 Aug 2011 07:10:20 +0000

As a followup to my last post, and also because Portal needs to support audio as well as video, I have implemented the same kind of detection and serving of files for audio. We transcode audio files into MP3 slightly low bitrate (depends on the clients wishes, but its not a great codec for streaming lots of audio over a network), and we can also do an OGG version. Here is the current support list:

HTML5 video support

Sat, 06 Aug 2011 10:44:31 +0000

At Cantemo for our Portal product we are working a lot with HTML5 video, its starting to get really nicely supported by all the major vendors and we have some nice technology to support frame accurate playback, frameforward and frameback on a lot of browsers (Chrome, Firefox, Safari etc). This puts us in a much better position than we have had in the past with h.264 playing back through the Flash player (though this is a fallback mechanism still).

Quick update

Tue, 14 Jun 2011 22:32:28 +0000

Haven’t had much time recently to post anything on here, though lots has been going on that I could write about. Been to Cyprus for a family wedding which was really nice, pity that we had some stuff stolen including my iPhone, Nikon DSLR and video camera but otherwise it was great. At work we are building new HTML5 based tools, improving the look and feel and capabilities of our main product – should really write up about some of the technology being used.

Resizing ext3 or ext4 partition for virtual image

Mon, 02 May 2011 08:41:43 +0000

Note: please backup and make sure that you have a copy of your data and virtual images, this can go wrong and I won’t be held responsible. This worked for me, and might not work for you. For ext4 please use the latest GParted. As I migrated from raw or qcow images, some of the partition sizes that I have to work with are not as big as they could be.

Virtual host QCow convert to LVM

Sun, 01 May 2011 11:47:16 +0000

Sometimes its better to have your virtual images running directly of LVM instead of using raw or QCow formatted files. So how do we convert? Basically you have to make sure that you have a volume group, of the right size or bigger and then dd the file into a LV on that volume group: This should in the directory where you have the image: [cc lang=“bash”] # Get the filesize of the raw image in Kilobytes.

Damn nice bag

Wed, 27 Apr 2011 21:19:46 +0000

They people have some damn nice bags: http://shop.hardgraft.com/bags/2unfold-laptop-bag-brown

Webcasts to watch

Fri, 15 Apr 2011 15:45:00 +0000

Recently I was unfortunately quite ill and away from work for an extended time, the only upside being that I had some time to spend learning some new things and watching web conferences on my Apple TV2. Of those that are of interest, I am going to note them down here: LeWeb – Really quite good, european focused web event PyCon 2011 – A must watch for anyone using Python.

My Jenkins nginx proxy script

Fri, 15 Apr 2011 12:35:11 +0000

Here is a very simple configuration for nginx to proxy Jenkins (the new name for the un-Oracle’d Hudson) [cc lang=“bash”] server { listen 80 default; server_name bld-master localhost; root /var/lib/jenkins; access_log /var/log/nginx/jenkins.access.log; location / { proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:8080/; proxy_redirect off; proxy_set_header Host $http_host; proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr; proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for; } } [/cc]

Setting MAC Addresses on Debian and Ubuntu

Thu, 14 Apr 2011 10:34:48 +0000

I recently had a problem with having duplicate MAC addresses on my network for a couple of machines that I was using in a Linux KVM cluster. Flashing the firmware on the motherboards seem to have reset the MAC address to a default (thanks ASUS) that was the same on each board. Changing the MAC address back seems like quite a hard job and looking around on the internet it seems that many people are doing this the hard way with shell scripts and so forth.

Time saving tips for linux

Fri, 25 Mar 2011 09:23:19 +0000

Really nice little round up on Quora: http://www.quora.com/Linux/What-are-some-time-saving-tips-that-every-Linux-user-should-know With a follow up on hacker news: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2361978 Probably going to be more of these.

Slow disks on MacBook Pro

Tue, 22 Mar 2011 09:10:18 +0000

I really like my MacBook Pro, but I have no idea why they ship with a 5400RPM 2.5″ slooooow disk. Even with the i5 processor it makes everything crawl. Part of my standard software stack now is Dropbox, PostgreSQL and CrashPlan. All pieces of software I am really happy with, except they all access the disk all the time. fs_usage is a command you can run to see what is current accessing the disk in OS X to see what is slowing down that already slow disk.

2010 – 2011

Tue, 22 Feb 2011 09:10:29 +0000

EDIT This post has been in draft for ages, I think I am just going to post as is, was going to add lots more personal stuff, but blah – rather do it instead. I think most years I have been doing a summary, something I might revisit if I have the time. Instead I think its perhaps more interesting to think about what I might be doing this year instead.

WebM/VP8 and H.264

Wed, 19 Jan 2011 09:32:36 +0000

This is probably the best over article on the whole WebM/VP8 and H.264 issue: http://antimatter15.com/wp/2011/01/the-ambiguity-of-open-and-vp8-vs-h-264/ Well worth a read.

Django Select Multiple filter.

Tue, 02 Nov 2010 16:33:28 +0000

Django has a really nice select multiple field, for choosing multiple items at once with a Javascript chooser.. It is really handy to use when there is a large number of items that have to be chosen from in a select. I am using with JQuery. To do this, grab SelectFilter2.js from the django-admin media folder, or get it from Django’s GitHub repository. Then to initialize it you can put the following into your code:

Django localization and internationalization

Tue, 19 Oct 2010 21:50:07 +0000

We have been using the localization and internationalization ( l10n& i18n ) from Django quite a bit for our translations, and although we haven’t had to tackle anything difficult like Arabic or Persian yet there are still some shortcomings in the system. The standard Django module for input of dates and datetime stamps is quite restrictive. It depends on a module, I think written by Simon Willson which uses the PHP notation rather than the Python/C strftime / strptime notation.

Celery, RabbitMQ and sending messages directly

Sun, 17 Oct 2010 09:47:10 +0000

Been using RabbitMQ quite a lot at Cantemo, where we use it for long standing jobs, working with other languages and for notifications. But I needed to decouple some of the code from my application, to be able to distribute it and talk from other systems – exactly what we needed to do, run tasks that are in the application from another application via posting messages to RabbitMQ. Tasks are held in Celery, and started usually within the code base.

NetGrowl

Sat, 02 Oct 2010 09:43:24 +0000

I needed to test sending growl messages to machines running Growl, using just Python. There was a problem trying to find scripts, old websites were not responding, and there was a distinct lack of being able to get anything off the group easily but I chanced upon a script that worked. Fearing that the site it is hosted on might also end up biting dust, I made my changes to the script and have uploaded it to GitHub:

Compiling RabbitMQ on Ubuntu 10.04

Mon, 23 Aug 2010 15:05:33 +0000

As part of my on going effort for realtime web updates on one of our applications I needed to install RabbitMQ HEAD (That is the development head) with the RabbitMQ STOMP adaptor. Talking on IRC channel it was recommended to me to install from source, but unfortunately the documentation is out of date. So the following will do it cleanly: [cc lang=“bash”] sudo apt-get install erlang-crypto erlang-snmp erlang-syntax-tools libsctp1 lksctp-tools erlang-runtime-tools erlang-mnesia erlang-public-key erlang-os-mon erlang-ssl erlang-base erlang-parsetools mercurial git-core build-essential erlang-dev zip erlang-tools erlang-src python-simplejson erlang-edoc

Orbited + Django dev daemon

Sat, 21 Aug 2010 14:11:36 +0000

Today I got my Django project working with Orbited. By creating a twisted proxy for Orbited and Django I am able to serve a development environment for both Django and Orbited plus the builtin MorbidQ message queue. I am going to be using this to give live notifications of events that are happening on the system in realtime, and so it should be able to handle quite a large load. To do this I will use another queue in production, but I have found it needed to sort out the development environment first of course.

psycopg2 OS X – _PQbackendPID

Fri, 20 Aug 2010 13:21:26 +0000

If you are having problems with _PQbackendPID, psycopg2 and OS X and have tried the forcing to 32 bit mentioned in other posts about the web then it might be time to try a more forceful approach. This is an example of the error that you might face: [cc lang=“bash”] dlopen(/Library/Python/2.6/site-packages/psycopg2/_psycopg.so, 2): Symbol not found: _PQbackendPID Referenced from: /Library/Python/2.6/site-packages/psycopg2/_psycopg.so Expected in: flat namespace in /Library/Python/2.6/site-packages/psycopg2/_psycopg.so [/cc] The first thing to do is get rid of your old Psycopg2 (just in case), so locate the site-packages directory:

Realtime web – Orbited vs Tornado

Mon, 16 Aug 2010 20:18:31 +0000

My latest task and one that I have been researching and playing with for some time is to integrate real time feedback in to our web application. The main goal is to be able to provide real time feedback of jobs and updates to users without Ajax style polling. This is a simple requirement to write, but one that had many deeper issues. Firstly it needs to be able to handle many users concurrently and secondly it should do so without blocking execution of code.

Wake On Lan with Ubuntu

Fri, 06 Aug 2010 12:08:22 +0000

Wake-on-lan is incredibly useful for those scenarios where you have more than one machine on a network, but you don’t always want to have them running but they are needed sometimes. To setup, make sure that the Motherboard and NIC support is there from your manufacturer. Sometimes it has to be enabled, such as making sure that it uses S3 for shutdown, and that PCI wake is supported. Next you need to check support from the operating system, I am using Ubuntu 10.

Switching from YUI to JQuery

Mon, 17 May 2010 12:41:06 +0000

I have been using the Yahoo YUI Javascript library for more than a couple of years now (perhaps about 4) and although I really like it, I have never felt particularly productive using it. Over those years I have also dabbled in other frameworks, including: ExtJS (mainly from my old work looking at theming it – and its heavily based upon YUI.) – I dislike the licensing on ExtJS so it really isn’t an option for me any more Looked strongly at Cappucino, but there was no real productivity gains to be had, and I wasn’t writing my current application as a solely Javascript app MooTools – Seems nice but never really gelled with it and I haven’t liked the documentation SproutCore – Love it so far, but again I am not writing a pure Javascript App.

Django 1.2 release

Sat, 15 May 2010 08:07:46 +0000

It was just announced that Django 1.2 will be released on May 17th, which is in 3 days time. Been waiting a while for this one to go to production release so I am really glad. The new messages framework looks much better, and I also love the date i18n features – something that really helps on a project at Cantemo where we have to deal with ISO formatted datetimes.

VMWare Ubuntu IP address change

Tue, 04 May 2010 16:00:11 +0000

I always have this problem when moving VMWare images of Ubuntu, the most recent of a 10.04 LTS Server. Whenever you move or copy a VMWare image it assigns a new Mac address and Ubuntu starts without properly bringing up the interface. Really annoying when you are using VMWare server without a console. To make it grab the IP Address again, simply remove the rule: [cc lang=“bash”] sudo rm /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules

Dropbox startup lessons learned

Sat, 01 May 2010 09:00:02 +0000

Really interesting slide show by Drew Houston on what they have learnt about starting up Dropbox. http://www.slideshare.net/gueste94e4c/dropbox-startup-lessons-learned-3836587

Python plugin systems

Thu, 22 Apr 2010 11:01:17 +0000

There is a lot of interesting information about creating plugin architectures using Python all over the web, but its in fairly disparate places. This is an overview of the documentation that I found as of April 2010. Firstly Dr André Roberge has some very interesting posts, as well as a talk at PyCon 2009 on Blip.tv entitled Plugins and monkeypatching: increasing flexibility, dealing with inflexibility. He is also the author of Crunchy which uses a plugin system.

VMWare player IP address

Fri, 09 Apr 2010 12:21:05 +0000

This was something that really annoyed me when trying to configure VMWare Player 3, there seemed to be no easy way of changing the IP address range or the DHCP addresses when using Windows as the host OS. Actually there is but in a stroke of genius by VMWare it isn’t installed properly. The program that you require is called vmnetcfg.exe and is included in the installer but isn’t installed. Its really difficult to find anything about it on VMWare’s site so to get to it:

Trip to England

Thu, 08 Apr 2010 19:29:40 +0000

The weekend we got back from a visit to England primarily to see my parents as it was my Dads 60th Birthday – Happy Birthday! and we also managed to see some friends, and meet up to do a little business. First stop was London. Its always interesting to go back to the place after having lived there for about 10 years. I forgot how busy SoHo gets during the day, but that was made up by other factors.

Django on RedHat or CentOS

Fri, 26 Mar 2010 10:07:21 +0000

I am normally using Debian, Ubuntu or even Suse for deploying Django, but a recent customer needed to deploy on Red Hat Enterprise Server 5. We decided beforehand to test deployment on RHEL5 and also on CentOS 5.4 and so these instructions should work for both environments. NginX will be used as the webserver. The first thing I like to do is to upgrade the repository and add EPEL. This wasn’t needed I found on the RedHat box I was using, but was needed on CentOS but your mileage might vary.

Using Hudson to build Sphinx documentation

Sun, 21 Mar 2010 16:47:32 +0000

I have become quite the fan of both Hudson and Sphinx. At Cantemo we are using Hudson for Continuous Integration testing, and its a large improvement over buildbot which I was trying before. For documentation at the moment I am using Sphinx, a python based documentation generator. We require the documentation to be updated at the same time as the development and tests are built so it is becoming second nature to build documents soon after development is done.

Postfix and Gmail

Sat, 20 Mar 2010 12:07:03 +0000

I have been using Hudson as a continuous integration server for a short while now and I am super impressed. I have it running on Debian and is really quite feature-full. One thing that I did have a problem with was with the standard Debian 5 Java environment there was a problem using TLS for mail it seemed, and I didn’t just want to send stuff to gmail’s SMTP server all the time so I configured a local Postfix SMTP relay on another server.

The undesigned redesign

Fri, 19 Mar 2010 15:57:54 +0000

Finally have done something about the sorry state of these pages. I had a quick 3 hour sprint today to see how much I could do with the aim to improve this site in the following ways: Improve readability Get rid of all the unneccesary links and content Generally update the look and colours Remove that horrible header image that I had Make the site more useful for viewers 3 hours isn’t a long time to do a complete redesign so I consider this the undesigned addition and its probably all the better for it.

Django staff member required

Sat, 13 Mar 2010 09:30:50 +0000

Here is a simple decorator that isn’t mentioned properly in the Django documentation. [cc lang=“python”]@staff_member_required[/cc] It basically checks to see if the user is logged in and has is_staff before allowing a user access to the view. Use like you would the normal @login_required decorator. [cc lang=“python”] from django.shortcuts import render_to_response from django.template.context import RequestContext from django.contrib.admin.views.decorators import staff_member_required @staff_member_required def my_view(request): return render_to_response(‘page.html’, context_instance=RequestContext(request)) [/cc]

Extending Django’s user admin

Thu, 18 Feb 2010 22:06:23 +0000

The built in admin pages that you get in Django can be useful, but they particularly become useful once you start to add a lot more functionality to them. For instance the Django’s User authentication system (which lives in django.contrib.auth ) is widely used, and quite often you need to extend the user’s profile by using AUTH_PROFILE_MODULE and a separate model. But having a separate Admin screen for this is kind of pointless.

gcc and python

Thu, 18 Feb 2010 14:18:14 +0000

Had an interesting little problem with gcc and python today on OS X 10.6. Basically I was trying to use graphviz and pygraphviz, and installing from source I got messages like this: [cc lang=“bash”] gcc -arch ppc -arch i386 -isysroot /Developer/SDKs/MacOSX10.4u.sdk -fno-strict-aliasing -Wno-long-double -no-cpp-precomp -mno-fused-madd -fno-common -dynamic -DNDEBUG -g -O3 -I/usr/local/include/graphviz -I/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.5/include/python2.5 -c pygraphviz/graphviz_wrap.c -o build/temp.macosx-10.3-i386-2.5/pygraphviz/graphviz_wrap.o cc1: error: unrecognized command line option “-Wno-long-double” cc1: error: unrecognized command line option “-Wno-long-double”

How do we kick our synchronous addiction?

Thu, 11 Feb 2010 11:29:46 +0000

How do we kick our synchronous addiction? Really interesting post. Pity I don’t have the time to discuss it in more depth – too busying developing!

Django settings in template

Fri, 22 Jan 2010 10:51:18 +0000

So what do you do if you require a django setting in your templates, much like we have MEDIA_URL today? Well there are use cases for this, (if you are in doubt have a look at the original ticket for adding MEDIA_URL to django ). The easiest way that I have found so far is to write a context processor. For example in my settings I might have JAVASCRIPT_URL (which in my real life code changes depending on whether I am running in debug, test or from a CDN):

The White Balance Lens Cap

Fri, 22 Jan 2010 08:28:10 +0000

Oh this is clever: The White Balance Lens Cap: “ You may think automatic white balance is good enough. But if you’ve ever had to fix dozens (or even 100s) of photos with just slightly different colors, one-by-one, you know the true meaning of pain. The White Balance Lens Cap leaves you no excuse for not properly white-balancing every situation you encounter. Simply flip your camera into custom White Balance mode, snap a photo with your White Balance Lens Cap on, and your camera creates a perfect profile of the actual lighting in front of you.

Sugru

Wed, 20 Jan 2010 15:33:27 +0000

Awesome silicon based material for hacking anything – http://sugru.com/

is that an iPhone or a MiniMac?

Tue, 12 Jan 2010 11:04:30 +0000

is that an iPhone or a MiniMac?: “ []2 Love it. (Via swissmiss.)

Updating contact details

Fri, 01 Jan 2010 13:53:45 +0000

I have just spent the past 90 minutes updating contact details – much longer than it should take. Would be nice if I could just update say on Plaxo, and linkedin, Facebook etc would receive the updates but I guess we haven’t got to that stage yet. Have also sent out emails to lots of people, so apologies if you haven’t received one. The main change is my mobile number – it belonged to Vizrt, with whom my last day was officially the 31st of December.

Christmas!

Mon, 28 Dec 2009 13:54:01 +0000

It’s been another Christmas, and almost a full year. Christmas was good this year – Mum and Dad came over and spent it in Sweden, a little bit of time in Stockholm but mostly in the country. I think they really enjoyed meeting Harriet for the first time. Harriet enjoyed meeting them too but I don’t think that she really noticed Christmas this year. She got lots of nice things to make her life cosy, her teddy bear and soft toy collection is growing almost as fast as her clothing collection is.

LEGO CD Boombox

Wed, 09 Dec 2009 22:18:02 +0000

LEGO CD Boombox: “ This looks awesome. (Via swissmiss.)

Officially a father

Mon, 23 Nov 2009 16:26:10 +0000

Went in today to sign some documents and have an “interview” – so its official that I am now a father. Was quite sure that I was at least a month ago also, but thanks mother Sweden for making it available in the public records. Baby is doing fine, me as well I think.

Cooking tart

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 19:34:58 +0000

Been making a lot of tarts recently for some reason.. Perhaps because they taste some damn good. Today was a Italian spinach and ham tart that was quite like the recipe used in one of Jamie Oliver’s books, it was good but not as good as the Courgette tart (or Zucchini tart) I cooked the other day. Others have been Goat Cheese and Leek and a Spinach and Blue Cheese tart.

Cooking cooking cooking

Fri, 30 Oct 2009 07:39:15 +0000

Kristin continues to feed the baby and I feed her, so I have been doing a lot of cooking recently such as: Goat Cheese and Leek Tart, for today. Brownies – These are more of a desert brownie, great with icing sugar and a little cream. Roasted White fish with leek – A classic kind of Jamie Oliver dish, I used cod. Potato supper, a simple dish of Bacon, Potatoes, Onions to which I added a good quality Italian sausage.

Our new arrival

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 07:38:20 +0000

On Saturday at 17:40 our beautiful baby girl was born. The delivery was really quick and both Mother and baby did a sterling job. We haven’t decided upon a name yet, trying to work out something that works in English and Swedish is not that easy but we hope to have something soon. Here are some photos taken just after the birth:

Last week – an update

Mon, 19 Oct 2009 09:45:40 +0000

Been quite busy over the last week, getting things ready for the baby and it was Kristin’s Birthday. We went out for a meal at Sjögräsin Södermalm ( south Stockholm ) and it was really good. I had a nice Reindeer steak with Hazelnuts and Cranberries, and then a Run tasting for desert. Next time I will go for a starter as the portions are quite small in this dish, though I saw a couple of tables over a huge portion of what looked like a salad being served.

NewNewsWire

Fri, 09 Oct 2009 07:58:32 +0000

I have posted about NetNewsWire many times on here before. Its been my favourite news reading application for a couple of years now (if not more) but recent development has severally hampered the usability of the software. It seemed to be when they changed it to support sync to Google Reader – not a bad idea by any means, but releasing the software before it was full tested and working was a huge mistake.

Update from the summer

Thu, 08 Oct 2009 04:49:03 +0000

Its been a while since I have posted an update here other some technical posts. So the big news is that we are expecting a baby, and this has really consumed most of the thoughts over the summer and changed our behaviour somewhat! Everything seems to be about getting ready for the big day (In November) and the huge changes that will come with it. But we managed to go on some picnics and tried to make the most of the short summer here in Sweden.

Hacked WordPress

Fri, 04 Sep 2009 21:54:20 +0000

After posting up the last entry about SSH I noticed that I had a problem with my Permalinks. Seems that there is some nasty little injection problem with WordPress that changes the Permalinks with the addition of. &({${eval(base64_decode($_SERVER[HTTP_REFERER]))}}|.+)& I am following the suggestions here: http://blog.4rev.net/2009-09/wordpress-hacked-eval-base64_decode-_serverhttp_referer/ And it seemed to work.

The beauty of the ssh config file

Fri, 04 Sep 2009 21:35:17 +0000

This is a tip that I have used on OS X and on Linux, which I presume works on other *nix and BSDs using SSH. Basically in the .ssh folder in your home directory you can create a file called config with which you can put all sorts of configuration information for your ssh client but the real benefit for me was to use this to give extra information to hosts such as defining a different port number to connect on.

etckeeper

Fri, 04 Sep 2009 18:47:46 +0000

I have been looking for a good way of keeping track of changes to /etc and with Ubuntu 9.04 Server I see that they have rolled in support for etckeeper (using bzr as the default). This little util allows the use of version control (bzr, hg or git) to track changes to /etc and with the Ubuntu version integrates with apt and dpkg so that new package installs are tracked.

Ubuntu 9.04 server at home

Thu, 03 Sep 2009 16:33:09 +0000

Over the past week or so (slowed down by the damn flu) I have been building a new server for home. Its going to have the following duties: Backup server (with Apple Time Machine) File server NNTP server iTunes server Database server (mainly PostgreSQL) VMWare server The hardware is mounted in rackmount chassis with space for 12 drives, 6 of which will be populated straight away, has a 64bit processor and will have 3Gb of RAM (The maximum on this old hardware).

Ubuntu compared to Vista and Windows 7

Fri, 21 Aug 2009 12:59:15 +0000

There is a really interesting article over here about ubuntu 9 compared to Vista and Windows 7. http://tuxradar.com/content/benchmarked-ubuntu-vs-vista-vs-windows-7 They compared installation time. Ubuntu was faster. Mouse clicks in the installation: Ubuntu had less. Disk space used: Ubuntu used less. Bootup: Microsoft was faster, Windows 7 being the leader. Shutdown: Linux was faster. IO: Linux was faster. Python: Windows just about edged it. In the real world it probably doesn’t matter, the vast majority of users will continue on with a Microsoft operating system because the software they want to run and have supported by their local IT team will make this easier.

mkv to mp4 for ps3 on Ubuntu

Wed, 19 Aug 2009 09:48:02 +0000

This is some notes about what I have been trying to do with converting video for the PS3. I have actually decided to use Plex as a media centre as the PS3 is rubbish in its networking and format support. I hope they sort it out sometime. sudo apt-get install mkvtoolnix gpac mplayer Need to install NeroAacEnc so download from here: http://www.nero.com/eng/downloads-nerodigital-nero-aac-codec.php Unpack linux directory, chmod +x neroAacEnc and copy it to a location of your choice (within your path)

WANT – Oliver Jeffers Prints

Thu, 16 Jul 2009 13:00:44 +0000

Oliver Jeffers Print: “” (Via swissmiss.)

Leading zeros in django

Mon, 13 Jul 2009 11:28:55 +0000

I am always forgetting about the stringformatting tag in Django’s templating language. For instance for leading zeros: {{ variable|stringformat:“02d” }} This will always put a leading zero.

Loving Alexandros Vasmoulakis’s work

Fri, 10 Jul 2009 07:35:42 +0000

Just really fantastic imagery: I have to get some of these paintings I think, trouble is he paints them on the side of buildings: Maybe a small one painted in the living room would look cool. More information here: http://www.zap51.com/pheyo/

A sneak peek at Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland film

Thu, 09 Jul 2009 11:01:02 +0000

This just looks excellent (and I have shamelessly lifted this from another RSS feed). A sneak peek at Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland film: “ “ (Via Alpha Mummy – Times Online – WBLG.)

Google chrome OS

Wed, 08 Jul 2009 08:02:11 +0000

Wow, Google have announced the release of the Google OS. Although it wasn’t entirely a shock its nice to see that they are promoting something from the ground up. http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/07/introducing-google-chrome-os.html Looking forward to trying it out even if I don’t have a netbook.

More nice things for the home

Fri, 03 Jul 2009 07:55:03 +0000

Last weekend we went on quite the shopping spree, taking advantage of the summer sun, the summer sale and the good mood generally about in Stockholm. First stop after lunch was Iittala again and we got the following: A Taika mug to go with the Taika bowl we bought earlier. And also some Alvar Alto tiny bowls / tea light holders: We got some for presents and then 2 green and 2 blue for the home.

Nice things for the home

Thu, 25 Jun 2009 12:15:03 +0000

Been buying things for the apartment recently, not least some lovely Iittala bowls: This one is the 2,8L salad bowl, part of the Taika design by Klaus Haapaniemi. Perfect summer design for summer salads. Kristin also picked up some bowls from a local potter in Varmland.

Absolutely loving Bluelounge’s solutions

Fri, 12 Jun 2009 13:02:42 +0000

Really nice looking products from Bluelounge for helping with cable maintenance and other traditionally boring things: Wish they did a corner desk solution though.

Django test fixtures and contenttypes

Fri, 29 May 2009 03:46:38 +0000

Just came across an interesting problem with the contenttypes contributed application and the test framework. If you are using fixtures in the test frame work you might find that the database gets out of date as you are working on it, particularly if you are creating new models all the time. To get around this you need to regenerate the contenttypes database. If you depend on this, the following steps could give you problems so make sure that you back up your data (dumpdata) beforehand.

PostgreSQL for Mac and language support – PLPGSQL

Tue, 26 May 2009 12:48:45 +0000

Seems sometimes the PostgresqlforMac package doesn’t have support out of the box for PLPGSQL or other stored procedure languages and you can’t simply change to the correct user to upgrade it instead call the createlang command like this: [cc lang=“bash”] /Library/PostgreSQL8/bin/createlang -l DATABASE -U USER; [/cc] Obviously changing DATABASE to your database and USER to your user. This will list all the languages enabled for that database. To add PL/PGSQL, try this:

This week in review

Mon, 25 May 2009 20:58:49 +0000

Another week gone by, another update. So this week gone by was a bit of a strange one, though probably normal for a Swede, Thursday was off, Friday back to work and then the weekend off. A lot of people take the Friday off from work so Stockholm was beautifully quiet, just like the holiday period. So it was more bike rides, around Djurgärden up in to Östermalm and back in to Södermalm.

Not last years model

Sat, 23 May 2009 14:27:25 +0000

So I was thinking what have I/We bought in the last year that was new.. Well I think top of the list are: Pioneer plasma TV. We already had TVs but this looks and performs about as well as you can get right now. Harman Kardon 7.1 surround sound amp. We needed a solution for the bedroom and living room for surround sound so I upgraded to this and kept the old amp for the bedroom.

LastYearsModel

Mon, 18 May 2009 10:49:59 +0000

Really like the idea behind lastyearsmodel.org. Even though I would love new shiny things all the time there doesn’t seem much that point most of the time. Examples for me are: iPod. I still have a 30Gb old style model. New touch would be great, but mine still works and plays music well. New iPod touch might be nice when it holds 128Gb+ of music and video Phone. Still using my 2+ year old HTC windows based mobile.

The weekend in review

Mon, 18 May 2009 05:43:35 +0000

Seems along time since I have given an update and I guess this is due mainly to lack of time in my part. Since the last update I have been skiing and hanging out some with friends. So this weekend was fairly typical. Friday: Finished some design work for work, got the documentation out and built a new version of some Windows software. Went and got Kristin a Kronan miltary bike – really nice.

Seth Godin on the tribes we lead

Fri, 15 May 2009 10:19:44 +0000

Really interesting talk by Seth Godin:

Bada Table transforms into a love seat.

Thu, 14 May 2009 14:58:58 +0000

Bada Table transforms into a love seat.: “ Perfect for small-living spaces, the multi-functional Bada Table from EcoSystems, made of reclaimed walnut, transforms from a sleek table to a love seat with a simple ‘flick of the wrist.’‘Slatted for production soon, future models will be constructed of FSC certified wood. Clever. Via. ” (Via Curbly Recent Posts.) This is very cool.

Star Trek – lovely lens flare

Wed, 13 May 2009 09:21:55 +0000

Seems that the new Star Trek film is getting talked about quite a lot at the moment and quite a lot of it to do with the lens flare used through out the production. I must admit that I really liked it, and I am sure a large percentage of that was to do with the look and feel of the film, lens flare included. Yes its geeky, yes its a summer blockbuster, yes its quite puerile – but its good fun and very attractive ( Colorist was Stefan Sonnenfeld ) at the same time.

BBC HD – slow motion surfing

Fri, 08 May 2009 15:02:35 +0000

This is just awesome: Make sure that you watch it in HD.

Nice playstation T-shirt

Wed, 29 Apr 2009 01:47:19 +0000

Like this T-shirt From WireAndTwine. They have kids T-shirts as well, makes a change from Threadless.

Lovely papercuts by Julene

Tue, 28 Apr 2009 12:36:39 +0000

As well as having a wonderful name, Julene has been making some pretty damn nice paper cut work such as these: More at: http://madebyjulene.com/

Python

Wed, 08 Apr 2009 07:41:21 +0000

I really like Python, and hence this made me laugh:

Microsoft Internet Explorer team are full of fail

Fri, 20 Mar 2009 09:33:26 +0000

Suffice to say that this details my thinking that they are idiots: [http://www.isolani.co.uk/blog/standards/Ie8BlacklistForcingStandardsRenderingOptIn ]1 They are blacklisting domains to render in IE7 compatibility mode based upon general usage patterns and by top-level domain. Not whether they work or not. Internet Explorer team, you should be ashamed of yourselves.

Twitter mobile phone number fail

Wed, 18 Mar 2009 08:49:59 +0000

Could someone please tell me exactly how I am supposed to put in my phone number? Seriously something wrong with this. And of course if I click submit it tells me that I should have filled out the number correctly.

Moving to Sweden or Norway

Thu, 05 Mar 2009 11:36:40 +0000

Its funny, my posts about moving to Norway are far more popular and getting many more visitors than any post about moving to Sweden. Could it be because Norway is quite a difficult place to enter compared to Sweden?

Anyone know who this picture is by?

Wed, 18 Feb 2009 11:54:03 +0000

Saw this on a blog the other day, with no description and it was from a Apple Mac Expo.

Google PowerMeter

Wed, 11 Feb 2009 14:40:12 +0000

I really want to see Google PowerMeter adopted in Sweden, I guess it will be a long time coming, but an overview of power usage would be excellent. http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/02/power-to-people.html For that matter I would like to see Mint.com adopted by Swedish banks though I am sure they will argue that they have to do it themselves with some stupid software developed by a kid out of University that knows nothing about UI, and banks that complicate everything as much as possible.

mplayer – disable LIRC

Tue, 10 Feb 2009 10:42:30 +0000

Been trying to use mplayer from the shell on Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy) and LIRC was giving my problems, but I couldn’t find any help with the following mplayer error: mplayer: could not connect to socket mplayer: No such file or directory Failed to open LIRC support. You will not be able to use your remote control. Well all you need to do to is to disable LIRC support by doing the following:

Linksys wireless with Ubuntu server

Sun, 08 Feb 2009 18:25:28 +0000

Been trying to get a linksys wireless card working on my server with Ubuntu 8.04. Its not the easiest thing. My output of lspci shows: Network controller: Broadcom Corporation BCM4306 802.11b/g Wireless LAN Controller (rev 03) And my lshw -C network: *-network description: Network controller product: BCM4306 802.11b/g Wireless LAN Controller vendor: Broadcom Corporation physical id: 9 bus info: pci@0000:01:09.0 version: 03 width: 32 bits clock: 33MHz capabilities: bus_master configuration: driver=b43-pci-bridge latency=32 module=ssb *-network description: Wireless interface physical id: 1 logical name: wlan0 serial: 00:0f:66:f3:0e:78 capabilities: ethernet physical wireless configuration: broadcast=yes multicast=yes wireless=IEEE 802.

Installing Windows 2008 on MacBook Pro 10.5

Sat, 07 Feb 2009 21:07:42 +0000

Windows 2008 Server is probably the most robust operating system to come out from Microsoft whilst still supporting most of the modern features users demand. The robustness and speed of it is just two of the advantages it has over Vista. To install on a MacBook Pro its probably easiest to use Windows 2008 Server x86 CD 32bit. 64Bit and bootcamp is not recommended at the moment! First steps of the installation:

Newly updated

Mon, 02 Feb 2009 19:26:37 +0000

As promised I have updated this site to the latest version of WordPress – 2.7 Its actually really impressive, and really shows why I updated to an off-the-shelf blogging tool instead of sticking with my own home grown set up several years ago. I also cleared up many of the problems with images being aligned on the site, and finally have decent code previews thanks to the CodeColorer plugin by Dmytro.

Apologies for the RSS feeds

Sun, 01 Feb 2009 23:23:42 +0000

It seems that my move of feeds from feedburner to the google feedburner service has messed up my RSS feeds quite a bit. Not sure what has happened or why the links on my site got messed up, but its probably something to do with the plugin that I had installed. All in all it highlights the need for me to update this site from its current version of WordPress to the latest version.

As seen on the T-Bana

Fri, 30 Jan 2009 08:43:45 +0000

Someone has been dressing up the T-Bana (Stockholm’s subway/Metro/Tube system).

Hilarious look at Adobe’s UI

Thu, 29 Jan 2009 11:58:46 +0000

So what’s wrong with Adobe’s UI: Well this is a very funny tumbl log of plenty of comments of things that could be done better: [http://adobegripes.tumblr.com/ ]1 Things that particularly standout are issues with there cross-platform UI. Although praised by many as a good example, it just shows that some of the finer details are missed. Via UIEye.

Why blog?

Tue, 27 Jan 2009 09:15:05 +0000

From http://www.gapingvoid.com/Moveable_Type/archives/001395.html

Whats in a pixel?

Wed, 21 Jan 2009 12:09:09 +0000

Really interesting talk hosted by Panavision about Digital Camera systems. http://media.panavision.com/ScreeningRoom/Screening_Room/Demystifying_Part1_480p.html First part is about pixels and worth watching if you have ever wondered what is resolution and what is a pixel about in the camera domain.

UI design in the open

Mon, 19 Jan 2009 11:42:00 +0000

This is just great: http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2009/01/redesigning-a-u.html A summary of the post that basically Bug Labs has hired IDEO to redesign their hardware user interface for BUGbase and to do it in the open. Updates on the design process can be sees at: Bug Blog, Bug Community, and the IDEO blog.

History of Python

Wed, 14 Jan 2009 14:35:40 +0000

A nice start to the series History of Python.

Arstechnica on windows 7

Tue, 13 Jan 2009 17:58:27 +0000

Arstechnica does its usual good job of looking in depth at Windows 7 Beta, and then they compare it to Vista: “Windows 7 shouldn’t make anything any worse” Outstanding.

InspireUX

Tue, 13 Jan 2009 09:38:34 +0000

Words in inspire user experience designers: http://www.inspireux.com/. Nice list of quotes, one to add to the news reader that’s for sure. I particularly agree with: “In design, space is not the problem. Attention is.” “Making assumptions about our users leads us to design for ourselves” “The worst misstep one can make in design is to solve the wrong problem”

Working with SVN on OS X

Sat, 10 Jan 2009 12:24:25 +0000

I use SVN (subversion) quite a bit, even at home to manage my own files, but recently I have been running the beta version for Versions by Sofa and Pico. It turned into an excellent way of using SVN, being very visual and supporting everything that I needed, but alas the Beta period ran out and they released Versions 1. Now I was all for buying this application, but the purchase price of 39 Euros totally puts my of.

Palm Pre

Sat, 10 Jan 2009 08:13:57 +0000

The Palm Pre looks really interesting, not sure it will get me away from lusting after an iPhone – particularly for its OS X integration but I am glad Palm is doing good. Pity they couldn’t do better with the design though, but it looks like it could be comfortable to hold. This is what Scoble has to say about it: Palm did what Nokia, RIM, and Microsoft couldn’t: build a better experience than Apple: “

2008 Applications of the year

Fri, 09 Jan 2009 11:17:52 +0000

So here are my most used OS X applications of the year, in no particular order: Spotify. This is just an excellent music application, the speed with which the streams start is simply amazing and I don’t find that I get that many adverts in the way of the vast array of songs on offer. Textmate. I probably use this more than any other application on the Mac, for me hands down the best text editor that I have ever used and I find more and more features in it everyday.

Facebook is AOL 2.0

Thu, 08 Jan 2009 11:30:09 +0000

Facebook is The Borg: “ Much of the activity that used to happen out in the wild unfettered Net, over email, open (XMPP-based) IM and blog posts is now happening inside the Facebook silo. It is AOL 2.0. I avoid the place, but that’s getting harder. On this current visit I see 7 friend suggestions, 273 friend requests, 6 event invitations, 5 good karma from debo requests, 1 good karma request, 220 other requests, 4 new updates, 235 items in my inbox, 7 pokes and 522 friends to start with.

A new year, new computer

Thu, 08 Jan 2009 11:11:34 +0000

Well not really, but every year I do some maintenance to make sure whatever I am using is up to date and fresh and this includes installing the latest versions and services packs to everything including: VLC Microsoft Office 2008 Skype Skype 2.8 Beta is the one that I am looking forward to using, included in the new features is screen sharing – which apparently works across different operating systems, which should prove really handy for debugging and helping my parents with their PC from my Mac.

Its 2009 but should I resolve to do something?

Tue, 06 Jan 2009 14:11:18 +0000

So its 2009, and it came around all too quickly. I can see from MarsEdit that the amount of posts that I have put on this blog is quite down from a couple of years ago, which is testament to how busy I have been. For the Christmas period I tried to step away from my computer a bit and calm down, and the other period I was in Karlstad enjoying the festivities and doing a small amount of work and reading the great RESTful Web Services book.

This is awesome – Papervision

Tue, 16 Dec 2008 10:34:58 +0000

This is really really awesome, and you have to really check it out for your self. Its a little flash application that uses a webcam or other camera attached to your computer to project a little ‘Proto’ guy on top of a printed piece of paper. They have even got some code released for it. Check it out here with some images and video, but it really works better to try it yourselves:

Movie Posters with brand integration

Fri, 17 Oct 2008 09:38:31 +0000

Movie Posters with brand integration Alternate movie posters about film brand integration. These are just great.

Product redesign, first steps in a process

Tue, 14 Oct 2008 17:27:17 +0000

So we have started on a major product redesign at work and things are going well. The product in question is the flagship product from our Swedish office, and the launch point and central resource for the many others here. Starting a redesign is no simple process, after all the decision to do so usually comes from several sources not just the need to do it, but justifiable business reasoning.

Karlstad and Birthdays

Mon, 13 Oct 2008 21:25:52 +0000

So this weekend we went up to Karlstad, and it feels like quite a while ago that we did. Kristin had her birthday this Monday, so it was a small family gathering for her eating good food, dealing with too many chickens and picking Chanterelle mushrooms. Yesterday was Kristin’s birthday so we went out for a meal at Brassier Godot. It was good food, but perhaps not as cosy as we could have wished.

Last FM

Fri, 10 Oct 2008 14:58:18 +0000

I recently thought that I would check out my listing on Last FM to see stats etc.. and to see what features they have added. Looks like I had forgotten to run last.fm on my Mac so it wasn’t updated since February. So that’s probably about 1000 hours of music unlisted, and lots of music missing. Gutted. Oh well, perhaps I will remember now.

New paint, new kitchen – almost

Sat, 04 Oct 2008 09:15:21 +0000

Last weekend we got our act together and started on the kitchen, its probably the room in the house that needs the least work on it but its nice to make our own mark and give it some character. As with the rest of the house, the ceilings are white, and some of the smaller walls we kept white, which goes nicely with the kitchen units and the old 1920s original kitchen cupboards and doors that are still there.

Long time no update

Wed, 24 Sep 2008 17:57:23 +0000

It was brought to my attention yesterday that I haven’t been blogging that much recently, being busy with other things means that I haven’t had time to reflect on what I have been up to. Reflecting upon the blog itself, in its current form I started it on October 23rd, 2003 – almost 5 years ago. I actually had an older blog with custom PHP that I wrote before that, and even longer before that I had an HTML blog that I edited in a text editor.

Creating workflow diagrams

Mon, 04 Aug 2008 17:22:01 +0000

I haven’t seen any good examples recently of workflow diagrams, at least not more technical ones based around software, services and workflow. Creating a diagram like this its always nice to see other examples of how people have approached the problem but in this scenario I have yet to see anything. Even Edward Tufte came short on this, though the diagrams and illustrations he provides examples for are excellent. So this is what I came up with to illustrate a workflow with our software in a newsroom environment.

My top ten OS X applications

Mon, 21 Jul 2008 17:38:57 +0000

Its been a year with this Mac Book Pro that I am using so I thought that I would round up with my top ten Mac software – the software that I would install first of all after a crash. Quicksilver. This is a must have on the Mac. I find out something new about it every week if not everyday and it makes using OS X even easier and more streamlined.

Back from England – part1

Mon, 21 Jul 2008 07:59:04 +0000

Last weekend we arrived back from a all-too-short week away in England. Its the first time that I have been back in quite a while and one of the ones that I have most enjoyed. Firstly we flew in to London City Airport dodging the bad luggage of Heathrow, the bad connections of Stanstead and the general grottyness of Gatwick. It only took about 30 minutes to get to our hotel, the Hoxton situated nicely on Great Eastern Street.

Decorating.

Thu, 26 Jun 2008 07:39:20 +0000

So now we have moved in the decorating is in full swing. There has been lots that we have done, but much still to do. K and I have been talking about building a floating wall for the living room, I think that needs some more thought but first off its the easy things like curtains. So last night we went to Marimekko and chose a design by Erja Hirvi called Lumimarja.

Fat Bastard redesign

Tue, 24 Jun 2008 10:08:58 +0000

Is this the greatest wine bottle design ever? (from thedieline.com). Fat Bastard redesign: “ A redesign by Turner Duckworth for Fat Bastard wines. I love that they integrated the name and visuals in a witty and sophisticated solution for a wine that is affordable yet has a lot of weight behind it. ” (Via TheDieline.com: The Leading Package Design Blog.)

django one form, two models

Sat, 21 Jun 2008 10:25:04 +0000

This post is a work in progress is now working I am glad to say. I have been working on a django site which needs two models updated for one post. It is actually using models very close to that on django-forums and I have created a forms.py file: class ThreadForm(forms.ModelForm): class Meta: model = Thread exclude = (‘forum’, ‘sticky’, ‘closed’, ‘posts’, ‘views’, ‘latest_post_time’) def clean_title(self): title = self.

Another week

Wed, 18 Jun 2008 16:52:15 +0000

Time seems to be flying by as I get even closer to my next birthday, with the minutes rolling into hours, the hours in to days and so forth. Last night we had a friend over and I cooked a meal, of recipe for which is conveniently on the internet: Roast Pork with Rosemary and Caramelised Apples. I added some peas and some Roast Potatoes for good measure. Was quite good, though probably not the best thing that I have cooked.

Värmland

Mon, 02 Jun 2008 09:47:37 +0000

Värmland, originally uploaded by timc3. Went to Värmland this weekend, and it was beautifully sunny and green so we spent quite a bit of time outside and relaxing..

Good eats, bad eats

Fri, 30 May 2008 17:01:12 +0000

So another week goes by and some more food eaten. First up is Östgöta Källaren on Östgötagatan, and basically we didn’t eat here because of the extremely rude service we received upon trying to find a table. I would avoid this place in the near future as there are so many other places worthy of your business in the area. Vampire Lounge underneath though can be recommended for the great cocktails available.

Stockholm congestion tax and roads in general

Thu, 22 May 2008 07:43:33 +0000

Have been borrowing a couple of cars quite recently and I have just noticed that its cheaper to take a car from inside the city and pay the congestion charge than to pay the average day car parking fee, now I am not sure how that helps matters. Surely it would be better to leave the car at home and just use public transport until I need the car. I haven’t looked at how much a monthly permit is but I wonder whether it is cheaper than the 25Kr a day it costs in congestion charge at the times that I use it…

New furniture

Thu, 15 May 2008 11:46:51 +0000

Argh! The boxes! Stockholm has been having quite changeable weather recently, and of course everything is in boxes and bags and until the new wardrobes arrive. All the clothes are scattered all over the place and I can’t find anything. Let alone if I go sailing this weekend with all my winter clothes packed up. At least the TV and the sofa are now up and ready, and of course being used.

We moved in!

Mon, 12 May 2008 08:09:17 +0000

Finally finally! On Friday we got the keys and sorted out the paper work, moved all our things from Solna to Södermalm and started to unpack! It feels great to finally be in though there are lots of things to sort out, though the most important room is pretty much there. More of an update soon.

Moving moving moving

Thu, 08 May 2008 07:05:35 +0000

The move continues to happen. After spending a long weekend in Karlstad we came back to pack even more things, a room a day or there abouts. Can’t say I enjoy packing, but tomorrow it will all be worth it for thats when we move in! WooHoo! Its been a long wait.

Upgraded WordPress

Thu, 24 Apr 2008 15:10:28 +0000

Well I decided to update the blogging software that I use – WordPress, to the latest version. I guess that I will be trying to sort out problems for a while ;-) It does seem more responsive – but it has messed up a few things.

16 days to the new apartment

Wed, 23 Apr 2008 15:15:13 +0000

So we have 16 more days to go before we move in to the new apartment and the wait is getting frustrating – I want to be in already. I think what is frustrating is that we have all these ideas of what we want to do, but we can’t really finalise them until we have a good idea what everything looks like and in typical Swedish house buying style we haven’t seen the apartment for weeks now.

Data visualisation / visualization

Wed, 23 Apr 2008 11:51:32 +0000

This is a blog page to some data visualisation places for future reference:

http://www.tom-carden.co.uk/2008/04/16/data-visualisation-blogs-you-might-not-know-about/

I have also cut+pasted them in to the extended entry in case the blog goes down.

Moving moving moving

Mon, 21 Apr 2008 15:06:21 +0000

This weekend was a busy one, but strangely relaxing at the same time. Kristin and I hired a van, and took some things of hers from her apartment back to her home town of Karlstad roughly located between Stockholm and Oslo. In the new apartment we decided that a lot of her furniture was of the wrong period predating the apartment quite significantly so what we didn’t want we stored. It took about 3 and a half hours to drive there, not bad going in a van and we arrived at 1pm after spotting the odd Badger and Beaver along the way.

Looks like Django is really taking off

Fri, 18 Apr 2008 09:42:56 +0000

Since the introduction of Google’s appengine which includes support for some of Django’s code, and the template system there has been an incredible amount of press for Django. At the moment there is no backend support for AppEngine in Django (and DB2 support is still lacking – there was a blog post about a year ago but nothing seems to have happened since, and I would love to be proved wrong on that one) but it must only be a matter of time before this happens so for the moment you have to disable the ORM support.

Quick update

Mon, 14 Apr 2008 17:11:25 +0000

So, lots of thing have been doing on lately and I have been rather remiss in updating this old blog, I suppose getting things done takes a precedence over writing about things that are happening at the moment.. So a couple of weeks ago my Mother came to visit me in Stockholm as I hadn’t seen her in ages, and it was a good way for her to see the town that I lived in, not having been to Sweden before.

Installing ffmpeg on OS X

Tue, 25 Mar 2008 09:38:17 +0000

This is a work in progress for installing ffmpeg on OSX by a custom compile This is another thing that I have needed to do and decided to put what I am doing in a blog post, I might need it in the future or it might be helpful for others. So firstly download LAME – this is needed for supporting MP3 audio files, such as those in FLV and also for vorbis support.

Django and URLS naming

Thu, 13 Mar 2008 18:51:20 +0000

Django URLs naming can be a pain sometimes, unless it is just me but an easy way to debug is to use Django’s shell and import urlresolvers: python manage.py shell >> from django.core.urlresolvers import reverse >> reverse(‘nameofurl’) If there are arguments in the URLS field (for instance passing in the slug): >> reverse(‘nameofurl’, ‘slug’) [/sourcecode] Then it should resolve the name to the URL path needed.

Microsofts WorldWide Telescope

Thu, 28 Feb 2008 11:12:54 +0000

This looks really awesome, Microsoft research have combined the feeds from satellites and telescopes all over to create a window into the universe. The Ted video will show more: There is more information on their website http://wwtelescope.com/ and release should be in spring time sometime.

Alessi Spring/Summer 2008

Fri, 22 Feb 2008 10:44:18 +0000

Alessi Spring/Summer 2008: “ Alessi have just released their Spring/Summer 2008 range. I’m liking the look of the Orientales collection above. ” (Via Made in ENGLAND by Gentlemen.)

Damn flu

Wed, 13 Feb 2008 15:41:25 +0000

Damn I wish this flu would go away, feel useless whilst me neck and head aches, my throat sore – enough to stop me from sleeping easily and this general muscle ache all over. Damn it.

Update from the weekend in Feb

Sun, 10 Feb 2008 11:50:28 +0000

So on Thursday we had done a little shopping and hungry as always we decided to go for some food and fate took us to Odenplan in Vasastan. We ended up going to a “sushi” bar called itamae located at Odengatan 62. I had been here before, but its worth visiting more than once, though to call it a sushi bar is in line with Stockholm’s bastardisation of the word (and Itamae means sushi chef) – its more of a wok/thai place I think and the food is really good and really cheap.

Johnny Chung Lee – Projects – Wii

Wed, 06 Feb 2008 17:19:11 +0000

I really like what Johnny Chung Lee Wii is doing with his projects on the Wii and the Wii controller. There are many good examples on his website with YouTube movies of tracking fingers, multipoint interactive whiteboard, head tracking and more… Discussion forums are over at .

No Country for Old Men.

Tue, 05 Feb 2008 18:09:13 +0000

Yesterday we saw the latest Coen Brothers film: No Country for Old Men and I must say that I liked it very much. Firstly the downsides; I am totally unsure about whether I liked or even got the ending at all. And thats about it for the downpoints – I think its probably the best movie the Coen Brothers have directed though not necessarily the most enjoyable. The acting was first rate, the dialogue was fantastic and I particularly liked Josh Brolin’s character.

Address book abbu backup import

Mon, 04 Feb 2008 17:54:40 +0000

Well it appears that Address book in Leopard has got a pretty nasty bug/feature with importing archived address book items. When I make large changes to my Address Book I have got into the habit of backing up, and with Plaxo and several other services and devices syncing off it I can often need it. Today somehow my address book contacts got really messed up and I thought “well lucky me I have backups from when it was last in good shape, so no problem, I will just import the backup”.

More bars and places in Stockholm – weekend update

Sat, 02 Feb 2008 13:50:50 +0000

So this weekend went to a few more places, after work I went to Belgobaren (Bryggargatan 12 just off Vasagatan), not the first time that I have been there but its a good place with an excellent range of Belgium beer and it was located very close to T-Centralen. Unfortunately the service that we got for food was non-existant so we left as it took 20 minutes to get just a menu, so I would recommend it for the excellent Kwak, Chimey or Duvel they have but I am not so sure about the food.

Low Key Stand

Fri, 01 Feb 2008 16:25:57 +0000

This looks like a really nice stand for Apple computers with an integral 4 port USB hub. Raising the display might also help usability because I feel the default position is slightly too low. You can get them from Macessity.

Good food but bad movie.

Fri, 01 Feb 2008 14:39:38 +0000

Last night we went out shopping, ended up buying something in Keihls store in Stockholm. As always the service was great and we found out that if you are not happy with a product you can take it back and exchange it for something different. Very unusual for a cosmetics company. After that we went to find some food, originally we thought about going to get some Tapas, but instead ended up around Rådmansgatan, and after a short walk decided to try Paladar de Cuba, Tegnérgatan 19 and I must say that we were quite impressed.

Whats happening to coding horror?

Thu, 31 Jan 2008 17:26:38 +0000

I have been a big fan of Jeff Atwood’s coding horror for some time now, its been one of the best tech blogs on the internet that I have found due to its excellent range of subjects and usually impartial commentary on matters related to the computing world. The last two articles however have seen a significant downturn in the quality and impartiality of articles, so much so that I feel like commenting here, and actually emailing Jeff (comments within articles are so many that one gets the impression that it would be a full time position to keep up with them all).

The shy Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook

Sun, 27 Jan 2008 10:33:58 +0000

Interesting article from Scoble about Mark Zuckerberg. I can’t help but feel that Facebook has had its time unless some radical changes happen, much like how some have got bored with MySpace and left it to the kids as their playground. The shy Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook: “breakfast” (Via Scobleizer – Microsoft Geek Blogger.)

MacHeist

Fri, 18 Jan 2008 17:50:34 +0000

Today I purchased the MacHeist bundle of OS X software. This will be available for the next 5 days and includes quite a few applications and gives a major saving on buying them alone for the amazingly cheap price of $49. On top of this it also gives money to charity. The included applications are: 1password – a password manager. I currently use KeepassX because its cross platform CoverSutra – a iTunes player Cha-Ching – A personal money organiser.

Sun aquires MySQL

Thu, 17 Jan 2008 14:02:45 +0000

News just in, Sun acquires MySQL. MySQL makes one of the most popular opensource database in the world and they have just acquired it for $1billion. More about it here: http://www.sun.com/aboutsun/pr/2008-01/sunflash.20080116.1.xml

Predictions for 2008

Thu, 17 Jan 2008 07:00:00 +0000

I don’t think its too late to provide some predictions for 2008, so here are mine. 3D Printers We are going to be seeing a lot more on the subject, although they have been out for a while I think this is going to be the year that we are going to be hearing alot more about 3D printers and 3D printing methods, and seeing a lot more things they can do.

NetNewsWire now free

Wed, 16 Jan 2008 08:50:04 +0000

One of my favourite applications and one of my most used applications on the Mac is NetNewsWire from Newsgator and it has been since I started using it. I have found it to be the best way to deal with Newsfeeds for me, the integration of browser, the ease of use and probably the way it syncs with its online counterpart has kept me away from other solutions. My first thoughts when I found out that it was now free was “I paid for that!

Ping Pong Door

Mon, 14 Jan 2008 16:17:08 +0000

Ping Pong Door What wonderfully playful idea this is – a door whose centre flips down to make a ping pong table in between the two rooms. Designed by Tobias Fraenzel, available soon. I would love to get one of these for the door inbetween my living room and dining room. (Via Made in ENGLAND by Gentlemen.)

Windows Mobile 6 MMS settings

Thu, 10 Jan 2008 13:55:08 +0000

I recently upgraded my phone, a HTC S620, to Windows Mobile 6 – the latest version supported on the HTC and had to reset up the device. Of course being Microsoft based it wasn’t all plain sailing and the one thing that I got stuck on was finding the settings for MMS servers. It wasn’t at all where you would expect it and after no help from the manual (still on Windows Mobile 5) I finally found the settings for MMS servers on Windows Mobile 6.

100 things that you didn’t know about 2007

Mon, 07 Jan 2008 14:03:34 +0000

For once BBC news comes up with something interesting, a list of 100 things that you didn’t know about 2007: http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/magazinemonitor/2008/01/100_things_we_didnt_know_last_3.shtml Some that I like include: Newcastle is the noisiest place in England. Only about half of China’s population can speak the national language, Mandarin. There is mobile phone reception from the summit of Mount Everest. Denmark is the happiest country in Europe; Italy the unhappiest. Cats can be police constables

Windows Mobile 6

Fri, 04 Jan 2008 16:36:44 +0000

I have finally got around to upgrading my HTC S620 phone to Windows Mobile 6 now that its a free upgrade from HTC. Of course I didn’t bother to backup the old SMS that I had on it, but ActiveSync took care of the contacts, calender, email etc with no problem. Now I have to go through the painful business of installing software on it. So here are my picks at the moment:

John Battelle’s Searchblog: Predictions 2008

Wed, 02 Jan 2008 15:06:51 +0000

This is quite interesting, though I had hoped that he would say Myspace would disappear. Heres hoping. John Battelle’s Searchblog: Predictions 2008: “This year I am going to organize my predictions by companies (just the big ones) and trends. I’m focusing on advertising and search markets and the largest companies in that space, as that seems to be what’s on our collective minds these days, and it’s what I seem to have focused on in the past, as I read through my past prediction posts.

Happy New Year

Wed, 02 Jan 2008 14:22:20 +0000

Now 2008 is upon us I have noticed that I really haven’t been giving this site the attention it deserves, particularly in the amount of updates, so hopefully I will get much more on top of things here than I did in 2007 but it does feel that I have been quite busy at work and in my personal life so here is a list of what I have been up to:

Fixing the screen backspace and delete key

Wed, 02 Jan 2008 13:58:15 +0000

When running screen sometimes there is a problem using the backspace or delete key and you get the dreaded “Wuff Wuff” message. Try editing ~/.bashrc And adding: alias screen='TERM=screen screen'

Japan

Mon, 10 Dec 2007 16:14:12 +0000

Seems ages since I last posted up and since then I have visited Japan. The main part of my stay was for InterBee tradeshow with Vizrt where I was showing some of the new integration work for Viz software and the Viz|Video Hub. The show was in an area called Chiba (Greater Tokyo Area of Honshū Island). Then after this I moved into Tokyo proper to have a few days off and see Tokyo.

Inquisitor on Leopard

Mon, 12 Nov 2007 09:24:19 +0000

Leopard ships with the latest version of Safari, and there has been much talk that Apple has disabled the use of 3rd party plugins which is bad news for fans of plugins such as the wonderful inquisitor. Well if you download the latest version of inquisitor and are still having problems, try deleting the Input Managers folder under ~/Library and then installing again.

Leopard – OS X 10.5

Fri, 09 Nov 2007 08:21:44 +0000

This has been probably blogged several million times now, but I am really enjoying the latest release of OS X – 10.5 also know as Leopard. Lots has been written about it including a really good review over at Arstechnica, but for me most of the downsides they note are ignorable. The 3D dock – I really don’t notice it in every day action anymore, it might be because I am using Quicksilver but its not so bad.

I give up – an essay on smoking

Fri, 09 Nov 2007 08:02:44 +0000

Stephen Fry posted this on his blog the other day, and well its a perfectly good tale of smoking. Really liking his blog. I Give Up A short blessay on addiction. Have I an ‘addictive personality?’ Am I an addiction addict? Is there some gene in me that predisposes me to dependency? Did I inherit a demonstrable physical tendency or was it a character flaw? Am I simply weak? Weak-willed, self-indulgent, lacking in character, moral fibre, decency, strength of mind, honesty and courage?

Wow. Nice Y-3s

Fri, 19 Oct 2007 10:28:36 +0000

These have been out for a while now, but I think I am love.. Y-3 Haciendas, only in a run of 250 pairs for the price of 345GBP. More info over at Josh Spear and creative review.

Creative work environments

Tue, 04 Sep 2007 12:51:06 +0000

I am going to have to take a closer look at this sometime, but these offices look really nice. http://www.thecoolhunter.net/design/CREATIVE-WORK-ENVIRONMENTS—Do-you-work-in-one-/ Off to Amsterdam this afternoon. Expect more pictures ;-)

Back from Beijing

Tue, 28 Aug 2007 19:26:12 +0000

So I have just got back from Beijing and it was really good. They seemed to clear up the pollution whilst I was there, going from a nasty cloudy mess to bright blue skies – helped by some rain on the last day. I got some time to experience some more of Beijing at night, eating Scorpions, Centipedes and Snake (don’t try Centipede – it doesn’t taste so good and is twice the price of the other snacks) and I totally recommend trying Scorpion.

I found tilde!

Thu, 23 Aug 2007 04:56:23 +0000

Finally I have found the tilde on my Swedish Mac keyboard. Its hidden under Option-¨ What a stupid place to put it..

Some books I want to read

Fri, 17 Aug 2007 14:38:43 +0000

Well some links to books that I want to read ;-) http://800ceoread.com/blog/archives/007183.html “Competitive Strategy” by Michael Porter “Execution” by Larry Bossidy, Ram Charan, and Charles Burck “In Search of Excellence” by Tom Peters and Bob Waterman “Good to Great” by Jim Collins “The Effective Executive” by Peter Drucker http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0735605351/ “Software Estimation: Demystifying the Black Art” by Steve McConnell “The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable” I am sure this list will get longer…

Ubuntu 7.04 on Parallels

Fri, 10 Aug 2007 12:24:37 +0000

Just been installing Ubuntu 7.04 on Parallels for work, and its not as straight forward as it should be. Luckily there is a good tutorial over on simplyhelp.net.

Still not a number

Fri, 10 Aug 2007 12:14:07 +0000

Sweden, originally uploaded by timc3. So I have been back in Sweden almost a week now, but still no sign of my personal number. I went to the office about a month ago now, and all I can think of thats holding it back is that everyone in Sweden has been on holiday. The same as in Norway, it is popular to all go on vacation at the same time – what seems to be a mixture of making the most of the season with the best weather and also a hangover from old factory days.

Back to Stockholm

Wed, 01 Aug 2007 13:06:13 +0000

Kastellholmen – 249.jpg, originally uploaded by timc3. Going back to Stockholm in two days, I can hardly wait. It feels like a long time that I have been in Sweden and I hope I haven’t missed the whole Scandinavian summer!

Hangover remedies

Tue, 31 Jul 2007 12:10:52 +0000

Now I am sometimes unlucky enough to inflict upon myself a hangover – it seems to get worse with age, so here are some remedies and prevention techniques to try: http://www.healthmad.com/Health/Hangover-Prevention-and-Remedies.33307 Odds on that they don’t work but you might as well give them ago…

Three good things about Sydney

Mon, 30 Jul 2007 10:59:43 +0000

So whilst I have been here three things really stand out as the highlight of Sydney. The Asian food. I have had some really good Asian food here, whether its Japanese Ramen, Korean Octopus or simply Chinese noodles, it really puts Europe to shame – I have yet to have even a mediocre dish put in front of me. The place looks absolutely stunning, it really does have some fantastic views, skylines and buildings.

Petrol Meter

Sat, 28 Jul 2007 00:56:45 +0000

All over the world right now people are thinking about the price of Oil, mostly because it costs so much to run their big engined, wasteful cars and not because of any effect it will have on the environment. Most of the time these cars are accelerating quite fast, running not so frugally and generally polluting everything around them and adding to general problems of the earth. Of course hurting people in their wallets or purses will perhaps make users change, but what about if they could actually see how much money they are wasting?

Sydney!

Tue, 24 Jul 2007 21:14:33 +0000

Overlooking the office district, originally uploaded by timc3. I am in Sydney at the moment, mainly been working but we have a great view from our Vizrt Office overlooking the office district. Sydney is really beautiful, and although the locals think its cold – it really is the perfect temperature for an English Man! Take a look at http://www.flickr.com/people/timc3/ for more photos.

Django and OSX

Mon, 09 Jul 2007 21:56:23 +0000

Those who have been here before know that I am a big fan of the Django python webframework, and also a big fan of OS X. So I thought that I would install Django on my MacBook Pro. I did have it all installed on my G4 laptop, but I am going to be using it with at least two different databases on this machine. I am not going to give a complete, what I typed style install, just an overview because it is fairly easy.

WPF and MDI

Thu, 05 Jul 2007 20:46:07 +0000

Just been using Windows Presentation Foundation ( WPF ) to prototype an application that I am working on and althought Microsoft Expression Blend is a fantastic tool I am finding some frustrating limitations with WPF already. Chiefly amoung these is support for Multiple Document Interfaces or MDI. I was hoping to create an interface where I could open and close windows within an application ala Photoshop, After Effects, Director or any application in the last 10 years to do with media creation but Microsoft have decided, in their infinite wisdom, that MDI is a no no.

I was the bestman…

Tue, 03 Jul 2007 20:29:26 +0000

This weekend just gone I flew back to England as it was my cousins wedding and I had the honour of being his bestman. I must admit I was rather nervous – mainly because of the speech that English weddings dictate the bestman should do. But everything seemed to go really well. The wedding was really good, and it was great to see my family and lots of friends there and it was fantastic to see Eric and Ellie getting married.

upgraded wordpress

Tue, 03 Jul 2007 20:25:44 +0000

Just a quickone, but I have upgraded wordpress on this site to version 2.2.1 which should be the very latest. I had it stuck at a very old version before so it should operate better now, and also I should have all the latest bug fixes.

Singapore

Mon, 25 Jun 2007 08:22:39 +0000

My first update in ages, and its from Singapore. I have also recently been to Frankfurt and Berlin, but they are of course a little nearer than Singapore. I think this is the first time that I have been somewhere so humid, but I really enjoyed it here. Broadcast Asia 2007 seemed to go well, our main reason for coming here but we got a couple of evenings to sample the food – which was great, particularly the crab and the venison.

Will I have a problem getting an ID card?

Wed, 23 May 2007 12:54:05 +0000

It seems there is still alot of question around how easy it is to get the Swedish ID card for non-swedish people. As mentioned in this article, Everyone has the right to an ID card, the Swedish Cashier Service tightened its rules as of 1 January 2007 so that only those with Swedish family can not get an ID card. So there is to be an investigation, but the date with which they have to form a result is December 2007 – still a long way off!

Co-ordination number

Wed, 23 May 2007 12:35:42 +0000

On friday I got one step nearer to being properly registered in Sweden and that was getting my co-ordination number. This is a number that can be used by foreign citizens in Sweden for tax and other purposes when one doesn’t have a personal number. I got the number by sending off the form I recieved from Skattekontoret Uppsala to Skatteverket. This form I had to phone up for since I am a member of the EU.

Top 100 cities

Wed, 16 May 2007 10:14:57 +0000

This is quite an interesting list of the top 100 most livable cities for expats: http://bwnt.businessweek.com/interactive_reports/livable_cities_worldwide/ Stockholm is at number 20, which is at least up from London at position 39. Zurich tops it for the second year running though.

Getting a Swedish bank account..

Mon, 14 May 2007 10:30:07 +0000

So today I went to the Swedbank bank in Stockholm to see about getting a bank account, but this dream was rather short lived. It seems that there is a new law saying that I have to have a Swedish ID card to get the bank account. To get the Swedish Identity card, I need to get a Swedish Personal number and to get this have to have registered with the Tax office.

Copenhagen

Wed, 09 May 2007 10:48:56 +0000

DSC_0015.JPG, originally uploaded by timc3. So last weekend I went to Copenhagen and visited Simon and Mikaela. Its a short trip away from Stockholm, but the feel of the place was a bit different, more pubs and slightly greener from what I saw. We had fantastic weather, and it was nice to sit out in the sun and drink Carlsberg (even the water is Carlsberg there).

Start the paper work rolling

Thu, 26 Apr 2007 11:22:06 +0000

Yay! Today I got in my hand the contract from work which means that I can now go through the process of applying for swedish personal numbers, and registration to work. The personal number is a big deal in Sweden, everything is centered around it from healthcare, banking to video shops and applications. I like the fact that you register your address against it, then you only need to change it in one place all the companies are updated at once.

Full time Mac user – sort of

Wed, 25 Apr 2007 11:39:25 +0000

Anyone that has been on this site before will know that I have an affinity for Apple Macs, particularly their laptops. Since moving to Sweden I have now ditched windows machines – full time, almost! Actually one of the main reasons for getting the new MacBook Pro was that I could run, OSX, Windows XP (or Vista) and Linux/BSD on the same machine. Because of work Windows XP is a major requirement, our software mainly runs on it and a lot of development is done on it and after testing that it ran our OpenGL based VizArtist correctly I knew that it was the right machine to have with 2Gb of RAM of course.

Moved to Sweden

Tue, 27 Mar 2007 08:15:18 +0000

Well its been a long time since I have posted on this blog, and a lot has changed since that last post. Firstly the biggest change has been I have relocated to Stockholm which I am really excited about. So far its still my first week and I am currently on hold to the Swedish Migration Board trying to find out exactly what forms I need to send. I have moved into the centre of Stockholm about 10 minutes walk from Kungsgaten, and I am working for Ardendo a Vizrt company, working on integration projects.

Wiki as project management tool.

Sun, 19 Nov 2006 16:37:49 +0000

Using a Wiki as a project management tool is something that I have been thinking over quite alot recently. At work we do some project management using our internal Wiki, and its great for everyone else to be able to access it. But there is some nagging doubt in my head. Perhaps its because it requires self discipline to be able to work it properly, or that it we could be doing it better.

Debian to Ubuntu without reinstall

Sun, 19 Nov 2006 16:33:31 +0000

So still on this subject I decided that I would do some reading, and everything that I have seen points to the fact that its a bad idea. I upgraded a box from Ubuntu 6.06 to Ubuntu 6.10 last week to test the upgrading, and it really didn’t like it. This was a freshly installed desktop machine with no funny hardware so that is putting me off going from Debian to Ubuntu totally.

From Debian to Ubuntu

Wed, 15 Nov 2006 15:58:04 +0000

In the past I have gone from Linux distro to Linux distro, but almost always a result of taking a CD, and doing a completely fresh install. Its been the easiest way. But with my next upgrade I am going to cross from Debian to Ubuntu and keep all my files and information but have the OS do the hard work. As Ubuntu is based on Debian and use the same package management system I can do this, and reap the benefits of having all my linux boxes running on the same distro.

Zussaweb now with Newzbin IDs

Wed, 08 Nov 2006 16:57:28 +0000

The modification I made to zussaweb the PHP frontend to HellaNZB is now available in sourceforge for downloaded as a 0.3 release. They tidied it up abit, but I am glad it made it in after all the requests and emails that I got for this feature. Now perhaps I should integrate a Newzbin RSS feed!!

Mapping folders to drive letters

Tue, 07 Nov 2006 11:10:36 +0000

I needed to map a folder on Windows XP to a drive letter to emulate another machine, and looking around for an application that would do this I came across one that has been bundled with Windows since the DOS days: Subst This handy little util will map any folder to a free drive letter, fire up a cmd shell window and type: subst e: s:\myfolder</tt> This will map myfolder to the e:\ drive.

Firefox 2 is released

Wed, 25 Oct 2006 15:11:17 +0000

So firefox 2 the latest release from Mozilla is out to the public today, and so I am typing this to you from it. I think its looking good, though I am not sure what it is doing to the padding on the backend of WordPress. I am really liking the built in spell checker. Its a nice feature particularly when you spend a lot of time typing into websites.

Wakeonlan nforce and Ubuntu

Mon, 23 Oct 2006 19:18:59 +0000

So with my new Ubuntu server, I thought that I would shut it down everynight to save electricity, as it is taking about 100W constantly with all the harddrives spinning. I am using an NForce motherboard, and using wakeonlan to start it up remotely, or when needed. So heres how I did it: First I went into the motherboards BIOS and enabled all the power on lan settings, then I checked to see what the settings are on the box once it was booted.

Langalist

Tue, 17 Oct 2006 07:58:19 +0000

The excellent Langalist now has a blog up at http://www.langa.com/blog/ to compliment the always excellent email list. Today I am going to try out the X1 desktop indexed search tool that they recommended. For more information on that either check out langa blog or visit http://www.x1.com/download/ directly.

YUI and Camino

Sun, 15 Oct 2006 18:57:48 +0000

So I have been adding some AJAX goodness to the new site that I am building (all will be revealed soon after testing!) and after some help choosing a framework I decided upon Yahoo’s YUI. It helps that some others are already looking at this library, but I am so far having trouble with Camino. Camino is my favorite browser on the Mac by far, so of the niceness of the Gecko browsing engine along with better Mac integration but should I support it.

Zussaweb modifications for Newzbin

Fri, 13 Oct 2006 18:19:07 +0000

Today I modified Zussaweb, the PHP frontend to HellaNZB that I mentioned in a previous post. I like Zussaweb, but it was missing one crucial thing for me, and that was that it didn’t accept Newzbin ID’s which is about the quickest way to get a file from Newzbin’s listings. I therefore patched Zussaweb and put in the form. It only took 10 minutes including the testing, but now I have a great little program with most of things I liked about hellahella without the pain that went with it.

HellaNZB options and configuration

Fri, 13 Oct 2006 18:15:06 +0000

As regular readers know I am rather partial to a Usenet program called HellaNZB. Its basically a python application that deals with downloading archives from Usenet either being supplied with a NZB file or a newbin ID. After this is decodes, unrar’s, and pars the file if necessary. I have recently upgrade to a new server with alot of disk space (on RAID5) and I took the decision not to install HellaHella.

Really useful list of small linux howto’s

Wed, 11 Oct 2006 09:57:22 +0000

At first I didn’t see the point of the list, but its a nice example of how experienced users setup certain things such as group sharing and also how to do certain tasks. http://ftp1.sourceforge.net/souptonuts/How_to_Linux_and_Open_Source.txt

Django site comments and all!

Sun, 08 Oct 2006 15:25:00 +0000

I haven’t been posted that much here recently and thats because I have been doing other things and working on other sites. I have also built a new server for home, which will be detailed later, but first and foremost I am still playing with Django and build a site using it. I have had enough with doing WordPress sites, and although I do know it fairly well I wanted to write something a bit more tailored to the application.

Dreamhost backup plans

Sun, 08 Oct 2006 14:55:59 +0000

I have been looking at how I backup my data at home, and one thing that always comes to mind is how to get these backups of site, and preferrably into a different geographical area easily. Well Amazon S3 storage was always on my mind, but recently Dreamhost have gone crazy with their storage offerings. I know have over 400Gb of space with over 4Tb of transfer for a small outlay each month.

Is NetBSD in a bad way?

Fri, 06 Oct 2006 14:37:29 +0000

Well if this email from one of the founders and leaders of the NetBSD project and foundation it could be. http://mail-index.netbsd.org/netbsd-users/2006/08/30/0016.html From what he is saying is that participation in NetBSD is at an all time low, and contributors have no clear leader pushing development leading to stagnation in the project. Its interesting stuff particularly if you want to know why this project is failing and others succeding, but at the end of the day it is what businesses know all along – one strong leader to push and fight is always better than a committee of joint responsibility, why else would major corporations around the world work like this.

Joke of the day

Fri, 29 Sep 2006 15:08:05 +0000

A man flying in a hot air balloon realized he was lost. Reducing altitude, he spotted a man on the ground and descended to shouting range.. “Excuse me,” he shouted. “Can you help me? I promised my friend I would meet him a half hour ago, but I don’t know where I am.” The man below responded: “Yes. You are in a hot air balloon, hovering approximately 30 feet above this field.

Ubuntu with xgl and compiz

Mon, 25 Sep 2006 19:13:43 +0000

I installed xgl and compiz on top of Gnome running on my Ubuntu install the other day and it looks fantastic. Ubuntu was always the best looking desktop linux distro I have tried and believe me I have tried a fair few but it was always lacking the polish of OSX and XP/2003 but no longer I think. It really is a fantastic looking desktop environment, and the 3D graphics are really smooth on the NVidia 6800GT card I installed it on.

Nintendo Wii countdown has begun

Thu, 14 Sep 2006 18:57:37 +0000

In America and Japan at least. I haven’t yet heard when it is going to be arriving in Europe, but its going to be a 11th of November launch in America for $249 including the games to show off the new controller – tennis, bowling, boxing, golf to name but a few. Hope it gets here soon. Read engadgets overview of the press conference here : http://www.engadget.com/2006/09/14/live-at-nintendos-nyc-wii-press-conference/ Its only going to be in white in the US, with only one controller bundled, but the online service is looking good with such things as photo sharing and avatars built in.

DS Lite homebrew

Tue, 05 Sep 2006 18:37:19 +0000

So recently it was my birthday and I got a Nintendo DS Lite. Some say that I am too old for this kind of thing, but I recently found out that it could be modified to run some homebrew code quite easily, including Linux and I couldn’t help myself. My Xbox modifications have turned it into one of the best things I own, so I wanted to see what this does.

Norwegian public holidays

Mon, 28 Aug 2006 10:17:34 +0000

So I was wondering what days are public holidays in Norway, and it seems that most of them are up front in the year, the biggest being the national constitution day on the 17th of May. This is for 2006: New Years Day 01 January Palm Sunday 9 April Maundy Thursday 13 April Good Friday 14 April Easter Sunday 16 April Easter Monday 17 April Public holiday 01 May Constitution Day

Windows tips collection

Thu, 24 Aug 2006 06:04:14 +0000

Excellent post here with lots of tips and tricks to make Windows a better experience – or at least make it easier to live with it day to day. It includes: How to hack windows XP admin password Registry Hacking Increasing options in add/remove programs Automatically Kill Programs At Shutdown: Speeding Up Share Viewing Aspi

Goldeneye Source

Mon, 21 Aug 2006 17:09:11 +0000

Totally excited about this, almost as much as the upcoming Nintendo Wii. Its a Halflife/Counterstrike mod that acts like the old Nintendo N64 title Goldeneye which I have many memories of spending happy hours running around throughing bouncing bombs and more around. So much so that I went home and just downloaded Steam, and purchased Counterstrike Source so I could play it. Hows that for a impulse purchase!! - Well actually only $19.

Almost finished a site!

Sat, 12 Aug 2006 21:35:53 +0000

Along time ago I wrote a list of things that I need to complete, well I have managed to get one thing done on the list, and that was a site I was building for a friend. Its almost complete from his designs, though I have yet to get feedback. The site is in Norwegian, for a Norwegain company and it is: http://www.nord-vesteiendom.as/ Its a really simple site on the outside, showcasing new house builds, and all the import information will be uploaded in PDFs shortly.

LVM and RAID

Wed, 09 Aug 2006 09:57:11 +0000

With all the nice scripts I have been writing for usenet on linux, I am running out of space all the time on my file server. So soon, I am going to bite the bullet and upgrade my disks. Currently I am thinking of taking on of my machines which is a sempron, underclocking it and putting in some new disks. Firstly if I put in 3x320Gb Seagate barracudas I can use Linux to Raid-5 the 3 disks and use LVM to create a big partition that I can add to in the future.

Mollie Ballantine

Sun, 30 Jul 2006 19:14:04 +0000

Mollie Ballantine, originally uploaded by timc3. The newest member of our family Mollie Ballantine. She went to sleep as soon as she got to her new home, and being a Basset Hound I am sure its a pose that we will get used to! Shes so cute!

Creating with iLife

Thu, 27 Jul 2006 18:29:44 +0000

One of the things that I wanted to do when I came back from my holiday (vacation to those Americans) was to take all the footage and photos and put them in something more structured and what better way than to create a DVD with everything. This is how I did it (if you are reading this through RSS you might want to go to the site as the structure will be better).

Securing Debian

Thu, 27 Jul 2006 09:08:36 +0000

One thing I do when I have installed Debian is to tighten it down slightly. There are some great scripts to do this, such as bastille and also the securing debian howto but here is my top 10 lockdowns: Secure users home directories chmod -R 700 /home vi /etc/adduser.conf Disable all services not used and make sure that sshd is running on protocol2. Disable ftp (use ftpd-ssl or scp instead) and telnet (you should be using ssh)

Joining Debian to AD

Thu, 27 Jul 2006 08:20:35 +0000

These are some really good instructions to joining a Debian box to an Active Directory domain using winbind. http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/battista/documentation/winbind/ The only step it didn’t say was to create a directory under /home with the name of the AD domain that you are joining so that pam.d can create the user directory when a user logs on for the first time.

django with apache2

Wed, 26 Jul 2006 18:31:40 +0000

One thing that I feel is harder than it should be with django is getting it working with Apache2. Sure the built in webserver is nice for development, but there comes a time when you need to step up and use a webserver for development that you can also deploy the site upon. I have used Apache a lot in the past, but recently I have decided to move over to installing everything the Debian way, and this will reflect that.

hellahella on Apache 2

Sun, 16 Jul 2006 17:00:46 +0000

I have been using hellahella using paster serve and I must say the performance was terrible. I don’t think that it is mean’t to be run for any length of time which is at odds with hellahella, the web interface to hellanzb, which is. I have documented before that I am using hellanzb to manage my nzb files, and hellahella makes it even easier and with integration with http://www.newzbin.com it is even better (how about one click downloads, unrar, par, and ready to view – yes I have it!

What have I been doing

Sun, 16 Jul 2006 16:37:49 +0000

Well it seems to me like quite alot, so much so that I haven’t made much time to put updates in here so I will probably have more posts to follow this one when the time is right. But here is a quick list: Spring cleaning the house – better late than never I support Learning more about Django and getting it setup on 3 servers.. Setting up hellanzb in a daemon Setting up the hellahella interface in Apache.

Django setup

Tue, 11 Jul 2006 19:29:17 +0000

Over the last few days I have been playing with Django quite alot, installing it on a couple of machines and on Dreamhost. The Dreamhost configuration is now well documented by Jeff Croft in his post: http://www2.jeffcroft.com/2006/may/11/django-dreamhost/ and the on Dreamhost Wiki here: http://wiki.dreamhost.com/index.php/Django I did seem to use a few different settings on the file: django.fcgi: #!/usr/bin/env python import sys sys.path += ['/home/timc3/django/django_src'] sys.path += ['/home/timc3/django/django_projects'] from fcgi import WSGIServer from django.

SSH tricks

Fri, 07 Jul 2006 13:55:03 +0000

The article describes in a human language some of the powerful, yet very useful (even for total newbies) capabilities of OpenSSH, such as passwordless login, automatic execution of commands on a remote system or even mounting a remote folder using SSH. read more | digg story

Infrared Photo Gallery!

Wed, 05 Jul 2006 19:06:58 +0000

Seen this gallery a couple of times before but thought as I keep going back to it, why not blog it straight from Digg. He says in the comments field that he is using a Filter to get these images, and with a long exposure time it is possible with a Digital Camera, so I might be getting a Hoya R72 for my Nikon D50 quite soon! read more | digg story

Back from Holidays

Wed, 05 Jul 2006 18:58:36 +0000

DSC_0101, originally uploaded by timc3. Yay! We are finally back in Bergen after what seems a really long but good trip. Two Weddings, several flights, lots of friends and relatives and we are relaxing now in Sunny Bergen with a nice White Russian (for the record it does need Vodka!). I have put some photos up from the 1100 I took on flickr, and will be putting some more up at some point!

Interesting Django video

Thu, 15 Jun 2006 07:35:42 +0000

Nice hour long video on Django, from a google presentation here: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-70449010942275062 Worth watching if you are thinking about getting in to the Django framework.

Mona Lisa speaks

Thu, 01 Jun 2006 06:46:43 +0000

Scientists have put together the voice of Mona Lisa based upon her head height and hands from estimates of her overall height. More here: http://today.reuters.com/news/newsarticle.aspx

To Do list

Wed, 31 May 2006 22:03:03 +0000

Speaking about the To Do list, there actually seems to be quite a lot on there at the moment. So as a note to myself and in no particular order I need to build: Finish off our EveryMetric.com marketing site. This was something a group of us formed to fill a particular hole in the market place. All the backend and the framework is in place, we have some more work to do on the extranet and I need to finish off our marketing site.

Keeping the wheel – Norsk Test

Wed, 31 May 2006 21:18:52 +0000

I was thinking about redoing this in Django on it or something, but then I thought; what is the point of redoing this? Although it only took me 4 hours to build in the first place, there is not really much point in rebuilding something that works. So Norsk Test is back and still a multiple choice test that I was using to test myself on Norwegian words, either from Norwegian to English or English to Norwegian.

django and python

Mon, 29 May 2006 20:12:07 +0000

At Vizrt there is alot of python, and although I wish I could have jumped on the bandwagon and started messing around more with Ruby, I am enjoying working with python where the scripts are properly authored. So I was looking for a nice framework that would give me Rails style speed of prototyping web applications whilst using Python and after looking at the usual suspects (Turbogears, pylons, zope & plone) I am again playing around with Django again.

Feeds now working again.

Mon, 29 May 2006 19:54:48 +0000

My feeds should now be working again, after some time of activity. This was probably due to either the upgrade to WordPress 2.0.2, and not upgrading the plugin or changing back to the old theme. But the feeds should go to the very reliable feedburner now!

Growl network port

Sat, 27 May 2006 19:28:23 +0000

Been trying to find out what port growl was using, and I think that its UDP 9887. Growl, is a personal notification system for OSX.

Upgrade to WordPress 2.2

Sun, 21 May 2006 12:15:23 +0000

Well I did a quick upgrade yesterday to WordPress 2.2 after restoring this old theme back (not sure why I did that other one, but I looked at it again and though it was even more terrible than this one) but it looks like I forgot to put in the code for google analytics into the footer. I wondered why nothing was happening on the site! WordPress upgrading was easier that I first though after reading the upgrade instructions.

Carson Systems busy at it again

Sun, 21 May 2006 12:12:42 +0000

Ryan Carson (and if course Gillian) have been busy at work again, not only is he creating a new application he is blogging about it at http://www.barenakedapp.com/ and very interesting it is to. If you have ever wanted to see the process of what goes into building an application you can follow it all at the above. Personally I can’t wait to see how Amigo turns out. He also has an interesting article about using Digg as a marketing weapon over at 37 signals it seems to have sparked some interesting conversation!

Authentication systems

Fri, 19 May 2006 08:48:29 +0000

I have been thinking about this for a while, but I couldn’t see how a single person could build a trust system for sites that don’t need alot of authentication or security. Now it seems that Verisign are tackling the problem by creating OpenID as reported by Arstechnica . As they say, other companies have tried and failed, but I am hoping that it will provide a central, safe and non-intrusive way of sharing logins etc across sites that don’t require strong encryption for credit cards etc.

Removing files of certain date

Thu, 18 May 2006 08:15:08 +0000

To remove files depending on a certain date on Linux, Unix and OSX (and I presume using Cygwin on Windows) you can use the find command and get it to execute the rm command. find . -atime +1 -exec rm {} \; Will send all files in the current directory that are older than one day to the remove command. Its probably best to test it by looking at the files first:

Introducing Macbook

Tue, 16 May 2006 12:57:20 +0000

It is finally here!!! The new apple Mac Book, available in white and black with built in iSight and with intel core duo. It looks sweet in black but they are selling that at a premium which is probably not worth it. Here it is in white, with a 1.83Ghz Intel Core Duo chip, 60Gb HD, 512Mb Ram and a Combo drive it costs $1099. The specs for the next model up is 2.

Halo3

Wed, 10 May 2006 17:04:42 +0000

Damn I have always loved the Halo series, and now it looks like I am going to have to buy an Xbox 360 as Halo 3 has just been announced with a teaser video and slated for release in 2007. http://www.bungie.net/News/TopStory.aspx?link=Halo3Announcement And if you check out the videos, they have declared that everything is being rendered on the Xbox 360 in real time. The videos show some clue to the story line so watch closely.

Interview with Radia Perlman

Tue, 09 May 2006 18:36:59 +0000

Excellent interview by Network World with Radia Perlman who the also named one of the 20 most influential networking personalities of the last 20 years. She talks about Networks, her spanning tree protocol and what she is doing now including working at Sun on many projects including looking at networking and security. A most interesting Lady (though she doesn’t seem to want any treatment regarding her gender either). Also related is this entry on 20 people who changed the industry, of which she is one and 20 network-changing products in 20 years.

A list of Google tools

Tue, 09 May 2006 07:10:00 +0000

So I was looking for a way of creating site maps and I came across a google tool that I didn’t know that had been created, namely Google Sitemaps.

This got me thinking, actually how many tools are there by google, and what do they all do. Google sitesmaps could do any number of things (check out the blog at http://sitemaps.blogspot.com/), and how does it compare to google analytics? So I came up with a list:

Google Earth. A download that provides mapping streamed from Google to your computer. It supports both Mac and PCs, but requires a fast internet connection and uses satellite images with maps to display the Earth in pseudo 3D form.

Gmail. The google mail service, with huge storage, google style searching all in a web interface which has become extremely popular thanks to its referral signup process.

Google Groups. Search and find information on Usenet with google powered search.

http://www.google.com – Allows users to search the web, usenet and the web for images.

Google Maps. AJAX powered maps of the US, and some of the rest of the world in differing detail. Satellite images can also be used and it provides an API so that third parties can integrate.

http://news.google.com/. An aggregated news viewer with google search integrated. The news can be personalized to your taste with news from all over the world.

Google Scholar. Keep abreast of new research, literature and papers with this Beta service.

Google Sitemaps – Experiment in web crawling where you define your site, upload a map and let google crawl it.

Google Talk A google online chat client which integrates nicely with gmail.

Google Video Upload and share your video, and offer it for sale straight from the webpage. Videos are automatically thumbnailed and can be keyworded.

http://toolbar.google.com/ A toolbar offering extra features to your web browser such as auto form filling, spell check, search and notification of unsafe sites.

http://books.google.com/

Search inside books

http://desktop.google.com/ An application that runs on your desktop and indexs content such as files, emails so that you can quickly search and find information on your computer. It also integrates with google search so that you can search the internet and your computer at the same time.

http://directory.google.com/ A categorized directory of weblinks alot like the original yahoo site.

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/google blog site, where you can build your own blog and host it. Comes with many features and a well defined API for extension.

http://labs.google.com/ Googles own technology playground. All sorts of new and interesting bits are posted here.

http://www.google.com/notebook Google notebook, add notes and clipbook information while you are browsing the internet without leaving your browser with this browser extension.

http://www.google.com/coop Help others with finding information and create specialised search topics and subscribed links on specialised subjects.

http://www.google.com/trends Compare searches. i.e. Dogs vs Cats (looks like dogs are winning!).

And of courses there is:

http://moon.google.com/

answers.google.com

http://blogsearch.google.com/

http://pages.google.com/

https://adwords.google.com/select/

http://calendar.google.com/

http://pack.google.com/

http://finance.google.com/finance

http://froogle.google.com/

http://picasa.google.com/

http://code.google.com/

http://catalogs.google.com/

http://webaccelerator.google.com/

http://www.google.org/

http://www.googlealert.com/

http://sketchup.google.com/

http://www.google.com/intl/en/options/

http://www.googlestore.com/

Of course after putting together this list I find out that Wikipedia has an entry, in its own unique style, but I am going to update this in a while with information on each of those, I have used all of them. Then perhaps I will be looking at what Yahoo and Windows Live is doing…

Movies coming out

Wed, 03 May 2006 21:22:34 +0000

There are some excellent movies coming out, or at least they should be excellent if they live up to my expectations, and I don’t usually hold high hopes for films. First up Casino Royale: And secondly there is Superman returns which should be released in June:

China & India passing degrees fast

Sun, 23 Apr 2006 23:44:11 +0000

This is one to read later… Tech Crisis: China & India pass US in Engineering degrees: “While American youths study to head into law and finance, students in China and India are earning engineering degrees in droves and have passed the US in absolute numbers. If science and innovation drive the wealth and productivity of a society, we have a problem…”

The Cartoon Guide to.. Programming?

Sun, 23 Apr 2006 14:13:07 +0000

Great post on Coding horror, with links to some fantastic Cartoons by the legendary Larry Gonick. The Cartoon Guide to.. Programming?: “ I recently found a link to a series of Larry Gonick’s mathematical cartoons that were originally published in Discover magazine: Beauty and the Beasts (neural nets) Prime Time (cryptography) Proof Positive? (probabalistic proofs) Lumps, with Mother Nature (chaotic mixing) Speed (relativity) The Solution (traveling salesman’s problem) Filler Up!

Darknets

Sun, 23 Apr 2006 13:43:01 +0000

The whole darknet thing has been interesting me recently, not as a way of doing anything undercover, just more of the potential of running networks on top of networks and closed community creating new content. One post that really got me into it was that at: http://blogumentary.typepad.com/chuck/2006/03/mpaa_smackdown.html When Kori Bernards of the MPAA got many questions thrown at her about copyright, when the discussion should have been about Darknets. It goes a little way to show the passion that users have for buying content and using it in the ways they want not in the predefined ways that the middlemen think we should.

American spam slowing; Europe, Asia taking over

Sun, 23 Apr 2006 13:42:43 +0000

Interesting article on the growth of spam in other countries, particularly Asia. American spam slowing; Europe, Asia taking over: ” American spam slowing; Europe, Asia taking over 4/21/2006 11:20:01 AM, by Anders Bylund The most recent global spam study conducted by Sophos shows China closing in on the US when it comes to relaying spam, and the Asian markets together have put some distance between itself and former spam leader North America.

Going to Las Vegas

Wed, 19 Apr 2006 18:38:43 +0000

Yepp my second time to crazyville, again for NAB, this time NAB 2006 with Vizrt as we have a rather large stand there in the main conference centre showing off our production pipeline. We will of course be showing off all our products, plus how we have a whole televisual pipeline from asset creation, storage, and publishing to multiple devices at once such as HD television to 3G phones.

XP’s Little-Known ‘Rebuild’ Command

Tue, 18 Apr 2006 10:03:47 +0000

This is the Digg description “Have you ever run into a “Missing HAL.DLL,” “Invalid Boot.Ini,” or “Windows could not start…” message? That was when I learned about XP’s built-in “Rebuild” command. It often can easily fix “missing HAL,” “Invalid Boot.Ini,” “Windows could not start…” and similar problems in just a minute or two.” However this article also gives insight into not only rebuilding but pointers into streamlining installs and reinstalls and other areas users don’t often see with their Windows boxes until too late.

10 Best Designed Blogs

Tue, 18 Apr 2006 09:52:13 +0000

A list by someone (yes, I haven’t taken the time to look at who wrote the article) of some rather nicely designed blogs, but they all seem to have quite interesting content aswell which for me makes them worthy of blogging. read more | digg story

Mac OSX stuff

Tue, 11 Apr 2006 19:11:50 +0000

Just a couple of tricks, first updating the software. Apple has provided the commandline tool softwareupdate which can be used like this: softwareupdate -i -r To do installs and updates of the various OS specific and Apple software. Its not Ports, or even APT but its better than nothing I suppose. Another one that is often not known about is the built in, system wide spell checker. Check on the edit menu of alot of applications to see what the shortcut is.

NZB files

Tue, 11 Apr 2006 18:49:38 +0000

I’ve been looking for a way for ages on getting content down fast on to my Linux server, and the combination of a Giganews as my usenet server and my newly installed nzbperl scripts running mean I am getting there. I have setup two folders on the linux box, one that is a watch folder, looking all the time for new NZB files, and another with the results of the files.

New Theme

Thu, 06 Apr 2006 22:52:04 +0000

As you can see at the moment I am working on a new theme (CSS style) for this site. I was never happy with the old version, it never looked finished so I just started work on it yesterday and I already prefer it so I am going to leave it up for now. Work will carry on tomorrow evening. Can’t wait to get it finished and looking like it deserves.

Zabbix install

Thu, 06 Apr 2006 10:11:19 +0000

I had the need to check on the health of some PCs over time so I turned to my old faithful Zabbix to do some stats, put them into a MySQL database for recall at a later date. The Machines that I wanted to monitor are Windows XP and 2000 boxes, and perhaps the linux box that I am going to install this on, all of which zabbix supports by SNMP and running a small client daemon which reports to the Zabbix Daemon.

Putting Together a Budget DIY Lighting System

Mon, 03 Apr 2006 14:31:23 +0000

Interesting article on building a DIY budget photographic lighting system. Lighting is one of the most important aspects of photography, but can often be expensive. This article shows how a little creativity and hardware skills can go a long way, without breaking the bank! read more | digg story

thursday links

Thu, 30 Mar 2006 16:03:00 +0000

Some more links for this week that I need to catch up on in my spare time, with a slight transport theme for some reason: Wired News: World’s Most Expensive Cars, 2006: “ Of course it has the Bugatti Veyron in there. And if you are interested in cars, do a search for “Audi R10″ in google; A mad turbo diesel Le Man race car. And if you are really bored here some overloaded vehicles: http://www.

Possibly the world’s largest game collection. (Pics!)

Wed, 29 Mar 2006 10:53:14 +0000

This is quite an amazing feat, even if you are not into video games this collection is quite possibly the biggest in the world. I wish he commented a bit more though. Probably doesn’t get out much. read more | digg story

AskOxford

Thu, 23 Mar 2006 11:51:38 +0000

[]1: “” Nice site by Oxford English Dictionary, with some answers to frequently asked questions. I really think this is a great idea, and while wikipedia can answer a lot of our wants, a focused site like this still has plenty to offer, and in this case more so. They are openly asking for submissions so if you have a questions about English usage, origins of words or are just looking to settle an argument about English Language history look no further.

Petition – Public Geo Data

Mon, 20 Mar 2006 18:49:43 +0000

Great, as we have seen with some interesting US based mapping technologies recently opening up state-collected geographical data is in everyones interest. After all we paid for it to be done in the first place and so it should be available to all. Sign this petition: Petition – Public Geo Data:

NetNewsWire

Mon, 20 Mar 2006 18:26:47 +0000

Well NetNewsWire is definitely the best News (RSS) reader that I have used period, so I didn’t have much trouble coughing up the small amount that it cost to get a license for it. If it had the Camino HTML rendering engine built in it would be perfect. As I have written about before the fact that you can flag items that are of interest is excellent, and presents an easy way of coming back to content later, plus it has features that every other RSS reader would love to have whether on Mac or PC > Tabbed Browsing, Searching, Podcast, Smart lists, Bloglines syncing, Search engine subscriptions, scripting, HTML difference tracking, finding feeds that haven’t been updated in a long time.

Broken SATA connector

Mon, 20 Mar 2006 18:19:40 +0000

It looks like the SATA cable connector specification isnt up to much. At first I couldn’t believe it when it broke off with no force whatsoever, but after looking into it and a couple of google searches later it looks like it is a problem that can happen all too often. Luckily the really nice people at Hitachi storage are looking into it at the moment. The drive is a 400Gb Hitachi, one of the biggest they offer.

Odeo Mío

Mon, 20 Mar 2006 09:39:11 +0000

Friend, and one time radio collaborator Minusbaby has just got into Odeo. You need to check it out!! Odeo Mío: “My latest semi-obsession is ODEO . I made a channel. Vocal Intros and Breaks in Popular Music ‘I’m recording sections of songs and transcribing them. Voice(s) in a song which are without musical accompaniment and don’t reference the song they’re a part of harmonically, rhythmically or melodically. They’re just talking.’

LVM2 and adding disks

Sun, 19 Mar 2006 14:17:30 +0000

As part of my media server, one of the things that I need to be able to do is to add disks when I need them. I decided to run the server from an 80Gb drive that I had spare, but knew the first drive I would add would be a 400Gb SATA drive so I installed my debian system with LVM2 support. The latest kernel (2.6.8.15) has good SATA support for my Maxtor card, so I upgraded through debian and wanted to increase my /assets LVM logical drive.

Interesting…

Wed, 15 Mar 2006 13:21:38 +0000

There has been many interesting articles, products and discussions on the web in the past week and I have been cutting and pasting them into this blog entry. Seeing as they don’t seem to be stopping perhaps time to post them up. Amazon launches S3 – Simple Storage Service. At the moment its part of their AWS (Amazon Web Services) platform but it looks great. Its currently using SOAP and could take the crown from Google Drive, but more importantly opens up all sorts for nice web app mashups.

Linux – again

Sat, 11 Mar 2006 17:00:47 +0000

Well I have finally got fed up with copying media around my home network, and having movies, music and pictures located in so many different places on so many PCs I thought that I would create one machine that would hold everything. Of course this is running Debian 3.0 at the moment, and I am just installing all that is needed, but it looks like it is going to be a solid Samba install on a machine with a lot of space.

Tuesdays applications

Tue, 07 Mar 2006 07:28:41 +0000

Should have posted this ages ago. Been finding more applications that are really nice. Firstly WinZip is a pain in the backside so try out 7Zip. It handles many types of files. Adobe Reader is slow and also a complete pain try Foxit. For Mac I am currently trialling Ecto2 and MarsEdit for blogging purposes. I will blog how I get on. And I have switched my newsfeeds from my PC where I was using FeedDemon to the Mac where I tried Vienna, didn’t like it so went back to the old favourite – NetNewsWire.

Back from skiing

Tue, 07 Mar 2006 07:25:57 +0000

Hi all, I am back from Skiing in Norway now, so I have a bit more access to the internet than I did before. I am not sure of the phone charges when using my mobile to connect to the internet so I only used it to check my bank account and pay a couple of bills. The Mac and the phone work flawlessly together though so no complaints there, and the holiday was great – some really nice weather and some good skiing.

Technorati 100

Tue, 28 Feb 2006 21:19:33 +0000

Interesting post about the top 100 feeds this year compared to those of last year. It is interesting just to see who is in the top 100. A lot are really techie feeds which just goes to show the readership of RSS at the moment. http://www.tnl.net/blog/entry/Technorati_100_Here_Today_Gone_Tomorrow

Norway, home insurance

Mon, 27 Feb 2006 08:05:34 +0000

To follow on from my page and other posts about moving to Norway, I thought that I would just mention that I got some new home insurance the other day from DnB Nor, the largest Bank in Norway, as they have a deal which is cheap when you have internet banking with them. As they are one of the easiest banks to setup with when you are a non-norwegian this is probably quite relevant information.

RSS branding.

Fri, 24 Feb 2006 22:57:50 +0000

For quite a while now Robert Scoble has talking about supplying full content on RSS, and quite often the arguments boil down to a branding issue. After all you are not exactly driving people to your site with RSS, supplying them with your well prepared graphics, and giving them much experience outside of the comfort of their RSS reader. Or are you? When I was away from my RSS reader the other day (the excellent NetNewsWire) with five minutes to spare I was thinking, what sites shall I check.

pop3 server for osx

Thu, 23 Feb 2006 23:17:52 +0000

I need a pop3 server for osx for testing an application that I am thinking of building. I would like it small as in lightweight, osx switch on/switch offable and with little dependancies. Anyone know of one?

C’etait un Rendezvous

Thu, 23 Feb 2006 14:18:45 +0000

These students rock. C’etait un Rendezvous: “ In 1976, a Frenchman made a film called ‘C’etait un Rendezvous’ consisting solely of some guy driving a Ferrari really, really fast through the streets of Paris. The idea is that the guy wanted to meet his girlfriend (hence the title) and the film ends with him parking the car and getting out to meeting a pretty young thing on some hillside.

Democracy: a new platform for making and seeing TV on the net

Wed, 22 Feb 2006 18:40:14 +0000

Now this looks really cool. Democracy: a new platform for making and seeing TV on the net: “Cory Doctorow: A new suite of free and open tools let you watch TV, make TV, and recommend TV in a way that’s easier, cheaper and more accessible than ever before. Democracy is a new Internet TV viewer that combines RSS (so you can pull a ‘channel’ of programming), BitTorrent (so you can download TV from indie producers without gonking their site by sucking down all their bandwidth) and VLC, a multi-format player (so you can watch video no matter how it’s encoded).

Carson Workshop podcasts

Wed, 22 Feb 2006 15:27:58 +0000

There are some really excellent podcasts of The Future of Web Apps One day conference/summit hosted by Carson Workshops. Ryan Carson has really put together an excellent summit, pity being in Norway that I couldn’t go, but luckily for all of us he has made the podcasts available on the carson workshops website at: http://www.carsonworkshops.com/summit/ All are worth listening to I think, and there is something for everyone thats involved in development whether web based or not.

distellamap

Mon, 20 Feb 2006 19:54:45 +0000

Wow these are rather nice. distellamap: “Atari 2600 code operations rendered as art. So awesome. via Coudal.” (Via What Do I Know – Enjoying.)

Skiing after work

Mon, 20 Feb 2006 19:22:38 +0000

I went skiing after work on Friday night, took about an hour to get the slopes from Bergen and although the slope was dark it was extremely well lit. In fact it was in some ways better than in the day – very clear to see what lay ahead. I think its great that one can get down to the slopes and ski where as I used to go down the pub and have a few too many drinks!

Follow the blue ball

Sat, 18 Feb 2006 17:53:54 +0000

Just spent ages looking at this little blue ball going around the screen! Its one big 500px x 500px repeating animated gif. http://blueballfixed.ytmnd.com/ Some people just have too much time on their hands.

New Blog MusicTech.

Wed, 15 Feb 2006 17:35:23 +0000

Well timc3.com keeps expanding, not sure whether it is getting any better but it is expanding! This time I have added a new blog called MusicTech to talk about music technology, synths, and any other cool pieces of kit that I come across. I have been wanting to blog about this for ages but until now I have refrained as I didn’t want to clutter up this site anymore that it already is – after all it is holding both my personal information and my techie stuff at the same time as commenting on what is happening with my move to Bergen.

Registering with the Police Station

Wed, 15 Feb 2006 17:16:59 +0000

Today I went down and took my employment contract into the Police Station. Apparently this will make the application for staying in Norway that much smoother that I had to mention it here. Still not sure how long it is going to take before I get my number and confirmation but at least I know that they are looking at my application!

Todays links

Wed, 15 Feb 2006 09:08:41 +0000

Just going to post up todays interesting links from my blogroll so I can check them out later! OSX 10.4.4 Security broken Whats wrong with blogs How to scale video to HDTV New Windows Spyware software How long have you got test

300 Hours of Norwegian

Tue, 14 Feb 2006 16:18:15 +0000

This doesn’t seem to be common knowledge yet, but the Norwegian government in their quest for new rules and laws (not to mention new taxes!) has implemented a rule that everyone that comes to Norway after the 1st September 2005 will have to complete 300 hours of tuition if they want to stay permanently. Slight bit of information on the UDI site as well as more in Norwegian on the ImDi

Working!

Tue, 14 Feb 2006 15:56:49 +0000

Well I have been really busy working at Vizrt, getting to know the systems, and getting to know python and a damn horrible Java website. Python is really nice, been running through the tutorials at home, looking at this Django framework for websites which I might write my music site in, if I can get it to run properly on Dreamhost. Django doesn’t have the AJAX support built in yet, but otherwise it is fairly close to what Rails is doing to Ruby.

SSH on a windows server

Tue, 07 Feb 2006 13:17:04 +0000

Running an SSH server on windows can be very advantageous particularly when the server has Cygwin running on it. Luckily if you are running Cygwin, it is very easy to start up your own SSH service and run it as a service. Follow the instructions here. I am currently using it on Windows XP, where it doesnt need quite so many details when it is setting it self up so just check out the ones you need on the instructions.

VMWare free version

Fri, 03 Feb 2006 08:20:42 +0000

Just read on the register that VMWare is going to offer a free version of its server product. There is no mention of this on their site yet unless they are talking about the VMWare Player which can be used to host VMware / Microsoft and Symantic virtual PC sessions. I am really interested to see where they go with this. For instance at home it would make for a really good test system and its a good competitor to Xen running on Linux.

DeMudi

Thu, 02 Feb 2006 20:45:21 +0000

Well the posts have been slowing down again, probably because I started at Vizrt this Monday, all going well so far. Will probably post more stuff regarding that when I am more settled. Anyways, before I moved to Bergen I was looking through my cupboards getting rid if excess so that I didn’t have to take unwanted items when I found that I basically had enough bits of computer to build a complete new one.

Job at Vizrt!

Fri, 27 Jan 2006 19:30:57 +0000

Today I accepted an offer for a position at Vizrt, which I am very excited about. The company is a fast growing dynamic company with extremely interesting products in the broadcast graphics arena. Their client list is second to none including TV2, BBC, ITN, Fox, CNN, and the product set seems excellent. I am looking forward to starting on Monday.

DSC05189_edited

Thu, 26 Jan 2006 19:19:56 +0000

DSC05189_edited, originally uploaded by timc3. Been working on this postcard for a while now and finally its complete. Started off in Illustrator 10 (yepp no autotrace for me – it was all hand done apart from the cake where I took a profile in to Flash) and then finished off in Photoshop CS2. Photoshop was used to compile the background mostly, and make sure the colour was to the printers request.

Buy this book

Wed, 11 Jan 2006 21:53:09 +0000

Fantastic book created by a fellow humhumer for his son, but luckily for us he printed another 999 copies. he detailed the process here: http://www.secretcreatures.com/archives/dukes-ramblings/book-publishing-advice/ If you wish to buy it for the reasonable sum of $20 please go to http://steamcrow.com/shop/index.php?main_page=product_info&products_id=42

Joomla

Tue, 10 Jan 2006 19:29:46 +0000

Been messing around with Joomla, and so far I am really impressed. I must admit one of the features that I am looking forward to implementing is WordPress in Joomla – best of both worlds perhaps? I am not sure, as I haven’t installed it yet, but one of the resources I found interesting seems to have disappeared: a tutorial on setting up a Joomla template, luckily I have managed to rescue it out of googles cache.

Started skole!

Mon, 09 Jan 2006 15:56:13 +0000

Today I started Norwegian classes at Nygård school in Bergen, doing the morning classes 8:30 till 12:00 with 30 minutes break. Damn that feels early! If you want to join you have to go along to the school between 1pm and 3pm 5 days a week on the 4th Floor to get registered on to the waiting list. I was lucky and joined the next day – today. Basically there are different prices for differing lessons so it is best to ask for a months price, and because I have registered with the police and I am in Samboir when my number comes through from the Police this should be covered, otherwise you have to pay this.

TweakBench

Sat, 07 Jan 2006 16:31:31 +0000

Wow! I have been testing out quite a few plugins for cubase recently, to complement my established synths and effects and I am loving the Tweakbench VST effects and VSTi’s go download some now:

Tim on Ice

Sat, 07 Jan 2006 02:22:54 +0000

This year I want to upload and create more video from my digital camera so starting with this post is the first, and hopefully not the last of my video blog uploads. I am just going to create them on my Sony DSC-V1 camera for now, using the default MPG encoding. So here is me on a frozen lake, click on the picture to play.

WordPress 2

Sat, 07 Jan 2006 00:31:55 +0000

Yes, its finally here, WordPress 2. I am currently using WordPress 1.5 on this blog and 2 other sites I have developed so I am not going to upgrade for a while on those 2 sites because they are working very well, but I might test with this blog – well perhaps after just doing some upgrades that I have been planning for a while. Here are some of the new features:

Norsk TV, VoIP & Internet

Thu, 05 Jan 2006 17:16:57 +0000

When we moved into our flat we where lucky, the owner had supplied a satellite TV box, and the previous occupants had left their card in there for Canal Digital. As an Englishmen I was able to get my favourite BBC programs through BBC Prime (an international channel from the BBC), BBC World news, BBC Food (really good) and english programming on Discovery and a couple of other channels. Of course being satellite I also had approx.

Stardust.tv

Thu, 05 Jan 2006 16:50:42 +0000

Just reading through my RSS feeds, and somehow I came across a online store that Joshua Davies was working on, now I know quite a lot of his work but this site was full of errors and badly formatted HTML and images – not up to what I was expecting, but luckily I came across stardust.tv a really nice fresh flash site promoting this L.A and NYC based motion graphics company.

Ruby

Wed, 04 Jan 2006 08:54:43 +0000

Ruby and Ruby on Rails is the language of the moment it seems, getting good press from all those that try it and even converting .net users. I admire the evanglism for a small budget, nowhere near that of .net for example Ruby and Rails have produced videos showing the ease in producing a blog in 15 minutes, a wiki, shown some high profile applications, made the most hyped web technology (AJAX) of 2005 easier and much more – for 2005⁄2006 very uptodate ways of marketing rails and ruby have been produced and got quite a lot of developers interested in the technology.

Happy New Year

Tue, 03 Jan 2006 13:51:57 +0000

Horse on ice, originally uploaded by timc3. Happy New year from Norway, we took this photo just after coming back from skiing near Voss.

Thar Desert

Fri, 23 Dec 2005 08:45:27 +0000

Thar Desert, originally uploaded by ellieandeza. Eric and Ellie look like they are having fun with travelling, though they look dressed more for the cold than a desert.

Norway BigMac test

Thu, 22 Dec 2005 15:19:22 +0000

So, despite the slight hangover, I ventured out into Bergen town today. Luckily unlike the day before where I was drenched in torrential rain, I was greeted with a grey but fresh day, hoping to get some bargins for Christmas that was until my usual Bergen shopping syndrome set in. I don’t know what it is about me or Bergen but I can’t stand shopping here and I can’t for the life of me figure out why.

December morning

Wed, 21 Dec 2005 01:31:41 +0000

December morning, originally uploaded by -Kj.. Another picture of Bergen in the snow.

Bergen 3rd snow

Sun, 18 Dec 2005 22:22:03 +0000

Bergen, originally uploaded by Jarle W.. Over the last few days we have had the 3rd and best snowfall yet in Bergen. Our Christmas tree is up and looking great (along with Mathildes Christmas tree in our hall way – making 2!), our Christmas lights and decorations. Everything is looking very cosy here. :-)

Widgets

Sat, 17 Dec 2005 12:11:16 +0000

Just found a really useful widget – the WordPressDash widget, lets me post up to a word press blog from the OSX dashboard which I am alittle happier to say I am actually find use for as a good place to write down notes. And now that I am back from Førde I can begin posting more!

I am in Førde

Wed, 14 Dec 2005 20:26:24 +0000

Yes, I haven’t been posting very much recently as I am in Førde, Norway, at the moment. For those that don’t know Førde is situated north of Bergen where my girlfriend is performing in a Play at the Sogn og Fjordane teater. As I am without an internet connection I don’t have the opportunity to post much (and get out of being in the cold grey outdoors of Førde but needless to say that everything else in the world of the Net seems to be going on without me.

Moving to Norway

Sat, 10 Dec 2005 01:02:30 +0000

Well I have had this post about Moving to Norway for a while now and I thought that it deserved its own page so I have moved the content and added some new ones. **Please visit [http://blog.timc3.com/moving-to-norway/ ]1 to read more.**

RFID in phones

Wed, 07 Dec 2005 19:33:22 +0000

I’ve been interested in RFID for along time now as it presents amazing possbilities both good and bad once some of its problems are sorted out (such as IDing alot of goods at once, range, personal rights issues) and there are some interesting developments going on particularly in the retail space. Well things are set to get more interesting with RFID being put into phones, such as the Nokia prototype being beta tested by Mook that shows off what a difference it can make to usability.

Camino

Tue, 06 Dec 2005 14:52:56 +0000

Well I have used Firefox for ages now, and although it is my preferred browser on Linux and Windows, for Mac it is less than ideal. As I have previously noted Mac users are used to their usual way of working, and although somethings could be improved, such as adding decent package management (the fink project goes someways to rectifying the situation – but one has to ask why this wasn’t included as standard) others are quite well thought out.

Firefox 1.5 is out

Wed, 30 Nov 2005 01:18:51 +0000

Yes, Mozilla Firefox 1.5 is now out! Ready for download, though the spreadfirefox.com site is down ready for the launch of Firefox Flicks. I just beta tested Firefox flicks, and it is basically really going to cause a lot of noise on the blogsphere. Personally it ran really badly on my G4 Laptop – but then many of Flash Apps do. Its going to be interesting to see what gets posted up on that site, particularly when you have things like http://www.

New Firefox

Tue, 29 Nov 2005 17:20:09 +0000

The new Firefox browser is almost with us, and I have signed up as a last minute Beta tester. As soon as the browser is out, and it should be followed by a new video marketing compaign, which I can’t wait to see – I am sure there will be main opensourced versions of it to come. As soon as it is up I will post again.

A walk in Bergen

Mon, 28 Nov 2005 16:45:10 +0000

A walk in Bergen, originally uploaded by timc3. Just been for a walk along a path in Bergen, its about -1C and its been snowing at night.

Fireworks over Bergen

Sun, 27 Nov 2005 17:21:55 +0000

Fireworks over Bergen, originally uploaded by Espen Lodden. Another excellent picture of the fireworks over Bergen

Fyrverkeri,lysfest Bergen

Sun, 27 Nov 2005 17:20:05 +0000

Fyrverkeri,lysfest Bergen Originally uploaded by Jarle W.. Great Fireworks last night in Bergen, pity I was in and missed them! Next time perhaps then..

Flickr

Sun, 27 Nov 2005 17:04:20 +0000

This is a test post from , a fancy photo sharing thing.

Google Blog and a 2.0 Checklist

Thu, 24 Nov 2005 16:53:23 +0000

Well six apart is talking about Google launching their new Blog Search engine. Why one can’t just use the normal search engine is beyond me, but as noted in the six apart post is that it can search by author and it gets its data from the XML feeds.. http://www.sixapart.com/pronet/weblog/2005/09/google_launches.html The search engine does seem to work, but thats to be expected of Google really. I wish they would stop bringing out new ways of controlling the market place and improve their offerings though.

Bergen

Wed, 23 Nov 2005 20:36:42 +0000

Well I have moved to Bergen and as stated in an earlier post I was going to write about moving here, firstly the town itself. Bergen is the second largest city in Norway, a municipality, it used to be the capital (now Oslo), is situated on the west coast of Norway and has a population of about 240,000 people. It is a very old trading city, and some of the old buildings can still be seen, though the most famous Bryggen is from the early 18th Century.

New to Bergen

Wed, 23 Nov 2005 17:33:37 +0000

So are you new to Bergen? I have just joined a new yahoo group called newtobergen for any one that is new, and particularly I think none Norwegians, to Bergen and the surrounding area. http://groups.yahoo.com/group/newtobergen/ If this is you, go join!

New sites

Tue, 22 Nov 2005 13:01:24 +0000

Well I spent too long last night inbetween episodes of Rome looking at websites, because after 3 weeks being off I felt like I have forgotten the web. Theres alot of speak about Web 2.0 most of which later, but its just a stupid term (wasn’t web 2.0 e-commerce, or rather e-commerce becoming ecommerce?) but there are alot of really good sites doing things with APIs, merging and syndicating content, tagging, RSS + ATOM, colloboration etc.

Test post

Tue, 22 Nov 2005 12:02:32 +0000

I am doing 43 things.

Linking up

Mon, 21 Nov 2005 22:39:36 +0000

A friend of mine has been busy building a link site called http://www.lilisto.com which looks like a pretty neat bookmarks manager. But of course I have lost my password, so during the wait I checked out del.icio.us a bookmark tagging system that has been around for some time. I never bothered to put my bookmarks on until now because I have really started to use more than one computer at home – including a Mac with Camino.

Blog design and logo evolution

Mon, 21 Nov 2005 21:22:31 +0000

Just been looking over this design, and its clear to me that theres still a lot of work to do. One of the problems with going to a off the shelf blogging tool and then modding it is the that it takes a while to get to know everything and change it as needed. I have some time now to put in the effort – so you are going to see some changes around here.

New home in Norway, new blog version

Mon, 21 Nov 2005 16:04:46 +0000

Well finally I have moved this blog from testing into its real domain. It now mirrors more effectively the style of www.timc3.com but looking at it after a few weeks of having no internet connection I still see I have a lot of work to do. Moving from my own code base means that I don’t have to spend time on coding it anymore and should be able to get on with the content!

the M5

Tue, 25 Oct 2005 14:53:38 +0000

Not often I have linked to another site for the last 12 months, mostly because alot don’t grab me, but the execution of the M5 is top notch. It also features some old favourites such as The Designers Republic and MK12. Pity I don’t like the music though. The site is sponsered by of all people Coke Cola, some kind of exercise in branding which I think totally misses the spot – I am not going to buy more sugary drinks unless it infused with a high quota of ginger and pertains to come from Jamaica.

Installing MSDE on Windows XP

Fri, 21 Oct 2005 12:44:23 +0000

I was just installing MSDE 2000 release A on my local machine to do a little bit of pre-application testing and after downloading the 43Mb exe from http://www.microsoft.com/sql/msde/downloads/download.mspx and unzippin I ran setup and got the error: ” A strong SA Password required for security reasons. Please use SAPWD switch to supply the same………” To get around this, instead browse to where it has unzipped itself, and run it with the option:

Been Offline

Fri, 21 Oct 2005 11:11:21 +0000

Well I have been offline recently due to a router going bang, and then the back up cheap ADSL modem that I bought (a Speedtouch) doesn’t work properly with my Linux based firewall. So in the meantime I am just using this from the one PC – instead of using my powerbook to work on this blog. This gave me time to sort out my PC and Macs, upgrade, clean up the systems, install more into Subversion on the Mac.

Thunderbird Junk Filter

Tue, 04 Oct 2005 20:39:34 +0000

I’ve been using Thunderbird for a year or perhaps more now, and although I like it I have always been thinking that the Junk filter wasn’t working properly. Well it seems I over trained it. Everytime I got Junk email I pressed it, apparently this is not the way, and since clearing it out its been a lot better. Trouble is it is not perfect still. I am using AVG to filter for virus and trojans but now I am going to try POPfile.

Ex IE developer talks

Sat, 01 Oct 2005 22:32:24 +0000

Very interesting post on the blog of Ex-Internet Explorer UI Developer Scott Burkin about why he switched to Firefox. I don’t understand why people are still using IE at all anymore, but I guess there are just people that think its ok – the truth is it has had some security bugs, but they are fixed quickly, and they haven’t led anywhere yet. IEs integration into the OS worries me when using it aswell.

LiveSearch

Sat, 01 Oct 2005 21:36:19 +0000

Well one of the things that I wanted to implement on my V2. blog software was a live Ajax search preview, so instead I have adopted it into WordPress. I read all the code and stuff before googling to find that someone had actually read a tutorial, what they didn’t mention was that had an updated post with fixes for FireFox. Oh well it was easy following the instructions and it works well being served from DreamHost – I wondered whether having a shared server would have performance problems but it appears not.

Shining 2005

Sat, 01 Oct 2005 12:42:38 +0000

Done by “Rob” this is a remake of a classic. http://www.ps260.com/molly/SHINING%20FINAL.mov 95% of women tested didn’t get it.

Problems with iPod Nano

Sat, 01 Oct 2005 05:33:08 +0000

I haven’t posted anything about the Nano before, mainly because it came out whilst I was busy not posting but reported on the BBC site (its not like I read much iPod stuff elsewhere at the moment) here is there is a fault with the lovely little screen on a very small percentage. Lets hope they work it out as this is my favourite model they have yet to come up with, I love the thiness, portability and just the solid state nature of the thing.

MITs $100 laptop

Thu, 29 Sep 2005 21:41:05 +0000

I have grabbed this from a forum I frequent often, but it was too good not to post. It has been talked about before but according to beta.news.com.com the $100 is getting closer to launch. The reasons for creation are obvious, and the main one – bridging the poor rich information divide a good one, but its the design of the thing that really impresses and I think it even betters the design of Apples best products.

Moving the blog to WordPress continued

Thu, 29 Sep 2005 21:22:13 +0000

Well I am still on this tip, and the more that I am doing with it the more that I think its a good idea. Afterall, can I really spend the time I have at the moment reinventing the wheel, or instead getting ready for other things. So WordPress it is, and I have so far found the RSS import of past data really easy, particularly after making sure that the RSS was valid – watch those ampersands basically, which often means making sure they are correct in any links that you might have embedded into your site.

First test post

Sun, 25 Sep 2005 16:17:16 +0000

This is a test post to see what the new blog will perform like. I have imported all the entries from my old blog, which is still up and running for now – at least until I can get my CSS done! I think that I am going to make it more inline with timc3.com for the look and feel. Then of course I will just finish off my share and that should be it!

Subversion on Mac

Fri, 23 Sep 2005 08:59:34 +0000

I have just installed Subversion on my Apple Mac Powerbook laptop. I needed a system that would allow me to work on files on the road, and at home on my PC and transferring between the two was becoming a pain in the neck so installing Subversion on the Mac helps with a central storage place, a way of backing up all my media and also of course a versioning system so no more hundreds of files all over the place.

Test entry

Tue, 20 Sep 2005 04:30:35 +0000

Just testing with PHP5.

I am back

Wed, 03 Aug 2005 12:06:20 +0000

As you can see the blog is back. I have gone from hosting it on my own server to hosting it at dreamhost which I am very happy with. They offer alot of bandwidth and server space at a very reasonable price. I have also moved over timc3.com which I have completed as a portfolio piece and also Since leaving DigitalVision I have been travelling around Norway, and I am now working on some websites, one for a theatre company based in Norway and another for a motion graphics artist.

flickr

Wed, 15 Jun 2005 23:53:38 +0000

Well I actually did it, I signed up to flikr and put a few photos up there for good measure. Mainly just to have a look at the tagging system, as I still think it too damn slow. Every time that I go to see a friends photos on flickr they seem to take an age to view, but I am going to have to do something about my own hosting soon as I have a large number of photos now on http://share.

Server move

Mon, 30 May 2005 15:45:11 +0000

I am going to be moving the sites to a new server soon, and using my updated code. Apologies for any downtime, or lack of posts but I intend to be back up and running fully from the 30th June.

Whats going on

Mon, 23 May 2005 08:40:29 +0000

Well its been over a month since my last post and a lot has been going on. The main thing is that Digital Vision has been aquired by Getty Images for $165 million in cash. For the industry this is quite big news and for me, well it wasn’t a shock but it gives me an opportunity to go and do bigger and better things! I am looking into the idea of doing contract work.

Debian from DHCP to Static

Tue, 19 Apr 2005 14:54:17 +0000

All you have to do is edit /etc/network/interfaces and change: iface eth0 inet dhcp to: iface eth0 inet static address 10.10.10.2 netmask 255.255.255.0 network 10.10.10.0 broadcast 10.10.10.255 gateway 10.10.10.1 Of course it is possible to uninstall dhclient, but I wouldn’t advise it because it can be useful in the future.

Adobe and Macromedia

Mon, 18 Apr 2005 13:24:37 +0000

Adobe and Macromedia jointly announced today that Adobe is to acquire all Macromedia stocks for approx $3.4 billion. This will make them in effect a huge creative monopoly with Adobe getting all the nice frontend developer tools that they found so hard to make themselves. Apparently though, this merger will not happen until approved by the stock holders and government regulators for obvious reasons. For more information I recommend reading the Adobe FAQ:

Project Grizzly

Sun, 17 Apr 2005 22:46:00 +0000

I so want to see this: http://www.revolvergroup.com/grizzly/

Problems with Lilo

Sun, 17 Apr 2005 18:50:24 +0000

Went to use my Linux server the other day and it just would boot. After going through the usual tests, and the fact that it displayed “Li” on the screen I figured that it was a problem with Lilo. Luckly I had the rather cool System Rescue CD to hand which gives a full CD bootable Linux but unlike Knoppix it is aimed at sorting out problems. After mounting my problem disk (the root partition, checked by using fdisk /dev/hda) I could then start repairing Lilo.

Hectic

Tue, 05 Apr 2005 23:36:05 +0000

Well things have been getting hectic on my ass of late, so little going on for the postings, and the recoding of the site has slowed down somewhat – but of course not forgotten! The new functionality is look sweet. But I have still had time to see the following: Hitachi weird Animation improved Sound and picture! Google Video Blogging

So where do I live

Sat, 02 Apr 2005 11:36:53 +0000

About here: http://worldmap.humhum.be/user/timc3 Self congratulations goes to the fact that “Tim Child” brings me up at the top and not the creator of eighties kid program Knightmare. Now subconsciously did I just put in this entry to get higher up the rankings or not? I shall never know. Received my first DVD in the post from Tesco DVD rentals, if you look around hard enough then you can find 30 day free trials.

Google Gulp

Fri, 01 Apr 2005 13:59:49 +0000

Looks like Google are doing the same with their New Drink as they did with gmail – letting everyone else do the hardwork in getting one ;-) Already there are caps for sale on ebay.co.uk and I expect to see plenty more and plenty more stupid bids. Happy 1st April.

ClubLime

Mon, 28 Mar 2005 15:39:24 +0000

Just checking out the site – clublime of a fellow HumHumer, Emil Korngold, and found a couple of real Gems – http://www.abandonia.com – play old DOS based games, many to download. Just downloading Street Fighter 2 and Xenon 2 Megablast. Fantastic. And also a link to one of my favourite ADs at the moment, the Volkswagon video remix of Singing in the Rain for the new Golf Gti: http://image.guardian.co.uk/sys-video/Media/video/2005/01/27/golfgti.mov

Delivery

Mon, 28 Mar 2005 15:08:26 +0000

I am loving this short movie entitled “Delivery” by Till Nowak over at Framebox. Check it out: http://www.delivery.framebox.de/ Its worth the download of the Divx version

Debian SCSI & IDE

Mon, 28 Mar 2005 12:30:30 +0000

Had a small problem the other day ( No such device or address while trying to open /dev/sda1 ) as I was building a new machine that had not only IDE harddisks but also SCSI disks. The system was giving me errors from fdisk whilst trying to get to /dev/sda1 and the reason being was that it didn’t have the modules loaded at the time. Took the opportunity to install the latest kernel – 2.

PSP, Wipeout Pure and BBC news

Sun, 27 Mar 2005 23:02:54 +0000

Amazon have changed their delivery date on the Sony PSP to the 24th June, 2005, of course they are taking pre-orders up until then but it could of course be delayed even later. But whats the point? Perhaps some of the button bugs that have been talked about will be ironed out by then. If think I will be getting one just to carry on my almost forgotten obsession with WipeOut as WipeOut Pure is being launched at the same time.

Labradford

Sun, 27 Mar 2005 13:02:57 +0000

Currently listening to Fixed::Content by Labradford perfect for a sunday morning – or what would have been my Sunday morn if the clocks hadn’t gone forwards, utterly pointless idea I think.

Bit of an outage the otherday

Fri, 25 Mar 2005 19:49:46 +0000

So the site has been down for a couple of days whilst we sort out the air-con. Startd working on the new version of this site already, new framework that should approve the ability to update with new features as this version is still very much a collection of scripts rather than a complete blogging framework. I will post a list of the new features but if all goes well I will consider posting up the source code.

Sunny Saturday

Sat, 19 Mar 2005 22:21:25 +0000

Well the [sun]() has finally decided to make an showing in London to warm up the capital, and very nice it was too. Spent a nice day walking down The Thames and along Southbank taking in the views, the beach or what you can call a beach though I am sure the reclaim the beach parties are in aid of something and generally enjoying the weather before it takes a turn back to the norm.

Blog awards

Thu, 17 Mar 2005 08:51:51 +0000

The other day the winners of the 2005 Bloggies award were announced at sxsw and I think most of it was well deserved, though I am not sure about the more profereally be looked at – but then again I love Gizmodo as much as the next person. I am sure that if everyone had a sponser we could produce a better blog. Some of the others I read all the time and must admit the content is usually very good, these are the higlights for me:

Cool Colorization technique

Wed, 16 Mar 2005 13:05:51 +0000

This is very cool, putting borders of colour on to a black and white image or piece of motion footage this method can then colourise (english spelling?!) the image and it looks like it works really well. http://www.cs.huji.ac.il/~yweiss/Colorization/

Home made arcade machine

Tue, 15 Mar 2005 15:25:51 +0000

I have seen several of these over the years but this is perhaps the best that I have seen for a long time and it is also running from a Mac, go check it out: http://www.creativebastard.com/

Spike Jonze Adidas Ad

Sun, 13 Mar 2005 11:33:45 +0000

Recent posts have been alittle dry and techie recently so here is something a bit more creative, a new Spike Jonze Adidas Ad ad – very beautiful it is too. http://www.boardsmag.com/screeningroom/commercials/1586/

DNS and SPF

Sun, 13 Mar 2005 10:40:15 +0000

Just been updating my DNS for timc3.com as I ran a health check from DNS report a tool that I wish I knew about ages ago as it checks many things to do with the domain, the output looks like this and although there are still a couple of warnings this is down to my mail provider and not me! There are other tools that are useful over at DNS Stuff that are as useful as any over at SamSpade and would help in tracking down a problem.

Updated the image library

Wed, 09 Mar 2005 23:02:09 +0000

After installing GDLib to version 2 I have now been able to get thumbnails on share.timc3.com, which makes it much easier to browse to. Going to integrate the sites abit more in the future when I get the chance. If you like the browser be sure to get it at: http://editkid.com/EUWDPCpix/

Installing GD

Wed, 09 Mar 2005 22:57:53 +0000

You might have noticed that the server has been abit up and down of late, well thats because I have been upgrading Apache and PHP to the latest versions. At the same time I thought I would take advantage and upgrade GDlib to the latest version. And what a little nightmare that is, but I finally managed it. I –prefix everything to /usr and used this as my configuration: ./configure --prefix=/usr --with-png=/usr --with-freetype=/usr/lib --with-jpeg=/usr/lib --with-xpm=/usr

GDLib

Wed, 09 Mar 2005 09:20:09 +0000

Why can I never seem to find a download of GDLib when I need one? Well I am not sure if this is the ultimate place to get it but, it seems like a good start and the latest version as I write this is 2.0.33, and I am pleased to say that they have got Gif support back in since version 2.0.28. http://www.boutell.com/gd/ Looks like there are some other interesting resources in there.

Web interface Terminal Services

Fri, 04 Mar 2005 14:36:33 +0000

Had to reinstall this the other day due to a problem on the server, so in the end I installed a fresh copy of Windows 2003 server, implemented Terminal Services in the server configuration menu (can also be done from add/remove windows components) and pointed the licensing to the licensing server running on our Active Directory Domain cController. At this point, its good to do the windows update and get on with something else as Microsoft tries to patch itself in to semi-security!

Skype and Broadreach team up

Thu, 03 Mar 2005 11:17:36 +0000

Good news for those in the UK, Skype and Broadreach are teaming up for wireless free VOIP calls in the UK where ever the Broad Reach ReadytoTalk service is available. I have been testing out Skype on a HP iPaq 3715, and apart from not finding out where the microphone and speakers are it works really well. This will open the application of using this even further as it is already possible to phone outside lines through the skype out service.

Good windows scripting resource

Wed, 02 Mar 2005 18:48:55 +0000

Nice little resource on Windows Scripting for Logons: http://www.rlmueller.net/LogonScriptFAQ.htm

Putty update

Wed, 02 Mar 2005 12:39:53 +0000

There is a new update to the best SSH tools on Windows, Putty, available to download now. This fixes a security hole and if you need a ssh client or you are already using it you are advised to upgrade. Download here: http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/download.html Also glad to hear they are now using subversion for version control now.

Skype on PocketPC

Tue, 01 Mar 2005 13:19:26 +0000

I have recently been using Skype around the house, to make calls to friends on mobiles in the UK, to offices in the US and the only problems I got was trying to use it to call Norway, but I am sure this will get resolved at some point in time. I have a cheap headset bought from Ebuyer which is plugged into the motherboards built in sound card, leaving my other high quality cards plugged in for other duties.

l33t speak

Sat, 19 Feb 2005 22:56:33 +0000

This is a fantastic little offering from Microsoft: http://www.microsoft.com/athome/security/children/kidtalk.mspx

Carniv�le

Sat, 12 Feb 2005 21:21:13 +0000

Wow, this is a cool series. Brought to my notice by my friends over at [][1]http://humhum.be, and its utterly strange but very very good. Described as Twin Peaks for the Naughties it is almost on a par with the famous series. Check it out at http://www.hbocarnivaletarot.com/ and http://www.hbo.com/carnivale/ or buy it at: http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/B0006GVK0M/blogtimc3com-21

Installing fonts on to Linux box

Thu, 10 Feb 2005 16:02:58 +0000

I always forget how to do this, but here it is, the way to install fonts on Gnome. I am running Gnome 2 on Debian unstable: Open a Nautilus window by typing “fonts:///” Unpack your fontfiles if you need to and then drag them into this window It won’t show straight away but they will be there in your.fonts folder. Logging out and Logining in again will show up the fonts as needed.

New Google product

Wed, 09 Feb 2005 18:16:23 +0000

Yes, they don’t site around for long. Google maps is the latest and very nice it is too. Of course it is nothing mind blowing but then they have been working and buying some interesting things recently so hopefully it will be a case of more than its sum of parts. http://maps.google.com

Best review of the Mac Mini yet!

Fri, 04 Feb 2005 14:57:37 +0000

Fantastic review of the Mac mini, my favourite bit has to be: “So is the mini a maxi value? For me, clearly, no. When I consider that a good deal of my time is spent running applications like Disk Defragmenter, Scandisk, Norton AV, Windows Update and Ad-Aware–none of which are available for the Mac platform–it doesn’t make sense for me to “switch” to a Mac at this time.”

Photoshop scripting support

Wed, 02 Feb 2005 18:03:00 +0000

I have been a long time user ofAdobe Photoshop scripting support. Firstly with using Javascript, and VBScript and then going on to build programs that interact with Microsoft SQL Databases using Visual Basic. I was starting a new project and I am now using Photoshop CS which has the scripting built in now. A very welcome feature. I haven’t yet tested the backwards compatibility but I will be doing so soon.

Showing hidden devices in Windows XP

Fri, 28 Jan 2005 12:37:53 +0000

Useful little thing to know if you want to show all the hidden hardware on a Windows machine: http://episteme.arstechnica.com/eve/ubb.x?a=tpc&s=50009562&f=77909774&m=1400925745 Basically at a cmd prompt: set devmgr_show_nonpresent_devices=1 start devmgmt.msc Then in device manager “show hidden devices” under the view option. Edit for 2006: this is also useful for finding hidden devices.

How they started google

Thu, 27 Jan 2005 10:56:00 +0000

Interesting paper on Standford University site from Sergey Brin andLawrence Page or Larry Page as he is better know now, entitled: The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine. As I haven’t raed it all yet I am putting it up here as one to read, but I am sure that it makes interesting reading and so far has been a nice little eye opener. Of course it lead to the infamous google.

Upgraded my Home cinema abit

Tue, 25 Jan 2005 01:35:42 +0000

Just I made the plunge and finally upgraded some elements of the home cinema by the inclusion of firstly a Pioneer 575A DVD player which also plays back DVD-A, SACD, DVD-R/RW, CDR, Divx, jpg and mp3 files! It has progressive scan on component video outs and it plays very nicely to.Next up was the screen so I choose after many hours reading the forums over at AVForums a Panasonic PWD6. I am still waiting for the stand to arrive but so far I am very impressed with the performance of the screen particularly when driven from the component outputs of the 575A with progressive scan enabled.

Just started college again

Tue, 25 Jan 2005 01:21:32 +0000

At Morley College. More Norwegian classes, so I am probably going to do some more work on http://norsk.timc3.com sometime soon if I don’t upgrade the server somewhat.!

Giganews

Fri, 14 Jan 2005 22:02:21 +0000

Just got a Giganews account, and its very good indeed. I am impressed with the transfer speed which always manages to successfully max out my broadband connection. I like the fact that you can get a full searchable list of groups and that the retention is up to 50 days. I am using the great newsreactor news reader after trying newsbin, agent, outlook express and several others this was very simple and fast to use and has most of the features that I am looking for.

New products from Apple

Tue, 11 Jan 2005 21:43:40 +0000

Its that time of year when Apple brings out some of its more exciting products and I must admit they look great. First of is the Shuffle which looks fantastic. Its either 512Mb or 1Gb chewing gum sized music player and I think I am going to put my order in straight away! It just looks so cool and I love the fact that it just charges off a usb port of which most people have lots!

Give to the Tsunami appeal

Tue, 11 Jan 2005 21:31:45 +0000

The Tsunami in asia was one of the worst natural disasters to happen in recent times, and is unfortunetly only going to get worse even though the media will soon forget about it. Give help by donating to it here: http://www.oxfam.co.uk/what_you_can_do/give_to_oxfam/donate/asiaquake1204.htm If you have an amazon account you can also give through that, so don’t hesitate log in and give.

Lego Spiderman

Fri, 31 Dec 2004 14:59:59 +0000

Really good bit of animation on this http://playlist.yahoo.com/makeplaylist.dll?id=1277881&sdm=web&qtw=480&qt short made out of Lego.

Make Firefox faster

Wed, 22 Dec 2004 18:33:40 +0000

This can make a great difference on Firefox if you have broadband or faster http://devnulled.com/archives/2004/12/how_to_make_firefox_faster.php

To much time on your hands?

Sun, 19 Dec 2004 22:07:10 +0000

Then make a mini orange http://www.taiwankiss.com/board1/data/89162.html

StarWars Episode III trailer

Sat, 18 Dec 2004 15:03:10 +0000

The new trailer for STARWARS episode III is out now, and it looks fantastic – lots of Wookies, Darth Vader rising, Sabers – its got the lot. Its at http://www.starwars.com and heres some screen grabs:

Lots of Hitchcock films on TV

Sat, 18 Dec 2004 14:53:41 +0000

Just about to go on in a moment including the sublime1938 “The Lady Vanishes” and “39 Steps” Can’t wait! Of course I am getting all my TV listings from the much improved Radio Times website or the lovely CSS guide off Bleb. Enjoy.

Got rid of the excess of pictures

Thu, 16 Dec 2004 00:34:29 +0000

There seemed to be lots of pictures of just Ed from the phone which was weird so, I have just deleted them. Probably upload the others at some point!

Test from motorola phone

Thu, 09 Dec 2004 15:00:01 +0000

MobBlog:

New page to the family

Mon, 06 Dec 2004 22:32:18 +0000

In between everything else I have been doing I have been taken Norwegian lessons, but as per normal with most technical people I needed to work on my memory – remembering words seemed to be the hardest thing so I built my own multiple choice test system! I based it around the books that I am learning from – Klar for Norge, so it was applicable to my lessons, but also they seemed like a good base to anyone learning.

Playstation 3 processor out

Sun, 28 Nov 2004 12:47:19 +0000

Thought I would leave this until their was a decent review out and now there is by the great people over at Arstechnica. Love the fact that Arstechnica also has its own file extension, perhaps I might do the same on this blog. Perhaps not. Can see the problems with PCs that don’t know the extension… http://arstechnica.com/articles/paedia/cpu/cell-1.ars There is also more information over at IBM who jointly developed the processor with Toshiba and Sony, and who will also be bring out a workstation based on the Chip.

FireFox 1.0.1 Is out

Sun, 28 Nov 2004 12:42:36 +0000

New update to Mozilla Firefox is out with various bug fixes. The latest download also fixes some issues that users have been having upgrading so go ahead now if you didn’t want to be an early adopter!

I have a new mouse!

Sat, 20 Nov 2004 13:31:31 +0000

And I think it is fantastic. Although a normal mouse will do the job just fine, if you spend as much time as I do in front of a computer then your input devices are very important. I already had a fairly good mouse in the shape of a Microsoft Intellmouse Explorer. It wasn’t wireless, but it was optical, had the scroll wheel and enough buttons but I noticed that it wasn’t particularly precise.

Interview with FedEx logo designer

Sat, 20 Nov 2004 13:18:42 +0000

Really interesting interview with Lindon Leader; the designer of the FedEx logo, IMHO one of the best logo designs yet, and one that continues to cause much debate over the infamous hidden arrow.

FireFox 1.0 Released!!

Tue, 09 Nov 2004 10:45:00 +0000

Yes, the time has come, Mozilla has released Firefox 1.0 for download. The site is still abit slow at the moment but I am glad to see that it lives up to the hype. Now I just need to install it on all my machines and on my linux box.

Blockbuster DVD rental

Tue, 02 Nov 2004 23:50:30 +0000

Just saw the advert for blockbuster rent out films through the post (yes america have had this for a while) and thought that I would check it out, as somehow I am usually to lazy to take them back and posting would be so much easier. So I checked out there top films of 2003 – and I have seen every single one of them… Oh well back to work I suppose!

Playstation 2 Ad by Ben Dawkins

Sun, 31 Oct 2004 13:06:40 +0000

Another awesome clip put together by Ben Dawkins http://www.bendawkins.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/ps2_stork.html

Apache 2 with SSL

Sun, 31 Oct 2004 13:03:46 +0000

Couldn’t find any decent instructions for adding https to an apache2.0.52 server so I thought that I would write my own: Firstly get down the latest versions of openssl and apache into your src directory (not as root) wget http://www.openssl.org/source/openssl-0.9.7e.tar.gz wget http://www.mirror.ac.uk/mirror/ftp.apache.org/httpd/httpd-2.0.52.tar.bz2 First we have to make &install openssl: tar -xvzf openssl-0.9.7e.tar.gz cd openssl-0.9.7e ./config make make test su -c "make install" This will have made and install a base version of openssl in /usr/local/ssl You can put the bin subdirectory in your Path statement but as we don’t need it very often there is little point.

Updating the server

Sat, 30 Oct 2004 18:13:10 +0000

Well have been running on some old versions of apps now, so I have taken advantage of this saturday to upgrade PostgreSQL to the latest version: 7.2.6 – version 8 isn’t out yet, but then again this is really good enough for what I want to do with it!. I have also updated the apache on one of my box to the latest 2.0.52 release with OpenSSL support for some future projects on this box.

RIP John Peel

Tue, 26 Oct 2004 21:44:55 +0000

I am saddened to hear that John Peel, one of the most important figures in UK music died today from a heart attack in Peru. He will sadly missed. Read more about it here and leave your tribute: http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio1/news/altnews/041026_john_peel.shtml

Halo2 leaked

Sat, 16 Oct 2004 14:58:20 +0000

Yepp, Halo2 perhaps the most eagerly awaited game of all time has been leaked out onto the Net a month before its 9th November release date. There are different versions going around, but its mostly the european versions. News at IGN has more information here: http://xbox.ign.com/articles/557/557133p1.html aswell as the beeb http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/3743110.stm

Christopher Reeve

Mon, 11 Oct 2004 08:31:08 +0000

Actor Christopher Reeve died last night aged 52. He will be missed. Read more: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/film/3732310.stm

Interpolation software

Mon, 04 Oct 2004 08:46:54 +0000

So what to use to interpolate your photos, well I have been using Genuine Fractals Print Pro for many years now but there are a couple of newcomers on the market, with the surprise being Adobe Photoshop CS. Apparently, and I have yet to test, using “bicubic smoother” option when upsizing will give you excellent results within certain ranges. I wouldn’t use it for downsizing – “bicubic sharpening” being the favoured method still.

Usability labs

Tue, 28 Sep 2004 23:48:30 +0000

Today I went down to look at our digital vision web site being used by a couple of users in a usability lab hosted by flow interactive. I watched 2 users, both experienced with looking at royalty free stock photography, but one had heard about us and one hadn’t. It was extremely interesting seeing at which points they found it hard to decide where to go, but there where some similarities in the way that they wanted to use the site.

Slashdot hiring artists for Open Source Projects

Tue, 28 Sep 2004 12:57:49 +0000

The question of how is the best way to hire “artists to provide graphics, music, and other artwork for Open Source projects?” was posed the other day on http://slashdot.org well one was is to hunt them down on http://rentacoder.com or http://www.newstoday.com but very likely you will get all sorts, I would recommend nicely hunting down talent through online communities, artists blogs and websites http://ask.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/06/22/217250&mode=thread&tid=141&tid=152&tid=185&tid=188

Farm images

Tue, 28 Sep 2004 12:49:06 +0000

Just put up the images on the share.timc3.com site from the other weekend when I went down to Eric birthday. There are a couple more of the car, plus some good ones of the farm and friends.. Go check it out at: http://share.timc3.com/index.php?view=thumb&dir=thefarm2

iPaq 3715

Sun, 26 Sep 2004 00:10:57 +0000

At work this week I got hold of one of the latest HP iPaq’s to come out, the rx3715 model. This was my first iPaq (I have had a Palm a while ago, but it still didn’t have the features I needed), so it was interesting to get involved with some technology that I didn’t have much experience with The primary reason for getting it is to basically get myself organised, put in task lists, track projects and use a project management system and have wireless access to be able to get in to our systems in case of an emergency from anywhere

Running Debian full time

Mon, 20 Sep 2004 08:41:31 +0000

I have pretty much started using Debian full time as my main OS at work, and it is going quite well, I am using it with the Gnome GUI, and half the time Terminal Served into a windows box, but still I am love being back to use /bin/bash. At home I am still using Windows XP, but I install a 64Bit Athlon with a Gigabyte motherboard. All seems well, apart from the CD writer playing up, but I think that it might have been in cable select mode.

575M

Mon, 20 Sep 2004 08:36:09 +0000

Haven’t posted for a while, which is becoming a bad habit, but one of the reasons being getting over this beauty: As you can see it visually stunning, but the first thing that hits you is the smell of expensive Italian leather as you enter, then its how solid everything is as you pull off, the whole car feels like it is hewn out of lightweight metals, but really it is quite a heavy car, which is all the more amazing for the hit that the front engined V12 gives when it keeps accelerating, and accelerating, and accelerating.

The Branding of Polaroid

Fri, 10 Sep 2004 13:07:57 +0000

This is a really nice link that was posted up on humhum the other day, and adds to the other branding sites that I have put the other day: http://blog.timc3.com/item.php?entry=195 http://giam.typepad.com/the_branding_of_polaroid_/

Linux update

Fri, 10 Sep 2004 10:36:49 +0000

So I have started to use Linux as my main desktop at work. Well sort of, I have got MS Remote Desktop setup on my windows box so I can still access the applications that I NEED to run for work, namely – Microsoft Visio, Microsoft SourceSafe, Microsoft Visual Basic Studio, .Net Studio, and a couple of other bits and pieces. But running terminal services in t his way is actually quite good, and for the majority of the time its all I need.

iMac V3

Thu, 02 Sep 2004 10:28:03 +0000

The latest iMac has been announced and I think it looks quite lovely (and I wasn’t a big fan of either of the other versions). The specifications are very good, with G5 chip, 17″ or 20″ screens and the usual compliment of USB2, Firewire and digital audio connections. All in all, I think this makes it an excellent proposition for making music, particularly in keeping the number of wires down in the studio!

shhh…

Sun, 29 Aug 2004 12:50:01 +0000

Well yesterday was my Birthday and amoung other things we went to see shhh… at the V&A yesterday, and it was really quite good. Its an exploritive of music composed by various musicians with varying degrees of success. Of the highlights was Roots Manuva and a long time favourite of mine, Cornelius. Just walking around looking at the exhibits with music gave quite a different feel to the whole museum and I really recommend that even if you didn’t get to see this, take an iPod around and try and make your own soundtrack – the results are outstanding and sometimes felt like I was involved within a movie

Samba onto Windows Network

Wed, 25 Aug 2004 10:26:56 +0000

This is a really easy way of mounting a windows share on a debian box. It takes like 5 minutes to install and perhaps less to setup. First as root: Apt-get install samba Apt-get install smbfs Then try the following to get the server mounted: mount �t smbfs �o username=YOURWINDOWSUSER,password=YOURWINDOWSPASSWORD //SERVER/FILESHARE/YOURMOUNTPOINT

Debian Apt source

Tue, 24 Aug 2004 10:28:20 +0000

It appears that the apt source (the main uk debian mirror – ftp.uk.debian.org ) that I was using didn’t produce the full list when I was trying to install the software. Instead I used one of the others that you can get from this page (apt source list is basically the same as the mirror list) – http://www.uk.debian.org/mirror/list . I am just trying the http://debian.hands.com/ one at the moment, after manually editing the /etc/apt/sources.

Installing Debian unstable

Tue, 24 Aug 2004 09:43:38 +0000

Just been trying out the install to the latest unstable version of Debian (that is due to go to stable this september) and I must say that I am impressed. The old installer was alittle hard to use, even for those with Linux experience, but now it helps you along most of the way. I choose the net installer so I didn’t have to download Gb’s of Iso’s and let it get on its merry way, the only thing that was slightly confusing was the package chooser after I had choose to install custom packages (there are default options for web, file, print etc.

bjork now playing

Fri, 20 Aug 2004 11:19:25 +0000

Just going to play the new Bjork album, Medulla on humhum radio for a bit. Its the first time that I have listened to it aswell, but I have heard that it is good! Pleasure Is All Mine Show Me Forgiveness Where Is The Line? Vokuro Oll Birtan Who Is It Oceania Submarine Sonnets/Unrealities XI Desired Constellation Ancestors Mouths Cradle Mivikudags Triumph Of A Heart And if you like it, buy it: Bjork – Medulla.

Branding sites

Tue, 17 Aug 2004 12:20:46 +0000

Just a couple of branding sites that have been posted on the renascentfused board that I thought would be very useful for future reference. http://www.ge.com/brand/design_library http://www.cidoc.net/ http://users.ncrvnet.nl/mstol/57.htm I am particularly impressed with a corporate like General Electric putting their brand tools on a very public part of their site.

Live Search box

Wed, 21 Jul 2004 13:05:03 +0000

This is a very sweet bit of web building on the bifluf blog. A nice live search box: http://blog.bitflux.ch/p1740.html Very fast aswell.

Now playing!

Sat, 10 Jul 2004 12:52:46 +0000

For the next couple of hours, whilst doing some work, I am going to be playing some tunes on HumHum Radio so catch a listen if you can, I haven’t had alot of time to spend on it recently, but I am playing some jazz, blues, northern soul;

Bogdan

Thu, 08 Jul 2004 15:12:01 +0000

I said I awhile ago that I was going to be posting some sweet motion work, and things have been a bit busy, so I have been abit remiss in doing so, but here to make up for that is a link – http://www.bendawkins.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/bogdan_qt.html – there you go, to a nice little motion piece.

Booked flight

Thu, 08 Jul 2004 12:43:59 +0000

Just booked my flight to go to Bergen, Norway at the end of the month. I already knew that I could get a good deal by using norwegian.no as my girlfriend has been using them the last couple of times that she has flown over, but I thought that I would check out the competition aswell to see what they are doing as I don’t particularly like the branding or even the “open” in a new window aspect of http://www.

99Rooms

Thu, 08 Jul 2004 12:19:32 +0000

Excellent site, well worth spending 20 minutes on (something which can’t be said for most sites at the moment). It does require abit of investigating what you are doing, but it looks and sounds great. http://www.99rooms.com

Wireless anywhere?

Tue, 06 Jul 2004 16:47:24 +0000

Will Wireless become so prevalent that they will become just another commodity available worldwide, with free access to all? I think so…

New apple displays

Tue, 29 Jun 2004 20:43:23 +0000

I think we all knew that they where coming, and that they where going to bring out a 30 inch but they still shock as a stunning piece of technology that is beautiful to boot. The 30 inch is obviously massive, and sports a 2560 x 1600 resolution – enough for a full Final Cut Pro instance or well over a hundred logic channels. To achieve this is must be matched to an Nvidia 6800 Ultra DDL Graphics card – which is of course the new top of the range Nvidia GForce and a departure from ATI

I am back

Mon, 28 Jun 2004 12:52:14 +0000

Well, its been along time since the last post, since then I have been to Norway and back and had a great time. Got to see abit more of Norway as we borrowed a car and went for a trip to Hardangefjord, and stayed in a hotel in Lofthus with an amazing view. I have uploaded the photos onto my photo share at: http://share.timc3.com/index.php?view=thumb&dir=norway so that you can see them.

Mobile TV

Fri, 25 Jun 2004 00:04:48 +0000

As reported by BBC news, those uncannily up2date Norwegians have been trying out TV on their phones, using a Streaming download service from network NRK. I presume as the users don’t have to have a player that its running from a Java applet, though the Nokia phone pictured does have RealPlayer installed by default. So far the reported take up has been 2000 streams, which seems about right as although the countries new technology take up is high from what I gather from the last Norwegian dinner party I was invited to, its not always technology for technology sake that interests but purely gaining a better life for those involved.

Book recommendations

Thu, 24 Jun 2004 23:26:14 +0000

Been purchasing some new books and some secondhand bExpressions book from OReilly which I throughly recommend. And then I have order several books secondhand from http://www.alibris.com/ and they have been in excellent condition, and you can find some real bargins http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/redirect-home/blogtimc3com-21′ target=_blank

Useful info and techie site

Mon, 21 Jun 2004 10:41:03 +0000

Found this very useful site the other day that has some interesting articles including these: Windows XP AVI problems Compression Utilities Comparison Serial ATA guide In fact there are alot more interesting articles on there so go and checkout http://www.rojakpot.com

Openswan Network Traversal

Sun, 20 Jun 2004 17:51:20 +0000

A while ago I posted that I had managed to get a VPN between Checkpoint NG and a smoothwall personal firewall. This setup was a rather regular one, with Express 2.0 release of smoothwall and r54 checkpoint running on a Nokia with the latest security patches enabled. I’ve actually updated and had an even easier time with openswan on the same setup and for ease of administration through the Smoothwall web gui I installed the modification VPN pack 3.

Firefox 0.9

Wed, 16 Jun 2004 17:08:45 +0000

A new release of Mozilla Firefox, 0.9, has been released. If you feel like an early adopter and losing most of your extensions and plugins then go and download it. Its good, perhaps in some ways better than the old version but I am finding some display bugs though this could be down to my PC struggling. http://www.mozilla.org

gmail

Wed, 16 Jun 2004 14:19:21 +0000

woohoo! So someone was good enough to give me an invite, yes its still invite only, to set myself up on gmail so I now have the timchild at gmail address with 1Gb of space. First impressions, its very google like, very fast and very easy to use (unless their DNS servers go haywire and then I might as well post email). The next thing that I want to do is to import all my email from the last 10 years into here so I can nicely index and search on things (a feature that really works!

Internet Problems

Wed, 16 Jun 2004 14:11:18 +0000

So, you might have experienced some traffic outages or you couldn’t get to google, yahoo, microsoft or apple yesterday. As this: http://arstechnica.com/news/posts/1087311151.html arstechnica article explains it was down to Akamai having an outage with their DNS servers, and they provide the DNS for those and other sites as they are mean’t to be highly reliable. Apart from the good side effect that they mean that you might actually get on with something more productive instead of wasting countless hours on the web it just shows how fragile the DNS system and parts of the internet could be.

smoothwall

Tue, 15 Jun 2004 00:49:59 +0000

I really ought to remember how to do this, but I am upgrading my home firewall because I was running an older version of smoothwall and I forgot how to put the manual probing of the network card information in. For next time: ne io=0×220,0×300 irq=5,4 I must say that smoothwall is coming on leaps and bounds with each release and if you need a firewalling or sharing solution for your home no matter how much knowledge you have this is a great product.

dform1

Tue, 15 Jun 2004 00:45:07 +0000

As promised here is another great example of some motion content, this time from Anders Schroder. The piece is very simple and stylish and a great example of what can be done with a bit (or should I rather say, alot) of skill with some off the shelf tools. http://www.dform1.com/ Check out all the pieces and he has also done some work for Digital Vision aswell.

Stefan Sagmeister

Thu, 10 Jun 2004 16:59:49 +0000

In my small amount of spare time I have been catching some great web movies, so over the next couple of days I will be reporting on them! First up, Hillman Curtis has film a nice interview with Stefan Sagmeister for Adobe Studios. Adobe studios have perhaps lost there way a little of late, and I for one can’t find what I am looking for most of the time so if I happen by something like this, it tends to be by chance.

New WWFT

Thu, 10 Jun 2004 14:36:16 +0000

New site by the boys at weworkforthem. http://www.weworkforthem.com/

New Apple Line-up

Wed, 09 Jun 2004 16:50:39 +0000

Looks like Apple have been busy, which can only be a good thing. They have launched upgraded processors in their G5′s and apparently according to this: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/06/09/apple_g5_update/ article the dual 2.5 is now liquid cooled. Liquid Cooling once the preserve of super computers has gained alot of followers over the last couple of years (and I am thinking of trying it) but its a completely new thing for a consumer ‘mainstream’ machine to have.

New AMD Processor

Tue, 08 Jun 2004 11:38:41 +0000

AMD have announced here http://www.amd.com/us-en/Corporate/VirtualPressRoom/0,,51_104_543~86164,00.html that they are introducing a new line of processors called Sempron� for emerging markets. There XP processors are still going to be produced and will probably merge with the AMD 64 line.

Venus

Tue, 08 Jun 2004 11:34:36 +0000

WooHoo! Went out a couple of hours with a couple of workfriends and some binoculars and caught a view of Venus eclipsing the moon. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/3784293.stm

Upgrading the VPN

Mon, 07 Jun 2004 11:33:02 +0000

In an earlier post I had noted that I was using FreeSwan to create a VPN with a Checkpoint Firewall well I can heartly recommend the new OpenSwan as I upgraded and found this much easier to use. In other news I can say I really don’t like CVS at the moment and I am finding it a complete pain, but again this is all really boring techie stuff. So for a break I recommend catching the new Harry Potter movie, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban.

Happy B’Day Zeldman.com

Thu, 03 Jun 2004 23:15:23 +0000

His site is nine years old today. That is quite an age in Internet Terms, can’t say that I had a site back then but at least I was online. Or is that a bad thing?!

Regular Expressions

Sun, 30 May 2004 00:48:19 +0000

So I was trying to use regular expression properly the other day, but even the basic stuff that I remembered from working with Perl had all but been lost in the depths of time. So I am pleased to come across this little bit of of software: RegEx Coach. Going to be trying it out over the next few days. Oh and if anyone woud like to tell me why there reg-ex isn’t standards compiliant with either POSIX or unix style regex I would be grateful.

xbox media center

Fri, 28 May 2004 20:59:10 +0000

So like alot of people I have modded my xbox, put in a 120Gb disk and mainly use it for watching movies with the excellent XBMC software. Doing a search actually brought back results for this,and its the first time that I have heard about it. http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/mediacenter/evaluation/devices/xboxextenderkit.asp So it looks like Microsoft are getting in on the action aswell, and what particularly interests me is the integration with Windows Media Center.

Nasty XML

Tue, 25 May 2004 23:35:28 +0000

If you are going to the humhum radio pages and wondering why they are down this is usually because of older broadcast software sending nasty xml to the server. Bare with us and I will get it sorted. In the meantime just tune in!

Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind

Sun, 23 May 2004 17:05:44 +0000

Saw this film last night and I really liked it, which is good because I haven’t been to the cinema for absolutely ages (much to my Girlfriends horror sometimes) . Michel Gondry was up to form and though there are a couple of bits which might be slightly dragged out its a great film. Jim Carrey, Kirsten Dunst, Elijah Wood and Kate Winslet all give really strong performances with Jim’s being the highlight and showing that he has real versatility.

Humhum we go!

Sat, 22 May 2004 12:26:35 +0000

Well HumHumFM is taking off! I have a page up at http://humhum.timc3.com and we have had some really great sets from Alistair Stevens, Richard Alexander Caraballo, Peter Dekkers, little_gray, Mark Connelly, Crispin, animoller, David Hamilton and more playing a range of all types of music. Check it out. I am going to build some more pages on to the tool and then hopefully the transistion of players will be more fluid, but so I can’t complain the above people have made it amazing.

CSS arguments

Wed, 19 May 2004 14:17:42 +0000

Still really nicely balanced CSS argues at Andy’s blog. Just what one needs on such a beautifully sunny day in London!

Talented work

Mon, 17 May 2004 23:24:23 +0000

Some really great work here, and an inspiration: http://www.rcstudios.com/

Hum hum radio

Mon, 17 May 2004 12:11:39 +0000

You too can listen here: http://humhum.timc3.com:8000/listen.pls along with the !almost! countless others that have.

BT Losing it

Mon, 17 May 2004 12:09:33 +0000

Apparently BT is losing 150,000 customers a month, which is quite abit more than there Ad compaign is saying that they are gaining. I would switch to if I didn’t need a BT line for my Broadband. I know I should be grateful that I can have internet at such speeds, but the fact that I am stuck with BT – who lets face it are less than good at most things really grates.

Humhum radio

Wed, 12 May 2004 16:36:03 +0000

Finally got humhum radio up and working!! I have started to use shoutcast streaming software after testing a couple of the others including icecast the ease of use and setup for shoutcast won over. Who knows I might just use icecast in the future but for now I got shoutcast working within 30mins and have been testing fully for the last 2 days..

PSP in different colours

Wed, 12 May 2004 16:33:46 +0000

Looks like the PSP is going to be available in different colours. All I can say is, just make it available asap!!

PSP screenshots!

Tue, 11 May 2004 22:24:47 +0000

Wow, fantastic. I hope this is real: http://www.gizmodo.com/archives/images/e3_psp_5.JPG I won’t try an embed this picture as this it a great scoop for gizmodo.

A bit late but still good news

Mon, 10 May 2004 15:13:33 +0000

Well that post from the Lion King came up abit later, but as they say better late than never and the same can be said for Reuters having RSS news feeds. I think this is excellent news, now all I need is the FT to provide the same and to have a free copy of The Economist sitting on my door every Monday and my news sources will be sorted!

Hello from lion king

Mon, 10 May 2004 11:45:01 +0000

MobBlog: In full swing!

BBC to test downloadable programming

Wed, 05 May 2004 17:49:24 +0000

Its only a test, but we can live in hope that the BBC will go through with making programmes available for download from their site after they have been air’ed. The are increasingly seeing progamming on P2P networks so this is an excellent move. How about if they fixed up your favourite programmes with RSS so you automatically get it downloaded when you want it. The possiblities just keep appearing – http://news.

Measure the speed of light with Marshmellows

Wed, 05 May 2004 13:19:08 +0000

This is very funny: http://www.boingboing.net/2004/05/05/marshmallowbased_spe.html

Venice

Tue, 04 May 2004 12:13:37 +0000

Got back yesterday from a lovely trip to Venice for a long weekend, would recommend it to anyone, and I must say that it is probably one of the best places that I have been too. When you go there, take time to visit the other islands aswell because as a whole there is alot to do when added together. For photos check out: http://share.timc3.com/index.php?view=thumb&dir=Venice

update to my share

Wed, 28 Apr 2004 13:10:58 +0000

Updated http://share.timc3.com from my own custom file viewer to the EUWDPCpix file brower created by humhum creator pea aka Peter Dekkers. This version allows nice thumbnails (if I hadn’t have used save for web on each of my photos!), and probably a better layout, though I am going to change the CSS once I get home to something more inline with the old style.

No more Silhouettes

Thu, 15 Apr 2004 14:54:10 +0000

Apple are withdrawing there silhouette ads for the iPod now: http://apple.weblogsinc.com/entry/1252615493759137/

New amazon search site

Thu, 15 Apr 2004 14:51:45 +0000

In competition with google now? Maybe not quite, but when did they buy Alexa? I missed that.. http://www.a9.com/

Star Wars Clone wars

Wed, 14 Apr 2004 13:37:26 +0000

Animation versions of the film, that are actually alot better than the motion film! Go get them here: http://www.pcpages.com/1010101/index.html

Next Windows release cutback

Wed, 14 Apr 2004 10:23:41 +0000

During typing in a huge post about the state of windows, Longhorn being cut, Windows Professional edition Firefox decided to crash when I visited http://channel9.msdn.com/ – the first time ever that I have seen it crash. So instead check out: http://arstechnica.com/news/posts/1081551191.html http://yahoo.businessweek.com/magazine/content/04_16/b3879009_mz001.htm http://radio.weblogs.com/0001011/2004/04/09.html#a7193 http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowForum.aspx?ForumID=14 (perhaps IE only for that one!)

Web Standards

Tue, 06 Apr 2004 15:48:31 +0000

The new MACCAWs article is up, find it at: http://www.maccaws.org/

Tue, 06 Apr 2004 10:04:40 +0000

Been meaning to link to this amazing site about a womans (Elena’s) journey on her bike though the DeadZone near Chernobyl for quite some time as it is truely one of the best sites around at the moment. It is as breathtaking as a website can be, an one of the best uses of the internet so far. That hit counter really is going up with some pace.

Football playing robots

Tue, 06 Apr 2004 10:00:44 +0000

Or Soccer to you.. But it is great to watch them at http://www.vstone.co.jp/e/rt01e.htm

Bix light facade for Kunsthaus

Mon, 05 Apr 2004 12:06:00 +0000

This is an amazing looking building and light system, you must also check out the RealVideo’s of the display of the building.. “ BIX is a light- and media installation for the Kunsthaus Graz in Austria which transforms the acrylic glass facade of the Kunsthaus in a low resolution computer display – we call it the “communicative display skin”. BIX is not only one of the biggest (900m2) but from an architectural point of view one of the most integrated media facades.

Sending Mail from Sh

Sun, 04 Apr 2004 00:47:27 +0000

Ever wanted to send email from the shell, but also to give it a Mime type so that the mail reader doesn’t just put your attachment straight into the body of the message ( envoking mail myemail@mydomain.com < myattachment , will include the attachment but won’t split the message up). Well this handy little example will let you from an easy to modify Perl script: http://www.akadia.com/services/email_attachments_using_perl.html You will have install the MIME-lite bits and pieces: http://www.

Zach Gold

Thu, 01 Apr 2004 12:04:56 +0000

This is really quite amazing display of talent from Zach Gold and I really wish he had more examples on the site but its well worth checking out, probably will put a link into the links section for this.

Cools Robots

Thu, 01 Apr 2004 11:48:44 +0000

Been loving the Robots of late, including this really rather cool video and the new Robosapian soon to go on sale at http://www.iirobotics.com

Personal Google

Wed, 31 Mar 2004 11:10:56 +0000

New from google labs, http://labs.google.com/personalized/ looks promising though I have yet to give it a decent test.

MySQL binding

Wed, 31 Mar 2004 10:19:37 +0000

Looking around last night for ways to upgrade RedHat to http://www.debian.org (which proves somewhat non-trivial, the easiest way being a reinstall to Debian), I was looking into one of my systems and I found that MySQL was binding port 3306 to the outside IP address. After some looking around, I found that to disable this you had to have a my.cnf file in /etc that MySQL looked at whilst starting.

007 Everything or Nothing

Mon, 29 Mar 2004 16:51:28 +0000

Been playing this on the xbox whenever I get the chance at the moment, which is rarely enough it seems, and I have been loving it, all the way up to the 26th Level then it crashes and I am not the only one it seems which leads me to believe that it has some fairly fundemental flaws in the programming. It hasn’t received the best reviews all over, for instance: http://www.

More PSP news

Mon, 29 Mar 2004 16:43:06 +0000

Some more interesting PSP news about the forthcoming handheld over here http://www.eurogamer.net/article.php?article_id=55042

BD4D

Thu, 25 Mar 2004 17:16:21 +0000

I will be at the bd4d version 2 launch tonight, to celebrate the launch of the http://www.bd4d.com site tomorrow. Check it out in 12 or so hours time..

Microsoft being fined

Wed, 24 Mar 2004 13:19:15 +0000

You just have to love this picture don’t you..

RSS Neighborhood meet

Wed, 24 Mar 2004 12:55:03 +0000

Very Interesting little article from a meet of the RSS Neighborhood with a speech from Scoble who made some very interesting points, mostly that I agree with about creating successful RSS feeds and getting traffic. Also some notes on corporate feeds, though I think that I will find it hard to get the digital vision marketing department to buy in to a feed for our customers at the moment. Hopefully when RSS is more mainstream (and I am getting the feeling that the UK is 2 years behind in the up take of RSS) we will approach this in the intellegent way Scoble is describing.

Personal Video Devices

Thu, 18 Mar 2004 11:30:24 +0000

As a follow up, BBC news just came out with this article, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/3516504.stm, also talking about Personal Video Devices and I realised that I had forgotten about the Thomsen device the PDP2860 which does do MPEG4 video on the go, but as the BBC article says it just hasn’t been given the shelf space because retailers think that consumers don’t want video on the move. Well why not give them the option and see.

RSS & Bittorrent merged

Thu, 18 Mar 2004 11:01:40 +0000

Two of the hottest Internet tech’s, RSS and Bittorrent have been merged by Andrew Grumet to produce a syndicated download technology tha RSS feed of your choice. The beta of this is here that uses the Radio Userland tool to kick off your Bittorrent downloads. This pairing of RSS and Bittorrent just goes to push the 2 further into the main stream publics eye though I doubt yet it will push it beyond the acceptance each has got so far until there is a killer delivery platform.

Colour iPod?

Thu, 18 Mar 2004 10:22:34 +0000

Rumours are being spread around, mainly from http://www.appleinsider.com about the upcoming release of a new iPod with 50Gb Harddisk, but more interestingly a new 2″ colour screen and video out for static pictures. Personally I am waiting for a device that does video, with MPEG 4, divx and xvid support aswell. I don’t see why they can not. I know that the http://www.archos.com can so this but the screen at the moment is too small and the player not exactly pretty.

Kokoro

Wed, 17 Mar 2004 10:48:10 +0000

I just love this site by Kokoro and I just love the gadgets and the use of English within (though perhaps I shouldn’t be laughing out too loud as my efforts with English arn’t exactly much better and any other language, well you might as well forget it!).

Advice on Bittorrent sharing

Wed, 17 Mar 2004 10:13:45 +0000

To carry on from the last post, Simon Carless the admin for legaltorrents.com has some notes in this this O’Reilly Net article about proper distributing of files and how to torrent..

Sony robotic research centre

Mon, 15 Mar 2004 17:26:21 +0000

I know I love robots perhaps more than the next man but this is undeniably cool – Sony are setting up their own intellegent Robot lab. More here

Life in Microsofts Research

Mon, 15 Mar 2004 14:54:28 +0000

I have been reading RSS news feeds for a short while now but this article by Kevin Schofield on his Weblog about life in Microsoft’s research centre is truely one of the most interesting yet. Read it!

Linux vs Windows

Fri, 12 Mar 2004 10:41:51 +0000

An intellegent and indepth article about the differences of the two on Linux Insider. I hope by the state of that URL that they arn’t really using Perl on their server though..

P900

Fri, 12 Mar 2004 10:39:33 +0000

Just a quick link into the world of Joi Ito who being the lucky sod that he is gets plenty of stuff to play with. At the moment, he is talking about his new p900 NTT DoCoMo phone.

Checkpoint NG VPN to Smoothwall

Thu, 11 Mar 2004 16:20:17 +0000

Having a bit of a break from blogging has given me some time to test creating a VPN between Checkpoint NG R54 firewall and Smoothwall Firewall version 2.0 which essentially uses the no-longer in active developmentfreeswan VPN (though I am sure that it is going to still be used for a while to come) as a test to buy the corporate version of Smoothwall. A VPN between Freeswan and Checkpoint has been done many times before, but documentation is rather sparse so I intend to document some findings here.

Mandarina Duck

Mon, 08 Mar 2004 23:43:18 +0000

Just a quick note to say that the new Mandarina Duck web site is lovely. Lots going, full of colour and very vibrant. Excellent work by Nico Stumpo.

History of Apple OS

Mon, 08 Mar 2004 11:23:39 +0000

Interesting little article that’s being linked all over the web so why should I be any different..The History of the Apple Operating System.

Straight from the phone

Sat, 06 Mar 2004 23:05:41 +0000

MobBlog: first full test.

SavRow computers

Sat, 06 Mar 2004 19:19:54 +0000

Came across the SavRow site a while ago but in my search for a new case I came across it again and they are making some mighty beatiful computers – and computers cannot often be labelled that not even the G5′s.

MY head

Thu, 04 Mar 2004 11:39:30 +0000

MobBlog: gone.

glamour

Thu, 04 Mar 2004 11:39:30 +0000

MobBlog: meT

Its us

Wed, 03 Mar 2004 23:05:20 +0000

MobBlog: Tim and Jeanette

The latest Cron job!

Wed, 03 Mar 2004 23:03:04 +0000

MobBlog: Automatic Updates happening now!!

Well that should be it!

Wed, 03 Mar 2004 20:42:48 +0000

I have now got the Crontab(the process on a Unix box that will do a job at a submitted time) working for the Mobblog so I can of course now send and the blog will automatically pickup any entry every half an hour. Basically an entry in cron is need so this is done by: ssh into your server crontab -e (this will edit the Crontab in Vi or create a new one if needed)

Updates..

Wed, 03 Mar 2004 19:26:23 +0000

Well as you can probably see below I have updated this blog to now include Moblog entries, meaning that I can push entries straight from my mobile phone into the blog including photos that I have taken on my T610 Sony Ericsson. All it took was a script that can read a email box, PHP to be recompiled with imap and GD, plus the phone setup so that it can send email.

Webstandards

Tue, 02 Mar 2004 14:18:32 +0000

Great looking site and linked content at http://www.webstandardsawards.com/ which is aiming to further spread the message of using standards from the likes of http://www.webstandards.org/ and http://www.webstandardsgroup.org/ . I like the way that the site is very clean, and the css is hiding some of the images such as the logo above from casual thiefs.. One of the outstanding sites linked deserves further mention and that is http://www.shauninman.com/. I love the use of Din for the Headline text, and the general cleaness of the site.

Developer tools

Tue, 02 Mar 2004 14:12:08 +0000

Well Mozilla Firefox is becoming my browser of choice nowdays and its because of tools like these that the decision is easy. Being able to do just a few of these things from an easily hidable browser bar makes life so easy for anyone involved in web page design I wonder whether I will ever go back to IE. But then again thats what we all said about the move from Netscape to IE 4 or 5 years ago.

Latest Updates

Mon, 01 Mar 2004 20:27:45 +0000

Well, after a period of neglect I have decided to update the ole’blog abit, hopefully to make it a bit easier to use, though I still think that it has some work to go with this, and just to make it abit easier to use. The list of updates: Search against the blog. RSS 2.0 xml that properly validates. Moblog from mobile phone (still working on this for the images).

xbox 2 sdk

Sun, 29 Feb 2004 23:58:06 +0000

In a quite suprising move, Microsoft have given out the first release of the xbox 2 SDK to developers – but unusually it runs a special ported version of Windows NT on the Apple Mac! In no small part due to the fact that the xbox 2 will be featuring a IBM chip – which of course forms the base of the Power PC architecture. Rumour has it at the moment that the SDK is making use of the ATI radeon 9800 on the Mac until ATI get round to releasing the graphics chip (ATI R500) and drivers that will be making it onto the xbox2.

Grey Album

Sat, 28 Feb 2004 11:19:37 +0000

Well it has been much hyped and the hype is still going on but I still thought that it was worth writing about the album from Dj Danger Mouse because it is a good piece of work and I feel like that it is supporting a worthy cause, without going into the details about the album (you can read about them in this BBC news article: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/3517661.stm or this http://www.nme.com/news/107642.htm ) but I think that movement that it is having is a positive one.

Channel 4 and 5 merger?

Fri, 27 Feb 2004 15:25:09 +0000

Well its in the papers at the moment and of course there is an article on BBC news about the possible talks over a merger of 4 &5. Well the only reason that I am commenting is that I hope that this will enable Channel 4 to have a further outlet to its more creative programming… Already we have a decent, if subscription based FilmFour service, but what about all the cool programmes that Channel 4 is well known for – they don’t often repeat them but this would be a cool way of getting more quality entertainment on 5.

froogle from a store

Fri, 27 Feb 2004 10:33:14 +0000

Froogle looks like it has stepped up to the mark now offering a WML service which of course means, mobile phone access, which of course means shopping comparisons in store while you shop to web sites. Online retail has been held back to a short degree by the quality of preview of a product you can get – the touchy feely part that is still one of the bricks and mortars best selling points.

Sony delays handheld Playstation

Fri, 27 Feb 2004 08:52:49 +0000

Looks like Sony has delayed the release of the PlayStation handheld. BBC reports.. Actually I am surprised that they have delayed it to spring 2005 in the euro-american markets but then again a launch for Christmas in Japan will gain them mass market share and no doubt anyone wanting it will pay the high import prices and put up with the import restrictions. In the past consoles on import have sold well.

Microsoft SQL Reporting Server

Wed, 25 Feb 2004 15:03:47 +0000

On the Microsoft thread again yesterday, better late than never, I came across the launch for Microsoft SQL server Reporting Tools. After watching the launch webcast, it all looks rather interesting. But be warned the requirements for testing it are: SQL server, IIS, Visual Studio .Net 2003 on top of what your OS and other bits and pieces take up – in my case of a working PC almost all the spare space.

its a google

Wed, 25 Feb 2004 10:12:06 +0000

Some interesting articles coming about from http://www.wired.com and http://www.arstechnica.com about http://www.google.com, but nothing that you haven’t already heard if you have your nose to the ground. Throughly recommend googl’ing for the google weblog and taking a feed on your RSS reader.

Microsoft Photos

Wed, 25 Feb 2004 00:31:23 +0000

Some interesting photos of Microsoft’s headquarters in Redmond. Amazed by the size, but it is perhaps lacking a little atmosphere? http://www.dylangreene.com/browse.asp?albumID=409&page=1

Icon design for firefox

Mon, 23 Feb 2004 17:38:21 +0000

Wow! This is a great find, how Icon artist Jon Hicks did the designs for firefox and then there is the interview with Jon by Skinny J..

skype conference calling

Mon, 23 Feb 2004 12:34:25 +0000

Wow, now http://www.skype.com is enabled for conference calling it has turned into a really mature application. If you haven’t heard about it before then you are probably about too as there has been alot recently about VOIP technologies that finally they have sorted out the compression techniques and bandwidth worldwide has on the whole improved. Skype is by the same team that has brought about a popular P2P program and is based upon the same tech.

Top 75 Security Tools

Mon, 23 Feb 2004 11:59:28 +0000

Really useful little page from a survey of users favourite security tools for a variety of platforms produced by http://www.insecure.com. Alot of the tools are OpenSource or free to use and are extremely useful. http://www.insecure.org/tools.html

Damn Virus!

Sat, 21 Feb 2004 19:58:20 +0000

Well after that last update I found that I hadn’t installed my Anti-Virus software properly and of course within hours of installing everything I caught a particularly nasty trojan and virus. So now a reinstall has fixed it but what a waste of time, needless to say the first thing I installed was anti-virus software and this time the AVG non-commercial licensed version from Grisoft – http://www.grisoft.com/us/us_index.php and I have found it very good so far.

Long time no blog

Wed, 18 Feb 2004 22:13:46 +0000

Well, I have been quite busy, but even so I feel that I have been really neglecting my space here. Anyways I now have my Broadband installed in my new Flat, after much research from the likes of http://www.adslguide.org.uk I have decided to go with Freedom2Surf, as they over a static IP aswell as very reasonable rates.. At the same time I have decided to update my PC and got my hands on a AMD Barton that I will no doubt end up overclocking and some other parts.

Good food, little updates

Mon, 09 Feb 2004 13:23:20 +0000

Not having Broadband at home as considerably cut short the amount of time I spend on the Internet and also not having a big tv has cut down on the amount of films that I watch which I suppose isn’t that bad a side effect but its quite a change in habit for me I guess Instead I have been reading the wonderful cooking book by Nigel Slater – Appetite which is more than just a collection of recipes, and trys and succeeds in pointing one towards what really is the crux of food – enjoying it.

Pixar dropping Disney

Fri, 30 Jan 2004 15:42:03 +0000

It has bugged me (no pun intended) for quite sometime that a company such as Pixar whose complete existance is testiment to John Lassiter’s creative vision and hardwork would team up with Disney in the first place for its distribution and the greater risk of brand and commercialisation stealing Disney would be capable of. But this is now luckly consigned to history. Pixar have made the great (IMHO) decision to drop Disney and stand on their own in the market place, and I am sure that with great films such as Finding Nemo, Toy Story 1 &2 they won’t have any problem.

Warp Bleep

Wed, 28 Jan 2004 14:06:47 +0000

In competition with the bigger labels and general bandwagon hangers on (thats you coke-cola) Warp Records have released their own Bleep service. Included are many excellent tracks from forth coming single’s and albums plus classic Warp releases, hard to get releases and more such as AFX – Hangable Auto Bulb, NoW – Smokers Delight, LFO – Frequencies and the great Sabres of Paradise – Sabresonic album.

More mini updates

Wed, 28 Jan 2004 11:19:10 +0000

Cool products from atypyk Have to get me some of those from http://www.magmabooks.com or the other stockists mentioned. Link blatently stolen from the wonderful Carole Guevin curator of the excellent http://www.netdiver.net site.

Portable Media Center

Wed, 28 Jan 2004 11:18:51 +0000

Microsoft are working hard on a potential iPod killer, the Portable Media Center which can basically be thought of as the Media Center on the move without the recording capabilities. Creative Labs, iRiver, Samsung, Viewsonic are some of the hardware partners working to bring about a good platform for the software aswell as integrating with a Windows Home network with XP Media Center to transfer your PVR recordings so that you can watch them on the move.

No Net Connection :-(

Tue, 27 Jan 2004 17:19:00 +0000

Having moved house I now can hear Big Ben but have temporarily lost my internet connection (aswell as a bag of bolts for the cupboards, if you find them please mail them to me!) for the next few days hence posts will be sparse. In the meantime I would checkout the following: http://www.dform1.com/ showreel http://www.sundance.org/ film festival and Primer http://www.res.com magazine Plus all the usual places Also if anyone has a decent clue as to why if I want a BT phone line, which in the UK is what we need for decent ADSL-Broadband services and a basic television service in this new flat I have such a hassle.

Mini update

Tue, 27 Jan 2004 17:13:23 +0000

Just a short update for now, this is what I have been seeing today: Pixel reviews Valentin MyDoom Virus targeting SCO Lego winner

Killer games machine?

Fri, 23 Jan 2004 00:03:09 +0000

This week Nintendo have been putting the hype about for their latest games machine – a dual screen handheld. Mmmm where have we seen those before? Sarcasm aside, this is a surprise move for Nintendo whom many see as falling behind in the console race behind Sony and Microsoft aswell as the huge online gaming scene that is particularly prevalent in Asia. The Handheld is said to hold two 3″ TFT backlit screens and two processors, and their main selling point seems to be not what I expected – the design, but you use the second screen for a second perspective of a game which is quite unique at the moment for any gaming machine – but is it enough to compete against the much rumoured Sony PSP?

Mozilla Firebird

Tue, 20 Jan 2004 17:46:25 +0000

Like a lot of ‘web people’ as my girlfriend and friends sometimes like referring me as, I have recently become, in the last 12 months a Mozilla Firebird convert. I have been using it as a main browser at home and at work, on PC and Mac and it is almost a complete IE replacement – and it easily betters Safari in many ways. It of course gets alot of praise for its tabbed browsing, and although it doesn’t seem that useful at the moment to anyone that hasn’t used it, its something of a god-send to those that have.

New Digital Vision Site!

Mon, 19 Jan 2004 11:25:46 +0000

Finally, after much sweat and tears our web team has launched the latest and best yet www.digitalvision.com and a mighty fine site it is. The old site was well received but past its sell by date, and this really brings us up to a more useable level as much thought had gone into how to create the easiest experience whilst still maintaining the Digital Vision look and feel and I think that it has succedded on almost all accounts.

Renascent’s Attic

Thu, 15 Jan 2004 12:59:30 +0000

Me olde mucka Joost is serving up a storm on his site with his new piece attic. I love the direction and the sketched look of the rendering, and unlike other reviewers I think that the audio is quite suited to the reel.</p Such a Nice bloke too!! ;-)

National Geographic shooting on Digital Cameras

Wed, 14 Jan 2004 13:57:14 +0000

Being employed by a Stock Photography company I am constantly looking at Pictures and obliviously the technicalities of creating Photography is of interest and beneficial to my position. Up until recently digital photography has been seen as the poor cousin of film but things are starting to change, but I wouldn�t be surprised if one publication will help this change evolve somewhat quicker now. Many see the National Geographic as a benchmark and its acceptance of using digital cameras for one of its main shots as seen in this article will spur publishers to take on the advantages offered by this medium.

Mac not by Jobs

Mon, 12 Jan 2004 13:41:33 +0000

An article posted on Wired News follows the story by Owen Linzmayers that the Macintosh was not created by Steve Jobs but was the brainchild of one Jef Raskin. Actually I am not really that surprised..

Engelbart – Point and Click

Sun, 11 Jan 2004 17:35:56 +0000

As usual at the moment, I have been quite transfixxed by the latest issue of http://www.wired.com/wired and in particular the article by Doug Engelbart (page 158, or viewable at http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.01/mouse_pr.html ) on creating interactive systems in the late 60s at Stanford Research Institute. The article has interesting information on the first mouse: carved out of wood plus hyperlinks, videoconferencing, wordprocessing and network collaboration. In other words basically the technologies that we are now taking advantage of in our everyday lifes.

RedLabor

Sun, 11 Jan 2004 15:01:18 +0000

Looks like my wardrobe might actually get a new addition with the launch of the Redlabor site. Alot of the posters are also quite nice and probably alot nicer in the flesh than most designers output from the likes of Threadless.

RSS – useful after all

Sat, 10 Jan 2004 03:39:34 +0000

After looking at creating an RSS news feed I thought that I would checkout some readers, not thinking that they would be quite so useful to myself as they are. After downloading an RSS news reader I have been won over, instead of going around the many news sites I do every day I can simply get the headlines, some body content and a link to the article proper Quite simply it is one of the best services I have come accross in along time and I wish the FT, Reuters, PixelSurgeon, DiK and a few others would supply their news feeds like this also.

RSS news feed

Sat, 10 Jan 2004 03:35:02 +0000

I have decided that it would be quite cool to create an RSS news feed for this site so that I can update the site and feed it into other applications where I want. At the moment it is quite a basic feed but with time and when the site improves perhaps it will turn into something that is of some use! View it here: http://blog.timc3.com/rss.xml

RSS update

Sat, 10 Jan 2004 03:31:32 +0000

This is what I wanted to see:- My feed validating through a XML RSS newsfeed validator. That and creating the site a bit easier to maintain I think my conclude my evenings work.. Or perhaps not!

iPod Mini

Thu, 08 Jan 2004 02:59:36 +0000

So Apple have announced the iPod mini, as of yet I haven’t heard much about the response from the expo itself, but the overall response and I share this opinion is that they are simply overpriced at $249. For $50 more, consumers can get the new entry level 15Gb iPod, and in April when they are available outside of the States I wouldn’t be surprised if the pound price would be �249.

Money Scam

Tue, 06 Jan 2004 16:00:11 +0000

What happens when you reply to the Nigerian Money Scam? Well Silicon have been asking the question and decided to reply to it, though perhaps the article goes on alittle too long and the reporter could have delt with it in a slightly more exciting way.

round up of 2003 design

Tue, 06 Jan 2004 13:02:02 +0000

Maki does a nifty little round-up of design styles and trends of 2003. According to him, repeating backgrounds, CSS styles, UL menus and using fonts other Verdana where in then. So what am I to do for 2004 then?!! Check it.

Back to work!

Mon, 05 Jan 2004 16:54:12 +0000

Well back to work for another day, obviously a large change from the festive period! First thing is I had a quick look at was a change for Zeldman with a new layout. Can’t say I like it that much, find it abit confusing though I dare say that the CSS and XHTML is likely to be alot more compliant than mine!. A link to http://www.dailystandards.com/ shows off a new site for http://www.

Bootleg Objects

Fri, 02 Jan 2004 23:38:52 +0000

I thought that this would be tacky at first – taking oldschool electronics and updating it with modern components, but you have to check out http://www.bootleg-objects.com/. Hopefully there are more to come..

cheap ipods?

Fri, 02 Jan 2004 23:35:34 +0000

Well hopefully they will be announced, and if so I am sure that they are going to be extremely popular, particularly if they have a similar form factor to the existing iPod

Find books at Google

Thu, 18 Dec 2003 12:29:40 +0000

Google has launched a new beta service that allows you to search for contents within a book and then pass you on to a retailer. Google is not receiving any revenue from the service as of yet. Get the low down here

New Winamp Version

Tue, 16 Dec 2003 10:29:16 +0000

The best player for the PC (in version 2 guise) has just got an upgrade to version 5. This latest version takes the code from version 2 and version 3 and merges the best bits of both. As usual there is a Winamp Lite (655Kb) version and a Winamp Full (4Mb) version. is taking abit of a bashing from all the traffic at the moment so is going abit slow but I have tested the product and it seems fine.

sing it for you

Wed, 10 Dec 2003 13:47:23 +0000

This is genius: It makes up songs from words that you give it

cvs

Wed, 10 Dec 2003 12:46:48 +0000

This is a blatent rip of the article in Linux arstechnica but I couldn’t find a way of linking to that one article or keeping the information of a very interesting introduction to CVS They talk about basic building of a system with links to a Open Source Development with CVS tutorial, graphical clients and their personal favourite Windows client TortoiseCVS. All useful stuff.

USA more fun!

Tue, 09 Dec 2003 01:09:19 +0000

Reading other users blogs and news sites has shown that the level of new and interesting technology for the home coming out from over the Pond is so much greater than here and with much more competitive pricing. Not only have they had a greater range of home-automation products for many years now because of x10, they are starting to see many of the big computer manufactor’s getting in the on the act, not least Gateway.

PSX news

Sun, 07 Dec 2003 20:57:30 +0000

Sony have brought out some more news on the forthcoming PSX, according to the bbc news it feature the TV tuner, Harddisk, PS2 internals that we thought it would be. Not included in the box are MP3 playback and CD-R support. The DESR-7000 will sport a 250Gb Harddisk for 99,800 yen, and the DESR-5000 a 160Gb Disk for 79,800 yen. Non-inclusion of MP3 playback might not be so bad, the audio format at its best doesn’t have the fidelity that competing codecs can manage though Sony’s proprietary ATRAC format suffers from not being compatiable in alot of devices including Apple’s widespread iPod.

Latest update!

Sat, 06 Dec 2003 16:28:56 +0000

Well I have changed alot with this latest update, mainly the style sheet. I tired of the old one with its picture and as it was mainly for autumn a winter theme seemed more valid. At the moment I don’t have a picture for the top, perhaps I will render one in 3DS Max, but for now I am liking the change.. Just need to add to the new content areas.

updates

Thu, 04 Dec 2003 16:55:40 +0000

Updated the blog slightly to make more of it run from database so that it is easier to manage and update from afar.. Will be doing the new pages soon, so that there is more content… And a Winter picture is also coming.. Not much news from further afield because of being asleep most of the time due to this pesky flu.. Oh Well..

a slow monday

Mon, 01 Dec 2003 12:23:34 +0000

Well it has started slowely, after re-building my smoothwall firewall box – mainly because another person pulling the power on it messed up the filesystem and bios quite well, and secondly to use RC1 of 2.0 beta release. Also gave me a good opportunity to re-number my internal network. Shown to me this morning is also http://www.strategy.gov.uk which happens to have a really nice PDF of the UK versus the rest of the world… Its nice to see how well we are doing or not as the case may be.

A new day

Mon, 24 Nov 2003 12:17:03 +0000

Due to Redhat basically changing their product line-up , I successfully installed Debian over the weekend on a spare machine and within an hour had the usual system up and running. I was very impressed with the install and with the actual distro itself – the packages are all installed where they should be, without masses of unneeded stuff. Recommended!

Making up for Lack of Posts

Tue, 18 Nov 2003 13:16:04 +0000

Seen some good stuff on the web recently. Firstly a report from the BBCi’s redesign called The Glass Wall, which I found extremely interesting. Then of course is the Macromedia Special reports. Will be looking into providing perm. links in the future. Also take a google for the eyetoy – look s like a great PS2 toy.

design or not..

Fri, 07 Nov 2003 11:55:10 +0000

Another day goes by, and the world redesign another 1000 websites or in this case 53 redesigns for www.useit.com, the home of Jakob Nielsen, in the ReUseIT competition. I am all for a decent redesign of the distinctly under-designed usability site but the entries for this redesign seem really poor. The aesthetics of each entry is barly better than the original and they have no fluidity or balance, the usability – the sites talking point would be no better and indeed in most cases worse and alot put much emphasis on Jakob’s celeribity.

linkwhore

Wed, 05 Nov 2003 01:22:01 +0000

More great design links purged from the usual places. http://www.thomaselsner.com/ http://www.ajberni.com/ http://www.creativebehavior.com/ enjoy!

ibm xbox2?

Tue, 04 Nov 2003 01:13:28 +0000

Well this was something that I certainly wasn’t expecting – a collabration between IBM and Microsoft on the xbox 2. Now this statement doesn’t go to say that it will drop x86 as its main processor, but as reported on arstechnica.com sources indicate this could be true – meaning that it could be sporting a G5 or member of its family.. Apparently this is because only IBM have the technology and knowhow to put this together – perhaps why Nintendo and Sony Playstation are also looking at the chip.

Refreshed

Mon, 03 Nov 2003 13:06:28 +0000

Back from Holiday in Rome and completely refreshed, there are many new developments that I can see, but the most significant addition to an e-commerce site award goes to amazon. Their new search within a book featurea is a fairly significant move forward for the experience and usability of the site, but the integration into the normal search most be commended.

This blog will self-destruct

Fri, 24 Oct 2003 16:06:31 +0000

Un-be-known to myself at the point of Blog entry for Microsoft Office below, Microsoft have come up with the ability for documents and emails to have a limited time period – deleting themselves after a period of time. This new feature brings about interesting privacy issues, including perhaps the yet not taken up opportunity of a hacker being able to exploit the feature. Also anyone with a slight computer knowledge will be able to get around the feature – UNDELETE anyone?

not alot

Fri, 24 Oct 2003 00:46:18 +0000

So.. there is not along going on today for me to report on really, spent all day teching along getting search servers sorted but looks like the rest of world hasn’t been upto much. There are still Apple Mac diehards saying that Windows users are jolly lucky now that they now have itunes, but all the Windows can’t hear because they are still listening to the vastly better winamp 2.9

Latest Sony Aibo!

Thu, 23 Oct 2003 01:07:54 +0000

The Great new Sony Aibo is available for pre-order from all good retailers near you.. The new little pet is now more intellegent than ever, it can recieve commands via your mobile phone, is able to respond to a greater range of variety of stimuli and better still its the cutest model yet to be released.

New alistapart.com!!

Thu, 23 Oct 2003 01:07:21 +0000

WooHoo! So it has finally arrived, after zeldman and all have been working hard with the revised, version 3, of the wonderful http://www.alistapart.com/ The latest features include; Facts and Opinion About Fahrner Image Replacement, Sliding Doors of CSS and Random Image Rotation

New Office Application

Thu, 23 Oct 2003 01:06:34 +0000

Another year, and another release of perhaps one of Microsoft’s greatest revenue generators, The Office suite of Applications. New features include; Collaboration advances, much improved support for XML, Hopefully increased security, and every Application seems to have had an upgrade. As usual this is being hailed as the greatest release ever, which will of course increase productivity whilst lowering costs etc.. One of the interesting features for me is the greater integration with server products and this alone is one of the ways that Microsoft is far ahead of the competition.

FFC to encrypt broadcasts

Thu, 23 Oct 2003 01:05:01 +0000

In a move to stop piracy and sharing online, the FCC is proposing to start encrypting broadcasts with a decision to be made in the next few weeks. Now as we have all seen with every type of consumer encryption so far, it remains to be seen how long it takes for this to be broken More at Reuters…

Linus Torvalds

Thu, 23 Oct 2003 01:04:00 +0000

Great article from wired magazine about how Linus became leader of perhaps the greatest free collaboration in the world yet, and how his laid back leadership is paving the way for new companies.