In case you hadn't heard, IceTV lost their case in the Federal Court. IceTV provide(d) an electronic programme guide (EPG) service commonly used by people with personal video recorders (PVR) that work like Tivo. In other words, you can say to your recorder "record The Simpsons whenever it is on" and the PVR, knowing the programme guide, can just schedule those recordings. Any time you want to watch some Simpsons, there'll be loads sitting there for you.

Fortunately for PVR users, there's alternative, though I suppose it's legally-dubious in that it uses screen scraping and the like to replicate the EPG. It works brilliantly though.

To my non-lawyerly eyes, this judgement seems rather far-ranging. It seems that basically any collection of data can now be covered by copyright, no matter how you recreate it. The court viewed the act of scheduling programmes on a television channel as a creative act. Having worked extensively with schedulers in a past life, I'd tend to agree, it is something these people agonise over. But I think the impact is going to be quite widespread.

For example, let's say I wanted to set up a web site that allows people to compare phone plans. I use publicly-available information about the various suppliers' pricing to build a database that is looked up to recommend a specific plan from a specific provider. This would now seem to be a breach of copyright. I work with people who design phone plans, and I can tell you it's a very creative process -- though perhaps not for the right reasons.

So this judgement seems to have impacts far beyond the commercial channels' obsession with preventing people form skipping their shitty, all-to-regular ads. It could, in fact, prevent efficient markets as in my example (though telcos go to great lengths there anyway). Is this a desirable outcome?

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• @zelut: yeah, totally! #
• time to mow… before it rains #
• @zelut: you should install TwitterTools to let all your followers know when you’ve posted a new blog post via twitter #
• @zelut: http://tinyurl.com/2wgmtt in case you were wondering #

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Wind chimes swayed gently in the almost breeze at the ranch in Arizona. Actually, I’m not sure if they’re wind chimes or bells but I suppose there’s not much difference.

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Tags: Arizona, bells, Black and White, canon 20D Canon 10-22, irishblogs, United States

Earlier today Adobe announced a public beta release of Flash Player 10. Some of the new features include 3D visual effects, a new text rendering engine, and changes to how the player handles dynamic sound loaded at runtime. If you are interested in learning more about the significance of FP10, check out the current blog buzz by visiting the links below. I've trolled through the latest content and hand selected some of the most informative and interesting blog posts. Flash Player 10 available on Adobe Labs
http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashplayer10/ Public Bugbase powered by JIRA
http://bugs.adobe.com/flashplayer/ Flash Player team member Tinic Uro takes us on a tour of the new features
Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Wired magazine covers the release (by Scott Gilbertson)
http://blog.wired.com/monkeybites/2008/05/flash-player-10.html FlashMagazine.com on FP10's new text engine
http://www.flashmagazine.com/news/detail/flash_player_10_feature_new_text_engine/ FlashMagazine.com on using FileReference to load and save files
http://www.flashmagazine.com/news/detail/flash_player_10_new_feature_load_and_save_files_using_filereference/ FlashMagazine.com on PixelBender (formerly known as "Hydra")
http://www.flashmagazine.com/news/detail/flash_player_10_feature_pixel_bender/ FlashMagazine.com on Dynamic Streaming in FP10
http://www.flashmagazine.com/News/detail/flash_player_10_feature_dynamic_streaming/ FlashMagazine.com on Dynamic Audio Generation
http://www.flashmagazine.com/News/detail/flash_player_10_feature_dynamic_audio_generation/ FlashMagazine.com on 3D support in FP10
http://www.flashmagazine.com/News/detail/flash_player_10_feature_3d_support/ Grant Skinner on building FP10 demos
http://www.gskinner.com/blog/archives/2008/05/building_the_fl.html

We've released a new version of the Linode Manager with many goodies.  Besides a reorganization of the code (which makes us devs happy), the locations of many pre-existing features have been reorganized as well. But, the real news is this has enabled us to implement some cool features...

Single Sign On

• Multiple Linodes can now be managed much more intuitively under one Linode.com account.
• Linking multiple accounts together is no longer necessary.
• Linodes can be tagged with a label that you can change at any time, which makes identifying multiple Linodes much easier
• Adding a Linode to your account is a piece of cake.  It's as easy as: "Add a Linode" link off the Linodes sub-tab, select the plan, confirm. Done.
• A much requested feature, you can now change your username at any time.  Amen.

Multiuser Support

• You can now create additional Linode.com users that are able to log into your account.
• Our system now allows you to restrict a user's access to specific Linodes, DNS zones, or even create a "billing only" user.
• Timezone preference setting is now per User vs per Customer

Instance-Day Billing

• Similar to Amazon's EC2, this feature allows you to add Linodes or extras and receive a pro-rated credit to your account when you remove them. This is perfect for short term projects or tasks (or if you want to show your friends how cool Linode is without giving them access to your production server).

Linode.com Account Persistence

• If you remove all of your Linodes from your account (but don't cancel your account), your Linode.com login will remain valid.
• You can return at any time and use any of your credit remaining.
• Your DNS zones will remain, but they won't be served unless you have a billable Linode.

Web-based AJAX Console

• Although we implemented this many months ago, there was no official announcement.  Welp, there's browser based console access to your Linode.
• The browser console automatically authenticates you.  Entering in your username and password is no longer required
• There is a console server in each data center.  Launching the console directs you to the console server in the same data center as the Linode.

Graphs

• Disk IO Graphs to compliment the CPU and network graphs
• A new graph history interface

Support Tickets

• Tickets can be opened regarding a specific object (a Linode or a DNS zone).
• All users with access to that object will be able to see the ticket, receive ticket updates via email, and can participate in the ticket.

My thanks go out to those that helped test the new version -- you guys were a big help!

So, after giving Allan some feedback about the latest less project, Get More Honey, we chatted a bit and it came out that I'm a PHP guy, with a bit of a leaning towards CakePHP. But, I'll fully admit that I love the ruby language, have played with it quite a bit, but simply never had an opportunity to write a rails app. People pay me to write PHP code. ;)

But, it did inspire me to fire up vim and write something in ruby. (Some day I'll dust off RubyKnight, the chess engine I wrote in ruby after reading Behind Deep Blue) Here it is:

#!/usr/bin/ruby
# Written by Chris Moyer (chris@inarow.net // http://inarow.net/)
# Do with it whatever you want.  That's public domain, right?
 
require 'readline'
require 'rubygems'
require 'twitter'
  
user = ARGV[0]
pass = ARGV[1]
  
if !user or !pass then
        puts 'usage: tweet username password'
        exit
end
 
$0 = "tweet #{user} xxxxxxxx"
twitter = Twitter::Base.new(user, pass)
  
while line = Readline::readline('(tweet)> ') do
        Readline::HISTORY.push(line)
        if line.length > 140 then
                puts "#{line.length - 140} characters too long, try again."
        else        
                begin
                        twitter.post(line)
                        puts "Tweeted!"
                rescue 
                        puts "Failed to tweet! (#{$!})"
                end
        end
end
 
puts "\nBye!"

It solves my problem of reading twitter via gtalk, and not wanting to open twitter.com to post... while hating when I underestimate the length of my message and being trunctaed. I can just let this run in window of my screen session, and tweet away.

So, I'd love to hear from the rubyists out there:

• What aspects of this are not good, idiomatic ruby practice?

The educational dreams of hundreds of refugees from Darfur came one step closer to reality on May 14, 2008. In Oxford, England, at the headquarters of renowned publisher Oxford University Press, Book Wish Foundation's UK-based partner CORD received the first group of Headway English language learning books destined for refugee camps in eastern Chad. Headway's publishing manager, Judith King, participated in the handover.

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We all know that major corporations at time are really hard to deal with being your average common man. That when you try to take on a company of big size to get something fixed, or just a comment on something is a task that seems a bit like climbing Mount Everest. This is something a guy named Adrian found out lately, when his Playstation 3 needed service. So what was the problem you ask?

Well, Adrian got his Playstation 3 as a Christmas gift, and for this reason he never got a receipt to go with it. So when he called Sony to have his Playstation 3 serviced, they of course asked his receipt, as to where he told them he had none as he got it for Christmas and the ones that bought it to him had lost their receipt. But there was a way to prove that his unit was still under warranty, as the sticker on the back that tells when the unit was manufactured clearly said that it was made “July 2007″.

This was not proof good enough for Sony, who still refused to accept the unit for repairs. Adrian was at a loss for what to do next, so he of course resorted to what many people do in this time and age; the internet. He was instructed to have the people that bought the unit to get their credit card company to deal with the matter, as they have much more weight in dealing with such a matters. Fair enough, but I find it hugely disturbing that companies fail to see the logic in such cases. When the customer can prove without the shadow of a doubt that a unit is still under warranty, the company should accept that proof. Yes, I know the rules are there for a reason, but for godness sake use your head and common sense!

Sony, I sincerely hope that you get this issue sorted you big brute!

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Tags: credit card, playstation 3, repair, sony, warranty

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The other day, a XBox 360 user by the name of Grant was banned from using XBox Live after his gamer tag “theGAYERgamer” was reported as being offensive by fellow gamers. Grant of course was somewhat stunned about this decision, so he tried to get in contact with Microsoft XBox Live customer support to inquire on the matter. There he got in contact with a customer representative by the name of Roxy, who could tell Grant that the greater XBox community found his tag offensive, but she herself admitted that she didn’t find it offensive.

We all know from online gaming that we at times find offensive and downright abusive players, and most games and servers has the ability to filter these elements out. If a player is offensive over voice comms, many games gives you the ability to mute the player in question. If a player continues to be abusive, most servers have server administrators that take the necessary steps to get rid of the unwanted elements. Unfortunately, there will always be disturbing elements as long as you have human players. Humans are per definition self destructive and abusive, but not everyone. And then comes the question of tolerance.

In the civilized world that we live in, being gay has become socially acceptable. People don’t look down upon gay people and frown upon their existence, at least not most people. When I look at a gamer tag like “theGAYERgamer”, I assume that the person behind the tag meant to be humorous and not offensive. Would people find tags like “theHAPPYgamer”, ‘”theHETROgamer”, “theSADgamer” or “theLONELYgamer” offensive? I rerckon not, and I find it sad that people have to be so petty as to report tags like ‘theGAYERgamer’. Seriously, don’t you people have better things to do?

I’ve seen far worse gamer tags than that, that are both discriminative, racist and offensive that are allowed and which are still allowed to use XBox Live. This is just plain stupid, let Grant play! And people, get a life! Remember, it’s only a game!

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Tags: ban, banned, gamer, grant, microsoft, tag, thegayergamer, xbox, xbox live

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This years Summit special event was held at South First Billiards, a rather large pool hall. They must've had 20+ pool tables. For the first hour and a half or so I played pool with Martin Dombroski, Bernie Dolan, and Christine Harold. I used my Flip video camera and shot two short videos of Bernie and I breaking. Check 'em out.
Me opening the game with a decent break.
Bernie Dolan opening the game with a decent break.

The first official day of the Adobe Community Summit was packed full of interesting talks from several key product players. This years summit is my third and every year it seems to get a bit better. The time spent with Adobe folks is invaluable and the information shared allows members of the Adobe community (Adobe Community Experts, User Group Managers, and Adobe Champions) to prepare for the future in ways not quite possible in the past. The first person on the podium was Michele Turner, manager of the Adobe Technology Platform. She gave the keynote address discussing Adobe's general technology strategy. She also covered an overview of Adobe's 2 year technology roadmap. There are certainly some exciting things coming in the future. Following Michele, was Scott Fegette, a long time Dreamweaver user, and video/audio production god. Scott talked about what we're likely to see in the next version of Dreamweaver. His talk was very well received as he is a dynamic speaker and always a crowd favorite. Mike Chambers, another crowd favorite, took the stage next to walk through the current happenings with Adobe AIR. Most of what he covered is already public knowledge and just a recap what has occurred over the last 3 months since the launch of Flex 3 and AIR 1.0. He did share a few new tidbits indicating AIR has a bright future ahead. After Mike's talk we broke for lunch. During lunch I had some great discussions with Peter Bell, Bernie Dolan, and David Harris on all things ColdFusion. Peter has walked through the fire of what is application generation and has an unbelievable amount of experience in this area. When he talks, I listen. Kicking things off after lunch, Doug Winnie discussed how Adobe really has a strategy for reaching both the designer and developer and the workflows that integrate the two. Next up was Steve Heintz who talked about Flex, both today and in the future. I couldn't remember if I had heard Steve speak before but he did a really nice job talking (conceptually) on what Adobe plans to do with Flex in the future. One of the most impressive presentations was by Jen Taylor and Doug Benson who showed off some of the new features in the next version of the Flash Authoring tool. There were several jaw-dropping moments that caused me to "double-take" to be sure I wasn't seeing things. About all I can say, is Adobe has been busy on the Flash Authoring tool! After we all wiped off the drool, Steve Heintz joined us again to talk about Thermo. Thermo's been a seemingly super secret tool with very little information about it shared with the community. That didn't change much with Steve's presentation, but he did give the impression Thermo has a clear focus and purpose which. It will be interesting to see how the community takes to Thermo as more information is shared in the future. I'm hoping this years MAX conference will bring more news on Thermo.

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Sorry ifoods.tv, just because you’ve been nominated for best Web 2.0 Start up in Europe is no reason to spam members of the Irish blogosphere.

They didn’t even do it very well, leaving Tom Raftery’s email address in the To: field and attaching a Word .doc file with the text, “Please Find attached press release” in the body of the text. I mean, come on, Web 2.0 my arse. If you had a clue you’d have built up a following on Twitter just like Pat Phelan or Paul Walsh. You would have got us interested in what you do.

Get thee back to Web 0.1

Edit Michele has blogged about them too. Love this quote,

You may have been nominated for an award, but it obviously wasn’t in marketing or email usage based on the rubbish you sent me today and the way you sent it.

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Most everyone should know by now Ed Sullivan is moving into a new role within Developer Relations at Adobe and he'll no longer be responsible for managing the user group program. There's no real replacement for someone like Ed, but Rachel Luxemburg will be taking on the task. To show appreciation for Ed's influence and leadership in the program for so many years, Bob Flynn and the Indianna University Multimedia User Group, and other user group managers, recorded a video where they try to determine the perfect parting gift for Ed. I recorded the video presentation with my Flip camera and have made the the video available below in four parts. The last video is the presentation of some special gifts the user group managers bought for Ed.
Ed Sullivan Farewell Video - Part 1
Ed Sullivan Farewell Video - Part 2
Ed Sullivan Farewell Video - Part 3
Ed Sullivan Farewell Video - Part 4
Ed Sullivan Farewell Gifts Video

Michael Davies pointed out in email that the changes to laptop purchases and taxation have already taken effect, there is no window of opportunity to buy a new private-use laptop and still salary sacrifice it. Depreciation on existing laptops purchased via salary sacrifice can be claimed for the 2007/2008 tax year, but that's the last time.

The Government will tighten the current fringe benefit tax (FBT) exemption for certain work‑related items (including laptop computers, personal digital assistants and tools of trade) by ensuring the exemption only applies where these items are used primarily for work purposes... The measure will apply to items purchased after 7.30 pm (AEST) on 13 May 2008. The measure reduces the FBT concession and tax expenditure for work‑related items...

...

The Government will also deny employees depreciation deductions for FBT exempt items (that is, items purchased primarily for work purposes) purchased from 7.30 pm (AEST) on 13 May 2008. For items purchased before that time, employees will be denied depreciation deductions for the 2008‑09 and later income years. This measure will ensure that employees are no longer able to gain a double benefit by obtaining an FBT exempt item (such as a laptop computer) from their pre‑tax income, and then claim a deduction for depreciation.

Budget Paper No. 2 > Part 1: Revenue Measures > Treasury

We've just saved $5,000 by deciding not to buy ducted heating for our house. Why were we thinking ducted heating? Well it's funny how the mind works, you end up on a path a long way from where you started. I'll step through it.

The house stays pretty cool in Summer, but it's pretty cold in Winter, so we were thinking heating. I've lived in far too many shitty rentals with draughts, no insulation and the only heating option being expensive, inefficient electric. London spoilt us for never being cold when at home.

So I started looking at gas heaters, the unflued portable kind, which come in around or under $1,000. Choice has a review of them and points out that they release CO and NOx, as well as water vapour, and the emissions can be bad for asthmatics (like Holly).

So I stepped up my thinking to a flued gas heater, to go in the fireplace in the lounge room. I didn't want one of these gas fire things that have the look of a real fire but don't actually do much int he way of heat. I want real heat, so I was looking at the nice fan-forced heaters. These start around $3,000 and go all the way up.

Now my parents have a brilliant ducted gas heating system in their house. It's lovely in every room in Winter. Prices for a small house like ours are apparently from $5,000, which was less than double what we were prepared to pay for the flued heating. You see how your mind steps up a notch without realising?

Anyway yesterday the quote came in for the ducted heating. $6270 including GST for a five-star efficient ducted system. We've ended up a long way from the grand or so I was originally thinking of. It forced something of a reality check.

If we spend a grand on a heater (actually should be a bit less) we can spend the rest on double glazing and upgrading our roof insulation. This has major additional benefits of Summer insulation and keeping out aircraft noise. To be completely serious, you only really need heating in a Sydney house for a month or two of the year. Nice to have for perhaps another month. Spending all that money for something used for a quarter of the year isn't sensible.

It's been an interesting journey, and has taught me that when you're looking at things you need to remember where you started. Go back to it and compare with the gold-plated option you're now contemplating.

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The one single non-standard tax 'thing' that many people I know do is to salary sacrifice for a new laptop. Quick review of how this works: normally, you are discouraged from buying yourself stuff out of pre-tax income, because otherwise a sensible financial strategy would go something like: pay for everything, declare small remainder to government, be taxed only on small remainder. The way the government puts a stop to this is by charging Fringe Benefits Tax on things bought from pre-tax income. FBT is a huge amount of money, you'll pay an insane amount of tax on fringe benefits: better to buy things from your wages after tax was taken out.

There are a few exceptions or partial exceptions to FBT, and one is laptops, at present, more info here (written from an employer's point of view). Given how many people I know get their employer to let them salary sacrifice for their 'yearly laptop', I am surprised to see less commentary on this aspect of the Federal Budget for 2008/2009:

FBT improves tax fairness by taxing non-cash remuneration. Tax planning arrangements and changes in technology have eroded the fairness and integrity of the FBT system, which will be addressed by:

• ...
• removing the FBT exemption for work-related items used mainly for private purposes such as laptops
• removing the double benefit from employee depreciation deductions on FBT exempt items used mainly for work purposes

Budget Overview 2008–2009 [706K], page 5

What does this mean for you? I am not a tax professional (or financial professional) but my interpretation is:

• if you are buying yourself a new laptop and it won't be used mostly for work, you buy it out of post-tax income from now on (and you don't claim depreciation on it either, you've never been allowed to depreciate private possessions like that anyway); or
• if you are buying yourself a new laptop and it will be used mostly for work, you can either buy it out of pre-tax income, or you can claim depreciation, but not both as you may have done previously.

I assume this applies from July 1 2008 on. My understanding of depreciation is that 'work purposes' in the above is something along the lines of 'assisting in the production of assessable income', but this is certainly getting into regions where you should consult the ATO and tax professionals.

• 19:51 Hooray for dead alternators \o/ #
• 20:48 Hooray, ipv6.google.com is finally live #

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I guess that’s a fair trade…risking life and limb (and bad marks on a permanent record) for a purple gumball.  How thoughtful of Matt…

Right now I’m working on redesigning the cover for Volume 1. This has meant making lots of rough thumbnails, arranging bits around in Inkscape, and agonizing over which iteration of the covers I like best…

Well, actually, I don’t really agonize over that last bit anymore.  I use a couple of Web-based tools to force myself to decide which versions of things I like the best, helping me prioritize my decisions. The Prioritizer from CNN Money, and the Idea Sandbox Prioritizer are the two that I use on a semi-regular basis for helping me make all sorts of decisions.  Give’em a spin!

For Eyes Optical, a retail optical company with over 140 stores in the United States, has responded in a big way to our call for reading glasses for Darfur refugees and villagers in eastern Chad. Reading glasses are a critical component of our reading relief package, enabling more people to derive educational, occupational, and mental health benefits from the books we provide. How many more? At least 100, thanks to For Eyes' donation of 100 pairs of reading glasses!

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I usually try to get a review copy and read through a book before mentioning it here, but a book like Deploying Rails Applications (Amazon.com alternative) has been in demand for a long time now. Its provenance (coming from the keyboards of Ezra “Engine Yard” Zygmuntowicz, Bruce Tate, and Clinton Begin - and published by Pragmatic Bookshelf) encourages me to support it without direct review. That’s not to say it’s certainly a good book, but it darn well shouldn’t be a bad one.

The book covers deploying Rails applications under shared hosting, virtual machine, and dedicated server hosting environments, and looks at the variety of technologies you can use, such as Apache, Nginx and Mongrel. Monitoring, source control, and automated deployment (using Capistrano) are also discussed.

For those who’d rather squint endlessly at the screen than fondle finely pressed tree flesh, Pragmatic Bookshelf have a PDF version available for $22.

This post is sponsored by KickStart Events — RubyOnRails Training at the EMCC (East Midlands Conference Centre), UK. High-quality hands-on workshops and courses for web application developers. Taught by experienced mentors using live coding sessions, slides and participatory discussion.

Dave Cross just posted a link to the Programme for Opentech 2008 in July in London. While I've long missed all the awesome bands I've been missing in London, this is one of those events I really would love to go to.

There's really cool stuff like the stuff the mySociety guys going on over there. Hackers hacking government to make democracy work better.

I really enjoyed some of the random conferences I went to in London.

London Perl Workshop had really inspirational talks on people doing seriously awesome stuff in Perl.

Sadly defunct NTK put on a really impressive day called XCOM2002 showcasing people doing weird and cool shit with computers.

I'd love to start something like this here in Sydney. London, at the time, had NTK, which gave enormous amounts of publicity to really interesting geek stuff going on, which helped in getting the word out. Not sure there's the critical mass here, but there are certainly loads of people doing really interesting things.

Not sure how to get stuff going. I've certainly never made it to a Dorkbot here, so I'm as bad as everyone else.

Perhaps we need an NTK for Sydney? Who's up for starting one? I'd only be interested if there's some helpers. For geeks who didn't live in London between 1997 and 2006 (i.e., most of you) NTK (Need To Know) was a sarcastic weekly, purposely low-tech newsletter about what was happening in and around London. By and for geeks, particularly the charismatic Dave Green and Danny O'Brien. Wikipedia article.

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Completely unrelated: this set of photos on flickr is really neat. Fashion students at Virginia Commonwealth University were given an assignment to design an abaya. Heard about it on The World on PRI.

Now to the main point. This is why you don’t mess with Texas. We already have fire ants, which can literally breathe fire. And now, we have ants that will eat your iPod while you watch. From the article:

Worse, they, like some other species of ants, are attracted to electrical equipment, for reasons that are not well understood by scientists.

They have ruined pumps at sewage pumping stations, fouled computers and at least one homeowner’s gas meter, and caused fire alarms to malfunction. They have been spotted at NASA’s Johnson Space Center and close to Hobby Airport, though they haven’t caused any major problems there yet.

They’re clearly saving NASA for some darker purpose.

Exterminators say calls from frustrated homeowners and businesses are increasing because the ants — which are starting to emerge by the billions with the onset of the warm, humid season — appear to be resistant to over-the-counter ant killers.

“The population built up so high that typical ant controls simply did no good,” said Jason Meyers, an A&M doctoral student who is writing his dissertation on the one-eighth-inch-long ant.

It’s not enough just to kill the queen. Experts say each colony has multiple queens that have to be taken out.

Hell yeah. I’m rooting for the ants. Let this insectocalypse begin!

TPH :: Tweets per Hour

So, as I mentioned before, Flot is an awesome jQuery plugin for making on-the-fly graphs. The twitter api supports a JSONP mode for its output. 100 lines of javascipt (well, 60 if you condense whitespace and braces, commas... less if the goal was to write small code).

What I don't understand about what I've done here is JSONP, which I first read about here, at remy sharp's blog... Why doesn't it get more press. Solves the problem that I would mentally run in to all the time when considering various mash-ups and takes on various internet APIs, that of cross-domain limitations with XMLHTTPRequest.

The heart of the magic is demonstrated in this incredibly simple example:

$.getJSON('http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline.json?id=CDMoyer&callback=?',
      twitterCallback);
 
function twitterCallback(timeline) {
      alert('Twitter Username: ' + timeline[0].user.screen_name);
}

The magic happens in two places. First, jQuery replaces the ?@ in @callback=? piece of the URL with a function name that references to the callback you pass to getJSON(). Second, the twitter API takes the callback parameter and wraps the JSON result structure in a function call with that name. The end result is that the JSON structure is passed to a function in the namespace of your document, circumventing the same-domain origin policy

So far Scoble has reached the highest TPH (8.0) I've seen, looking at various popular tweeters.

Important decisions in life. What job will I do in the future and should I wear a beard? I’ve got the job bit covered, but would I look better with a beard? I think there’d be trouble if I tried growing one!

The wearbeard sticker really caught my eye. It’s just weird to create a site about that but it takes all sorts I guess.

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Tags: Black and White, Canon 10-22, Canon 20D, Cork, Cork Photos, FAS, Ireland, Irish photos, irishblogs, jobs ireland, Photos, St Patrick's Street, Street, Urban, wearbeard.com

Took me long enough to get it right, so I thought I’d share.

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About a year ago, I blogged about my shiny new bike, a Giant CRX City Pro. I was very excited about the hub gears on it. A Mark Jones found my post and asked me about it, so I figure I should share my response for anyone else considering buying it.

Glad you asked because I wouldn't recommend it!

The bike itself, frame, wheels, everything but the gearing is brilliant. A mate bought the (somewhat cheaper) deraileur version and is wildly happy with it. It's a really zippy geometry, really wants to go.

The big problem is the Nexus internal hub. It's a real pain in the arse. I was won over by the idea of zero maintenance gearing, but that just hasn't panned out.

To fix a puncture, you need a spanner and end up covered with grease getting the wheel off and on. It takes ages, and you'll get it wrong the first three or four times you do it, causing further problems. Chain tensioning isn't exactly easy, either.

What's more, a couple of weeks ago one of the anti-rotation washers (the yellow one in this picture as described here by the late, great Sheldon Brown) had one of the lugs break off, which meant the axle rotates. Taking it into the shop tomorrow.

So while I was after a much reduced maintenance bike, it really hasn't turned out that way. I managed to seriously screw things up the first few times I had punctures, requiring shop visits to sort it out and show me the right way. What's more, you need to carry a spanner and end up covered in grease.

Longest ride I've been on? Dunno, not that far, maybe 50kms. It's my commuter bike, so it normally only does 10km a day. If you're thinking of touring with it, be aware that the lowest gear isn't all that low, so loaded up and going up mountains wouldn't be good.

If I were buying again, I'd buy the derailleur version of the bike. For the price and the quality of the bike, it's an amazing deal. I might spend the difference in price on a hub dynamo and light set.

Contact me

Reporting from her base in Hadjer Hadid, Chad, our on-the-ground partner Anne Goddard of CORD explains how she and her team are persisting through security threats to run education programs in 18 Chadian villages.

To show your admiration for their courage, please consider donating to the emergency school supply fund, which will enable on-demand purchasing of pens, pencils, notebooks, etc. for the Chadian and Darfurian students, preventing interruptions in their education due to supply shortages.

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WordPress has included native support for intersections since (I think) version 2.3. Unfortunately, however, robust post retrieval support is only available for tags (eg. tag=A,B retrieves the union of “A” and “B”; tag=A+B retrieves the intersection of “A” and “B”).

Categories still require a hack, and the old plugins for this of course now no longer work.

To get intersection working, try adding the following line before the loop:

<?php if ($_GET['cat']) query_posts(array(’category__and’=>preg_split(’/[\s,]+/’,$_GET['cat']))); ?>
<?php while( have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>


This applies an intersection to any list of categories separated by space, comma, or “plus” signs in the request.

See Ryan Boren’s post on WordPress intersection and union taxonomies for details on the various forms of post retrieval queries now available.

Related:

• September 9, 2007 -- Intersecting Categories in WordPress
• January 27, 2008 -- Visual editor broken in WordPress 1.3.2
• July 31, 2007 -- Working out karmic issues in WordPress

Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman drums rhythmically and desires orange juice in this undated video.

This is one for the Speccy fans out there, especially Walter and Conor. Jetpac is a simple shoot em up released by Ultimate Play The Game in 1983 on the ZX Spectrum. Apparently there’s a C64 conversion too but it was never as popular on that platform. In 1988, Ultimate: The Collected Works was released. Pictured on that page is a review from Your Sinclair that looks very familiar. I remember reading that issue. Can’t believe it’s 20 years ago! The first time I played this game was probably at a friend’s house when he bought that compilation.

Here’s the original 1983 game in all it’s glory. Revel in the single colour sprites, and simple but addictive gameplay!

And here’s the Xbox version, called Jetpac Refuelled. Totally mad stuff! Updated graphics but same great gameplay.

If that isn’t enough to wet your appetite, you can now play Jetpac in your browser! Head over to this freeonlinegames page and start refueling that ship! Oh the excitement!

(Yes, yes, it doesn’t seem as good these days. Our expectations of what games do have risen so high that retro gaming really is a niche that appeals to those that grew up with the games. Oh well!)

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• 08:34 @jadoba you silly billy #
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• sontek ( John M. Anderson ) » Python with a modular IDE (Vim)
  These are now in my ~/.vimrc. Turns vim into a very nice IDE.
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Follow up to http://darxus.livejournal.com/205631.html

Somebody on the defense team (appointed, I believe) just stopped by my house for maybe a half hour chat. The guy is currently "in custody".

Suppose a website displays banner adverts provided by a third party, most likely Google given their dominance in these areas. Suppose one of these adverts were to be an animated GIF or similar. Just who is in for the chop if the advert flashes, strobes or otherwise changes in a way that provokes photosensitive epilepsy and similar?

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Merbunity is a new site dedicated to “news, projects, and tutorials” related to the Merb Web framework (increasingly a common alternative to Rails). It’s very early days, but it’s well designed, and the initial content is good. It feels a little like a Ruby Inside for Merb. Great job! Among the launch content, and of almost immediate interest to Mac-based Merb developers, is Dr. Nic Williams’ TextMate bundle for Merb.

It should not be hard for Merbunity to get traction with Merb fans. In the past few months the amount of amazing content for Merb developers has grown significantly. Key examples include the Merb wiki, the Merb book, the “How to create a chat wall” tutorial, and even Ruby Inside’s own list of 21 Merb links, tutorials, and other resources.

If you’ve been steering clear of Merb because it’s “not mature enough” (a complaint I have heard more than once), start dipping a toe in now. The water’s now warm but still not crowded.

This post is sponsored by 16bugs — You know how cumbersome most bug trackers are. We know it, too! If you believe bug tracking should be an easy and unobtrusive task, you should try 16bugs right now. Use coupon code “RUBYINSIDE” and get 50% off when you upgrade your account.

Originally uploaded by nflect on 13th May, 2008.

MOAR SPIKY HAIR

Way back in January I gave a sneak peek of an Apache article I had written for the Fusion Authority Quarterly. During the welcome reception of the Adobe Community Summit (last night) Terrance Ryan came up and said he had read (and enjoyed mind you) my article. Up until that moment I didn't even know it was released. If you're interested in understanding Apache more I encourage you to check out my article. While you're at it, why not purchase a subscription to FAQU? It's an excellent magazine available in print and PDF versions.

We've had a few requests for larger Linodes.   So, a new plan has just been created -- the Linode 2880.  Enjoy!

Last night, at the Adobe Community Summit welcome reception Rachel Luxemburg was introduced as the new user group manager for Developer Relations at Adobe. Rachel replaces Ed Sullivan who has been an amazing manager in this role for many years. Ed is a stalwart in the Adobe community and will continue working with the community in his new role in Developer Relations. Rachel hails from New York City but currently lives in CA. She's an avid blogger and twitterer and has been a ColdFusion user as well. Please give Rachel a warm welcome to Adobe and the Adobe community.

James Barrett (aka jadoba), of PLUG fame, has joined the Linode team effective today.  Jim maintains the Debiosk, which is a system for quickly building Debian based kiosks.  Welcome aboard Jim!

http://wiki.debian.org/SSLkeys

April 2006: OpenSSL pseudorandom number generation code throws valgrind error, and a bug report is filed.[1]

May 2006: New package is released and shipped.

* Don't add uninitialised data to the random number generator. This stop valgrind from giving error messages in unrelated code. (Closes: #363516)[2]

September 2006: Given a second chance to avoid a terrible fate, the bug fix is actually applied:

* Move the modified rand/md_rand.c file to the right place, really fixing #363516.[3]

May 2008: "WHAT THE FUCK... WHO... JESUS HOLY SHIT! OH GOD!"

http://lists.debian.org/debian-security-announce/2008/msg00152.html
https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-security-announce/2008-May/000705.html

Summary: Any Debian or Ubuntu or derivative system that has generated a key (including SSH host keys!!) within the past two years is... uhh... well, let's just say you're going to want to recreate those keys. Oh, and if you used DSA at all, sorry.

apt-get update && apt-get upgrade ('tho I needed to dist-upgrade due to the openssh-blacklist package being added) will fix your SSH situation under Ubuntu, up to and including regenerating your keys and rejecting connections using bad client keys. ssh-vulnkey can be used to check your authorized_keys. YMMV under Debian, etc. I don't personally use https or other SSL'd services on my Debian/Ubuntu machines at the moment, so I'm not sure how to fix that.

Other software advisories:

• Tor: update required for ALL 0.2.0.x users, key regeneration required for afflicted OpenSSL users

SpaceHobo sent along some additional information about how obvious the openssl-team mailing list is. Run, don't walk, to your music store to get Yakety Sax if you aren't already listening to it in your head.

This page has a lot of useful stuff: http://wiki.debian.org/SSLkeys I highly recommend a gander at it, as it generally has better information than this post.

edit: revise wording on apt-get update paragraph to mention that my knowledge is SSH-specific; added other software advisory section. added advogato link from spacehobo. added debian wiki link, made it the master link on this blog entry.

This guide shows how to use FUSE and CurlFtpFs to mount an FTP filesystem on Yellow Dog Linux 6. This guide presumes that you have already built and installed your own FUSE capable kernel for YDL 6.

Unless otherwise specified, all commands are run as a normal user, NOT root!

1) Install the FUSE userspace tools

wget http://downloads.sourceforge.net/fuse/fuse-2.7.3.tar.gz?modtime=1203456610&big_mirror=0
tar xvzf fuse-2.7.3.tar.gz
cd fuse-2.7.3
./configure
make
su -c "make install"

This should all go smoothly and you should now have the FUSE tools such as "fusermount" installed.

2) Install CurlFtpFs

wget http://downloads.sourceforge.net/curlftpfs/curlftpfs-0.9.1.tar.gz?modtime=1175788159&big_mirror=0
tar zxvf curlftpfs-0.9.1.tar.gz
cd curlftpfs-0.9.1
jm_cv_func_working_malloc=yes
export jm_cv_func_working_malloc
ac_cv_func_malloc_0_nonnull=yes
export ac_cv_func_malloc_0_nonnull
jm_cv_func_working_realloc=yes
export jm_cv_func_working_realloc
ac_cv_func_realloc_0_nonnull=yes
export ac_cv_func_realloc_0_nonnull
./configure
make
su -c "make install"

Again, this should all go smoothly and you should now have the "curlftpfs" program installed.

3) Mounting the FTP server

Mounting procedure is as follows:

mkdir MountPoint (eg: mkdir /backup)
curlftpfs -o user=USERNAME:PASSWORD ftp://FTPHost/ MountPoint/
eg: curlftpfs -o user=testusr:mypass ftp://127.0.0.1/ /backup/

This guide explains how to build and install a custom kernel RPM with FUSE support on Yellow Dog Linux 6. The guide is written based on my experience with YDL on an Apple XServe G4 using kernel-2.6.23-9 on ppc architecture. If your system is different then adjust the guide as required.

Follow all the commands as a normal user, NOT root!

1) Create an rpm build environment

cd ~
mkdir ~/rpmbuild
mkdir ~/rpmbuild/BUILD
mkdir ~/rpmbuild/RPMS
mkdir ~/rpmbuild/SOURCES
mkdir ~/rpmbuild/SPECS
mkdir ~/rpmbuild/SRPMS

echo "%_topdir /home/`whoami`/rpmbuild" > ~/.rpmmacros

2) Download and install the source rpm of the current kernel.

Note: this is not the kernel-source rpm!

wget http://www.mirrorservice.org/sites/ftp.yellowdoglinux.com/pub/yellowdog/releases/yellowdog-6.0/SRPMS/kernel-2.6.23-9.ydl6.1.src.rpm
rpm -ivh kernel-2.6.23-9.ydl6.1.src.rpm

3) Prepare the kernel source tree

cd ~/rpmbuild/SPECS
rpmbuild -bp --target=`uname -m` kernel.spec

4) Configure the kernel

cd ~/rpmbuild/BUILD/kernel-2.6.23/linux-2.6.23.9/
cp configs/kernel-2.6.23-ppc.config .config
make oldconfig
make menuconfig

Using the down arrow key navigate to "File systems" then press Enter and then scroll down to "Filesystem in Userspace support" and press "M" to select it as a module. Press Tab to select Exit in the bottom bar, then do it again, then press Y when prompted to save the configuration.

Copy the config file to ~/rpmbuild/SOURCES/:

cp .config ~/rpmbuild/SOURCES/kernel-2.6.23-ppc.config

5) Prepare the build files

cd ~/rpmbuild/SPECS

Open up the kernel.spec file for editing and ensure the kernel has a unique name by changing the following line (line 32)

%define release %{subrev}.ydl6.%{rpmrev}

to

%define release %{subrev}.ydl6fuse.%{rpmrev}

6) Build the new kernel

rpmbuild -bb --with baseonly --without debuginfo --target=`uname -m` kernel.spec

The build process takes a long time to complete. A lot of messages will be printed to the screen. These messages can be ignored, unless the build ends with an error. If the build completes successfully, the new kernel packages in the ~/rpmbuild/RPMS directory.

7) Install the new kernel

cd ~/rpmbuild/RPMS/ppc
su -c "rpm -ivh kernel-2.6.23-9.ydl6fuse.1.ppc.rpm kernel-headers-2.6.23-9.ydl6fuse.1.ppc.rpm --oldpackage"

8) Make the new kernel boot by default

As root, open up /boot/etc/yaboot.conf for editing. You should now see two kernel images listed as boot options. Change the label of the ydl6fuse image to something friendly like "linuxfuse". Now change the "default" line to the same.

For example:

default=linuxfuse
image=/vmlinux-2.6.23-9.ydl6fuse.1
label=linuxfuse
read-only
initrd=/initrd-2.6.23-9.ydl6fuse.1.img
append="root=LABEL=/"

image=/vmlinux-2.6.23-9.ydl6.1
label=linux
read-only
initrd=/initrd-2.6.23-9.ydl6.1.img
append="root=LABEL=/"

Important: Ensure you also have a line that says "delay=5" (or a greater number) so if your new kernel won't boot you can still access the yaboot menu to boot your old kernel!

Save and exit the file.

Now run "ybin" (again, as root) to commit the changes. Reboot!

9) Load the fuse module

su -
modprobe fuse

To make the fuse module load on boot. Create the file /etc/sysconfig/modules/my.modules and give it the following contents:

#!/bin/sh
modprobe fuse >/dev/null 2>&1

Save and exit. Now make it executable:

chmod +x /etc/sysconfig/modules/my.modules

10) Finished!

Your kernel now supports FUSE. Now you can use any of the various userspace tools to mount the various filesystems supported by FUSE.

Yesterday began rather early with a quick trip to the Nashville airport. After roughly 6 hours in the air (Nashville - LAX - SJC) I landed in San Jose and grabbed a cab to the San Jose Fairmont, a really nice hotel in the downtown area. Walking into the lobby of the hotel I was greeted by several smiling faces, Dee Sadler, Jim Pickering, David Schmidt, Buck Sommerkamp, and more. After a dropping my bags off in the room and catching up with folks we headed to Cupertino to visit Apple's infamous headquarters. While there we perused the on campus Apple Store, bought swag, and took a photo or two (in Flickr stream below) next to the "1 Infinite Loop" sign. I picked up a few Apple branded goodies including a pen, mouse pad, shirts for the fam, and a coffee mug (I love cool mugs). Back at the Fairmont everyone gathered in lobby and chatted. Adobe Community Experts and user group managers were arriving one by one with each arrival marked with loud "Heys!" and hugs. While talking with Dee Sadler I described the Adobe Community Summit as the summer camp for adults. Most everyone knows everyone else through the different Internet channels we communicate through every day. Events like the summit work to solidify friendships because we spend an insane amount of time with one another at Adobe HQ, off campus events, hotel lobby chat sessions, and lunches and dinners through downtown San Jose. Shortly before 6:00pm we headed over to Adobe's offices 4 blocks away. All the experts, user group managers, and several Adobe employees including Ed Sullivan, Stacy Sisson (the new Adobe Community Experts manager), Rachel Luxemburg (the new Adobe user group manager in Developer Relations), Jonathan Wall (Ed and Rachel's boss), and Mike Chambers, occupied the patio area just outside of Adobe's huge cafeteria. Adobe served beer (they ran out again this year) and appetizers to help everyone unwind and visit with friends. I don't know the exact numbers but I heard a report that over 150 managers and experts are in attendance this year. That's at least 50-60 more than last year marking an attendance high since the summit started in 2006. After mixing and mingling with old (and new) friends we had two breakout sessions. One for the managers and one for the experts. Each grouped discussed their program, what was working and what wasn't and how as members of each respective group we can help the Adobe community grow further. It was a great first day. I haven't taken many pictures yet, but they'll all be loaded to the Flickr photo stream below if you want to check them out as the week progresses. Flickr photo stream

Xzibit generously donated a "doodle" for a charity Internet auction on eBay. The auction started yesterday May 8 and continues through May 18.

Margi is an artist and business woman living in Oracle, Arizona in the US. She makes beautiful handmade jewelry and glass beads from this small building near an iron smith in the town. I bought a few items for my wife and she loves them.

If you’re near Oracle, call in and say hi. She’s busy but is lovely to chat with and will gladly sell you beautiful jewelry!

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Tags: Arizona, Arizona Photos, Az, Black and White, Canon 10-22, Canon 20D, handmade jewelry, irishblogs, Oracle, Photos, portrait, United States

• django-db-log
  Logs Django exceptions to your database handler.

Smiffy designs a retro-look kitchen timer to suit his needs.

We've been getting quotes for heating in our house, as it's starting to get cold. Initially we thought we'd go for a flued, fan-forced gas heater in the fireplace in the lounge room. A friend has the unflued gas heater recommended by Choice and it's brilliant. Heats her whole house really well. We figured flued because then the exhaust gases go outside.

Turns out gas heaters of this calibre, flued or unflued, are around $3,000 or more plus installation. Not cheap! So we decided to have a look at ducted heating, which if it comes in at under double that, I reckon isn't a bad deal since it would heat the whole house.

Now I've found The Sun Lizard which was featured on New Inventors. It uses heat from the sun to force warm air in or out of the house, depending on the season, and stores the heat in the thermal mass of the house. Given we're in a double-brick house, we've got plenty of thermal mass.

This claims to heat by 4-6° which sounds like it'd probably be enough most of the time for us. In addition, it cools by up to 10° in summer which would be a nice bonus. At under $3,000 it sounds like a nice option, and with no ongoing costs it's quite attractive.

But I'm not sure 4-6° is quite enough, even in Sydney's mild winters. I vowed when we bought a house to never spend another winter shivering with all my clothes on and a crappy electric heater sucking down expensive juice. This is the experience of poorly insulated, unheated rental properties for about a month a year in Sydney.

I wonder if the money we were thinking of spending on ducted heating might be better spent on a unit like this and upgrading our insulation. Get the roof vacuumed and the old insulation replaced with modern, high-spec insulation. As an added benefit, it would reduce plane noise. We're also looking into double glazing, which has benefits for both thermal and acoustic insulation. Perhaps with greatly-enhanced insulation and this unit, we could get by with a crappy electric heater used for only a few days a year?

So does anyone out there have any experience with this unit?

Contact me

Two enthusiastic fans of Cork band, Fred, when they played at the May Day celebrations in Cork back in 2005. I loved their first album, but the second one was just more of the same. Great to hear and watch live though!

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Tags: Black and White, Cork Photos, crowd, Fred, Fred-The-Band, girl, happy, Irish photos, irishblogs, Music, Patrick's Street, People, smiles, Sony 717, St Patrick's Street, Street

The long delayed version 1.5.1 of WordPress MU has just been released. If you don’t want to read the rest of this post head to the download page and grab the zip file or tarball but make sure you come back here to read the upgrade docs.

This release of the popular multi-blog version of WordPress is synced with WordPress 2.5.1 and so has all the great features as well as bug and security fixes that went into that release.

Upgrading from a previous release
As long as you haven’t modified any core files, you can copy the files in 1.5.1 over your current install. Database upgrades will happen transparently in the background. The new salted hashing on passwords requires two constants, SECRET_KEY and SECRET_SALT to be defined in wp-config.php. If you upgrade and you don’t change wp-config.php your users will appear logged out when they go to a different blog. That’s why MU will display an ugly warning message to site admins with the two lines when they log in to the backend.

If you run into trouble, remember to check the forum and Trac. Someone else may have already answered your question.

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So I'm on the phone to EDF Energy, I'm used to dealing with tired-sounding underpaid people who sound like they'd like to strangle you with the phone cable or having to keep taking the phone away from my ear to key in numbers. Not with EDF, they seem to be running a shiny voice recognition system. Either that or their phone droids are chowing the happy pills like there's no tomorrow and are very rigidly scripted. Either way it gets confused if you add please and thanks on the end of things. I guess that's not an input they're used to.

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I've just walked out of a written exam on Functional Programming in Haskell. Given my preference for keyboard and text editor over pen and paper I ran into more than a few issues.

Ampersands and pens don't mix.

I think nine out of every ten lines in my answer booklet contained crossings out. Paper and code don't mix. Consider

the above would probably have started out as

 

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Hours ago, David Heinemeier Hansson announced informally on Twitter:

Rails 2.1 RC1 has been tagged, the gems are on the beta server, official announcement shortly. But no need holding you back from trying it.

New features include built-in timezone support, Gem dependencies, better caching, and more.

To get Rails 2.1 RC1 from the beta gems server, just use:

sudo gem install rails –source http://gems.rubyonrails.com/

If you prefer to go native, Ryan Bates of Railscasts has already produced a screencast showing how to install Rails 2.1 RC1 using Git.

To keep up with the community chatter about Rails 2.1, check out this search for “Rails 2.1″ on Twitter Summize. There’s already a lot of activity.

This post is sponsored by Rails Kits — Looking to build a subscription-based or membership web site with Rails? Use the SaaS Rails Kit to skip having to write the billing code. Instead of starting from scratch, start with subscription management and recurring billing all ready to go.