martin's blog

Snow Day

Sat, 02 Feb 2008 14:37:32 +0000

We've had a fair few snow showers (and howling wind) down here in Co'path, but not enough for the kids to use their sledges (which they got for Christmas 2006 and haven't used yet).

So we headed up into the hills instead, searching for a slope that's close enough to the road, steep enough (but not too steep) and with enough snow to not get stuck in the grass.

Found it (eventually)

Movember - Sponsor Me!

Tue, 27 Nov 2007 17:02:46 +0000

In common with a bunch of other blokes at the current project, I'm growing a moustache for the month of MOvember, in aid of Prostate Cancer. So do the right thing, and make clicky on the big blue button:

All sponsorships are made directly to The Prostate Cancer Charity which will use the money to fund high quality research into the causes, treatment and impact of prostate cancer and to provide support and information to men and their families.

The Shipping Forecast... With a Beat

Sun, 18 Nov 2007 20:40:42 +0000

As you'll notice if you're watching my latest iTunes music buys, I've just bought The Imagined Village — a set of resettings of traditional English tunes, with the likes of Billy Bragg, Paul Weller and Ben Zephaniah helping out folk stalwarts such as Eliza Carthy.

The results are pretty wonderful, not just because of the music (which has been rather unkindly described as Sitar lines and funky beats grafted on, and frankly is where Scots music was ten years ago with Martin Swan's Mouth Music), but firstly because this project takes up the grand old broadsheet ballad tradition of updating or replacing the words to songs to fit whatever the current situation, and secondly because it's exposing contemporary young(ish — le Bragg is about to be 50) musicians to traditional performing practises.

Anyway, it's very much worth a listen; and if you like your free samples before laying down the cash, here are some video tasters:

The Imagined Village Trailer: A look at the artists and music of The Imagined Village.
Hard Times of Old England Retold: The Imagined Village band perform this track live in The Big Room at Real World prior to their first performance at the WOMAD festival.

Wait a Minute, There's More

They've released Cold, Hailey, Rainy Night as a samplepack, downloadable from RealWorldRemixed, so with Garageband or similar, you can produce your own mixes, which is just what I've done:

OSX Leopard First Impressions

Sat, 27 Oct 2007 13:50:35 +0100

...first niggles mostly, but never mind.

Keychain

Existing keychain data (ie central password store for pretty much everything from Mail Accounts to Web Sites) appears to have been dumped, so I had to remember the passwords for everything.

Time Machine and Airport

Up until Monday this week, the Time Machine page promised that you could back up to a drive attached to an Airport base station. Well it happens that I have one of those, and I bought it with just this use case in mind.

But on the production release, it doesn't work — the functionality's been removed. You can connect an external drive to the machine you're backing up, or any other Leopard-running machine on the LAN with File Sharing enabled. Maybe it just missed the QA cut and it'll be back for future point releases, but it's not there now.

Iomega UltraMax

This was the drive I bought for Time Machine purposes. Ideally this would be in RAID 1 mode, so you've two mirrored drives automagically backing each other up. If one fails, you can replace it, rebuild the array and no data loss. Some online reviews claim that the drive can't do that under OSX, but that's daft as it's a hardware device. This isn't true, but what is hard is working out how to switch it to RAID 1 — certainly the supplied docs don't tell you. The trick is you need to first press and hold the Rebuild button on the front panel for 10 seconds or so. This will obviously (re)build the array, and it will then pop up in Disk Utility at half the JBOD size. You can then format and you're good to go.

Global Footwear Armistice

Mon, 22 Oct 2007 16:55:24 +0100

It would seem that the War On Global Footwear is over. The last two Thursdays have seen me going through LHR Terminal 1 without having to remove my shoes.

Presumably Al-Quaeda sent BAA a note, saying

Righteous Al-Quaeda Brethren in Jihadi Alliance under The Most Holy One to Western Materialistic Fascists, Greeting.

We promise no longer to attack your Western aggressor aviation industry by means of the bombs hidden in Shoes, honest we do. Therefore please call off the security shoe-removing behaviour which is causing us all to spend too long in Airports.

Yours in Faith
Osama

Update 26 Oct

War on Footwear back on, sadly. Presumably Al Queda were just on half term.

Oh, also LHR now have a War on Loading Your Own Tray.

Perhaps I'm just missing it — perhaps it's not a War on Terror, but a War on Catching Your Flight...

Going Off Air - updated

Wed, 05 Sep 2007 17:19:54 +0100

Just a quickie: easyweb — site and all mail accounts — will be off the air from late in the day on Monday 17th September until a week or so into October.

This is because it all runs on a server at home, and we're moving house, with some time in a caravan in between.

We'll be back up once we have ADSL in the new place.

Update

Back, obviously. Took a bit longer than expected — no thanks to BT and their useless Moving House process that doesn't work if you have an inter-regnum between houses.

New ADSL providers are WebTapestry, who are fab, affordable, and approachable. We're getting 8 Meg despite being in a tiny village miles from anywhere. But it's in Scotland, so it has a BB-enabled exchange, which we're ~50m from. But the move has done something odd to the site's ability to fetch RSS feeds. I suspect it's DNS related as very little else has changed, but I'm still in problem analysis mode.

Fighting Global Footwear

Fri, 31 Aug 2007 12:13:37 +0100

No, I'm sorry, I've spent too long fuming about this, so have to rant somewhat. Please excuse me...

Once again last night, coming home through LHR I was confronted by the sheer stupidity and theatrics of the security regime. In the last 6 months, LHR's security policy has moved from Occasionally, you will have your shoes checked to Randomly, you will need to put your shoes through the scanner to everyone will always have to have their shoes scanned.

Being a bolshie person who doesn't give in to implied orders, but waits to be explicitly told to do stuff, and even then challenges them, I enquired why this might be so. And the astounding answer was along the lines of:

Mumble, mumble, terrorism, mumble, mumble, current security climate, mumble, mumble, Shoebomber, mumble mumble.

Or, to put it another way, the best excuse they could come up with was a failed attempt nearly 6 years ago which hasn't been repeated since and has never happened under a British airport security regime, leaving two possible interpretations:

They're extremely slow on the uptake
It's all about being seen to be tough, without having any real impact on risk

The paranoid civil libertarian would naturally pick on the second explanation, as preparing the travelling public for any number of future restrictions (hell, why don't we all fly naked. And ban all fluids from aircraft). However, I prefer the third option of Random order from on high, which seemed like a good idea at the time but is so pointless even the staff can't work out (aka the Cockup theory). Well, it's better than the plain stupid the time taken to take off shoes lets them scan all the other things you now have to split out into separate trays theory.

I wouldn't even mind so much if the 'higher up' source was HMG, as then at least there'll have been some oversight from an intelligence source (what am I thinking?), or perhaps it's a BAA-wide policy. But no, it only applies to LHR.

How do I know? Because at EDI, another BAA establishment, they don't have a War on Footwear. Oh no. At EDI, they have a War on Belts. Yes, you have to take off your belt and put it through the scanner, while you walk through the metal detector (which I might add doesn't detect mobile phones as I discovered by accident on Monday), holding up your trews. Fair enough if it's a whacking great big thing with studs, clan crests and the like on it. But where can I hide a bomb in a modest thing with the smallest of buckles strictly needed to hold the thing together?

Or maybe they're just all scared in case I'm trying to smuggle on Holy Water... And don't get me started on that hoax.

Housemoving

Wed, 01 Aug 2007 11:18:53 +0100

We're on the move next month - having finally sold the current house, we'll be renting a rather nice 4 bedroom house in Cockburnspath, (pronounced Co'path incidentally) which is a few miles along the coast from Dunbar.

While we're there, we'll be looking for a plot to build a house, of which presumably much more later.

Move-in date is set for 21st29th September and we'll be in a caravan for 2 weeks between houses, so I guess we'll be having a joint housewarming/birthday party.

Harry Potter Spoilers

Wed, 18 Jul 2007 09:36:59 +0100

Seen in #evolt:

* NDBeresford kind of wishes he hadn't read that Harry Potter page
<garrettc> shut up
<garrettc> don't say a word
<garrettc> seriously
<garrettc> i will hurt you
<NDBeresford> It's OK
<garrettc> no matter how funny you think it's going to be, it won't be
<NDBeresford> No, what you mean is it won't be funny for you
<martinb> Snape is Kaiser Zhoze
<NDBeresford> Oh damn you Martin, give it away why don't you
* NDBeresford sighs
<martinb> Dumbledore is a woman
<martinb> Hagrid is dead, really
<martinb> Neville is The One
<martinb> James Potter is part of Harry's Split Personality
<martinb> Butterbeer is made of people (muggles though, so that's OK)
<martinb> Voldemort is Hermione's father
<martinb> and Slytherin House sacrifice Prof McGonagall

Flash 9 under 64-bit Linux

Sat, 02 Jun 2007 13:51:03 +0100

If, like me, you've gone out and bought an AMD64-based machine to run Ubuntu (or any other 64-bit distro) on, you'll have discovered that there's no Flash player available. Which is an awful pain when the point of the machine is to be a safe one for the kids to use on the Interwebs, specifically the CBeebies site.

Fortunately, Adobe's John Dowdell pointed out a rather useful wrapper that lets 64-bit Firefox use 32-bit plugins.

Two minutes on Google later, and I'd found a one-click install script for Ubuntu that sorts out nspluginwrapper and installs the Flash9 plugin.

NB it needs to be run for each user, but other than that, is bluddy grate.

JD, my kids thank you.

Wilburys Travelling Again

Fri, 01 Jun 2007 12:21:48 +0100

Hey - great news! One of my favourite albums of my teenage years is to be re-released after many years in deletia. The Travelling Wilburys Vol 1 is out on June 11, and is available for pre-order on iTMS now!

Here's a sample: their debut single Handle with Care.

Anne Moffat: Reductio ad Hitlerum

Fri, 01 Jun 2007 10:07:30 +0100

Our MP, Anne ~~Picking~~Moffat has historically been a thought-free, nodding dog for whatever hare-brained, knee jerk, reactionary guff the current government has dreamt up.

However, lately she's excelled herself in lack of thought, research, tact and insight when she conflated problems with the recent Scottish Ballot Paper with the principle of PR, and in doing so, compared the new First Minister to Hitler:

Did not proportional representation give Germany Adolf Hitler? To a lesser degree, we have been given the hon. Member for Banff and Buchan (Mr. Salmond). Can that be a good example?
Source

To pick off the obvious problems:

There's the obvious kneejerk against Labour's current bête noir — sour grapes for losing power in Scotland, mixed with the fear resulting from her own constituency being part of that shift.
Then there's the simple fact that proportionality delivers an overall result that is closer to the will of the people. That it tends to upset entrenched parties that benefit from the current system obviously leads to even the more reasonable of her Hon Friends decrying it.
Next, we can note that previous AMS elections had very few spoiled papers. And even this time round, the new STV system had a remarkably low spoilage rate. So bitchy comments about this particular election's validity are either supremely premature and ill-informed, or are directed at another target.
Finally, Ms Moffat has shown herself prone to making logical fallacies. In this case, the Reductio ad Hitlerum, generically expressed as Adolf Hitler (or the Nazi party) supported X; therefore X must be evil/undesirable/bad, etc. As X can include building motorways, painting watercolors, owning dogs and vegetarianism, this is clearly a fallacy. In the online world, this is known as the Corollary to Godwin's Law: the citing of Hitler in an argument ends the argument, with the citer being deemed to have automatically lost.

Nous Partirons En Vacances!

Mon, 21 May 2007 13:27:35 +0100

We're booked with Canvas Holidays, to spend two weeks in Sunny South Brittany.

The interesting thing is that I think this is the same campsite that I went to with Mum and Dad when I was about 13. Although much has changed since then — huge swimming pools with waterslides are now de rigeur.

Now I have to hit the Michel Thomas on the iPod, to refresh my rusty French.

Dry Bed

Thu, 17 May 2007 07:00:57 +0100

Woohoo! Ruaridh, in Big Boy Pants, woke up in a dry bed this morning! I am so proud!

I waked up in a dry bed mommy come see
I waked in a dry bed daddy I did
I woke up in a dry bed w/ dry feet & a dry head
I am a big boy now

Paying Attention to the Man Behind the Curtain

Fri, 11 May 2007 01:48:48 +0100

It's one of the basic tools of any magician — control of the audience's attention. It's said that a good magician knows at all times where the audience is looking, and controls it. Misdirect the audience into looking at your right hand, while your left hand palms the coin. Or, if that fails, use the Glamourous Assistant as the focal point.

Today's lesson in stage magicianship comes from our old friends, the Labour Party. While you're all looking at the left hand waving goodbye (or the Glamourous Assistant), the right hand is busy palming £400m of my money and yours.

That 8% cost slippage (that's £2.4bn so far, or 76% of the original budget for those keeping count) came out in the Gateway Review, a month past the required deadline, and just happened to be published within a few minutes of the Dear Leader's Resignation Speech. Mind you, the only reason it came out at all was because the courts ordered to be published.

Yes, it seems that even in its death throes, the Blair Project cannot resist spinning for all its worth. It's another Good Day to Bury Bad News — an open goal so wide that we should have seen it coming a mile off.

Oh, we did.