Yay, I’m back online!

Got loads of mail to catch up on (can you spot the running theme here?) so please bear with me if you’re waiting for a response.

In other news, I took delivery of a brand spanking new server for BritBlog yesterday. Nice to have something new for once, and it should be a decent machine. It’s got dual processors (which are dual core xeons), and 4 GB RAM, so it should be able to cope with all the new features we’ve got in the pipeline for BritBlog. It’s going to take quite a few weeks to be built and setup, but it’s nice to know we finally have it. Sorry to anyone who has noticed all our downtime lately (on the live site)… the old server has a hardware problem by the looks of things, and there’s not a lot we can do about it.

Any other news? Well the reason for the lack of connectivity is because I’ve moved into a nice little flat all on my own, and it took a while to get the ‘phone line sorted and the internet connection. The new place is all nice and clean, and I’ve got loads of space. It’s great!

Right, better get on with work before I get hit over the head…

I’ve been offline for the last few days, and will contiue to be without internet access fora couple of weeks as I’ve just moved home… Sorry to anyone waiting for a reply to an email!

The Houses of Parliament just after sunset, uploaded by Mark Sweeting.

I was rather surprised to find that someone else posted my photo to their flickr photo stream, passing it off as their own.

When prompted by someone else, the person did at least admit that they “found the photo on the web” (so that makes it alright?). Once I’d recovered a little bit from a rather odd feeling (I can’t describe how I felt — it was very odd), I emailed the person and asked them to remove the photo.

That they did, but not without saying they thought I was over reacting slightly.

The single biggest thing about flickr that annoys me is all these people constantly posting and reposting the same photo, either found from the web or pinched from another flickr user. I really don’t understand what the point of it is — how can anyone feel proud of someone else’s work?

This goes on such a lot, and there really isn’t an easy way to report it to flickr.

I know that if you put something up on the web then the chances are someone somewhere is going to download it and copy it etc., and for private use I guess I don’t have a problem with this.

But what gets on my goat is people taking something that isn’t theirs and either passing it off as their own, or even worse making money or some other benefit from it!

In this particular case, the copy of my photo got explored (quite an achievement on flickr — it means your photo is one of the most interesting at a given point in time), and I didn’t get any credit for it.

Ahh well, my sounding off is complete. Something like this makes you realise what these musicians and other artists must feel like when their music is distributed on the web for free… But that’s discussion is for another time!

Tags: flickr, annoyance, copyright, theft

Darren very kindly tagged me with this meme: “Five things you probably don’t know about me”. Difficult one this — it’s almost boundless. If you’ve read much of my blog you’ll know it isn’t too personal, so don’t expect anything revolutionary here…

1. I like jazz I like a lot of music, but my roots are jazz. I’ve listened to various forms of Jazz since I was 10 or 11, and I still love it today.
2. Having said that, I like classical music too, and listen to that more and more. Ever since Jazz FM went evil, I’ve found myself listening to Classic FM. I’ve always liked different classical themes, but these days find it great for listening too when driving to meetings…
3. I’m scared about getting old. I’m not getting any younger, and in many was I feel no older than I did when I was 18. However, I’m going grey, my knees don’t work as well as they used too, and I can’t drink a fraction of what I used to be able to drink. I don’t feel like I’ve lived properly yet, and hate having to think about pensions and old age.
4. I hate computers. I really do. What good do they do? Maybe a stupid point, but I’d love to have nothing to do with them!
5. Last but not least… I like to cuddle. Well I do OK?!

Tags: meme, five things

Christmas has come rather quickly this year! However, as it is now upon us it seems like as good a time as any to wish you, dear reader, a Merry Christmas, however you choose to celebrate it.

I seem to have had a few productive days since my holiday began on Thursday afternoon. I spent yesterday trying to track down splogs in Technoranki using SpolgSpot. Sadly, SplogSpot’s database seems to be full of rubbish. Yes, the do have some splogs in it, but they have more than 100 of our valid blogs in their database too (including our very own BritBlog Blog!). I just couldn’t be bothered checking all the ones it threw up as none that I checked were actually splogs.

So after yesterday’s rather failed attmept to locate splogs, I switched my efforts to locating dead and missing blogs in the BritBlog directory. I’ve written a little tool that goes and visits all the blogs in the directory and decides if the blog us there or not.

I’m going to run it each day (probably), and if a blog is missing more than 10 times in a row say, I’ll remove it from the database (probably after emailing the owner to tell them).

There is some room for improvement with this: for example I haven’t decided what to do with URL redirects yet. I think I need to sort out the trailing slash issue first, then worry about the remainder of these issues. It’s been a good chance to have a practice with Python though. Seems like a good language, but I’ve got a long way to go

Anyhoo, the tool seems to be doing it’s job so I’ll bolt it into the live application over the next few days. Will be good to remove some of the deadwood from the directory. That remonds me, the spider is running silently in the background. There’s a lot of work to do before it can go live, but it should be another useful tool in the battle to purge dead blogs from the directory.

Right, can’t sit up all night — I don’t want to scare off Santa!

Merry Christmas!

Tags: splogs, splogspot, santa, christmas

According to The Telegraph, the suspect arrested in connection with the murder of five women in Suffolk has his own My Space account, going by the name “The Bishop”.

If this is true and not just a hoax, I find this quite scary. It must be very odd for the 7 friends listed too (Lizz, Rain, hillary, Jordan, Sebastian, Tom). And the guy hasn’t logged in since 27/10/2006; is this date significant?

Mr Stephens, 37, was arrested at home in Trimley, near Felixstowe this morning.

Tags: serial killer, Ipswich, Felixstowe, Tom Stephens

Well I’m glad that week is over! It started off bad (with things I can’t really go into here), and gradually got worse. And to finish it off, my clutch (or rather my car’s clutch) went on Wednesday, and one of my PHP ‘contact me’ forms got hijacked by a spammer on Friday/Saturday.

Anyway, the car is now fixed so I have about three or four months to find a new one before the cam belt needs replacing. It’s not worth replacing it as the car has done nearly 250 thousand miles (yes, quarter of a million miles!), so I’ve got to start thinking about what to get next. The criteria are: cheap, air conditioning, heated wing mirrors, and diesel. Shouldn’t be too hard to suss.

The spam issue has been quite a pain. Looks like it’s quite easy to feed all sorts of rubbish into the PHP mail() function, so I’ve pulled them all out for the meantime. You may want to check your own forms if you use it.

I felt I needed a little cheering up so treated myself to some ’studio flashes’. Maybe slightly over the top for my needs, but I got myself an Elinchrom D-Lite 2 To Go set. This includes 2 x D-Lite 2 lights, 2 x stands, 2 x softboxes. I’ve never used this kind of light before, so should be fun having a play. No doubt I will write more about them once I’ve had a bit of a play…

Right, got to make dinner. Don’t forget the BritBlog Christmas Blogmeet next month. Should be a lot of fun!

Well as I alluded to in my last post, I’m now back from my holiday to Croatia. Had a great time: weather was perfect (sunny and dry with no humidity — just how I like it), food was good, drink (notably the local wine) was very good, and we got to see quite a lot of the Crotian coast in our time there.

We flew in to Rijeka airport in the North of Croatia and spent a couple of days driving down to Dubrovnik (via Šibenik and Split). After spending three days in Dubrovnik we went up to the island of Hvar, spent a few days there (had a great day on a small hire-boat that cost just twenty five quid for the day), then drove back up north to the Island of Krk, ready for the flight back.

As you can probably imagine, I took rather a lot of photos and I’ve started to filter them down. They’ll all appear on flickr in due course, but this time I’m trying something a little different: I’ll be geotagging my photos. I picked up a very small Garmin Geko 301 GPS receiver which I left in my camera bag, so I should be able to work out where I was everytime I took a photograph. (It was giving me accuracy of 12 feet and less with WAAS turned off, which I think is pretty amazing). Just in case there are issues with that, I also recorded the location from which I took lots of photos from as waypoints.

It will be interesting to see if this works, and I’m looking forward to seeing other people photos taken from the same places!

I saved my daily tracklogs (logs of where I had been) on the GPS, and it looks like you can publish them to your website and replay them on Google Earth. I’ve not worked out how to do this, but I’m guessing it’s quite straight forward. So watch this space - you’ll be able to re-live every detail of my holiday :-p

The worst thing about holidays is coming back to email. I’ve already deleted over 3000 spam mails that were missed by my spam filter, so if I’ve missed anything from anyone, then sorry! I’ve got quite a lot to follow up on too, which is a bit of a pain.

Anyway, must press on with work (or rather lunch now).

Tags: holiday, croatia, gps, geotagging

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