Well, I guess we know who BillG is voting for this year…

Well, I guess we know who BillG is voting for this year…

Absent

Off on holiday. Laptop not allowed, so nothing here until next week. Enjoy the peace and quiet…

Real cracks Apple DRM

This could get interesting - RealNetworks have reverse-engineered Apple’s Fairplay DRM so that tracks purchased from Rhapsody can be played on iPods.

It’s something of a test for Apple - if you take at face value that the iTunes store is a loss-leader for iPods, then anything that makes more content available for iPods should be A Good Thing as far as they are concerned. But there’s an equal chance that they’re going to be pissed off at Real for reverse-engineering, so in that case the nastygrams will start flying. But in any case, it’s a situation where Real needs Apple more than Apple needs Real…

Broadband house-moving woes

One of the downsides of working mainly from home is that I’m absolutely beholden to broadband availability, to the extent that there were large swathes of the area surrounding York that were off-limits as far as moving was concerned because they’re not ADSL-enabled. Basically, without either broadband or cable I’d be screwed - there’s just no way I’d be able to go back to dialup, and the alternatives like satellite aren’t exactly much better.

So part of the house-hunting process has involved getting hold of the phone number (overtly or otherwise) and running it through the availability checker at the first opportunity. The trouble is, that’s only 80 - 90% certain, and it’s that 10% risk that I’ve had to work around. What’s made it even more complicated is that at the new place, the previous owner has moved out and taken his number with him already. So I’ve ended up taking over the line before we’ve even exchanged contracts, and ordered ADSL from PlusNet just to see if it’s available or not. Best case scenario is that it is, and I end up paying line rental and ADSL service charges for a month or so before we actually get to move in; worst case scenario is the ADSL install fails and I end up paying out three month’s worth of line rental in a house that we then can’t buy.

So far it looks OK - although the BT checker mentioned long line lengths, we’d be no more than about 2km as the crow flies from the exchange, and the site is saying 2Mb should be possible. And everything’s gone through the initial stages with PlusNet, so fingers crossed it’ll go OK. But I’m still not going to exchange contracts until I’ve physically attached a router to the line and got a working connection. Which I guess makes me paranoid…

Theyworkforyou.com has RSS feeds

This is bloody brilliant. Not only have theyworkforyou.com scraped Hansard and produced the definitive guide to what our politicians are up to, they’ve also produced an RSS feed for each of the 653 MPs so that all their utterings in the House of Commons (and I assume committees as well) can be delivered directly into a newsreader. And all of this is done in spare time by volunteers, and they’ve open-sourced the source code.

Noisy neighbours

It’s 5:15am in the morning, and I was last asleep about four hours ago. The reasons I was last asleep four hours ago are two floors up and one apartment across - their party has wound down now, in no small part due to me pounding on their front door for the second time at 1am. The first time had been at about 11:30pm - which is probably a bit on the hair-trigger side on my part, but I’ve been bombarded by noisy neighbours all week and my tolerance levels are low.

So when they woke me up at 1am I wasn’t in a charitable, “oh never mind, they’re enjoying themselves” mood. The sequence of events went something like:

• I hammer on the door three times
• they come to look through the spyhole, decide it’s trouble, lock the door from the inside and walk away
• I hammer on the door again
• the music goes off temporarily
• the music goes back on, if anything marginally louder
• I hammer on the door again
• someone inside decides that I’m not going to do away, and the door is answered

It was answered by a large and extremely pissed South African who initially decided that the correct approach to the situation was to feel aggrieved that his door had been battered upon, but then changed tack and tried bonhomie - presumably after my thousand-watt-shrivel-up-and-die-expression got through the alcohol fog. It was a bit of an unnerving confrontation - I’d got about 3 or 4 inches on him vertically, but he had about 30 pounds on me. The only thing behind me was a waist-high handrail and a fifty-foot drop to the water feature in the atrium, and behind him was a flat-full of equally-pissed South Africans. Fortunately my body language obviously said “trained killer” and he backed down fairly quickly - the music went off, although there wasn’t much chance of me getting back to sleep once the post-argument adrenalin kicked in.

So since then I’ve been sat up tweaking the blog template and watching the early morning passers-by wandering past - where are people going at 5:15am on a Sunday morning? And the passers-by are wandering pas and wondering why that strange bloke is sat typing at a laptop at 5:15am on a Sunday morning…

A quick test post

This is a post with a blockquote in the middle of it:

This is a blockquote with an added div tag. Lorum ipsum dolor sit amet, whether it is nobler in the minds of men to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune…

And here’s some text afterwards…

New layout

I was starting to get increasingly fed up with the old layout for this blog - it wasn’t exactly easy on the eye, and the code and the stylesheet were something of a mess. After spending a couple of hours trying to bash it into shape, I admitted defeat and downloaded a template from Neil, our Infosential intern. He’s got several rather good layouts for Moveable Type and WordPress, which has saved me a lot of tweaking…

Orlowski has a pop at Wikipedia

So, Andrew, what have you done to contribute to the sum total of human knowledge recently?

Conversational cheapshots, or How NOT to Talk

Courtesy of Vandruff (is that something that eldery Transits suffer from?), a long list of conversational gambits guaranteed to start a punch-up.

Although as I’m a master of the devastatingly witty put-down dreamt up a full five minutes after I’ve left the room, my problem would be remembering them…