Student Radio Awards 2004 #
Tonight I travel to London for the Student Radio Awards at the Shepherds Bush Pavilion. Surge is nominated for 4 awards this year including Station of the Year and best Technical Innovation. It'll be fun - last year's was excellent.
Since Hanni's gotten me addicted to Flickr (a photo sharing service with more bells and whistles than you can shake a stick at), I've been fiddling with some of its features and come up with this page.
If this works, I'll be able to send photos from my Nokia, via Flickr, onto this page. A live photo log of the Student Radio Awards. I know photologs/moblogs aren't exactly new, but it'll be the first time I've tried it. Keep an eye out on that page tonight (from 7pm GMT) for photos from the Svencam!
Did ya know... #
Nine things you probably didn't want to know. I'm wearing gloves from now on. (from Planet Dan, via Woodge. 100% recycled links).
Google Scholar #
Google Scholar has just been released. It lets you search a subset of Google's vast database, covering all sorts of academic documents. Rather neat - I could've done with this last year! (via Silicon.com)
Radio Gaga #
Since I spend most of may days in front of a broadband-connected PC (something I'm becoming less and less proud of), I often can be found with Winamp running listening to my favourite stations.
Of the regular top ten at Shoutcast, Radio Paradise (listen) is my favourite. A great selection of music across genres, well-chosen and always a pleasure to listen to. I've yet to hear a single song on Radio Paradise I dislike.
Frequence3 (listen) is a French station. Much more modern than RP, but plays the more sensible chart songs from around the world (including quite a few French songs too, quelle surprise there).
Hitzradio (listen) is even more chart-focused, although it would be better if they didn't play Destiny's Child.
And of course I can't avoid adding SURGE (listen), me ol' station, to the list!
Brrrr #
First time I've had to scrape ice off my car this evening. Hello winter.
100,000 faxes and counting #
FaxYourMP reached its 100,000th fax yesterday. For those who don't know about it, FaxYourMP does exactly what it says on the tin. You enter your postcode to find your local MP, then you can type a message to send as a fax. The entire project is run as a non-profit by a small team of volunteers (two of whom I met yesterday). This milestone is a great achievement.
Microsoft Search #
Can't say I'm overly impressed by the tech preview of MSN's new search engine. A search for Microsoft lists its Windows Update page as the top result. Other results are not much more promising. Still, it's a technology preview and I ought to give them feedback as they request. (via babysimon)
Which side of the road do they drive on? #
Which side of the road do they drive on? "... an attempt to list which side of the road people drive on around the world, and to find some reasons why."
Quite fascinating actually. Unsuprisingly much is defined by the Brits and the French, but the page goes into much more detail, and picks out some very interesting bits and pieces. I also didn't realise that in many countries there is a lane discipline for pedestrians - apparantly we British are quite good at seemingly random walking movements, using eye contact and gestures to keep us from bashing into each other. In many other countries however, there is an implicit (and sometimes explicit) convention for walking to the left or right.
Link via Presurfer
Tea Lady #
There's nowt more annoying than finding a midget bathing in your cup of tea.
Argh #
I don't have any interest in the US elections: Bush, Kerry and whatnot. I'm sure the US president is a really important guy, but every single place I go is talking about it. Every blog has been telling me to vote Kerry or vote Bush, some were telling me to just vote full stop, and now the results are in everybody is either cheering or cursing. I need some relief from this in cyberspace, and I'm sure you do too, so I'm proud to announce this blog is proudly 100% election free.
(...Except this post)
(...Bollocks)
Desktop Searching #
Google Desktop Search
...it was only a matter of time!
Shoutcast RSS Feed #
Like Shoutcast? Want an RSS feed of the top twenty stations? Here you are.
This works great with Mozilla Firefox's new Live Bookmarks.
Ask Jeeves #
I haven't looked at Ask Jeeves for a while, but it's looking better than ever, with some intelligence in its parsing. Just like if you type 'three uk tablespoons in cubic feet' into Google it does more than just search.
Shame its geography isn't very good.
Free Stock Photos #
I know I'll need these again at some point. They're sites containing hundreds of free stock photos. Very handy.
http://www.morguefile.com/archive/index.php
http://www.pixelperfectdigital.com/
MSN Flakiness #
At work we are all mobile employees. I often work from home near Portsmouth, and stay in contact with colleagues and customers via the Internet. Skype is bloody brilliant, frankly. I know the technology isn't new, but it's the simplest Voice over IP tool I've used so far, and the quality is great.
We also use MSN Messenger, but very recently I've noticed an appalling drop in its reliability. Lines of chat are regularly lost, and its only when one of the participants repeats a question (looking for an answer) or when the conversation seems disjointed that a loss is apparant. I reckon a few lines per session are lost. Maybe 3-5% in total.
That's enough to cause confusion and demand tedious re-interation of conversation, and is likely to result in our using another IM service if this continues. I don't quite understand why lines of text appear to be lost, nor why it has only started happening recently. Is anybody else getting this?
Blogwise Improvements #
In the past month or so, Blogwise's performance has been through the floor. This is because most of the scripts used for maintenance of Blogwise are run on the server itself. The site has grown much faster than I expected, and the bits and pieces that run in the background are starting to feel the strain.
Classic example: one script which I ran at 2am daily was designed to go through and grab particular bits of data from every site listed. This was nice and simple originally, so I set it up as a cron task. Earlier this year it got to a point where the run-time was longer than 24 hours - instant slowdown. Since then, I've had the bots run only if an existing instance is not already active.
These scripts shouldn't normally cause too much of a problem, but another factor - spam - is really causing me a headache now. Some lovely individual out there decided to send a whole load of emails out with the From: address at {randomstring}@1do3.com. Result: every bounce came back to us. At its peak it was hitting 3,100 messages per minute. That is going to put a strain on any system. I've set up secondary and tertiary mail servers but UK2's DNS manager refuses to acknowledge my updates (grrr....) to the domain name.
So anyway, I've spent the past few weekends trying to optimise the Blogwise code (and its underlying system) and it seems to be giving some positive effects. Front page load time is better (albeit still a bit sluggish), and I've also shifted a lot of the maintenance responsibility to other computers, which can easily sit behind an ADSL line and just chug away.
It's remarkable how quickly a site can grow beyond what you expected, and how rapidly one must respond to changing circumstances - I'm hoping that now I can last for as long as possible without the (inevitable) need for a dedicated Blogwise server, particularly since that'll probably mean I'll need to set up a company to manage the assets.
Handy Windows Tip: Restoring the taskbar after a full-screen app crash #
If you are running an application full-screen when it crashes, the taskbar is left invisible. To restore the taskbar to its visible state just follow this little procedure:
- Press the Windows 'Start' key on your keyboard to bring up the Start Menu
- Press 'Esc' (to remove the menu)
- Press the 'popup menu' key (the one just to the right of Alt Gr).
- Click 'Properties'
- Click the Taskbar tab
- Click the 'Auto-hide the taskbar' option (to activate it).
- Click Apply.
- Click the 'Auto-hide the taskbar' option again (to clear it).
- Click OK. Your taskbar is now restored.
New Freeview Channel - ABC1 #
Just spotted on Freeview Channel 15 (UK digital terrestrial service)
....I've no idea what ABC is like in the states, but I guess we'll find out next month!
Apologies I haven't been posting much recently. Time consumed > time available and whatnot. More soon!
Nasty Security Hole in PuTTY #
In case you use PuTTY, the free Windows SSH client (and I know a lot of people who do), there is a rather nasty security vulnerability in it. Simon Tatham has just announced to the mailing list "...it could be as bad as allowing the server to execute code of its choice on the client."
Anyway, the best thing is to mosey on down to the PuTTY website and grab a copy of the latest version, 0.55. More details about the security hole will be found at the site.
iPods in 1984 #
Am I going mad, or is the woman in Apple's famous 1984 advert wearing an iPod? It looks like they've superimposed one, but there's no mention of it (the iPod, or Apple rejigging the advert) on any nearby links.