I've just watched the coverage of Greg Dyke leaving, Greg's last email. I feel like I have been robbed, Blair's insistence that the apology from yesterday was not enough has forced a great and popular leader of the BBC from office. WRT the Hutton report, I feel that the Independent has the best take on it.
January 2004 Archives
Off to the Fabian Society Annual Conference on the 7th Feb. A few years ago in 97 I, like many others, considered joining the Labour party, all flushed with the idea of finally having got the party of my choice in power. These days I'm still interested in politics, but feel more like heckling from the sidelines. Especially given today's and tomorrow's events, five votes is really by the skin of his teeth.
At least having Howard in charge of a real opposition might sharpen up the Labour party and stop them heading off on any more fool adventures in foreign policy.
Via tingilinde, Apple have created RSS feeds for all their music in iTMS. More fuel to the idea that they might have a music affiliate store sometime in the future?
Also via MacOSXhints Apple have a very useful new set of feeds for their help and docs support site.
Choice feeds are I think PowerBook, KnowledgeBase daily changes, MacOS X issues, Software downloads.
Saw this via plasticbag.org linkblog where Tom points to the corante mention of the Weblog workshop, held at the 13th World Wide Web Conference in New York City, 17-22 May 2004.
It has been a while, since I went to a W3 conference, I went to the 1st and the 5th, plus a raft of Hypertext conferences when I was at Nottingham. I guess that they have changed a lot since I went the the first one, when there were around 400 hundred attendees and almost the same number of journalists. New York in May should be lovely, too and the exchange rate is quite lovely too. Currently there is not a lot on the site for the conference, but hopefully registration and the conference programme will be up soon.
So, what else could you spend 800 billion dollars on, this was my second reaction after the science fiction excitement died away. Dan also made me think about the wider implications of Bush too.
Well if you want to keep it space related then, a space elevator might be a good start, probably safer and in the long run much cheaper than another shuttle.
However I was thinking more along the lines of advances for humanity in general, going to the moon and mars is a fine ambition and tempting for the science fiction readers out there, but clean water for all might be a better use of some of the money. Bush could be remembered as the American President who bought clean water to the world, rather than an empty dated Kennedy wannabe. This is even an issue in the USA, but a much more pressing one worldwide. It has been suggested that wars will be fought in the future over water, the Israel-Palestine crisis has water as a major background issue. Argentine and Chilean relations have been soured for decades over water.
There are many other schemes that could also be paid for in that vast amount of money. Dealing with the malaria swamps, and bilharzia or river blindness. Clearing landmines is another worthy opportunity.
However Bush seems to be hoping to be remembered as a hero, saving lives doesn't get you that, fighting wars and BIG science does. There is also the background issue that investing in space and the military gives the USA economy a solid injection of basic R&D to build on for the future. The space programme of the 60s did wonders for material science.
Maybe Bush and Congress can be brave enough to look beyond their own borders and at the world around them and invest in the future of this planet.
I have had an odd problem with my powerbook in the past few weeks. On wake from sleep the machine will not wake fully and it would keep the screen off. Sometimes it enters a seemingly forced shutdown mode when operating normally, like writing a document.
I spent a few weeks battling on and off with this, being careful to save documents regularily. I had thought it was related to usb storage devices, but then it happened when I had not been using one.
Finally I hunted in the Console, looking at the system.log file /private/var/log/system.log in 10.2.x, available from the Console application in 10.3.x. I found the line below recurring several times. New console application in Panther is much improved.
Jan 14 08:59:24 localhost kernal: ApplePMU::PMU FORCED SHUTDOWN, CAUSE = -96
So I realised that the power management unit might be acting up. A quick hunt on www.info.apple.com turned up the right document. Resetting iBook and PowerBook PMU.
I've also turned off screen saver and turned off requiring password on wake from sleep or screensaver and I think that has solved it.
Essentially, if you machine is acting weirdly on wake from sleep or shutting down erractically then reset the PMU.
I was in Brazil in 1999 and found it a wonderful place and it has left a lasting impression on me. I was there for a few days training at a multimedia company. So I had two experiences, one the car from hotel to machine gun protected corporate enclave, very friendly people at the company, but intense security.
The other much more free experience in the evening, walking around the markets and into Japan Town. Getting offered sex on sunny streets with pimps and dogs in the background, feeling uncomfortable taking pictures, as my camera felt too intrusive. Evenings were fun, hanging out in bars drinking Caipirinha, made with local cachaça. There is a different ambience in the local bars, people get up and sing or play guitar. It is not karaoke, but a remembering of the older songs, kind of a tradition, if only forty or fifty years old. I suppose like the now famous Cuban music scene, but taking influences from all of the vast country that is Brazil.
There is also that South American feeling of "'even if it is broken, leave it alone". Roads and buildings are put up shiny and new, then gradually decay over the years to be ripped down and replaced. Much of São Paulo is like the pictures below, the new and the old, cheek by jowl.
Today I found these pictures via Anne Galloway. They depict street scenes and the busy seemingly disorganised life that is São Paulo. There is a random mix of poverty vs the money represented by glass steel and concrete. Noise, architecture and never quite knowing what each street will bring to you. Yet it feels a very real place, almost friendly, yet holding on to itself, as if neither of you trust one another.
If I can find my pictures of the city, I'll scan some of them and put them here.
Not in a Barcablog type manner, but Lucy bought me an interesting book entitled "Onions Without Tears: Cooking with Onions, Leeks, Garlic and Chives" by Lindsay Bareham, hardback or paperback, both from amazon.co.uk, her soup book is also very good.
The book covers cookery using the whole onion family and has everything you can imagine from salsas to sauces to soups to recipes using onions, such as the many stews of French cooking. Expect some extracts over the coming weeks, as I try a few things out.
BTW the book is pretty much out of print, so the links above are to enable you to get one second hand if you want a copy.
I've always wanted to be able to make neat diagrams, as my handwriting is untidy and my straight lines are never quite.
So I've played with all number of drawing applications from MacDraw (back in the days when 1984 was a recent memory) to various versions of Illustrator, but we never got on. I've even tried Visio and a host of other pay for and shareware applications, offered to me, in my various guises over the years.
Well, now I am smitten, version 2 of OmniGraffle is quite nice, but version 3 is love at first sight. Those glows, the smoothness of things; the clever guides, the alignment tools that understand you and that feeling of power, I can make diagrams.
I strongly urge you all to go and pay Omni Group the 25 dollars to upgrade that free bundled copy of OmniGraffle you got with your PowerBook. The full retail isn't even that much, at only 70 dollars. If you need further justification, both Macworld and MacUser have given it a prize. If you have never tried it, then download a copy and get a trial license, now.
I'm off to try OmniOutliner, to see if it has the same effect on sorting out my life…
In 2006, there is going to be a new climbing wall in London, in Herne Hill, at the Herne Hill Velodrome, see Streetmap for location. They have a total estimated cost of £6 million for the whole complex. The indoor climbing wall aims to have a central 7.5 metre "mountain feature", bouldering wall and traversing walls.
Last June, Southwark's Planning Committee gave approval to the outline planning application to regenerate Herne Hill Velodrome. This saves the whole site which had been under threat.
See some pictures of the site and drawings of the plans, plus some older pictures of the site from the last century.
This new climbing wall will mean that there is a decent wall in all four corners of London, with the Westway, the Castle and my usual Mile End.
A bit underwhelming, Garage Band, the new music app seems interesting, if that is your thing. It has been in development for ages seemingly, I remember rumors from ages ago about a sequencing application called iMusic. The most amazing thing is the price really, $49 including the original iLife apps. Even the usb keyboard is pretty cheap. Though iPhoto and iMovie look to become part of the pay for package and no longer a free download, only iTunes will remain free. One interesting idea that struck me was as well as being able to take your music and put it in your iTunes library and on your iPod, how about being able to sell it through the iTunes Music Store, with a templated promo site on your .Mac account. Buy iLife'04 from the Apple Store UK.
iPhoto was the bit I was most interested in as the current version is too slow once you have over a thousand pictures in it. Speed is a much needed asset for the programme, it'll probably keep me and many others from buying iView Media though, which is sad for them. European photo printing services are welcome, but have been a long time coming. The ability to sensibly organise, categorise, rate and search the photos I have in iPhoto will be a welcome addition, as the current tools are not very powerful. Taking the playlist ideas from iTunes is a good idea, as it builds the user experience of the suite and it a much appreciated feature of iTunes.
On MacDevCenter someone asked for an iScan application, this I might well be interested in buying, as most scanner software is pretty lame. I bought a very nice Minolata Scan Elite 5400 recently and it is a great scanner, but the software leaves a lot to be desired.
The iPod mini, nice, very low weight, as evidenced by the arm band for running. A thousand songs is the same capacity as the original iPod, which I thought was a bit small, my 20G is 80 odd percent full. Mind you if I didn't have one, I'd think of getting this instead of the new 10 15G, as it is so much smaller and lighter.
The new Final Cut Express is a solid evolutionary upgrade to the existing package, integrating it further with the other packages Apple produces. Buy Final Cut Express 2 from the Apple Store UK.
G5 Xserve, pretty useful if you want one, but it is not really something I'd use of want to buy at the minute. The compute node is tapping into a market that Apple must be thanking Virginia Tech for daily. I think the 3rd fastest super computer on the market much have come as a bit of a shock to Apple. Though to give them credit the XGrid initiative and the compute node does seem to show they have integrated it into their strategy. the XRaid storage is so cheap for what you get that it is ludicrous.
So a fun worship at the jobsian altar, even if the rumour sites did get everything right ahead of the keynote....
I guess though that Apple are doing things right, no iPhone or tablet or pda, nor a huge screen or TV. The iBox rumour is interesting and I expect that there is a prototype of it somewhere in Infinite Loop, as I'm sure given the interests of Apple that tivo type devices are on the radar, but everything that becomes a prototype, even if it goes out to external testing will not become a real product. Apple spend a huge amount on r&d, somethings must get canned or shelved.
Chris Heathcoate has a really hard Christmas pictorial quiz of London and, as Lucy points out, google is no help what so ever...
Between Lucy and I, we are on 6 or so on a first pass, with about 10 or so that we think we know, but are probably wrong.
In Sainsbury's today and utterly bored by eating chicken or similar over christmas and sought something more tasty. Thanks to Nigel Slater, Jamie Oliver and Nigella Lawson (amazon.co.uk links to prefered books).
We found and created something rather tasty and cheap too.
Take the following
Jamie Oliver's 21 day old minute steaks 250g or so for two people
4 big mushrooms per person
one baguette
a couple of fat cloves of garlic
some butter
some olive oil
some rosemary from the garden
salt
pepper
Put the oven on, about 200 or gas mark 6, then chop up both cloves of garlic. Take your mushrooms and break out the stalks and spread about half the garlic, plus some salt and pepper and a bit of butter in each one. Put them in the oven for about 20 minutes.
Now take the rosemary and chop it finely and put it on a plate with a splash of olive oil and some salt (sea salt crystals if you have them) and some pepper. You will put the steak in this marinade, in the packet there are four steaks, put one on the oil and then take it out and turn it over and place another bit on the oily side, turn over again so that you are alternating steak against fresh oil from the marinade and the other side against already oiled steak. This process makes the marinade go further and means that there will be less oil to burn. Put a griddle pan on a high heat now, then do the last bit of prep now, take the rest of the garlic and mix it with a small lump of butter in a small bowl, use a knife to fold the garlic into the butter.
You now should have the mushrooms with about 8 minutes to go or so, and a hot griddle pan, start to cook the steak, but first put a plate in the oven to warm up. The steak will take 40-60 seconds per side, so you'll need to work quickly, the steak is ready when the blood and juices start to rise off the surface of the meat. If you do not get nice parallel lines on the cooked side then your pan is not hot enough, likewise if you are getting lots of smoke, then it is probably a bit hot.
It should take 6-7 minutes to cook all the steak, putting each bit on the warmed plate to rest after cooking. Butter the split baguette with the garlic butter and get the mushrooms out of the oven, put the mushrooms and the steak into the sandwich, you can cut it into strips which makes it easier to eat.
Enjoy with a glass of wine... or two.
Prompted by Euan writing about climbing, I found this quite raw post on the experience of climbing, unfinished from July.
climbing is a personal experience, it is difficult to impart the feeling and thoughts of lead climbing in an intelligible manner.
So, despite having said that, here are some thoughts and a narrative description of climbing the route Ringo, which I posted a picture of earlier.
there is a rythm to climbing and an order
setting up the belay
tieing in to the rope
checking one anothers harness
checking the rack
eyeing up the moves
getting to the first position
climbing
first gear above head height
finger jams
the bulge
leg jam rest
horizontal break
then layback / rockover to the rest
fiddling the gear
getting pumped and resting
gear in teeth to hold it whilst wrestling to choose the right size
last piece and feeling safer
make the move and haul over to the top
then set up the belay at the top and let your partner second it
My short summary review of Touching the Void and a list of links to other reviews of the film of the excellent Joe Simpson book, Touching the Void (amazon.com, amazon.co.uk)
A great film about friendship and being alone and the will to survive. It has superb photography, you really feel involved and the opening of the film is fantastic. It starts with sound of crampons and an ice axe on snow, plus the magical sound of climbing gear tinkling, see the trailer.
The style of the film is very suited to the book, a mixture of to camera interviews and climbing footage, then the long struggle from out of the crevasse and down the glacier.
Even if you have no ambition to climb a mountain, go see this film, it is really excellent and quite powerful, the reunion at the end is especially strong.
- Ed Douglas in Guardian Film
- Kevin MacDonald on making the film
- BBCi review of the film
- IMDB listing for the film with cast list (possibly one of the shortest at 4 people)
- The distributor Pathé have a small micro site for the film, with the trailer for the film
- Joe Simpson's personal website
- OutdoorsMagic article on the making of it
- In the January issue of the magazine Climber there is a 5-6 page article on the making of the film, focussing on an interview with Brian Hall, who acted as guide and extreme film-making consultant.
Happy New Year all, things should be back to a bit more regular posting over the coming month or so, some more recipes and lots of back logged stuff from December, when things got a bit too busy...
Building Social Web Applications by Gavin Bell.
