I’ve moved the hosting to a new location, it’s currently residing on a xen virtual server instance provided by linode. While I was migrating things around, I’ve tried to package it up a little more portably, and in future I ought to be able to move it easily to anywhere I can run a linux host. I also took the opportunity to tidy up the page templates, and cobble together a new theme. I’m still poking that around a little bit, let me know if you find any rough edges.

New job!

Aside from adjusting myself to my wonderful new daughter, I’ve gone and got myself a new job. I wasn’t really aware that I was looking for one, but life can surprise you like that sometimes. I’m now working as a Database Architect at Last.fm and I couldn’t be happier about that. Not only is last.fm an awesome site, which has long been one of my favourite things on the web, but the intersection between high volume web services, big databases, and music nerdery is very definitely my kind of niche.

Move to London

One small drawback with this full-time role was that it was based in London. We did weigh up the various commuting options, but after some deliberation, decided to take the plunge, and relocate, at least temporarily to London.

This meant finding somewhere to rent. Somewhere to rent that would take a baby and a dog. A location in the city with suitable dog exercise routes close at hand. Ideally a place from which I could daily commute to Shoreditch without too much trouble. Obviously we’d have to be able to afford it on one salary, whilst still maintaining a mortgage on the house in Bristol in the interim. Rather a tall order.

After balancing up the variables we settled on the Balham/Clapham area. After a few complicated expeditions up to view properties with little success, we managed to secure something with only days to spare, just down the road in Tooting Bec. A rather roomy ground floor flat facing right onto Tooting Bec common. It’s just a short walk to the Northern line, which leaves me with a manageable half-hour or so trip to work, door to door.

So the last few months have seen quite a furious pace of changes. Mostly I’ve been finding it all invigorating, and exciting, rather than incapacitating, but things can seem to be wooshing by, and there definitely aren’t as many hours in the day as there used to be. Five years ago I’d have been amazed at what the me of 2010 would be getting up to. Interesting times.

The chimney breast, in what has become the main living room needed some attention, having suffered some water damage long ago, due to leaking. The leaks are gone, but the brickwork and surface plaster were left saturated and continued to deteriorate. Rounding it all off, it was mounted with a bulky, mantelpiece of slate, with ugly pseudo-wood veneer, and filled with garish orange ceramic tiles.

Installing the stove was a way of addressing these issues simultaneously. When fired up, it should produce a generous heat in the centre of the house, well suited to the original building design and airflow. As part of the installation, we’ve had the chimney lined, the fireplace and hearth reconstructed, and the chimney breast re-surfaced. We ordered the stove from Kindle in Bristol, and they also managed all the installation work, which only took a couple of days.

The stove is a ClearView Pioneer 400. A clean-burn design, and the installation is certified for use in smokeless zones, such as Bristol. It’s a multi-fuel configuration, which can be used to burn (smokeless) coal as well as firewood. We’ve built a small log store in the back yard, and filled it with a metre-cubed of sawn firewood.

Due to the unseasonably hot weather, I’ve not had too much of a chance to get it up and running, aside from a few test sessions. I’m not yet sure what our practical fuel consumption will resolve to. In my tests, I’ve so far determined that it is capable of generating a startling amount of heat after just a few hours of operation.

On a less practical note, it is simply enormous fun having a large burning fire you can fiddle about with, sitting within easy reach. It’s very easy to get hypnotised by the thing, when it’s burning. I find it considerably more interesting to watch than most things that are on the television.

I’ve see a lot of encouraging signs of rehabilitated wildlife, as I wander round the green corridors of Bristol, walking that dog. We don’t see many butterflies.

There’s some lofty goals there. Let’s see how well I fare. An important thing to remember about giving things up, which I learnt when quitting my oodles-of-fags-a-day smoking habit, is that a lapse shouldn’t mean that you just abandon the effort. Some of them are obviously aspirational, and need to be viewed as a progression, not a destination.

I have a few more, given that I’m such a fan of self-improvement, but I won’t share everything.

Last year my only public resolution was to stop drinking alcohol, and that lasted three months, until I got very bored of it. I don’t think I have a drinking problem yet.

I blame Johnny Depp. I’m sure pirates used to be far less accessorised.

As a warm up to the main event, we spent the afternoon clay shooting courtesy of Avago entertainments. My nerves, already twisted by a long minibus drive, the rented bus an antique with a hundred and fifty thousand on the clock, the driver a first-timer, who kept commenting that he found the vehicle strange to drive as it had no brakes, I was feeling rather jumpy about spending the rest of the day discharging firearms. Luckily, just as we pulled up at the venue, I discovered my fears were all misplaced. We would, in fact, be laser shooting.

Effectively it is laser tag. The ‘guns’ are real deactivated shotguns, equipped with an infra-red sensor and transmitter. They communicate with the CPU in the scoreboard unit via a wireless network. The ‘clays’ are in fact miniature frisbees,covered with reflective stickers. You flick a switch to load your gun with two ’rounds’, and if the gun receives a reflection back when you pull the trigger, it records a hit. The base unit plays sampled sound effects in sync to represent rounds fired and breaking clays, in the case of a hit. A small LED within the gun’s sight flashes red or green to indicate a failure or success immediately after each shot.

It’s a more effective system than I’d have predicted, and thus surprisingly good fun. The guns come across as accurate, and the full weight reinforces your suspension of disbelief. I found a real sense of development, in that I managed to improve measurably as the day wore on, and I accumulated practice, although I was suddenly, shockingly poor at the game where you had to pick up your gun from the floor, sight and fire while the clay was in flight. The event was well run, with a considered graduation of difficulty moving up from practice rounds, through to scoring, with enough changes in setting and rules to keep interest keen all the way through to the end of the session, where points were tallied, and the top scorers compete in a final shoot-off. I missed the cut, mostly due to the aforementioned speed round. Overall it’s an absorbing afternoon’s entertainment, and good value. I’d recommend it if you’re looking for something to do with an appropriately sized group for around half a day or so.

Responses to the new platform seem mostly positive, although there’s already some mild grumblingseeping through across the web. There’s more software glitches, unsurprising; given the rush of new third-party applications there’s countless potential software combinations interacting in unpredictable ways. The new units eschew the metal casing of the original iPhone, for a return to possibly scratch-prone iPod plastic. 3G mode depletes the battery rapidly, just as Apple said it would, when they justified their initial transport choice of GPRS/EDGE. The camera is unimproved over the first generation (although I have always been rather impressed with the iPhone camera. For a phone, with no flash it takes great photos, a textbook-worthy example of why it’s nothing to do with the megapixel count)

So maybe it’s not the holy grail of portable devices. It’s certainly not for me. I don’t like the idea of being locked to a single phone company. I don’t want a smartphone that can’t be used as a 3G modem – I’ve grown too used to being able to connect a variety of devices up to the net, using USB / bluetooth or even infra-red links. It’s a little big for my idea of a phone.

As a portable, internet connected, media player cum tablet, it can’t be beaten. The mobile browser is immeasurably better than any others I’ve used. The iPod, photo, and movie playing is slick, and the iPod + iTunes combination still the best available digital music library implementation. The straightforward syncing of contacts and calender information beggars belief (at least for Mac users, such as myself ). Thrown in a few simple PIM applications, ebooks and games from the Application store, and you’re looking at a compelling platform.

Of course, you can get the majority of this behaviour in the iPod touch. Smaller and lighter than it’s phone siblings. Metal back. iPhone-trouncing storage capacity (up to 32GB). Runs the same operating system and applications, same beautiful interface. No contract. The downside being that you can only use it as an internet device over WiFi, which means you need to be tethered to a hotspot. Except it doesn’t mean this at all.

There’s a simple recipe to open up the iPod touch’s internet capabilities to something much closer to the iPhone.

1. Arrange a 3G phone+data connection with the phone provider of your choice. I use T-mobile, I’m very happy with the service.
2. Choose a phone handset, with a high speed modem capability. Make sure you get a model with WiFi. I have a Nokia E51. It’s lovely. Depending on your phone contract terms, you may get this as a freebie.
3. Configure your phone to act as a WiFi hotspot, using something like WalkingHotspot
4. Join your iPod touch with your phone’s WiFi network. Enjoy 3.5G connectivity on the go!

Of course it’s not a drop-in replacement. You don’t get an in-device camera or GPS, although you may have these in your phone. You do get to spread the battery load between two devices, one with the big screen and multimedia capabilities, another with the data transmission hardware. Although WiFi use will run down your iPod battery faster, you might still find that this combination outperforms an iPhone 3G.

Lots of fun. Lots of great costumes. The standard of costume was high, people really made an effort. Even Andy wore a vaguely 70s T-shirt.

I took plenty of photographs, but my tiny little Canon IXUS is tragically poor at indoor and low light photography. Here’s most of the ones that are worth sharing.

Database-nerd pedantry aside though, I do really like New Year resolutions. I like the idea of working at self-improvement, and consequently I always make a goodly set of targets for myself, mostly privately. They’re not always focused on tangible goals, and those that are I often fail to meet, but then, stretching oneself is sort of the point.

Probably the silliest scheme I’m going for in 2008 is to quit drinking alcohol. Not that I think I have a problem, as you’re traditionally obliged to add as a follow up to that statement. As a regular alcohol user though, I do think it will present an interesting challenge, and I suspect it will have a generally beneficial effect on my health, and also my bank balance. I’m in good company too, it seems like Richard Herring is joining me on my quest.

I’m going to leave myself the cop-out clause, of still allowing champagne. Firstly, it allows me to join in the toasts at significant social gatherings. Secondly, it lends an air of faux-class, as by champagne, I mean your actual champagne; none of your prosecco or cava, thanks very much. Thirdly, if I find myself regularly buying crates of champagne at bulk discount for home consumption, I’ll have good grounds to accuse myself of hiding a drink problem.

Another good thing about breaking in a new year, is that it encourages change. I’ve already indulged in some long-neglected home improvement work, and I’ve extensively rebuilt and replumbed this website to use the WordPress system for the blogging bits. The base URL has changed, and there’s now a wider variety of detailed feeds. I’ll endeavour to maintain all the old permalinks and feeds with redirects, and I’ve migrated all the old content across. There is bound to be breakage, so let me know if you spot anything.

Previously, I was using a publishing system which started out as the marvellously simple blosxom, which progressively grew less marvellous and more complex as I hurriedly hacked new features into it on demand, or whenever the mood caught me. Blosxom is ace, and if the idea of a blogging tool that is just a perl script that builds static content and uses text files within the filesystem instead of a database strikes you as intriguing, you should definitely give it a go.

Blosxom development seems to have stagnated for a long while, although there’s recently been more activity, and my slapdash customisations had grown crufty and brittle enough to make my publishing environment fragile, and irritating to change. And so, WordPress. This brings all sorts of new features I’ve been asked for, but too lazy/busy to add in the past (comments!), extensibility and an active development, and it’s based on the industry lowest-common-denominator combination of apache / PHP / mysql, so I can keep control of my own content, yet can easily move it to pretty much any cheap-ass hosting provider under the sun if needs be.

And as an added benefit, I expect I’ll be posting more frequently, at least until the novelty wears off.