Reading over at Fosfor Gadgets about the upcoming Canon EOS 40D, I have to admit I’m more than tempted, even though the sole major upgrade from the 30D seems to be the CCD:
1.6x 10.1M CMOS senor (30D has 1.6x 8.2M CMOS Sensor)
Anti-dust feature
2.5 inch LCD (30D has 2.5 inch LCD)
9 focus points (30D has 9 focus points)
5 fps (30D has 5fps)
Compact flash based memory cards (same as 30D).
There’s links on Slashgear and Gizmodo as well. Maybe time to upgrade the 10D after all!
I purchased the French maps for my PDA’s install of Tomtom last night, and left it downloading overnight. Turns out it requires 350M of space, which means the damn thing won’t fit onto the existing Tomtom SD card nor in the internal memory of the device. The details in Palm’s own knowledgebase neatly steps around giving me a clear answer as to whether I can use a 2GB card, and time is ticking.
Meantime, most of the online retailers I’ve tried for it are stiffing on postage or can’t deliver before Friday which cuts it a little fine for me. Looks like a trip to CCL may be in order. I’ll have a wander round Leeds too and see what I can find. Come to think of it, I only really need a gig one but it’d be nice to have the extra space if it’s going to be a matter of pennies; after all, one day I’ll need to put the Australian maps on there!
Update: Palm Support have been nice and proactive, and say yes I can use 2gig cards in the Palm TX. So it’s off to CCL I go o/
This morning passing down The Headrow in Leeds, the whole of the area from Primark (the old Odeon) through to The Wrens pub and the Vicar Lane end of the Grand Arcade, were all cordoned off with a police line. Wonder what’s happened – that’s a hell of a big area to cut off.
Edit: BBC News have a story – someone got shot.
Oh dear God, no!
“CBBC is developing a spin-off series from Doctor Who based on the adventures of investigative journalist Sarah Jane, played by Elisabeth Sladen, and to be written by Russell T Davies.
Sladen, who originally played the Doctor’s assistant in 1973, returned for the last series where she was seen vying with young Rose Tyler for the Doctor’s affections”.
This is going to be a remake of K9 And Company, isn’t it…
I wrote this morning that IBM (well, Lenovo) were meant to be sending a new HD for my laptop: they didn’t show up and the earliest they can promise me a call back is tomorrow morning so that’s getting escalated to a complaints department. This’ll be the second time they’ve screwed up a support ticket – the first time being when they “forgot” to screw the keyboard in when replacing the motherboard.
I also wrote that I was going to get some peace, which was really famous last words since I ended up telling someone how to configure sendmail (and how long is it since I last touched that – 7 years?) and then implementing something else quickly. So although I crossed the major hurdle with SOAP and PHP (ie. it connected to the service) I didn’t really get any ‘useful’ queries done.
So, to cut a long story short, I’m back at $contract tomorrow without a laptop, and trying to work out what Lenovo are going to do about it.
Still, at least the organ’s been picked up – it’s gone to a collector in Wales who has another one of the same brand and model that’s knackered. I’m glad it’s gone to someone who’ll appreciate it.
<%image(20060730-chilli.jpg|120|99|)%>There’s not a lot that’s as easy or stodge as chilli-con-carne, but having defrosted the freezer I’d got some mince which needed using and I fancied a bit of an experiment – so I started to sod around with the basic recipe. So, before I forget it, it needs noting.
Gently fry the mince in olive oil together with two chopped fat green chillis. Add a chopped onion and a tin of kidney beans and a couple of sploshes of red wine. Once that’s in, get it bubbling then crack two Oxo cubes in and some hot chilli powder. Then comes the more interesting stuff – a glass of red wine, a small (half square) of 99% Lindt chocolate, a small splosh of port, a squirt of tomato puree, and a squirt of garlic puree. Let that lot reduce for a bit, and pop in a stick of cinnamon for 5 minutes (any more and it’ll overpower the taste). Once the cinnamon has been removed, add another chopped green chilli and about half a teaspoon of curry powder. Finally, rip up a handful of coriander and add it in (do this at the last minute so it’s got some colour).
My presentation is getting better too – quite proud of the whole thing really.
Edit: Memo to self, don’t rub eyes after chopping chillies. *cry*
After planet.uknot.org seems to have stopped updating for the past week or so and goddamnit I need my fix, I set up my own installation and it’s up and working at planet2.uknot.org. Enjoy!
After the public and private comments on the customer service (or lack of it) in my last blog post regarding Oracle Bar in Leeds, I gave it another chance today: the MD had offered to take us, and despite a few of our team not being mad chuffed with the place we nodded and got bought lunch in the sun.
To be fair, it wasn’t bad. Aside from a 45-minute wait for a glass of diet Coke (!) and the waitress getting my order wrong (“it’s a new menu”) it was a reasonable outing. Still bloody expensive for what it is: the Oracle burgers (which resemble more a game of Kerplunk than food) were dried out and had a ‘pre-cooked’ feel, but at least we got fed on time.
Had we not been at the MD’s discretion of a slightly longer lunch I think we’d have timed out, and given there were empty tables outside I still don’t think it’s a good lunch venue if you’re on a tight schedule. It’s more an after-work place I guess, where – for a pint and a sit in the sun as you watch the totty wander over the bridge – it’s pretty good.
(By the way – the last couple of comments in my last post looked suspiciously like either staff or Oracle’s PR agency – make it a bit more believable next time, guys :P)
<%image(20060722-ripedev.jpg|120|97|)%>I’m not sure if any other PHP developers are getting this, but it’s got to the stage where I’m getting 3 or 4 calls a day from agencies asking if I’m available for urgent PHP dev and project management work. I think it must be the time of year – projects overdue, everyone on holiday, people moving jobs, etc. Today was the first Saturday in a while where I’ve had calls, and there were three (all I suspect for the same role): I think I’m pretty much booked up to the end of the year now, too bad ‘cos the role sounded tasty.
Trouble is there’s too many bedroom coders out there – teenage youths who learned PHP4 while sitting in their bedrooms, doing their own homepage and thinking that they’ve got sound commercial experience because they did a five-page website for their Dad’s best mate. It’s just the same as perl was in 1997 when kids were leaving before their A-levels for a dotcom which went tits-up in 5 months, and stuffing their University careers: those chaps are now working in MacDonalds, in a salary ceiling, or have retrained.
So, comedy moments in CV triage:
Nothing, however, beats the lad whom I had joining me once at a former employer: CV checked out, passed the tech test, references were academia but that’s not unusual. He started, and in the first day it became apparent that he couldn’t code at all – after a bit of digging it dawned that he’d taken his technical test on the phone and he’d been Googling (or whatever search engine was around then) for answers – and the test code he’d sent us had been done by his mate. Don’t try this at home kids.
(Apropos of which, if you’re a PHP developer who wants work in Leeds, my current contract are looking for a full-time junior developer to start asap – drop me a line, preferably with a chunk of PHP5 code you’ve written and a small database schema you’ve done so I can gauge what stage you’re at).
Bother – my IBM T42p laptop is once again exhibiting random seizures and screen corruption (the same thing it went in for at the end of May) – this after sweating over someone else’s server with disk corruption too. Seems to be the weather for things going titsup – maybe fans working overtime and stuff causing problems.
I hope Lenovo actually fix it this time – I’m starting to lose faith in their service procedures.
The day didn’t quite pan out with the hard-working completion of another milestone, since the main development server at $contract took a nosedive and I found myself with nothing to do. Now one of the things which galls me is that I wander through Leeds Market and want to buy stuff for dinner but by the time I get home the kids are getting ready for bed and everyone’s eaten. Today was that exception.
I spent a good hour wandering up and down the fish and meat market, thinking about tea and what we could have – there were some good exotic fishes including catfish and strawberry grouper but I settled on some fresh tuna steaks which I could do up in a Thai marinade. At that point I turned my mind to a starter and bought two fresh rabbits.
Pondering what to do with the rabbit I did a bit of digging on the ‘Net and aside from variants of rabbit stew there was little to do – the closest thing I used as a guide was this recipe, but that’s all it was: a guide.
The eventual recipe I invented went something like this: Cut off the rabbit’s legs and take off the meat from the carcass in large chunks as much as you can (rabbit is very bony so it can be quite a labour of love). Fry in hot olive oil in a casserole dish – just enough to seal the meat and for it to start to brown on the outside. While it’s frying, add some slivered almonds and some fresh ripped basil leaves, then put the top on the dish and slam it into an oven at around gas mark 5. Leave it there for 20 minutes while you warm a barbeque up (or a cast-iron skillet would do). When you’re ready to serve, give each piece of meat about 2-3 minutes either side on the bbq and serve with a couple of fresh basil leaves to garnish and a small amount of rocket if you want.
I also tried a bit of a reduction to go with it but it didn’t quite work: I used the olive oil and almonds when I’d put the meat on the bbq, added about 10cl of red wine and a dash of apple schnapps. It reduced really nicely and I liked it as a very light touch onto the rabbit but Nicky wasn’t too keen.
Finished off with an espresso and an amandine biscotti as the sun set over the trees. Feeling charged up for a weekend of Sorting Stuff Out now 🙂
Just got back from lunch after a totally and utterly failed trip to Oracle Bar in Leeds, and I felt that I should document our experience because it was utter bollocks. They actually take quite a bit of money off us in this company – we had the MD’s birthday lunch there last week, and I’ve visited there with other staff as well.
So, we arrived and sat at a table. And waited. And waited. And after waiting for a waitress for a while, one of us goes to the bar and gets beers ‘cos it’s quicker – and find out the reason we’ve not been served is that we’re not “in a food area”. Ok – the food area’s not delineated and there’s no indication but never mind, we move. And wait. And wait. And wait. Eventually we manage to flag a waitress.
“We’ve got 15 minutes – can you feed us two burgers and chips?”
“Sure.” she answers. “Let me just check with the kitchen.”
That’s fair, so off she potters.
Then we get pounced on by another waitress carrying a clipboard – looks like the manager or something asking if we’d been served – yes we have thankyou, at which point she just… ‘hovers’. Then the original woman comes back and says “No, we can’t – waiting time of 20 minutes on burgers.”
So (only having a short time for lunch) we think “never mind” and start finishing our beers so we can grab sandwiches elsewhere (from Yum Yum in fact, highly recommended), and not two minutes later Clipboard-Waitress (who knows we’re about to leave anyway) comes back to say “oh you can’t sit here, you’re not having food.” Mention no fact that there’s another 9 empty tables around us.
There’s an epilogue: while leaving, we got chased by Clipboard-Waitress who attempted to return us somebody else’s credit card. Not sure we’ll be going back there. Anyone got any other suggestions for lunchtime beer-n-burgers?
Mmmm, Level 3 Fileserver goodness 🙂
A brief overview of what I’m up to, since a few people have asked:
Way back in the late 80s and early 90s, I was involved in the Viewdata BBs scene: in common with my peers I used my Beeb to run a bulletin board (The Rabbit Run) and it had a couple of hundred users. Other boards around the time included Chipboard (which ran on EBBS in Leeds), CARBBS-based bulletin boards such as Odyssey, Optix and Cyclone, and FBBS-originated boards such as CCl4.
Having rediscovered the original disks for my BBs numerous times and archiving off portions of the board to more resilient media than the 5.25″ floppies they’re on, the data’s nice and intact.
Now comes the fun bit. One of “those” nights in the pub set me thinking about how the BBs could be put on the Internet, in a similar way to CCl4 and Haven. However, I’d want to keep a nice clean delineation and not “taint” the system with modern technologies or developments such as GoMMC. Thus the idea of using VoIP, modems, Econet storage and original hardware came along.
We’d take a BBC Micro running the BBs software using a Dataphone “Designer” modem to answer (no Hayes modems around this time, remember?), and connect the modem via a house phone exchange to another machine which would actually dial the line when an incoming telnet connection was made. The Beeb setup would remain on faithful pre-1990 hardware, and it’d be a solid recreation of an original Viewdata setup. The Java Viewdata applet could be used or we could write a new one with proper aspect ratio, etc.
Last week, that led to another thought – if we could get one BBs up, why not get others going? There are archives of pages and messages hidden in lofts (there are a couple which I’ve got copies of in any case); so the idea of using an Econet to have a stack of Beebs with modems came about. Believe it or not, I think the hardest bits to source will be the non-Hayes modems (Dataphone Demon-2, Designer, Telemod, Pace Nightingale, etc.).
The idea’s still work-in-progress until I get the stuff running, but it seems that we could end up with a live “Acorn BBs museum” using original hardware and files.
Update on the ST506 Problem: Ian and Jules over on the BBC Micro maillist suggested that it was probably the stepper motor in the Winchester drive being ‘sticky’ – rotated the stepper arm a couple of mm seems to have sorted the problem out. I’ll let Google index this for the next person to have the problem 😉
Yorkshire lass, born-and-bred. Photographs stuff, writes software, makes music, cooks, dances round the kitchen. Happy lesbinum, wife, and parent to three. Proud to have a rainbow family.
Musician, composer and producer, under the monicker of The Bleeding Obvious.
Regularly seen performing live – gig list here. Been on TV and radio in various capacities.
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By day I work as a systems architect for a marine technology company. More details about all that on LinkedIn.
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