Interflora Sucks....

Placed order for flowers for yesterday..... nothing turned up. Ring Interflora (numerous times) and it's all engaged tones or dead lines. That's shite. That's shite on a stick with a shite topping.

Update: For a more reasoned reasoning of the reasons that Interflora sucks, see Nomine's Just How Wrong Can You Get It

Update+: Interflora are refunding. Still never going to use them again.

BloglinesMenu 1.6rc

Yes, finally, I updated the BloglinesMenu to be universal. I'm flagging this one a release canidate as I'm not 100% on how this will run in the field*, but it's out there now. If no one flags a problem in the next month or so, I'll just drop the rc from the zip file name.

Enjoy.... I won't because I'm all Google Reader these days.

* When I say that, I've given it a good run and it seems to still stay small and work, it's just this is my first Universal build.

Regular readers may note....

Regular readers may note that I'm using LoudTwitter to preserve those links and bits that I twitter. Good? Bad? Annoying? Let me know. Or not.....

[ Update : The Loudtwittering has been moved to it's own blog ]

Hmmm

Guessing LoudTwitter isn't sending the mail then.

Well, there we go. Above this, my first LoudTwittered autopost. There'll be more links'n'shit in there in the future, but now you can either sniff my twitter (fnarr) or just wait for a daily posting of the tweets of the day.

iPhone Displays in the UK - Good News/Bad News

In the US, AT&T iPhone POS displays use Windows. Cue the pictures of Windows errors on them....

In the UK, it appears O2 use Macs. Yay! Except...



Yes, that's a nice "This Mac was unexpectedly restarted" dialog.

Green Blackmail, New Scientist Style....

So, here's a bit of green blackmail from a New Scientist subscription email.

"Not only will you save hassle later on, but you can also help us reduce the number of letters we send you, contributing towards a greener environment."

Uhuh, so, If I don't renew right now, New Scientist are going to send me paper mailings till I do, and I'm the one supposed to feel guilty about the carbon footprint.



I'm surprised it didn't have "Nice planet, shame if anything.... happened... to it". It also lessens the impact when you note this is an email.

Bah! Basshunter's broken....

Basshunter did a wonderful track called Boten Ana. How many songs do you know about IRC?



And now it arrives in the UK and.... OMG.... It's been... DEGEEKED....



It's almost a crime. Ah well, at least I have the Basshunter album "LOL <(^^,)>"... And I wish Basshunter great bleepy europop success.

Morning links.....

A review of The Rails Way can't wait for my copy to arrive.

iPhone 1.1.3 firmware rumours makes sense, getting ready for the SDK by letting people manage their home screen.

Aw Kitties!

Spooks....

Well, thats another series of Spooks wrapped up. If you haven't watched the last episode, look away now...




















Ok?

Right....

I enjoy Spooks, but there it has now just established itself as utterly misogynistic.

This series ends with the death of Jo, who despite being a solid staunch strong character goes from 0 to wreck in less than two jump cuts and a fade in. And so yet again a Spooks series ends with a female character dead because they were weak. This just keeps happening. The men are strong and get a million second chances (cf Adam, who should have been retired after the last series as he was a wreck, but oh no, he can manage it). The women are 'apparently strong', but always break. The next series, as soon as a new female character walks on, you will find yourself wondering how she's going to end up dead or disgraced. Take Ros this series, she was a strong, possibly too hard, character, and bish bosh, she's broken by torture, she's off helping Yalta (the chaps who torture her) and it's all down hill from there for her and off she's shuffled to a life of hiding... organised by the chaps.

It's not just this series, this has been happening from the start, from the deep fat fryer in episode one, series one. And it just keeps happening.

It's all so bloody infuriating, as the big arc story in Spooks this series worked really well, but when it comes to the character management, there's a big "Spying's a blokes game, watch us break the little ladies" theme running through.

Read XKCD?

Then you may want to watch this.

BBC's iPlayer works* on Mac and Linux

Hussah! (and w00t!)

And the volume control goes to 11.

Class work.

* Streaming only. Now about those downloads........

Pope notes* - Rails - restful_authentication --stateful

* Pope notes - things that I've just worked on, and got halfway, but need to press on with. Like little papal snapshots, mainly for my reference so I can come back to it later.

I like state machines; they make life cycles much easier to manage and acts_as_state_machine is a nice way of expressing state machines. The problem I just hit though was that restful_authentication plugin just added --stateful, which generates up an authentication setup that includes the Stateful authentication setup. It went well enough getting it to work, but there seems to be a mismatch in statefulness and the use of an observer to generate mail. The observer watches save and creates, and then uses the state of the user to decide what should be done. But, it does this for all saves, and because there's no indication of a state change having just occurred, then having the after_save observer mail when the users state is active triggers off multiple "you have signed in mails" and the variant, checking for a pending state, triggers an activation mail. What struck me was it should be better to move the mail generation into the user model, using the same hooks that the state machine uses for when a state is entered. I had a quick hack, and it seems to work, but does generate two activation mails.... this is probably fixable if I understood the acts_as_state_machine plugin better, so I'm going back to another part of the code which does use that.

Oh, and I'm in day two of my "coding rails without an IDE"... it's all TextMate and Terminal here for the next fortnight. No better way to know what an IDE is doing right or wrong than getting back to basics.

Lost By Translation

Lost By Translation.

Bonus link - Why Teller Is So Cool.

Logitech do the right thing...

I've just noticed that Logitech have released Logitech Control Center 2.4. In the past LCC has sucked because it installed APE. Well, now thats changed... "Unsanity's Application Enhancer (APE) is no longer installed and needed". Heck, I might even give it a try.

Update: Eyw, read the comments. I'll wait for 2.4.1....

Busy Busy....

What I find hard? Testing. Doubly hard, TDD. Triply hard, BDD. But dammit, I will do this new code base right for a change. Well, righter.

Busy at the moment working on Lendery. A simple application, I suspect, but I thought I'd mention it.

Lendery replaces my previous Libr project as I realised that Libr was a lot of work for users creating a library which they may only get one use out of per thing loaned. And thus Lendery was inspired. It lets you record who you loaned something to by their email address (initially) and uses email to tell them (after authenticating the account.... a once only event per email address)... sign up and you can create an identity of multiple email addresses (akas) and the ability to manage your loans on the web.

Well, thats the plan.

Twitterific defined

Twitterific: An application designed to display a nice yellow box over one third of it's UI explaining why Twitter isn't working at the moment. Alledgedly, twitters from your followed folk occasionally leak past this yellow box.

What I'd like in a clock/radio....

I like alarm clock/ipod playing/radios. I also like dawn wake-up lamps. But currently my bedside table has both on it. Now this is a tad redundant. I'd prefer just a straight lamp and an alarm clock/radio.

So here's the idea. An alarm clock/radio which had a connection (wired or wireless... I think wireless might be easier, and be easier to make international) to a plug adapter (which would be country specific). You plug your favourite lamp into the adapter and plug it in. You now control your lamps on/off and brightness from the alarm clock/radio. And when the alarm is due to go off, the alarm clock/radio starts ramping up the light brightness half an hour earlier.

Better still, the plug adapters could be sold seperately, and you could "pair" one or two of them to the radio so you could raise the lights on two lamps. And there could be a version for permanant installation in a socket, so you could have a "dawn enabled" socket.

Would you want one?

Touched up

Well, this I'd my first posting here with an iPod Touch via wifi and Safari. Neato.

iChat supports "/me"

iChat now (apparently undocumented) supports "/me"

/me is happy
/me does a little dance

So when you go to the chemists....

You've got a question to ask them... "Are you a Catholic Pharmacist?" because now, there's a good chance your Catholic pharmacist will not be doing their job and instead be trying to apply their "morality" to your life.

"We cannot anesthetize consciences as regards, for example, the effect of certain molecules that have the goal of preventing the implantation of the embryo or shortening a person's life"

On the plus side, at least Pope "But I wasn't a Nazi" Benedict XVI has made it explicit, welcome to the "War On Molecules".