Author Archives: rrees

Java

Oi! Quicktime! Noooo!

Halfway through a 350Mb download from Bleep I decide to upgrade Quicktime due to the serious security fixes that are available in Version 7.1 (or that is what the popup tells me).

During the install Quicktime tells me it has to close its running instances. Fine I think and click okay. Suddenly Firefox is shut down and a popup sensibly points out that if I close Firefox now I’ll lose 100Mb plus of the download that has already been stored on the PC. Do I really want to shutdown Firefox?

Thank god for Firefox I think! No, don’t stop downloading I tell it… Only to have Quicktime slyly close it anyway. And install itself once again into the Systray.

Apple stuff is easy to use, as long as you do what the program wants you to do and you don’t get any uppity ideas of your own. Sometimes though you actually know what you’re doing and its not down to a program to decide what you actually need to do. It is useability but at a stiff price.

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Television

The Return of the Cybermen

Cybermen rock! But Cybermen with big budgets rock hard! I was too young to see the original Cybermen shows but as a child they were my favourite novelisations of the series (along with the UNIT shows). The novelisation of the very first Cybermen appearance is great and I can remember bits of it even now. The themes of transformation, man-machine and the quest for eternal life are more relevant now than they were in the Sixties. After all just this week we've been debating the ethics of selecting embryos for cancer genes.

This show wasn't that deep but it is just Part One of a two parter (with a proper cliffhanger ending) and it was well-written with more for Mickey to do than normal. Styling wise though I love the new Cybermen look and for once the show hasn't had to improvise with domestic junk sprayed silver.

I also liked the way that the Cybermen were proper Dr. Who monsters in that they intrude into your life. They look alien and yet, unlike CGI, they look like something that really could appear in your house or on your street. There was also proper attention to detail such as making sure they were taller than the humans and getting the coordinated machine movement right. It's great stuff!

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Java

Toothbrush 3000

Our electric toothbrush’s casing cracked this weekend. Since mixing water and electric tools seemed a bad idea the search was on for a replacement. Since heads are expensive and we had quite a few of our current model stocked up we were essentially going to get pretty much the same model we have now. However turning up at Sainsbury’s revealed that there are now at least three models in the range. In addition one of the models is also produced in pink.

That lead to an unexpected need to make a choice. Having established the equivalent model to the one we already had left us with a choice, the equivalent (now branded the 5000) and the next model up the 7000. The price difference was about £15 but the actual difference between the two models was very unclear and there was a lot of head scratching and reading over the back of packets.

About the only definite difference was that the battery life for the 7000 is meant to be greater (and our current one is a bit crap, swiftly draining juice if not permenantly attached to the shaver socket) so what the hell, we bought a 7000.

The first experience was positive, there is at least a difference between the brushing motion of the old toothbrush and this one but is there a 2000 level difference? It is going to take longer than 24 hours to judge that.

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Uncategorized

Local May Elections

I have been struggling to decide who to vote for this year. Obviously for tribal reasons I can't go Tory even though I think the current Conservative counciller is probably a good guy. That narrows down to whether I should vote for the Liberals, Greens or Labour.

Camden (currently Labour) is a pretty hotly contented seat and seems a likely canididate to swing given the current discontent with the Parliamentary government. However using local elections to send a national message is a losing game. Councillers probably affect your day to day quality of life more than any other politician and living with a protest vote for two years is something you can really come to regret.

In the end it was the Labour leaflet that persuaded me how to cast my votes. The Liberals run Islington and the Torys run Westminster. Can I live with two years of either of those?

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Television

Time Team

The Taxman's Tavern episode broke a golden rule of Time Team. It is meant to be like cricket, interesting in a quiet way with not much happening. Indeed the final scene is usually meant to be a desperately optimistic summarising of a few bits of pottery and wild speculation.

This episode just didn't play ball, there was just too much interesting stuff going on.

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Software

Pod Receiver People

I quite liked jPodder when I first used it but the last release or two have been hideous with all manner of issues, particularly when I installed the Java 1.6 beta

It’s handy to be au fait with Java when looking at these problems and most of the problems with it seem to come from silly attempts to not be a Java program. Like for example using the Systray4J jar which is broken. I don’t expect a Java program to integrate fully into the OS. It’s no big issue, what I wanted from jPodder was a Podcast Receiver that would allow me to use BitTorrent to share the download burden amongst all the other client users. That’s what I wanted but I’ve given up for the moment and switched to using Juice. It’s not exactly what I wanted but its lightweight and it downloads Podcasts quickly and with minimum fuss. It also doesn’t try and download a set of default podcasts unlike jPodder

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Java

First Post!

So I decided that trying to blog via Amaya and manual upload was too hard and too unlikely to happen but I also decided that Blogger really does too much fudging with the tags inside the post (treating paragraphs as Break Lines for example).

Therefore given that in this brave new blogging world (blogging doesn’t have a business model as the Guardian pointed out yesterday) there are many providers all eager to capture inanity for free I might as well give WordPress a go. It is after all the blogging software that all the cool kids use

First impressions are that, whoa, there is a lot more to WordPress than the simplified Blogger interface. That has pros and cons, there is a far bigger “How do I do this?” than Blogger which was pretty much just log on and get typing.

Why is the title of this post horrid lime-green for example?

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