Status-Q

We spend the first bit of our lives wishing we were older, and the remainder wishing we were younger.

For men, the changeover probably happens around the mid-thirties. For women, in the mid-twenties.

There’s probably an excellent evolutionary explanation based around attractiveness to the opposite sex and peak reproductive performance…

The BBC’s iPlayer is a truly wonderful thing, as I have mentioned before.

In general, the content is only available in the UK, in the same way that Hulu is only in the US, but it gives those of us who pay a BBC licence fee access to everything on the Beeb’s now numerous channels from the last week. And with the iPlayer Download options, you can download it to your machine and watch it for up to 30 days. This used to involve a Windows-only binary, but now you can click a link to be an iPlayer Labs tester and iPlayer items will automatically gain a ‘download’ option, which makes use of an Adobe Air-based application, meaning that it works on Macs and Linux too.

I’ve only just discovered this download facility, though. Before that, on our recent trip to Paris, I was surprised to discover that the free wifi in our little hotel was attached to rather a good internet connection. I logged into my home Linux machine and did a little magic which allowed me to persuade iPlayer that I was still in the UK, and we had some happy evenings watching very high quality content, including episodes we might otherwise have missed of the rather fun ghost story Crooked House.

Catch, or download, the omnibus edition while it’s still there…

As an aside, I’m interested to note that the vast majority of people visiting Status-Q are Mac users – over 80% – which is probably because I post quite a bit about Mac software, and partly, no doubt, because of the intelligence of the readership with which I am blessed 🙂 Of the Windows users, though, three-quarters are using Chrome, a few using Opera, a very few on Firefox, and Internet Explorer users are too few for any statistics to be significant. Interesting. It may indicate that more of you are reading at home than at work, perhaps…

I’ve spent today converting the old Ndiyo site, which used Plone as the CMS, into Drupal.

Plone was very cool when we set the site up many years ago, but it’s quite quirky, and very heavy on memory usage. On a dedicated machine this is not a problem, but when I’ve been setting up sites on a shared server, I can run rather a large number of Drupal sites in the RAM required for one Plone installation. With hosting services like the excellent Webfaction, there’s a pretty direct motivation to switch. One Plone site needs more than the base-level service and so will cost you more per month than several Drupal sites.

Besides, Drupal is wonderful. I’ve investigated many CMSes over the years and I’ve fallen in love with Drupal. It’s beautifully designed, despite the fact that it’s written in PHP, which for me is a bit like admitting that I like The Matrix even though it stars Keanu Reeves.

Drupal’s power is not immediately apparent, but if you’re willing to put some time into it, listen to the podcasts, Google for the screencasts, explore the contributed modules (of which there are now thousands), your effort will be repaid. I was very pleased with how quickly I got Rose’s new site up and running, for example.

Anyway, all of that is a long introduction to the fact that I wrote a Python script which helped me convert Plone content into Drupal content and I’ve posted it on qandr.org in case it’s useful to anyone.

Don’t you just love the way people like to declare that this is the ‘International Year of X’, where X might be almost anything? Walking in the Jardin des Plantes yesterday I came across this:

2008 is the International Year of Planet Earth, apparently. That’s no doubt been a constant reminder for those of you who have been tempted to spend too much of the last 12 months thinking about Jupiter. And it should have made anybody on Jupiter sit up and take notice, too. Though, of course, they would have different years… Anyway, I’m glad I heard about it on Dec 29th or I could have missed out altogether! This concern led me to do some research, and discover that 2008 is also The International Year Of

• Sanitation
• Languages
• The Potato

And that’s just from the UN. I kid you not. Other organisations have declared 2008 to be The International Year Of

• The Organ
• The Reef
• The Frog

…to name a few. And those are just the international ones. I’m looking for an imaginative way to combine all of these in the next two days. There must be something fun you can do by combining Frogs, Potatoes and Organ pipes…

Cynique? Moi? Not at all! And to prove it, I am hearby making an important announcement, which Status-Q readers are privileged to know before anybody else…

Yes, this coming year is the time when we can celebrate all of those other International Years, and, finally, give due recognition to those that nobody else noticed at the time.

I think this could be big…

A nice feature of Google maps:

• Take a GPS log file
• Convert it into the .KML format used by Google Earth.
  (You can make these with GPSbabel, amongst other utilities.)
• Put it on a web server somewhere
• Go to Google Maps, and search for the URL of the .KML file

You’ll get a nice map of your track. And you’ll even get information about how to link to it and how to embed it in your site. Here’s a section of the route I walked today, for example:

View Larger Map

In early January, we’re launching version 2.0 of our CODA platform, and Michael’s done a short screencast which shows the fabulous new user interface that he, Thomas and Garry have been working on for the last few months. (We’ve also got a short video clip that’ll show you the basics if you aren’t familiar with CODA.)

The screencasts are really intended to show the new interface to our existing users rather than to sell it to new ones, but I know several of you are following what’s happening with CODA, so I thought they’d be worth posting.

Can’t wait to get version 2 out there…

Why not teach your squirrel to water-ski?

I last bought a DVD player at about the time the Java programming language was invented. Finally it gave up the ghost so I’ve just got another – and this one runs Java. How times change.

When I got my first one, I paid quite a lot for the vendor to do some soldering to make it region-free, and that was so long ago that I’d almost forgotten the ridiculous DVD region system. But back then, when I started buying DVDs, they were more plentiful and noticeably cheaper in the States, so I have a few region 1 discs.

Fortunately, it turns out that there’s a relatively straightforward hack for the Sony BDP-S350 to disable the region checking. So, to help make sure the details remain widely available, here’s a copy of what worked for me.
Continue Reading

One thing that has shocked me in the last couple of months – since we registered as an exhibitor at a major trade show – has been the number of calls we’ve had from trade publications and websites. These are typically called something like ‘Enterprise Technology Management’, and their salespeople can talk for half an hour without taking a breath about the merits of their publications, how all of their writers are drawn from ‘the analyst community’, and how influential they are in whichever world they claim to serve.

As they wind down, they tell you that they have a special opportunity in this quarter’s issue for an editorial/whitepaper/article/review focusing on your company – they would love to ‘work with you’ on this and it will typically cost you somewhere from £3000-6000. Oh, and it would be very helpful if you could make the decision now because the editor is waiting by their desk.

Now, I wouldn’t mind if a publication that I had actually heard of had called up, said they had advertising space, told me their circulation numbers, and asked if I wanted to buy half a page. And I’ve always known that reviewers of products – for example in HiFi magazines – are offered luxury skiing holidays and suchlike by the vendors of those products. But in my naïvety I hadn’t realised just how blatantly editorial inches were offered for sale, especially in the trade press. This has happened to us several times now.

So, gentle reader, in the unlikely event that you should be as innocent as I was, please don’t trust anything in any magazine or trade publication that might drop through your door. At least, don’t take it at face value. If you are unlucky enough to have to read these things, don’t assume that because an article doesn’t say ‘advertisement feature’ in the corner, that somebody hasn’t paid for it to be there. It could have been me.