Monthly Archives: June 2004

Tour

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Martin asked me to advertise the ICOS Tour website (variously known as “OpSoc Tour” or “MTSoc Tour” or even (misguidedly, perhaps) as “DramSoc Tour” or “Let’s all get pissed in Devon Tour”, or, best of all, plain old “Tour”. So there we go. I know that Dan Young is planning on playing around with stylesheets and suchlike (and I can see he’s been doing so already), and so I’ll plug some of my old posts about stylesheets and stuff.

But more importantly, either go on Tour, or pay some money to go watch it.

Familiar Face?

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Not that I’m bored, (and neither, of course, is Martin,) but we’ve been having a little play around with Google. Having a look at the Image Search, I was quite impressed that a photo of me comes first in the list of results for “Andy Allan”, but I’m going to try and get this photo of Andy Allan slightly higher in the list (i.e. on it at all). Or maybe a photo of Andy Allan in Peru instead. Whichever.

Oh, and the real point of this post is to point out how handsome that guy called “Gary Ewer” is. Ha Ha!

Post your own face-spotting links in the comments below…

Update – Damn. The image results seem to be somewhat volatile – when I posted this (a good three or four minutes ago), it was a photo of me at the top of the results for Gary. But by the time Gary appeared in the storeroom about two minutes later, it had all rearranged itself. Nevermind.

Honeypot

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Spotted on Slashdot – but is this a rather obvious oversight (surely Google knows about having a robots.txt file?), or just a cunning way of trapping ill-educated spammers? My money’s on the latter – only a few hundred email addresses can be harvested from this, and if it was real, I’d expect that a few hundred thousand (at least) would have signed up by now.

And bonus points for anyone who tells me how to search the internet (using Google, natch) for the term ‘site:google.com inurl:gmail +”a-”‘, so I can see if anyone else is talking about it.

Segwon’t

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I saw a Segway today, on Queens Gate Place, being used by someone actually going somewhere (so not any faffing around, demos or anything like that). He looked a bit of a pillock, but I’m not sure whether that was entirely the Segway’s fault. Still, it’s on the list of verbotten transportation, so I can’t be the only one who is slightly skeptical of them.

Guerrillamail

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Well, I don’t have a Gmail account. Unless they change one or two important details, I don’t really want one either – I’m with Steve on this one. Gmail sounds really interesting, but I pay good money to have all my email coming from gravitystorm.co.uk – and I’ve found in the past that having more than one email address, even if they all end up in the same place, just leads to people getting confused and constantly enquiring as to which email address they should use. If I could use Gmail silently, that is, with all my emails transparently appearing to come from and go to gravitystorm.co.uk, then I’d give it a go. Reply-to just doesn’t cut it.

Maybe it’ll be possible in the future, since what’s going on with Gmail is a slightly interesting attempt at guerilla marketing, and not being able to change the From address is surely part of the tactics. They announced the service, being much better than anything currently on offer, with a small catch – you couldn’t use it. There was a closed list of beta testers, and that was it. But cunningly, the beta testers were, occaisionally, allowed to invite a small number of people to join the list of testers. When word got around about these ‘invites’, they became valuable – everyone wanted one, and more importantly, everyone wanted to be given one. There was a lot of cred in having a Gmail account, since that showed that you knew someone important enough to have them to hand out. So I think there were a few people who might have tried it out, but definitely went for it when they were Invited.

But Google seems to be ramping up the number of users, and I don’t think the invite system has much more life in it. In my little group of friends, Adam was the source of it all, and still seems able to get rid of his invites. But Steve, Gary, Ed, Mike and Steve King have all had invites available over the last few days. It’s not just in my little sphere of influence either- Asa Dotzler and Pavlov are using contests to give theirs away. I reckon within the next week or so, the number of outstanding Gmail invites will be huge, and unless Google has a cunning plan up their sleeves (and, be honest, that’s fairly likely), there won’t be much point in not opening it up to the public. Except for loosing the guerrilla promotion they’ve been getting over the whole thing.

Which I’m only adding to! ;-)

Dancing

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Went bouldering in Sherfield again today, and came up with some good moves – I finally got onto the overhang wall coming from the left wall, which I think is a first amongst us lot, and I’ve also come up with a groovy move starting from the other side of the overhang and dancing along the wall onto the final stretch. So if (ha!) I manage to get the overhanging wall under control, that’ll almost be the whole thing sorted. Hmmm. The bouldering wall in Sherfield really is kinda hard.

I did challenge myself to go climbing more than once per month, and so far I’m doing quite well. I went bouldering yesterday evening; climbing for 5 hours on Sunday; Tuesday and Thursday last week were bouldering; the previous Sunday was also climbing – I think I’ve managed my ‘once a month’ for June.

Home Servers and File Transfer

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Well, another couple of people using Jabber now, but I’ve a feeling it’ll take a long while to convince everyone else to give it a go. So I’ll just have to keep on harping on about it until they relent…

In our flat, well, my current flat and my previous flat next door, we’re running our own Jabber server for in-house communications. That means that we can still message each other when the Internet connection goes down – and me being in a different house (we’ve got an ethernet cable swinging between windows) means that it’s not quite as lazy as it seems. So that’s quite useful.

Also, a new version of Psi has come out, and amongst other things, now supports file transfer. A couple of other Jabber clients have done file-transfer for a few years now, but generally by coming up with their own way of doing it. Now that all the file-transfer protocols have been officially standardised, Psi has added it to its repertoire. I’m not holding my breath for anyone to implement file-transfer on the cross-network transports though!

Purchasing Is Necessary

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I bought some climbing boots and a chalkbag yesterday, seeing as the whole climbing thing is becoming quite a routine, and I really, really need them for bouldering in Sherfield. But the thing that grabbed my attention was when I came to pay for it all – I got to use my chip-and-PIN on my credit card for the first time! Finally, I feel like we’re heading in the right direction, after spending years and years transferring billions of pounds around the country using the most ludicrously pathetic security system I’ve ever come across. Still, maybe some technologists should realise that despite signatures being sooo technically poor, for the most part, they still work. Most security systems don’t actually need to be perfect to be functional.

Still, in Britain we’re over a decade behind France when it comes to using PINs at points of sale, and when I was travelling around Australia and New Zealand I was grateful that many British tourists ahead of me had got all the checkout assistants well trained – as soon as they recognised a card from a British bank, they used the fall-back signature verification. Interestingly, PINs work fine in cashpoints, but even though I knew them for my cards, their point-of-sale network obviously wasn’t connected up to our PIN verification network (or however it all really works), since I had to sign for everything. Maybe next time it’ll all be joined up better.

Jabbering Along

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Hmm. I’ve aquired a few draft postings (ahh, the joys of a proper blogging tool), and I should get round to posting them. For the moment though, I’ll talk about something else.

I use Jabber for instant messaging, not MSN or ICQ or Yahoo or anything else. Well, that’s not entirely accurate, since I’ve been having a problem with it for the last few weeks. Not long after I got back, the MSN transport that I was using seems to have packed up, and it hasn’t reappeared. Transports to proprietary networks (proprietary = bad, mkay?) aren’t exactly the most reliable of things anyway, as I’ve discussed previously, so it’s not all that surprising. And I’ve heard Microsoft have been messing around over the last few months trying to stop this kind of thing anyway. So recently, I’ve only been messaging other people on Jabber.

So really, I haven’t been using it for IM at all, since I don’t know anyone else who uses Jabber often. So why have I stuck to it? Stubbornness, mainly, with a bit of ideology thrown in. But there is one over-riding reason – it’s called JabRSS and it’s the perfect fusion of two high-geek-factor technologies. I’ve added 37 RSS (huh?) feeds to it, mainly blogs that I read. It then sends me a jabber message when they get updated – it sent 411 headlines in the last 7 days. So that saves me soooo much time trawling around the web checking for updated sites – the updates come to me, and I can see if I want to read the rest of the article in question. Nice. If you keep track of lots of sites, and especially if you swap between lots of computers (and therefore a dedicated RSS reader is a bit of a hassle), then I’d recommend it.

Anyway, today I managed to persuade someone (with no important sounding position ;-) ) to sign up to Jabber, so if you decide to do so, you’ll probably already know both of us. And for the foreseeable future, it’s about the only way you’re going to be able to message me. andrewjrallan@jabber.org is the jabberid to add to your contact list.

(And for those of you who are on my contact list but don’t use Jabber any more, I’m interested to know why you’ve stopped.)

Well, It Does Work Quite Well

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So, Sam has moved onto WordPress, and changed away from Fireburst to samsharpe.net. And got rid of all his former entries, again. That’s something that would have narked me 11 months ago, since I was very much into the whole ‘URLs are permanent, and all data on the intarweb should be so too’ philosophy, but with that, and many other things, I’m proud to say I don’t really care anymore.

In an attempt to directly contradict myself, I’ve ensured that if you try following an old link to a weblog post, you get redirected to the new archives. Cause there’s just sooo many people linking to my old weblog posts. I’ll give it a couple of days, and retire the old database.

Mike has also started using WordPress, so that makes three of us in as many weeks. I wonder if anyone else is going to give it a whirl…