Andrew Wilkinson

I brought my laptop to my parents house so I could be guarenteed a decent computer to use. Unfortunately my desire to make sure it had all the latest software on it coupled with the fact it hadn't been updated for ages means that I've broken it several interesting ways over the past few days. Consequently I'm writing this blog post on my iPhone while lots of writing scrolls up my screen. I really need to get off Gentoo... At least the Wii is working. Mario Kart won't race itself you know!

I've been using my iPhone for two weeks now, and overall it's great. Easily the best phone I've ever used. It really has changed the way I live my life because there is so much I can now do from anywhere that before I'd need to be at my computer for.

Despite this though, there are a few things that Apple should fix.

1. There's no character count when typing a text message.

This might be a small issue and given I get 500 free texts a month (which is way more than I use) it doesn't matter that I might sometimes send people two messages. However, it would be nice to be able tailor my messages to the limit of 160 characters.

2. The new over-the-air download of podcasts is complete broken.

Rather than listen to my music on a loop while I travel I listen to a number of podcasts, and Steve Lamacq's 6music show. MythTV on my PC records his show every afternoon. A script then converts the recording into a 300MB MP3 file and updates the xml document that describes it as a podcast. This is served by Apache on my local machine.

Specifying http://192.168.0.8/podcasts/feed.rss works fine for iTunes on my PC. When I sync my iPhone new episodes of Lamacq's show get copied automatically across.

It was well known that an update last week would add over the air downloads for podcasts. This would be brilliant I thought, because then I wouldn't need to turn my girlfriends laptop on unless I want to back my phone up.

Disappointingly there are two big flaws with the implementation of podcasts on the phone when compared to podcasts on iTunes. Firstly there is no automatic checking for new episodes - you must press a button for each feed to see if it has been updated. Secondly only podcasts that are delivered through the iTunes store can be downloaded straight to your phone. When attempting to sync my custom podcast on my phone no attempt is made to download the feed and I get sent to the store's podcast homepage.

Is there any need for this limitation? I can't think of a good reason for it :-(

Google is useless to see if anyone else has come across this issue or resolved it because it's full of speculation and screenshots from before the update was released.

Recently I brought Ellen the West Wing box set, and we've been working our way through the series. Last night we started watching series 3, which is the series where they switched to widescreen. No problem you think, widescreen is common on DVDs and with a nice big widescreen tv I should get a great picture. Rather than make the picture widescreen, the DVD has a 4:3 image with black bars on the top and bottom. Not only that, but the image isn't even in the center of the 4:3 image so the TV's zoom function chops off the top of the picture!

Grr.

Like many people I have the Compare People application added on Facebook. Over the past few weeks they've been sending me emails ranking my friends across various categories, which is quite interesting. Today however they sent me an email I really wasn't quite so keen on...

In total, you were reviewed for dating 19 times and no people expressed interest in you.

Well gee, thanks for that! They continue...

You are more desirable than less than 20% of 23,340,004 people.

So less than 20% of people are less attractive than me? Is it a good business strategy to send insulting emails to users? Perhaps people know I'm happily in a relationship, or perhaps I'm just highly unattractive. Whatever the reason I don't really need to be told about it!

I decided to enter the Get Up And Play competition that Coca Cola are running to win an 'Ultimate Wii Games Room'. Admittedly I already have a Wii, but I'd give the second one to my brother and I just want a free TV.

When you click to find out more about the TV you can win they say...

The R8 also comes equipped with 2 x HDMI connections so you can enjoy playing the Wii in the highest digital quality.


That's funny, I thought the Wii only had composite S-Video and component connectors. There's no HDMI connector to be found on the back of my Wii...

Can anyone tell me what the point of this article on the BBC News website is, other than a big advert for SAP?

I'm normally a big fan of the BBC, but that article is complete crap!

After three days of battling my PhD software finally works under Windows. Got I hate Windows so much. I've got some many better things to do, but my supervisor said it really should work on Windows so I hope he's happy when I go to York next week having not done everything that I should have

My traditional Saturday morning lie-in was ruined today by the firealarm going off at 8:30am. Not too early suppose, but early enough to piss me off!

I can't wait until I move back into a proper house in a couple of weeks time.

I've got ten books out the library at the moment, and today I got an email telling me that they are all one day over due - meaning I get fined £2 for one measly day! The library has no trouble sending you an email to say that your books are overdue, but do then send you an email the day before the deadline to remind you? Do they heck. That would mean they wouldn't receive as much money for fines.

My replacement camera was supposed to have been delivered to my house either last week or the week before that. It still hasn't arrived.

The company that I'm force to deal with have a laughable attempt at a website, see here. No chance to track its status on there...

I phoned them up on Monday when they said 'I'll find out what's going on and phone you back'. No phone call was received.

I've phoned them up again today and they said the person I need to speak to is on the phone, they'll get him to call me back. 30 minutes have passed so far with no call. If I have to phone them back again this afternoon and I'm forced to listen to the annoying woman telling me how important my call is to them, then they'll be getting a taste of Angry Andrew.

Grr.

Update:

Hurrah! A combination of Angry Andrew and a nice chap called Graham have sorted it out. After a trip down to the warehouse a rather out of breath Graham returned with (apparently) my camera in front of him. Today's post has already left so it'll send it out tomorrow and I'll get it by Friday. I'll keep you informed, as I'm sure you're all on the edge of your seat. ;-)

According FACT and the BPI there is a counterfeiter of music and films working in almost every street of every town. Apparently this is big business and they are making a lot of money. My question to this is if there is someone making money out of copying films and music on every street, and a street has on average (as a wild guess) 50 houses how much pirated material are the people in the other 49 houses (as that is the size of the market for each counterfeiter) buying? It must be huge! An average 'fake' CD costs between £2 and £6 so to make 'big money' you need to sell an awful lot!

I'm pretty sure my Grandma has never brought a fake dvd or CD, nor have my parents. Neither have I for that matter (I spent £80 on DVDs and CDs on Monday...). I guess there must be someone else buying a large amount of fake material to make up for my family so these evil pirates can continue to live the Life of Riley.

Today I was demonstrating for CGV and one person had a very strange problem; they couldn't get the colour of text drawn by glutBitmapCharacter to change. It turns out the colour is not set by glColor, it's instead set by the GL_CURRENT_RASTER_COLOR parameter. And how do you set this parameter? By calling glRasterPos which as a side effect takes the current colour set by glColor.

Ummm, intuitive...

This morning before I went to lunch I went to a cash machine to get some money out. I pressed the £40 and it buzzed and whirried and flashed as usual, then my card popped out and then... nothing. The cash draw stayed resolutely closed with no sign of my hard earned cash.

Grrr I thought, fortunately nmitchell was kind enough to lend me some money to buy my lunch.

After that I went to the bank, got a mini statement and no forty has been withdrawn. The big question is, how long does it take for a withdrawal from another bank's cash machine to appear on your statement? Should I still be worried that I've lost 40 of my shiny pounds into the mysterious banking vortex of doom?

On Monday my girlfriend brought some ceramic hair straighteners, fair enough I thought - although I was a little surprised by the £100 price tag. Being the kind of person I am I read the back of the box to see what I could find out about them...

The ghd ceramic hairstyling iron is the Holy Grail of hair styling tools.

Slightly over the top, but forgivable I suppose as they're trying to sell them.

Thanks to it's unique built-in microprocessor, it not only conducts heat fast but also retains it more effectively too. The result? Instant long lasting heat for optimum styling control.

Built-in microprocessor? What? Why on earth do these things need a microprocessor in them? Wha ever this chip does it certainly will not make it conduct heat faster or retain it longer as that's a property of the material. The only use I can come up with for the microprocessor is to regulate the temperature of the tongs, but surely a thermistor - which has infinite precision - would be a better and simpler choice?

Plus it's advanced infra-red heat actually protects your hair by sealing in it's natural oils, moisture and hair colour, guaranteeing you beautifully straight hair with an attractive healthy shine.

Ok, they've really taken the biscuit now - advanced infra-red heat - what are they jabbering on about? The transfer of heat from the tongs to the hair is by contact so infra-red transmission of heat will be negligible, but then I suppose this isn't your run of the mill infra-red heat, it's advanced infra-red heat!

I'm tempted to write to the trading standards office because they shouldn't be allowed to get away with writing crap like that.

(Quotes taken from here)

Taken from this BBC News Have Your Say page on the closure of Darley Oaks Farm, which bred Guinea Pigs for use in medical research, after years of intimidation...

In centuries to come we will look back on the activities of animal rights activists and recognise them as brave and principled people who did what most of us could not do - they stopped the wholesale and pointless torture of millions of defenceless animals.
Anon, UK

Those 'brave and principled people' dug up and stole the remains of the owner's mother-in-law! How on earth is that brave and principled?

Fortunately most of the other comments are more balanced, even if I disagree with the people who say animal experimentation for the purposes of medical research is wrong.

I've just discovered that PyVault, a provider of RPM packages for Python software, has an RPM for some software that I have written (PyLinda). This is great and I'm very happy to see my software spread around on the internet. What does bug me slightly is the fact that they have gone to the trouble of patching my install script to remove the documentation and examples! That makes it practically useless for someone who doesn't already know what they're doing...

As much as I dislike the idea of an ID card my very own CitizenCard arrived this morning, and it took only two days longer than they said it would (and it only cost me a first class stamp). I think it looks like I've faked it, but at least I'll be able to get into Glastonbury and won't have the worry of taking my driving license or passport with me.

Latest Band News: British Sea Power are headlining the Leftfield Tent on Friday night so I'll definitely be catching them over the White Stripes.

The new Coldplay album, X&Y, arrived this morning - but none of the three cd-rom drives I've tried it in can play it! Damn copy protection! Looks like it's time for a bittorrent search...

*Andrew Smash!*

Update: With a bit of persuading one of the three cd-rom drives did read the cd, and although cdparanoia said there were errors it seems to have corrected them and the oggs are playing fine.

The BBC has a worrying report on the rise of creationism in the UK. While not as vocal they are in America the Creation Science Movement has been around since 1932 and they even have a Genesis Expo 'museum' (though I do feel that calling it a museum gives it too much credibility) in Plymouth.

One choice quote from the CSM's website is this "Today society witnesses to the effect of atheistic humanism which belief in the theory of evolution has brought--fragmented family units, abortion, child abuse etc.". I think these people have a rather distorted view of history - we've never had a perfect society, it's just that we're more open about these things. How believe in evolution is responsible for child abuse is not some thing they go into...

Another statement from their website is "Three distinct lines of experimental evidence from scientists of repute in Australia, America and Russia strongly suggest that the speed at which light travels has diminished with time. This affects the radiometric dating of rocks and the time taken for light to reach us from distant galaxies. It indicates that the universe is less than 10,000 years old." A report on the same topic from Space.com shows that this report did not directly measure a change in the speed of light, instead they found that the so-called fine-structure constant may have varied by 1 part in 100,000 over the past 12 billion years. From this they have implied that other constants may have changed, which implies that the speed of light may have changed too. Unfortunately you have to pay to read their pamphlets which I would hope give actually citations for the work they're basing their views on.

I'm glad Tony Blair has said that he wants to keep religion and government separate, but I do still worry about this. This book is a really excellent read on how to spot fake science, you're welcome to borrow my copy if I know you :-)

( A rant with spoilers )