2004 - Neil Turner's Blog

End of year quiz 2004

December 22, 2024December 28, 2004 by Neil Turner

Here’s a quiz I took this last year updated for 2004. Should be interesting when comparing answers. Read on…

1.What did you do in 2004 that you’d never done before?

Go out every night of the week – and by that I mean stay out later than midnight every night for 7 days solid. I’ve almost managed it before but this year was the first time I’d done it fully. I was totally knackered afterwards, as you can imagine.

2. Did you keep your new year’s resolutions, and will you make more for next year?

Well, my resolutions for 2004 were:

Drink less alcohol. Hmmm. No, didn’t keep that one somehow. I’d say my consumption patterns have changed – I’m having one or two a day rather than binging on a lot a couple of times a week, which is probably better for me in the longrun. But hey, I’m a student – drinking alcohol is in the job description 😉 .
Eat more healthily. Some improvement. I’m having fresh salad in my sandwiches more often and drinking more pure orange juice, but having a supermarket at the end of the road that does two pieces of Kentucky-esque fried chicken and fries for £1.19 is off-putting.
Do more work. Took me until the end of June but I have done a lot more work this year. Yay!
Do more exercise. A big fat no. Been as lazy as ever this year. Ah well.

For 2005 I’ll probably do more of the same.

3. Did anyone close to you give birth?

Not this year. My cousin’s daughter Eve is growing up fast – she’s learned to walk and is eating solid food now. She’s still adorable though, and very well behaved.

4. Did anyone close to you die?

Thankfully, no.

5. What countries did you visit?

If it counts, Wales (for a day in December). Haven’t really had the chance to go abroad this year.

6. What would you like to have in 2005 that you lacked in 2004?

A girlfriend? Although I’ve lacked that in 2003, 2002, 2001, 2000, 1999…

7. What date(s) from 2004 will remain etched upon your memory, and why?

The Beach Party in June for the sheer insanity of the whole thing. We’re having another one this year which promises to be bigger and better than last time – hopefully we’ll actually get some sunshine this time too!

8. What was your biggest achievement of the year?

Either getting a summer placement or doing much better in my resits than I did on my first attempt. I was also pretty impressed at getting asked to co-author a book about Movable Type, even if I didn’t get time to contribute in the end.

9. What was your biggest failure?

Having to do re-sits, and having to pull out of the book.

10. Did you suffer illness or injury?

No injuries, but I had the odd cold. Not as bad as last year though.

11. What was the best thing you bought?

My iPod Mini, without a doubt. Although I’m pretty pleased with my Family Guy DVDs too.

12. Whose behaviour merited celebration?

All my friends, as I said last year. They’ve been brilliant this year and really made my life worth living.

13. Whose behaviour made you appalled and depressed?

Like last year I’ll say a Labour politician, though it’ll be Charles Clarke and his bill to make students even poorer than they already are. Though that doesn’t mean Blair is off the hook either. He’s better than Howard or *shiver* Kilroy-Silk but that doesn’t mean I like him or his ideas.

14. Where did most of your money go?

The pub. And Apple Computer.

15. What did you get really, really, really excited about?

Christmas, the beach party, my iPod Mini.

16. What song will always remind you of 2004?

“In The Shadows” by The Rasmus.

17. Compared to this time last year, are you:

happier or sadder?Probably about the same, maybe happier. thinner or fatter?Fatter, alas. richer or poorer?Richer in that I have quite a lot more money in the bank, poorer in that I owe far more than that to the government in student loans.

18. What do you wish you’d done more of?

Exercise.

19. What do you wish you’d done less of?

Playing Solitaire and Freecell.

20. How will you be spending Christmas?

Yep, once again, I’ve taken this a few days too late.

21. Who deleted question 21?

The meme monster.

22. Did you fall in love in 2004?

Yeah, I wish.

23. How many one-night stands?

Yeah, I wish.

24. What was your favourite TV program?

Family Guy, although I’ve been watching that on DVD so I don’t know if it counts. Otherwise either 2DTV, QI, Have I Got News For You or Dead Ringers. From the radio I’d choose The News Quiz or The 99p Challenge.

25. Do you hate anyone now that you didn’t hate this time last year?

Not really no.

26. What was the best book you read?

Books? I read blogs! In which case I’d name Dooce as my favourite – Heather’s a brilliant observer and her writing always makes me chuckle.

27. What was your greatest musical discovery?

I hadn’t realised I liked Ash and Green Day so much. But they’re not really discoveries.

28. What did you want and get?

A new watch, a pen drive, a new mobile phone (twice), a DVD player and that iPod Mini again 🙂 .

29. What did you want and not get?

World peace and lots of money.

30. What was your favourite film of this year?

Of those that I saw, Spiderman II.

31. What did you do on your birthday, and how old were you?

Get drunk on Turboshandy (avoid it, please). I was 20.

32.What one thing would have made your year immeasurably more satisfying?

A girlfriend and more cash.

33. How would you describe your personal fashion concept in 2004?

Eh…? Same clothes I usually wear – subdued casuals.

34. What kept you sane?

My friends and having lots of stuff to do.

35. Which celebrity/public figure did you fancy the most?

Kirsten Dunst.

36. What political issue stirred you the most?

Top-up fees again, followed by equal opportunities/diversity, the Iraq war and hunting with dogs. I’ve been somewhat more political this year than in previous years.

37. Who did you miss?

A friend of mine who is on placement.

38. Who was the best new person you met?

Too many to mention.

39. Tell us a valuable life lesson you learned in 2004.

If you’re going to live with some mates of yours, make sure it’s only for a year at a time. I like my housemates and get on well with them, but I really don’t want to live with them next year…

40. Quote a song lyric that sums up your year.

“Girl! I’m gonna take you to a gay bar!” . Because I went to one (well, a gay club night) and my life, like the song, has been a bit insane at times over the year. All in all, 2004 was a good year for me, but hopefully 2005 will be better.

Present-ing…

December 22, 2024December 25, 2004 by Neil Turner

Hope you are all having a good Christmas! I got lots of presents this morning, including:

My dad also got a DAB digital radio, ~~although it only gets a digital signal upstairs for some reason (and even then can’t pick up all the channels)~~, which is a pity because he wanted to have it in the kitchen.

Update: It would appear that the radio itself is actually faulty – it also has FM and while every other radio in the house gets perfect reception this one seems to pick up interference from somewhere.

My grandparents got a Freeview digibox and a DVD player, along with some DVDs to go with it.

Back from Cardiff

June 1, 2025December 2, 2004 by Neil Turner

Just letting you know that I’m back from Cardiff okay. It was a good day, despite traffic problems and a poor turnout (both from Bradford and nationally) and I had a good time. I’ll post a full report and my photos either tomorrow or Saturday.

Meanwhile, here’s a BBC News Online article on the demo (and a Scotsman.com one), for your perusal.

New computer

March 1, 2025October 23, 2004 by Neil Turner

My parents are now the proud owners of a new Packard Bell desktop machine. It’s pretty good – AMD Athlon XP 3000+, 512MB RAM, 80GB HD, DVD rewriter, 64MB onboard graphics (since I doubt my parents will be playing Doom 3 any time soon), TV tuner card and multi-function card reader, plus the usual Ethernet, 56k modem, keyboard, mouse and related gubbins. There’s also a 17″ TFT monitor with built-in speakers that looks very nice and occupies much less space on the desktop. The whole setup is a rather fetching black and silver colour – much better than the beige boxes we used to have.

It comes with Norton Internet Security Suite 2004, but it’s only got 90 days of free updates, after which it’ll presumably demand payment of us, so I’m replacing that with the standard firewall in XP SP2 (which we had to install) and McAfee VirusScan Enterprise which is decidedly less annoying.

In fact about the only thing it doesn’t have is a floppy drive, which I suppose is a sign of the times.

My iPod Mini arrived!

December 22, 2024September 10, 2004 by Neil Turner

At long last, my iPod Mini arrived this morning. It’s now on charge, connected to the bundled transformer that is almost as big as the device itself. Unfortunately I won’t be able to do all that much with it until my laptop is repaired because neither my dad’s laptop or my parents’ PC have USB2 ports, although once I have iTunes installed and have the device fully-charged I’ll try anyway. Experience tells me that if you charge the device fully on first use you can greatly extend the battery life of a device so I’ll wait a few hours.

Still, I’m excited at the fact that I can call myself an ‘iPod owner’ 🙂 .

Bollocks bollocks bollocks

December 22, 2024August 31, 2004 by Neil Turner

My hard drive has failed. I was using it normally, and then most apps froze and then I got a BSOD. I rebooted, but the computer wouldn’t boot, citing an IDE error 🙁

The most annoying thing is that the machine is only 10 months old, and that I went for a Toshiba machine because I expected it to be better than my previous laptop, a Samsung, which at least made it to nearly 18 months before dying one me. Toshiba supposedly make good laptops.

Thankfully, it’s still be under the 12-month manufacturer’s warranty, so the reseller that sold me the machine are going to get an earful once I dig out their number. Still, I’m downloading Knoppix in the hope that I can salvage the more important data as I imagine that the ‘repair’ will merely consist of a new hard drive. In the meantime, I’ve requested a quote from OnTrack data recovery should damage to the drive be severe.

Update: Knoppix can see that there’s an HD in the system but it can’t read anything off it. This isn’t looking good. On the plus side, I do have internet and an office program and I can FTP stuff if I need to save anything.

Photographic eye

December 22, 2024August 24, 2004 by Neil Turner

You may remember the beach party back in June, which I waxed lyrical about for a few days and then nothing. I took around 170 photos over the two days (a total of 130MB) and still haven’t really got around to sorting them.

Anyway, the student union were given copies of my photos (since I was effectively their photographer) and the good news is that three of them have already been used in union ~~propaganda~~ publicity material, in the form of a leaflet given out to prospective students introducing the union and what it does. Surprisingly enough, student unions are somewhat more than a cheap source of alcohol.

You can have a look at scaled-down versions of the originals. Incidentally those were taken quite late in the day when the sun finally came out.

Why I’m not switching to WordPress

January 2, 2024August 22, 2004 by Neil Turner

Now that I’ve announced the book, I’ve had a couple of emails on the lines of “So I’m guessing you’re not switching to WordPress now, huh?”, and indeed I’m not. The book, however, is not the only thing that’s keeping me with MT and I’d like to use this (rather long) entry as a list of reasons why I’m not likely to switch any time soon.

Firstly, MT is what I’m used to. As of the middle of next month, I’ll have been using it for 2 years – whereas I’ve been using WordPress for less than 3 months. It’s the same reason why I use Windows as opposed to Linux – sure, Linux may be more secure and less likely to crash, but I know how Windows works and I feel comfortable in that environment.

Secondly, there’s the templating system, which I’m afraid to say, sucks. Again, maybe I’m just used to how MT works, but altering the way comments display in WordPress requires a lot more time and knowledge than it does in MT. In MT, the templates are totally separate from the MT source code – in WordPress, that separation isn’t so finely defined. Indeed, when you edit wp-comments.php (in 1.2) you’re faced with a 20 lines of PHP that you can’t edit before being able to dig in. And even then, you get comments like “if you delete this the sky will fall on your head” – hardly reassuring for a newbie.

Want to alter how the RSS feeds display? Then you have to edit a page with lots of PHP code which can’t be removed for fear of the sky falling on your head, and with a warning about this being an integral part of WordPress. You also need to know what the file is called since it’s not linked in the WordPress interface. Adding new pages, especially new types of feeds, seems to require a good understanding of PHP – adding a new template in MT is far, far easier.

WordPress isn’t all bad though, and it’s a whole load easier to install than MT is. In fact, a newbie to blogging* would be better off installing WordPress than MT, and includes nice blog-centric features like a links manager. But if you want to control how your site displays and don’t know much PHP then MT is the way to go, in my opinion.

(* = a newbie to blogging would really be better off on a service like Blogger or Typepad, but if they wanted something they could run themselves, WP would be easier than MT)

WordPress also wins on the comments front, despite what I said above, since it has much better comment management features built-in (although in 1.2 they are rather hidden away). That said, MT is brilliant once you have MT-Blacklist installed, since it deals with all the duplicate comments and spam perfectly, but that isn’t included out of the box (though it will be available with MT 3.1).

Rebuilds seem to be a bone of contention with some – if your web server isn’t so fast, they can take forever. I’ve never really had that problem as my host’s servers seem to run well (and I have optimised MT a bit to make it faster) but some people do find that rebuilds take forever for them. With that in mind, I suggest you wait for MT3.1 which adds support for dynamic pages. This will give you the best of both worlds – pages that get requested often like your indexes and feeds can be static, whereas other pages can be generated on the fly as needed. Sure, you can install a caching plug-in for WordPress but it’s not something that’s there out of the box (in 1.2, at least). The result is that rebuilds will be much quicker since only 2 or 3 files are being regenerated each time, plus, unlike in WordPress, you won’t have the PHP preprocessor kicking in and doing an SQL query every single time someone requests your RSS feed.

Rebuilds are also quicker in MT3.x due to its more efficient use of SQL queries and background tasks. Since upgrading to MT3, this site has been a whole lot faster, though I am working a new search script to replace mt-search which is a little slow.

Both packages have plug-ins and while WordPress kicks MT2.x’s arse in that respect, MT3.x does have much better plug-in support and many more hooks to allow developers to integrate their plug-ins with the MT interface without needing to modify the MT source code (detect a theme here?). For example, with MT-Blacklist installed, the comments mass editor has a ‘despam’ link added for running comments through the blacklist and removing the bad ones. As more plug-ins designed for MT3.x are released I’m sure we’ll see some truly great plug-ins that integrate tightly with MT.

MT’s help is better. There are some very extensive help documents provided with MT, whereas WP has a few links back to its rather sparse documentation pages on its web site. There’s also the wiki but like many wikis it suffers from a lack of structure, and some areas are quite patchy, in my opinion. Trying to have information only display on an individual entry page meant having to use a seemingly undocumented PHP function, for example. Apparently the #wordpress chat room is a good source of help but I’m not comfortable with asking for help in chat rooms and it assumes that you have an IRC client and that you’re on a connection that doesn’t block IRC like my university does.

This is getting quite long but as you can see, I have my reasons for not switching. What this isn’t is a “WordPress sucks and I can’t believe you all use it” rant, it is merely pointing out that WP is not for me. I’m sure that when WP reaches maturity it’ll be much better and I may give it another look when it hits 2.1 or something, but I’ve yet to be totally impressed. MT is at 3.01 now and feels much more mature than WordPress does. That said, my test install isn’t about to disappear any time soon, though a test install is what what it will remain.

I’ll leave comments open on here – I know this may seem controversial to some of you so please play nice.

Going into print

January 2, 2024August 17, 2004 by Neil Turner

The cover of the book 'Hacking Movable Type'

If you read Ben Hammersley and Jay Allen, you may have seen references to “the book” recently. This is Hacking Movable Type (sponsored link), a 500+ page guide to getting deep down and dirty with MT and customising it to the extreme. And now I think it’s time to let you know that I’m writing a couple of chapters for it.

It’s very much a group effort – as well as myself, Jay and Ben, there are contributions from Matt Haughey, Brad Choate and David Raynes amongst others, and the foreword to the book is being written by Ben and Mena Trott themselves. As arguably the least known of any of those, I’m naturally flattered to be involved in such a project.

The book is still very much a work in progress but will be out later this year. I’ll keep you posted. In the meantime, if you want to pre-order it, the ISBN is 076457499X and the publisher is John Wiley & Sons.

Beach for the stars

December 22, 2024June 10, 2004 by Neil Turner

I’m only able to post a few photos today. I have taken rather more (around 70 to be precise) but they’re not on this computer yet – I’ll probably upload a few at the weekend.

Today we had some schoolchildren and the university nursery use the beach, along with Bradford’s bactive campaign, who roped myself and other union members into “combat aerobics”. After that and then having to rake the sand my body is aching all over. Going out and then only having 6 hours sleep last night didn’t exactly help either…

On the plus side, I got to meet Bradford’s Lord Mayor, who’s actually a really nice guy. And despite all the pain, I did have a thoroughly enjoyable day – roll on Friday!