Year: 2005

End of year quiz 2005

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In what is now an annual event, it’s about time I did the ‘End Of Year Quiz’. Read my answers from 2004 and 2003, or read on for this year’s answers.

1.What did you do in 2005 that you’d never done before?

Get a serious girlfriend 🙂 . I also went to a few new places.

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

My resolutions have been the same for a few years now, and they were:

  1. Drink less alcohol. Not entirely sure whether to say I managed this or not. I certainly didn’t binge drink so much (bar a few notable exceptions) but I’m still drinking quite a bit – it just tends to be spread out more evenly. Which health-wise is probably a good thing.
  2. Eat more healthily. Good progress here. I’m eating much more fruit and veg and less chips and pizza.
  3. Do more work. Well, I graduated, didn’t I? Could still do more though.
  4. Do more exercise. At last, some progress here too. I’m now hiking on most Sundays and I live further away from the university so I do more walking during the day too. Not a lot, but an improvement.

For 2006, I’ll continue with 2,3 and 4. Instead of 1, I’ll do “Don’t binge drink”.

3. Did anyone close to you give birth?

Yes, they did. And he’s sooo cute.

Next year I should have another second cousin, which will be nice. He’s due in April.

4. Did anyone close to you die?

Thankfully, no.

5. What countries did you visit?

Again, didn’t really get to go abroad this year despite a planned trip to Ireland in November. I did spend a day in Scotland though. Hopefully I’ll be able to get away in 2006.

6. What would you like to have in 2006 that you lacked in 2005?

Hmmm. Can’t use the same answer from previous years now. To be honest, I really don’t know – all I can think of are little material things that I probably don’t need anyway, like a new iPod, new laptop…

7. What date(s) from 2005 will remain etched upon your memory, and why?

Meeting Hari in October (because she’s wonderful), the Make Poverty History demo in July (because it was such a big and positive event), my election campaign in March (because I learned a lot and didn’t come out as badly as I’d feared).

8. What was your biggest achievement of the year?

Graduating.

9. What was your biggest failure?

Not getting a 2:1 or first class honours in my degree.

10. Did you suffer illness or injury?

Just lots of colds. :-/

11. What was the best thing you bought?

My Mac Mini 🙂 . Probably followed by my digital camera.

12. Whose behaviour merited celebration?

I’m tempted to say all my friends again. They’ve been excellent this year.

13. Whose behaviour made you appalled and depressed?

George W Bush. Need I say more?

Oh, and the new president of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

14. Where did most of your money go?

Like last year, the pub and Apple Computer. But also the University of Bradford now that I’m paying part of my fees myself, eBay, and on stuff with Hari.

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

Christmas, the beach party, my Mac Mini and Hari. Essentially the same as last year, except last year it was an iPod and I didn’t know Hari.

16. What song will always remind you of 2005?

“Mr Brightside” by The Killers.

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

happier or sadder?Quite a bit happier.thinner or fatter?I think I’m a bit thinner.richer or poorer?Probably a bit richer (in terms of money in the bank) but I’m still in debt since I owe the student loans company £9000 now.

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

Time with Hari. And free time in general.

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

Playing Solitaire and Freecell. Again…

20. How will you be spending Christmas?

I make this mistake every year don’t I? Oh well, I spent it with my family again. It was nice to see them all again, especially my grandparents.

21. Who deleted question 21?

Davros.

22. Did you fall in love in 2004?

Erm, yeah, just a bit…

23. How many one-night stands?

None at all.

24. What was your favourite TV program?

I was really impressed at the revival of Doctor Who this year. I’ve also been enjoying the new series of Family Guy, Top Gear, Have I Got News For You and The Daily Show with Jon Stewart (now that’s available here).

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

No, not really.

26. What was the best book you read?

Books?!?!? That’s so ‘old media’!

Erm, well, I enjoyed Hacking Movable Type. Haven’t really read any fiction this year… again…

27. What was your greatest musical discovery?

Probably We Are Scientists and the Kaiser Chiefs.

28. What did you want and get?

A new mobile phone (again), a Mac Mini and some other stuff.

29. What did you want and not get?

Once again, world peace has failed to materialise, and I didn’t get a pony either. Hmph.

30. What was your favourite film of this year?

Wallace and Gromit and the Curse of the Were-Rabbit. But the new Harry Potter film was good too.

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

Not a lot, since it was the exam period and there was a big football game on. I was 21.

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

Meeting Hari earlier in the year.

33. How would you describe your personal fashion concept in 2005?

Same as usual.

34. What kept you sane?

My friends and hobbies.

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

Kirsten Dunst still. Though Charlotte Church is nice.

36. What political issue stirred you the most?

Probably equality and anti-racism, but Fairtrade was up there too.

37. Who did you miss?

My former housemate Jamie who’s now in France.

38. Who was the best new person you met?

Again, Hari, but there were plenty of others.

39. Tell us a valuable life lesson you learned in 2005.

I learned that I can’t drink lager quickly and still expect to be able to stand up.

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

“I’m coming out of my cage, and I’m doing just fine” – Mr Brightside, by The Killers.

Merry Christmas!

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Cute Christmas Card

Probably about time I posted my annual Christmas Message, so:

Merry Christmas Everyone!

Since it’s about 9am here we’ve opened our presents here already – I’ve got:

  • The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy (film) DVD (sponsored link)
  • The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy (BBC TV series) DVD (sponsored link)
  • Cocktail shaker and two cocktail glasses
  • Hiking boots
  • 5 small bottles of Absolut vodka
  • A bottle of Cockspur rum and a bottle of Diaquiri cocktail mix
  • Limoncello nougart
  • Green & Blacks organic dark chocolate
  • 2 tubs of Cadbury’s Heroes
  • A fawn-coloured Next long-sleeved t-shirt
  • A black zip-up top
  • A Van Heusen silk tie (in a posh box)
  • A black Mulberry shirt
  • Some Lindt chocolate Reindeer and a chocolate Santa
  • A box of Hazer Baba Turkish Delight
  • Some House of Commons dark chocolate
  • …and a bottle of Fentimans Curiosity Cola

In other words, I’ll be sat watching DVDs wearing some new clothes and hiking boots, eating chocolate and getting drunk on cocktails 🙂 .

Anyway, for those of you who celebrate Christmas (in whatever way you choose), I hope you have an enjoyable and happy day. 🙂

1000 reasons why IE is better than Firefox

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It’s in French, but here’s 1000 reasons why IE is better than Firefox. Except that there’s only actually 14 reasons, so it’s 986 short. And some aren’t really reasons. In fact, it’s a pretty pointless piece of flame-bait designed to stir up the Firefox community.

In any case, here are those reasons translated into English, with the help of the Google Translator and my French A-level (feel free to correct me if I get any of these wrong):

  1. Internet Explorer is integrated with Windows XP so you can surf the internet without having to decide which browser to use.
  2. Internet Explorer is accessible for everyone.
  3. IE can display all web pages – not all of them work in Firefox.
  4. IE requires hardly any extensions, whereas Firefox has a plethora.
  5. IE does not ship with tabs, but they can be added if you wish.
  6. IE does not have an RSS reader, which is a fad. You can just visit the site every day if you need to.
  7. IE is less secure than Firefox, but patches are released regularly.
  8. IE is closely linked to Windows.
  9. IE does not pass the Acid2 test like Safari does.
  10. You need to use IE to access Windows Update – even though Microsoft released a Firefox plugin for Windows Genuine Advantage, they will never open Windows Update to Firefox.
  11. IE doesn’t crash when visiting online banking sites, Firefox does.
  12. IE7 will adopt the standards of 2006 and include innovations of Microsoft and others, such as RSS, SSL3 and better security.
  13. IE does not respect W3C standards in their entirety.
  14. IE is the ‘de-facto’ standard that developers work to.

There you go. Pretty lame reasons, in my opinion, and some of them are reasons not to use IE as far as I’m concerned.

[Via Glazblog]

Screenshots on a PocketPC

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Since it took me a while to find out how to do this myself, I’m going to use this opportunity to tell you how to take screenshots on a PocketPC or Windows Mobile device – in my case, Windows Mobile 2003.

First of all, you need to know that, as far as I can tell, your device does not have a screenshot capability built in. It’s not like a Windows machine where you can hit Print Screen or a Mac where you can hit Cmd+Shift+3 – you will have to install some software first. I’m sure there’s some fancy-pants shareware jobby that will do the job painlessly but in this instance we’re going to use Pocket SnapIt (link no longer available), which is available for both normal Windows Mobile/PocketPC devices and Windows Smartphone handsets. There’s also a Windows version for your PC. It’s free and open source.

Choose the relevant package – for my Dell Axim x50v, I chose the PocketPC package – and download it to your device. This may mean downloading it to the Mobile Device folder in My Computer and then using ActiveSync to send it across. Then, click on the cabinet file on your device to have it install. If you’re using Windows Mobile 2003 (and probably 5.0 also) you’ll probably get a warning saying that the application was designed for an older operating system – you can ignore this. Now, go to Programs and run the newly-added Pocket SnapIt icon.

You’ll now need to define a hotkey to trigger the taking of screenshots. I chose the ‘/’ character – to set this, click on Menu and select Options. Then click Menu again, expand Options and choose Capture Options. Now click Menu a third time and click Select Capture Button. Click OK and then select a key on the keyboard. Click OK to go back to the main screen, and then click Start.

Now, open up the program you want to take a screenshot of and press the trigger key – you should hear a noise when you do. You should then find a bitmap file in your My Documents folder call Snap001.bmp – this is your screenshot.

You can see my effort further up the page – this was a shot from Skype for PocketPC. As you can see, the capturing mostly works but it chokes on the font smoothing, so you may want to consider turning this off first. You’ll also need to change the image format to something other than bitmap if you want to post your screenshot on the internet (since bitmaps are not compressed) – PNG is probably the best format to go for. The image I posted is less than 13KB.

Open Tech 2005

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I’m sat on the train back to Bradford (another direct one with wifi, woohoo!), ready to leave King’s Cross. The verdict on Open Tech 2005? Possibly the best £5 I’ve spent in a very long time.

There was wifi at the event (and indeed lots of geeks with Powerbooks reading their Bloglines subscriptions) however for some reason I couldn’t get it to work with this PDA. Damn Windows Mobile…

Anyway, what follows is my take on the days events.

Despite it being only two days after some wannabe terrorists tried to blow up the tube, the underground seemed surprisingly normal and I had no problems getting to where I needed to be. The event was being held in the Reynolds Building, part of the Imperial College London’s medical school in Charing Cross Hospital, and the talks were in a couple of the teaching rooms there. The first talk I went to was by Danny O’Brien on the issues surrounding privacy amongst those in the public eye, especially bloggers. It was very interesting (even if it did take a while to start due to internet access problems, eventually sorted with an impromptu SSH tunnel); Danny is a good speaker and kept the audience interested.

At 12:30 I moved over to the seminar room where I saw a Linux-powered iPod for the first time (and even watched a video on it), learned about scripting in iTunes and about MythTV, along with the BBC’s open source project Kamaelia. I also bumped into Sven from Blogwise and Gia who vaguely remembered me from the London Geek Dinner last month.

During a much needed lunch break Phil Wilson came to chat to me (it’s great to be recognised :) ), and we then headed back to the lecture room for the official launch of BBC Backstage – effectively the Beeb’s developer network, with APIs and syndication feeds galore (see BBC News Online article). There’s already some people doing cool stuff with it, like taking the BBC’s travel news feed and plotting the problems on a Google map, or a ‘changelog’ of the BBC News Online home page – Ben Metcalfe, who was presenting, used the archives from July 7th as a good example of why this was so cool. Ben Hammersley was the ‘master of ceremonies’ – he’s even more mad than his blog depicts him as. He was wearing a skirt…

Ben H also MC’d the next session which was with Jeremy Zawodny from Yahoo!. Jeremy’s talk focused on openness in technology – RSS, APIs etc. and how it benefits companies (and the problems it can create). Obviously being from Yahoo! the focus was on Yahoo! and Flickr but it did show how Yahoo! is ‘getting it’. While it didn’t make me as excited as the BBC talk it’s still good to see big companies opening themselves up, as it were.

It was at this point that I found out I’d won the third prize in the prize draw, so I picked up an O’Reilly USB flash drive (256MB!), along with a 1-year subscription to Make magazine. I also bought a copy of Ben’s ‘Developing Feeds with RSS and Atom‘ (sponsored link), which he signed.

The next session I went to was called Blogs and Social Software, and was chaired by Gia. Tom Reynolds, who works for the London Ambulance Service, did a talk about how to blog and not lose your job, which included lots of cat pictures, as any blogging talk should. He was followed by Paul Mutton, creator of the PieSpy IRC bot, about creating diagrams showing how individuals interact. He used data from Digital Spy’s Big Brother site to create an interaction map of the Big Brother housemates, which was pretty cool. Finally Paul Lenz talked about his Who Should You Vote For? site and his new project What Should I Read Next?, which lets you type in a book you have read and recieve suggestions for other titles to try. You can also add books that you like and help to extend the data set.

There was one final set of sessions after that but in tne interests of getting home at a reasonable time I left early so as to catch the 18:30 train from King’s Cross. All in all I had a great day and it was well worth the journey – I just wish I could have gone to all the sessions. That would have required some kind of cloning device though.

As well as those that I met (I also met Lloyd Davis in the last session), I saw but didn’t really have chance to meet Cory Doctorow, Tom Coates, Simon Willison and Matt Webb, amongst others.

Yikes, it’s taken me over an hour to write this. If I ever buy a PDA (this one is borrowed) I’ll be buying a keyboard for it. I’m in the Lincolnshire wilderness between Grantham and Newark now, by the way.

Update: Back home, so I’ve added links to some of the stuff I was talking about.

Good things come to those who wait

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PICT1418

It’s taken me almost two weeks but my photos from Edinburgh are finally up. Not all of them are very well annotated or tagged though since I’ve not really had an awful lot of time lately nor been near enough to an internet connection.

I also have photos taken at Diggerland from last Saturday as well as some from central Durham which we popped into on the way back since we had some time and it was a nice day.

A few weekends ago I also went out and took some photos around Little Horton Green, a road in Bradford that seems to have got stuck in an 18th century time-warp. It’s really nice down there, actually.

I’m now only 155 images away from my 1000th photo on Flickr – not bad for less than a year.

Post-birthday notes

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  • It’s the morning afternoon after the night before, and I’m actually feeling okay. I did drink a lot (by my standards) last night – mostly Southern Comfort, which, had I drank neat, would have seen me consume half a bottle of the stuff. I am somewhat hungover but I’ve been much, much worse than this before having consumed less, so, yay.
  • I went into town today to put a birthday money cheque into my account at the bank. This is the first time I’ve had to put any cheque in for about 2 months now; normally I have my Google AdSense cheque and rent from my parents to pay in, however thanks to Google introducing EFT and my parents embracing the joys of online banking the money now comes through electronically.
  • On the subject of money, now that I’m 21, I get access to a savings account that my grandmother has been keeping for me. I’m not quite sure how much is in there but it’s not an insignificant amount of money. I don’t need it desperately so I’m probably going to bung it into an ISA for a year or so to amass some interest.
  • There’s a surprisingly high number of Liverpool supporters in Bradford, as I found out last night. Trust me to have a birthday that coincides with one of the most gripping cup finals ever. Well done to Liverpool by the way.
  • I haven’t yet got all of my presents yet, but so far I’ve had a box of Celebrations from work, a blue drinking t-shirt from my parents and some birthday money. And money to buy the TFT screen which I’ll be ordering next week.
  • And now I’m off to the pub for a much-needed cool, caffeinated, non-alcoholic beverage.

To be 21

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I’ve just got back from my 21st birthday celebrations, which, as you can probably tell by me being able to post here, means that I haven’t managed to totally inebriate myself. I am pretty well-plastered, but on the other hand I have been much worse before. I’ll blame it on the fact that we got kicked out of a club due to one of my friends reproducing the contents of her stomach, after which we decided to go home.

Thanks for all the ‘happy birthday’ comments and the TFT screen recommendations; I think I’ve decided on one now so I’ll be ordering it in a few days time. But right now, I really, really need to go to bed.

Oh, on a totally unrelated note, congratulations to Lucio Buffone on getting a Sony Award and a contract with XFM. Lucio is a former University of Bradford student and was Communications Officer of the student union for a year as well as being a DJ on our radio station, Ramair.

Quickly compress PNG images

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Before posting any PNG images on here, I use the open source Pngcrush tool to compress the images as much as possible first. Even when I set the compression to its highest value in programs like IrfanView, Pngcrush is still able to make most images even smaller.

Unfortunately, Pngcrush is a command-line tool, so it’s not the easiest tool to use in Windows. So here’s how to add a ‘Crush’ option to the context (right-click) menu in Windows Explorer for quicker crushing.

Firstly, you’ll need to download Pngcrush, which is availble at Sourceforge. You’ll want the win32 version. Download it and unpack it somewhere.

The instructions that follow are for Windows XP; for older versions they’ll be a little different.
Open Control Panel and choose Folder Options. Select the File Types tab, and scroll down to the ‘PNG’ entry. Click on ‘Advanced’, then click on ‘New…’.

In ‘Action’, type Crush, and in ‘Application used to perform action’, type the following:

C:\Downloads\pngcrush\pngcrush.exe -e 2.png "%1"

The first portion should be the location of the pngcrush.exe file that you extracted from the archive. The ‘-e 2.png’ bit specifies what the outputted PNG image will be called, which in the case it’ll be the filename with ’2′ appended to it (so the crushed version of ‘catpicture.png’ would be called ‘catpicture2.png’). You could also use the following:

C:\Downloads\pngcrush\pngcrush.exe -brute -e 2.png "%1"

This does the same as the above but does a ‘brute force’ crush – rather than use one of a few common methods to crush the file, it will use all of them. It’ll take longer, especially on older hardware, but may result in a smaller PNG file.

And you’re done. Now, when you right-click on a PNG file, you can select ‘Crush’ and have Pngcrush your image for you. Remember that the compression is lossless – you won’t lose any quality by using the tool.