We got the next set of forms for my visa/residency application to The States.

Compared to getting my wife into the UK, this is like beauracracy on drugs.

Make Poverty History March Photos

There are loads of them on Flickr. The event finished a few hours ago - and there are currently 798 with that tag. I'm sure that number will rise.

Google satellite imagery

Well, Google Maps did one better than I hoped and released satellite imagery of the whole world. I wasted an entire evening cruising around looking at stuff.

I must admit that the resolution of most of it isn't all the great - but it's free - and it's far more than what we had a month ago.

Aye - the nights are fair drawing in!

summer sunset 5,
originally uploaded by mr-potter.

Red sky at night - yes the weather has been a delight. This was taken after the summer solstive - so the ttitle is kinda correct.

Flickr Fun

img_2009,
originally uploaded by mr-potter.

So, after seeing and hearing a lot about Flickr, I thought I would sign up and have a play. This is one of the three photos I have uploaded so far. It was taken when we were on holiday. You can see all of my photos here.

Just checked my yahoo mail box and it now says it has 1Gb of storage. Nice.

I regularly check out the Bismarck Tribune website to see what is happening there. One of the things that intrigues me is that they have this bit where people blog, called Tri-blog.

So, they have this blog site going which is running Wordpress - so all the usual stuff you would expect from that software. The main news site itself has no RSS at all. Why?

It seems like in some way they get it, and yet in another way they don't. Anyway, I would love them to have and RSS feed for their news - then I would follow them every day.

Google Maps the UK

I've just come across Google Maps for the UK. Looks pretty good. Hopefully soon we will have the satellite photos too.

three colds in three weeks. I am feeling very annoyed and very under the weather.

I got over the last cold and then two days later I have a new one.

Simple Versus Neat

At work, one of the things we are doing is preparing to replace a server with a more powerful one. As with all these things, there are always issues to talk through. One of the things I have noticed is that there are some people whose decisions are always different from what I would like them to choose.

After some thinking about this, I am coming to the conclusion that when it comes to such decisions, they choose the simple answer, when I would choose the neat answer.

so, for example, this server is multinetted, which means lots of static routing. It does not need to be like that, but currently it is. I would choose changing it so that the server is on only one network - it reduces complexity in the long run. My decision makers would chose the status quo - probably because it is the easy answer.

At work, this morning, I was going to get a coffee - as I usually do. To get to the canteen, I must walk through the lobby. Very often the lobby has stands with the latest thing that they are promoting is being pushed - I usually ignore these things.

Well, today, it was a bunch of people who were getting anonymous input on how well the organisation is communicating, and seeking ideas on how it could be done better. A whole stream of stuff went through my head: Cluetrain, RSS, all sorts of stuff. The thing is, I could not think of anything practical that did not make me sound like Mr Miagi from Karate Kid.

One of the things I noticed straight away was the fact that all the idea that were on the ideas board were top down ideas. I was hoping to see more bottom up stuff. The prospect excited me, but I was unable to provide anything that I felt would not be dismissed.

So, tonight, I am washing the dishes and listening to Lawrence Lessig. He talks about the innovation commons and the creative commons. He gives a description of the internet as an "end to end network" which is reminiscent of the "World of Ends". But it got me thinking again.

Should the principle of the end to end network apply to corporate networks too? Is it fair to say that the act of limiting what people can do on their corporate desktops through security policies, etc, restricting their ability to innovate? Lots of questions floating around my head.

Tip Trip

We have just come back from the tip.

I dumped a load of old computers. If they had worked, then the combined computing power of them all would have been less than my 1GHz laptop. The monitor from my first ever PC was dumped too.

Darn!

According to the BBC, " Sir Paul vows 'no Janet' repeat".

It's just a shame the Paul McCartney is too nice a guy to have not given a smart answer to the journalist who asked him that question in the first place.

beagle extra

I left my laptop with Beagle running for a few hours. When I cam e back, beagled had gobbled up all the memory it could possibly find. The machine ran like a dog.

So, as an experiment, I have edited the shell script that starts the daemon off, and taken out the --debug option. Best seems to run a lot faster now too. Lets see if it continues to eat up resources.

Beagle

I really like beagle - Beagle is cool.

It takes a bit to install - you really need to go through the steps outlined in the wiki. But it does work quite well. It still is a bit ropey, and it can miss things out, but it is shaping up to be a very exciting product.

There are features I have not enabled yet, like the g-streaner stuff, and the network awareness (I think it will go and search Google for you). So far it can see my evolution stuff, and my aggregated news/blogs in liferia, my gaim chat logs, and my ordinary files. Somehow, it won't search my xchat logs, which is a real shame. Once I get the epiphany extensions compiled, then my browsing history and my bookmarks will be included too. I think it will soon be a really nice and useful desktop search tool.

Use it or lose it

When I was on my usual lunch-time walk today, I heard a couple of women talking in Czech. It's always good to hear a language you recognise.

What it did bring home to me, though, is how much of it I have forgotten. I didn't know much to start with, and it has nearly all gone now. It just goes to show how quickly you forget things if you do not make use of them.

Smoking in public places

The Scottish Parliament is looking at banning smoking in public places. Check out a BBC article here. So, by next spring, it may be law. Not a bad thing in my view.

I'm sure it won't stop those who still smoke on buses, and those who think it is their god given right to smoke wherever and whenever they please. I don't think that even lung cancer will stop them.

First Post

Hi,

First post on this blog. Well, what more can I say?