Rick Hurst - Freelance Web developer. Bristol, England.

there must be nostalgia in the air as recently I recieved some mp3’s from an old friend of mine, mark (aka dudley) of a musical collaboration we once had going under the moniker of "mogrove jo"*.

it was 1997. I was going through my mercury rev/ I wanna be a singer phase. Mark did the programming, I did the bass/guitars/vocals/rebirth wibbling. This recording was done on a crap pc using cubasis audio and was mixed to tape before being redigitized by mark’s mate kev, who had the last remaining copy stashed in a cupboard somewhere on C90 audio tape - the quality didn’t start great…

anyway, out of the 50ish songs I wrote when I had too much time on my hands, spanish sunshine and cheap wine aplenty, this is one of the only ones I still like.. and buried under all that fuzz/FX/echo my voice sounds kinda OK

*the name derives from being lost in the north of spain and finding myself in a tiny village in the picos de europas(?) with a name that I remember being at least similar to mogrove jo.

example

#mysqldump –host=the.remotedatabase.com -u yourusername -p yourdatabasename > /Users/rick/backups/foo.sql

Someone at netsight has just taken delivery of a nokia web tablet. It is a lovely gadget and we are all busy thinking up reasons to justify us all getting one. The screen is pretty amazing and having 800 pixel width means that most websites are very useable. It is running opera and I was pleased to see that my DOM-only javascripts (such as the menus on this site*) work fine. It also has a flash plugin (not sure what version or how good it is). It has built in wifi and bluetooth, and runs linux so the possibilities are endless. The downside is that it doesn’t have a hard drive, so using it as a video ipod substitute isn’t really an option unless RS-MMC cards suddenly get really hi-capacity and cheap.

* I’ve since done a better, less "obtrusive" version of the menu javascript similar to used on this site. It is on a clients site that isn’t launched yet, I may well hint in it’s general direction when it goes live.

seems that a few of the popular hosted services are having problems - typepad and del.icio.us have been down in the last week, and bloglines had a news item recently warning that they are struggling and are soon to be moving to a bigger datacenter to cope.

It’s to be expected really as these things get more popular, but it gets people upset, even if it only actually causes minor inconvenience (what? you mean I can’t get to my daily bookmarks today - how will I cope? gahh!!!.. I can’t get to my blog to blog how angry I am about it! etc).

For business services obviously the inconvenience is greater, and has a financial impact. (Don’t make me say "time is money"- it’s not - but that is a whole other rant). Anyway, not sure where i’m going with this…

here is my proposed solution to the number of emails I receive from confused users of plone sites who have been sent to the Insufficient Privileges page. The default text for this page is a bit blunt, and often makes people take it personally and get confused or even angry. Therefore a bit of rewording and a cute kitten picture I believe might make things better for everyone

On my way into work I often stop in at a coffee shop and buy a stupidly overpriced coffee variation ("to go!" wtf?). I’m usually wearing my earphones, but I pause the music so I can communicate properly with the person behing the counter. If I don’t remove my earphones, the person serving me always assumes that I haven’t turned the music off so starts talking really loud at me or starts waving at me before speaking, so i’ve got into a habit of removing the earphones when I reach the counter. Today, I had to deal with a transition from Fugazi’s "Repeater" (the album, not sure what track) on my earphones to Madness’s "It must be love" on the coffee shop sound system, plus it got all complicated with me trying to find my money and hook the earphones through my bag strap.

Life is complicated - as you can see I obviously have a lot to deal with on a day to day basis. To make life easier, i’m going to advance to one of my usual new years resolutions - no more takeaway coffee. Starting now (just after i’ve consigned this last cardboard cup to the landfill).

yesterday I found that my web developer toolbar was greyed out. I wrongly assumed this was due to a recent upgrade to version 1.5 on my mac. It turned out it was nothing to do with that - I had inadvertently clicked the enable/disable button on the right hand side of the bar. The button is green if the toolbar is disabled, so if you have googled your way here and have the same problem, try clicking it!

This keeps cropping up on my radar. The website doesn’t give much away, but basically it is a project to build a creative quarter for bristol, uk using the site and buildings of a disused waterside victorian paintworks.

fantastic, this seems to work

Netsight have now launched their new colocation facility, offering rack-space in central Bristol, UK. From the new colocation data centre website (launched yesterday, yours truly did the HTML, CSS and Zope templating):-

The Netsight MCC (Metropolitan Colocation Centre) is located in central Bristol, and is easily reachable from the South West and the M4 corridor. The facility is compact but highly specified, and can provide data centre rackspace either by the U or in full racks.

The datacentre is independently owned and managed, and is completely telco-neutral. Our colocation packages are flexible and can be tailored to your exact requirements.

Housing the hub of the expanding BMEX metropolitan network, the facility is ideally suited for both commercial and research ventures.