The Sluggy Freelance webcomic is doing another “Harry Potter” satire. I wasn't really enjoying it very much, but they just hit a high point …

Lord Moldypants is weilding a 10" wormwood wand with a rabbit-whisker core!

chi-chikt Torg weilding a 26" chrome plated .724' back-bored barrel with a buckshot core.

Microsoft Windows is the face of the desktop-of-no-choice; Microsoft Office is the face of the corporate-standard-of-no-choice.

By which I mean, if you don't know anything about computers, when you buy a PC you get Windows. If you're a corporate, you give users Office. Anything else requires thinking, and is too hard.

So the Microsoft market is Corporates, and end-users.

Ray Ozzie has to change that. He made Groove, which understood the need for small business users to establish ad-hoc secure collaboration workspaces, and was so good that Microsoft bought it, and him. So what is the latest thing from Ray?

Live Mesh :- ''Live Mesh puts you at the center of your digital world, seamlessly connecting you to the people, devices, programs, and information you care about – available wherever you happen to be.''

Errm … is it just me, or isn't this just Groove with a different name? Sure, Groove didn't spread out into “devices”, but that's not really very difficult …

I wanted to see if Borders book shop was carrying a particular book — http://www.fishpond.co.nz was, and I was interested in comparing prices …

The Borders NZ website doesn't have a search facility.

There is a self-service catalog search facility in the store. But I'm sitting at home.

The Borders NZ website doesn't have a search facility.

FAIL

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No products were found.

Please note that our online catalogue only has a small selection of Borders huge range of products.

The Borders full range has over 200,000 titles, so if you haven't found what you're looking for, you may want to try your nearest store.

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The borders.com website has search; it is actually just a skin over the Amazon.com service, which is an interesting way of outsourcing your web service!

But Borders NZ? You have the data; but you don't seem to want the Internet to even advertise for you. I can understand if you don't want to get in to the whole online ordering thing, but why not just advertise the titles that you stock?

<rant> We all know that car drivers think that they own the road; but road-using cyclists should understand that we all share the road … we are all vehicles traveling together, and have responsibilities to each other.

Yes, cyclists that ignore road markings and the boundary between the road and pavement annoy me. If cyclists wish to be treated like vehicles, they have to act like vehicles.

There's another thing; cyclists should not feed the car-drivers' feelings to superiority. We should not let car drivers think that their arrogance is acceptable. A recent article in the Hutt News local paper reported a test drive of a recumbent velomobile, with the quote

It's a little disconcerting being so low-slung, well below the bonnet level of most cars and I found myself wondering whether drivers could see me.

Here's a cyclist (the journalist is a mountain biker) allowing car drivers license to not see him. Expecting that the poor little darlings are blind.

Here's news for you … somehow, against all the odds, car drivers can see things no taller than 1 freaking millimeter on the road. They're called lane markings and they're made out of paint for crying out loud!!

Car drivers are like children; they behave the way you expect and allow them to. Don't expect them to disregard you – don't allow them to disregard you. Cycle responsibly and safely, prove that you are a vehicle, and show them that you won't be disrespected.

If you don't know how to do that, because of a lifetime spent scared, riding on the pavement and in the gutter, get hold of Cyclecraft by John Franklin, and read that. This excellent book explains how to share the road and integrate safely, even with fast-moving traffic.

Take back the roads. </rant>

I posted a less-ranty letter to the Hutt News editor :-

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I have enjoyed reading the recent coverage given to Neville Whitlock and his velomobile, and occasionally spot him from the bus on my daily journey into Wellington. Good on you, Neville!

Jim Chipp's recent test drive report was quite fair, and as a rider of a recumbent bicycle myself, I quite understand his discomfort about being seated far below the position he is used to from his “upright” mountain bike.

However, I was unhappy about the way he worded his fears about car drivers, “wondering whether they could see me”. Somehow, car drivers manage to see painted lane markings on the road – these stand at a height of around 1 millimeter. There is absolutely no way that any driver, except for a criminally negligent one, can fail to see a recumbent bike, velomobile, or any other vehicle properly positioned on the road. The safest place to be, in general, is clearly on the road, often in between the headlights of the vehicle behind you. All cyclists know that pedal power is usually not as fast as petrol power, and try to ride to the side of the lane in order to minimise the disruption caused by passing vehicles; but when the road narrows, or traffic slows, the cyclist should reconsider this position with an eye to safety, remembering that they are a vehicle with a full right to their position on the road. Car drivers need to remember that cycles are vehicles too, and that cars are all too easily converted into lethally dangerous weapons as a result of simple inattention or intolerant actions.

I recommend the excellent book Cyclecraft, by John Franklin – see http://www.cyclecraft.co.uk/ for details. This explains how cyclists can share the road responsibly and safely, and techniques for integrating with fast-moving traffic. It is published by the UK's Stationery Office, recommended by our own Land Transport NZ, and should be available for around NZ$50 from a good local bookseller.

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Oh, that handy acronym LAMP

Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP! The darlings of the Web!

The argument over the letter P should have been easy – it was perl, but by the time we needed the word “LAMP” it had become PHP, simply by sheer weight of numbers (and not by quality). These days it's more likely to be Python, if you want a robust platform. Or Ruby!

Next to fall was the A – Apache is heavyweight, compared to lighttpd and now nginx. The language-specific apache modules are catered for by back-end application-dedicated HTTP servers like mongrel and my favourite workhorse, tracd.

And now the M, MySQL, seems to have shot itself in the foot and lost open-source credibility, confirming the utility of SQLite for small projects and PostgreSQL for big ones.

At least we can rely on the L for a bit longer … L(LN)(SP)(PR) ⇒ LNSPR ? Linspire? Nooooooooo …..

What a busy day for communications it is in iNode-land! I think the recent Fring and Vodem successes have gone to my head a little …

In a couple of weeks time the whanau and I will be moving from Wellington to Dunedin; I'll have to lose my TelstraClear cable connection to the net :-(

Is it time to go wireless? Vodafone are now selling their Home Phone Plus service, which promises $40 per month and unlimited calling (they don't actually say “free” but that's what they must mean) for NZ land-line phones. It's physically portable, which will be useful.

I need international calling too; but SIP may be the way to go there (last time I researched prices, VoIPBuster was one of the cheapest for the UK, €0.01/minute but closer to me in the Internet is Xnet, who reputedly have a great service in VFX, and 5 cents per minute to the UK)

There doesn't seem to be a very good 3G Broadband service in the areas of Dunedin that we'll probably end up in, so there's no point bundling up the Vodafone data services (plus, under vodem I get horrible ping times; that'll break my BZFlag habit) … but WIC might rescue me there, even though their setup isn't as portable as a mobile phone … but they also offer a local (03) number on their SIP service at $25 per month, but I don't know what the call-out rates are …

Interesting times ahead, I think!

Fring have released their first beta for the iPhone. Being connected to Google Talk while at the bus-stop (via Cafenet, of course) was very very useful (mostly because I'd just missed my bus and needed to sort out a pickup from the alternative route) … so useful that I actually switched on EDGE connectivity for the first time just to keep chatting!

I wish that Fring supported generic Jabber/XMPP as well as just Google Talk, but that's a start. I also will start to play with SIP, which I've been meaning to look at for ages. Now that the AIM/ICQ protocol is published (see http://dev.aol.com/aim) I could consider appearing on those networks, but I can't really see the point … I'm not going to be on Yahoo! or MSN any time soon, either, and I'm also considering dropping my very occasional use of Skype, too.

Anyway, Fring on the iPhone seems to be f'ringing excellent, and although there are a few niggles, it's still an early beta and can only get better :-)

At the end of last year, I got a Vodem for my team to use, for away-from-home support connectivity purposes. In theory we all have broadly the same version of Windows on similar Dell laptops, but while it worked just fine on some machines, on mine it refused to register reliably.

Once or twice I saw the storage device it offered, and ran the install software on there; but it always just left me in a repeating grey-bar land (actually a blue bar …). I'd tried downloading the fuller VMC software from the Vodafone website, but that didn't recognise the device at all.

So last night I tried to hook the vodem up to one of the Ubuntu laptops at home; downloaded the latest .deb from Vodafone Betavine Forge and everything worked first time; the SMS application and the 3G connectivity (including usage metering). Thanks Linux!

This morning I took far too much time to uninstall everything Vodafone-related on my Windows machine, grab the latest version of VMC from the Vodafone website (the download looks like it's the Vista version, but that's just the misleading text around the download link), reboot, reinstall, reboot, see the storage device again at last (hooray!), watch VMC fail to detect the vodem as a PC card, try the software on the vodem itself (to be greeted with a message saying "this installer is corrupted" and another infinite looping greybar), reboot, uninstall everything, reboot, install VMC, reboot, and then … VMC detects the vodem as a “mobile phone” at last!

So, it all seems to be working under Windows at last. Considering the number of Linux distributions and the number of Windows ones, what does it tell us that the Linux install these days is the easier one?

The button in my iPhone headset has failed …

This is the headset that came with the phone; I've had it for about 2 months. The microphone still works, but the click is only registered one time in 10 or thereabouts.

This isn't a big problem; I already have an iPhone headset adaptor from the nice folks at iGeneration, but the Apple unit is of course smaller and neater. I bought the adaptor to use with a cassette adaptor for the car (have a look on TradeMe for these) which works a treat and is good-enough quality for my car and it's default stereo system.

I considered raising an Apple support request; after all it will still be under warranty. But the amount of trouble I'd have to go to seeing as I'm not really in the US seems disproportional compared to similar units being sold for $1 on eBay … they're not as slick as the original, but that's really not a problem :-)

So now I can open the old one up without risking anything … I'll wait until I have a decent camera to do that, in case it's really interesting :-) The iPhone camera just won't hack it – the target item is too small and I can't get focus and zoom at the same time …

I'm just a command-line person I guess. I've set up a new blog at http://tommix.net/ covering Information Security topics, and I've chosen to use vee, the blog tool to power it with. In order to interact with vee (i.e. post new entries) you run vee from the command line and it fires up $EDITOR …

This blog runs with nanoblogger, which has the same interaction style – ssh in to the host machine, run nb and get $EDITOR … both engines also generate static HTML, which is easy to serve with a lightweight and secure webserver. Both can be driven non-interactively, which might provide an interesting way to hack a feed up for random data-sources …

Nanoblogger handles blog entries and articles, provides a calendar-based archive access, ‘recent changes’ section, categories indexing and overall looks like a much bigger blog engine. Vee just lists your blog entries in time order.

With a small amount of hacking, I've fitted the Disqus comment system into vee (yeah, it's just one line of HTML, I know), nominated quill as the blog entry markup language, generated an Atom feed, and provided an error page that has similar contents to the index …

Vee is written in Bourne shell (/bin/sh, which is often linked to the Bourne Again shell on Linux boxes), and although I've hacked the main script a little bit, most of the customisation has been able to play out in local per-instance scripts. Because it has so few files to update, it is noticeably quicker than nb.