David Morris – brassedoff.net

I am officially today launching BARF – Boys Against Raw Fibre.

Do you suffer from lack of attention? Is you wife or partner more concerned about wool than you? Is all you have to look forward to a pair of hand-knitted socks every once in a while because she needs something to do with the wool?

You should join BARF – Boys Against Raw Fibre.

It’s time for us lads to make a stand against alpaca, BFL, smelly fleeces camel fur and all the other obnoxious things you have coming into the house, just to satisfy your partner’s obsession with ravelling bits of animal fluff.

To show your allegiance to the cause, I’ve designed a logo for you to put on your blog.

If you want to link to this page with the image, you can include this explanation of why BARF is important.

http://www.brassedoff.net/wp/?p=109

Please also leave a comment if you’re joining our ranks.

I have a habitual spammer to my blog. He has a site called treesframe.co.uk where he publishes his excellent range of outdoor photographs. Will someone please put him out of his misery and buy one. Perhaps he might stop spamming my blog then :-) Otherwise, I have a feeling I night be getting one for Christmas.

…but is it JBuilder? Tim Anderson offers some interesting comments about the move, and it also made The Register. For myself, I think one of the major backward steps is the loss of the old JBuilder GUI designer. Whenever I’ve tried to use Eclipse (and believe me, I have tried), the GUI designer is the thing that’s let it down in my opinion. It’s just so damned slow.

Mind you, Borland’s isn’t perfect. My favourite is Matisse which is part of Sun’s Netbeans IDE but I’ve got other issues with Netbeans (especially around the issue of buiding JARs for deployment). Now a killer combination for me would be Matisse with JBuilder. the other thing with Eclipse is that (personally), I find the environment just a bit too graphically intensive, but that’s probably just me.

For the time being, I think I’ll be sticking with JBuilder2006 at work, although an (enforced) move to Oracle JDeveloper10g may be in the offing – it depends on where we go with our development efforts over the months and years to come.

Finally, why have Borland only released JBuilder2007 for Windows?

I WANT A LINUX VERSION

Having thought about it, ignore that last comment.

Yesterday, the weather was gorgeous. Clear blue skies. Windy, fresh, but nice. We went to start the Christmas shopping. We hit John Lewis’s. Why else would you want to go into Sheffield? (only kidding).

Armed with the camera, I got a couple of photos that I’m going to share with you, if for no other reason than I think Sheffield’s a nice place.

The top of Sheffield Town Hall and Vulcan, the winged messenger

The fountains in the Peace Gardens (popular for wedding photos!)

The clock in Orchard Square

Have you seen the adverts on the TV for 20Q? The electronic one is oval, maximum dimensions smaller than a tennis ball. The general idea is you think of something, and it tries, by a series of questions to which you answer “yes”, “no”, “sometimes” or “unknown” to guess what it is you’re thinking of.

It’s actually pretty good fun… I was pleasantly surprised.

It’s Daniel’s gadget. He’s saved up his spending money and was let loose in John Lewis’s yesterday.

Anyway, driving back from the tram stop yesterday (we took the tram because this time of year it’s more convenient than using the car as things get busier towards Christmas), he’s sat in the back playing away.

To his great delight, he announced that he’d beaten the gadget. “Great, Daniel” we replied. “What did it think you were thinking of?”

Daniel: “A baked potato”.

Us: “Really? What were you really thinking of?”

Daniel: “A fish”

Us: “Hmmm. When it asked you ‘Animal, Vegetable, Mineral or Other’ at the start, what did you tell it?”

Daniel: “Other”.

So, according to 20Q, the difference between a fish and a baked potato is that one is animal, the other isn’t. Of course, its final choice depends on the accurary of the answers to its questions.

Watch out for those baked potatoes though.

Last Sunday was Remembrance Day in the UK – the day where we remember all those who gave their lives in the numerous wars and conflicts we as a country have been engaged in over the years.

Although I live in Killamarsh, I play for Chapeltown Brass Band. Thus, every year on Remembrance Day, you’ll find me out with the Band, leading the parade around Chapeltown. This year for the first time, I took my camera and managed to get a shot of the parade as we were waiting for another group to join up with us.

The photo is taken around the back of the Escape Pub in Chapeltown. Behind the standards bearers, you’ve got the ATC, the Scouts, Guides, Brownies, Cubs, Beavers, Rainbows…

The start of the parade was nearly a bit of a disaster. The ATC who were assembled up the side of the Legion do everything by numbers. The rest of the parade was ready and formed up on the road. The ATC bod decided to march them down into position, so shouted out “By the left… Quick March”. We, the Band, in front, not knowing what was happening behind us, took it as the signal to go, so off we went. Fortunately, those behind us went with us. Who knows what happened further back. The parade was supposed to be ready to leave at 10am. The last person to arrive was one of the ATC officers. I’ll lay odds that if any of the ATC lower ranks had been late, they’d have got a roasting, but if it’s the boss that’s late?

I also went out with Daniel on his first parade with the Beavers. I’ve got a picture of him before they set off, but I’ve not got the shots out of the Canon yet. Maybe I’ll do that tomorrow…

…late update… picture added… Daniel on parade in his Beavers uniform

Change of tack now…

Have you ever bought or been given a kitchen gadget that seems like a good idea at the time but never seems to stand the test of time? We’ve got lots, but one that definitely doesn’t fall in to that category is our lovely coffee machine.

We like our coffee. We like our tea as well, but you need fewer accoutrements to make a decent cup of tea. When our last Krups machine died, we splashed out £300 or so on a behemoth of a coffee machine. It took a bit of getting used to, but we mastered it in the end. Then it all went pear-shaped. It started throwning more water out than ended up in the cups. Mrs Woolforbrains refused to use it. New coffee filters were purchased, but they made no difference. Eventually I reasoned that it couldn’t be too serious, so took the screwdriver to it. On the machine, where the filter head locks in, there’s a perforated plate where the water comes in. None of the manuals for the machine suggest this as a cause of problems, but when I removed it, living as we do in a hard water area, it was almost completely scaled up, and what wasn’t covered in scale was full of coffee residue.

Since I cleaned it up, it’s been a well-behaved coffee machine. So much so that Mrs Woolforbrains even feels safe using it on her own.

As well as getting nice coffee our (as you can see), it’s got an extremely effective steam jet which is great for steaming milk for latte, cappuccino and hot chocolate (much to Daniel’s delight).

Also, none of those silly little pods of coffee. Instant latte? Don’t make me laugh. We use Lavazza coffee out of a packet and milk out of a cow.

My favourite kitchen gadget – our Dualit coffee machine.

If you’ve been keeping up with the saga about the Killamarsh forum (not that I know anyone has because few people read my ramblings :), I reckon things have got to the stage now where it’s obvious the old forum isn’t going to appear anytime soon… it’s still down through unpaid bills.

I registered a new domain a few weeks ago with my favourite DNS provider: killamarsh-forum.co.uk which is almost the same as the old one ut with the judicious use of a hyphen. I’ve got the software installed on my home server for the time being. I’ve gone with a recent version of phpBB2 which is what the original forum started off with (until the admin decided to do the botched migration to vBulletin). I’ve set it up with the Neon theme which looks nice and isn’t graphically too heavy (unlike the theme the original admin installed on vBulletin – boy was that nasty).

I’ve sent press releases out to the Sheffield Star and Derbyshire Times as well as emailing the contact address for The Leader – the local free paper. I’ve also been in touch with the local Regeneration Office trying to find out whether there would be any likelihood of support from either the local council or the Parish Council… I’m still hopeful on that score.

I was planning on allowing local businesses to have a free mini banner ad on the site, but as I’m hoping to do something in conjunction with the Parish Council, I’m hanging off putting that in until I know what their reaction would be. For the time being, the site is advertising-free and whatever else happens, it certianly won’t have google ads or similar on it… I thought that was a killer on the last attempt.

So, for the time being, the forum’s here. At the time of writing, there are only two subscribers, me and woolforbrains. I’m hopeful that will change soon.

As a postscript, I’ve changed my favourite links down the right-hand side to point to the the forum.

I know I should have posted something earlier this week. I’ve had a couple of things running around in my mind of things I wanted to post but never got around to it. The trigger came this morning whilst I was browsing the BBC Technology News page (professional updating, OK?).

There was this article about charitable organisations shunning open source. The guy being interviewed, who’s something to do with IT in Christian Aid says:

Quite often, if you install open-source software within an organisation, you have a support contract that goes with it – it’s an essential part of operating that software

Now, bear in mind he’s using that as justification for installing an MS product over an equivalent open source application.

So, let’s consider that he has a need for a big database that’s critical to his organisation. Not an uncommon scenario – I have the same here. Do you just install the software and forget about it? Do you do the responsible thing and take a maintenance contract out for support should it fail? You do the latter don’t you. Note that I didn’t mention anything about open source or not there. Regardless of whether you’re using mySQL or SQL Server or Oracle or DB2. You pay someone a retainer to get you out of the carp should the whole lot go belly up. The difference here is that if you were using mYSQL, you didn’t necessarily pay an arm and a leg to get the software in the first place, and you’re not locked into some some expensive Upgrade Advantage program (or whatever Redmond call it these days) to keep it current.

But it gets better…

We are a funding organisation that ships £90m around the world – the last thing you want to do is open up your systems to anybody to have a look at to deal with bugs

…says this IT chap.

What utter and total and absolute crap. I’m sorry. I’m (almost!) at a complete loss for words. Like any responsible organistion would let any bearded geek in to examine the guts of their systems, just because it happened to be open source. Hasn’t he heard of control? There’s a valid argument that says that open source is better, simply because of the openness of the peer reviews to which it will be subjected… the same reason that the open source model may result in fewer critical bugs. If you’re putting your code on display to the whole community, you’re going to make sure it’s right, whereas if noone outside your organisation is ever going to see it, what does it matter what it looks like as long as it does the job. (I may have lost my way a bit in there, but I hope you can still see a thread of sense!)
Apparently, it’s important for charities to maximise the benefit they receive from donations and chucking money at Microsoft is a better option. Let’s also consider that generally, you get a better bang for your buck running Linux on your hardware than you do with MS applications because it tends to be less demanding.

Of course Microsoft have got good corporate social responsibility. It’s because people like him continue to throw money at them thus they can afford to have good corporate social responsibility.

Sheesh.

…and finally for today…

There I was, on Monday night after an excellent meal of pork leg, potatoes and spiced red cabbage, sat in O’Reilleys Irish Bar, drinking Kilkenny bitter watching Inverness Caledonian Thistles playing Aberdeen (it just happened to be on). The bartender had a less than convincing Irish accent though…
Which country and city? Dusseldorf, Germany.

The Irish are taking over…

Following on from yesterday’s entry I registered killamarsh-forum.co.uk, so www.killamarsh-forum.co.uk lives. It’s close enough to the original name not to confuse so much. If I do kick it in to life, I’ll be using phpBB rather than vBulletin, primarily ‘cos it’s free and just does what I think is needed withthe minimum of fuss.

Apparently, my new MP3 player has landed. I’ve gone for a Creative Zen V plus 1Gb model. It’s something to while away the happy hours I seem to be spending on aeroplanes lately. Dusseldorf on Monday again.

I was a bit concerned about the player. I’d ordered it from ebuyer with a Friday delivery which cost extra. When I checked last night, it hadn’t shipped and I had visions of eNote-ing ebuyer requesting a return on the extra postage charge.

When I checked this morning, it was picked at 22:00, at the final delivery point at 23:30 and on a van for local delivery at 06:45 this morning. Woolforbrains rang earlier to say it had arrived. 10/10 to ebuyer.

All I need now is for my new Blackberry case to arrive from proporta and I’m laughing!

It’s turned cooler in the last couple of days. On Wednesday, I had my shorts on to cycle to and from work, and I had problems getting the old leg muscles warm. Yesterday and worked from home. This morning, I looked out of the bedroom window at just after 7am, saw the layer of frost on the car windows and hunted through the wardrobe for some suitable leggings. It was -1′C when I left the houe (according to the car temperature gauge), warming up to a heady 0′C by the time I’d got to Ballifield to get my bike.

Daniel surprised us yesterday, and what a surprise. Since he’s had his pot off, his walking hasn’t been good, but yesterday he showed an incredible improvement. Apparently, he’d been practising with one of the school lunchtime supervisors and had even been running after her. This brought tears to my eyes yesterday I’ll freely admit. It’s been a difficult few weeks, not knowing how to encourage him to work on his walking, and the feeling of seeing him regain some semblance of normality in his walking defies description.

Tomorrow, Mark and I are off to Lower Parliament Street to see the Panthers against the Steelers… and that shold be fun. I must remember not to wear my contact lenses. Last time I went to LPS, I managed to pop one out on the floor before the game started. I struggled with one for the rest of the evening. I would have been better doing earlier what I did at the end of the game and popping the other one out and throwing it… at least everything would have been blurred then.

Finally, I read that Micro$oft have done a deal with Novell over SuSE. Amongst other things, it appears that M$ won’t take any action against SuSE users over any potential infringements of intellectual property (IP). That should protect things like SMB/CIFS amongst other things. Perhaps I’ll raise a glass of Laphroaig to Bill Gates tonight… or maybe just drink it and forget the toast :-)

I wrote a couple of days ago about the problems with our local village on-line forum. (It’s buried in the Hallowe’en post). You may remember. A poorly managed software upgrade followed by account suspension for unpaid bills.

Well, I wasn’t holding out much hope, but I did eventually decide to contact the hosting company , Servage.

I offered to pay the unpaid hosting bills. Like I said, I wasn’t hopeful, so I wasn’t that surprised when the email came back from their sales support address indicating that they couldn’t help.

The forum site is obviously still down.

What should I do? I think it would be a pity to lose the forum. The forum admin clearly has problems maintaining it and seeing as he / she didn’t want to be identified, we have no way of getting in touch other than through the (down) forum.

I could register an alternative (but similar) domain name and set another one up, hosting it on my server at home. It wasn’t high volume, and I’ve got all the necessary software and hardware to run the thing. All it would cost me is the domain name.

But, I don’t want to unduly tread on the feet of the person who had the orginal foresight to set the thing up and get it off the ground.

What a dilemma, eh?

Suggestions are more than welcome.