David Morris – brassedoff.net

Excuse me. I’m British. I’m English. I’m a born and bred Yorkshireman.

So, what got my goat today? REDL Auctions, specifically, this lot.

They’re one of the latest outfits to start advertising on daytime TV (and evening TV for that matter). They’re selling repossessed homes at auction to the highest bidder. Regardless of whether you agree or disagree with this policy, and I’m not going to go in to that here, it’s the style of the advertising that gets my goat.

Little things that mark out the advert as non British. When we write dates, we write 6th March, not March 6th. That was the first thing that started niggling me. Today when I say the advert, something about part of the backdrop caugt my attention. Thanks to the good old Sky+ box, I rewound the advert (how sad is that?) to check. Sure enough, the scrolling backdrop showing a typical list of properties is showing a propery listing from Tampa, Florida. Even the delivery style of the voice over. Ok, it’s an English bloke (probably) doing the voice over, but it reeks of American. If you’ve ever been unlucky enough to see any proper American TV adverts, you’ll probably know what I mean.

I’ve just been back to check the web site. They’ve not even bothered to reformat the dates on the listings, so there’s an auction starting in Birmingham on 04/02/2009. Sorry chaps. The majority of UK people are gong to look at that and think they’ve missed it. It’s cheap and poorly delivered. It’s a simple job in the back end to examine locale and adjust the dates accordingly, but this lot are too idle. Either that or they haven’t spotted it and think they’re still in the good ol’ US of A.

Come on guys. If your’e entering the UK market, at least give is some credit being a different country with a different culture and don’t try and shove your usual stuff down our throats.

This article is filed annoyingly under ‘rant’.

It all started off yesterday when I decided to buy a couple of lottery tickets on-line (as usual). In the last new days, the National Lottery upgraded their web site to something newer and shinier.

Newer, shinier and it doesn’t work withLinux. I assumed it was a prblem with the old version of Firefox 2 on my Linux box, or the Flash version, so I upgraded Flas and Firefox. That sucessfully killed Firefox altogether.

So, it being on a geriatric SuSE 10.2, I decided to download the ISO for openSuSE 11.1 and install that.

Bad move.

First off, the installer complained that my discs were identified by logical device name rather than UUID or physical name. That took a bit of googling to come up with a fix, then after the software update had finished, the system ended up in file system recovery because one of the drives wouldn’t mount. Fortunately, it was the backup drive. I still don’t know why this wouldn’t mount, but that was something to do with naming as well. Forcing that to device naming and forcing a mount point fixed that. Next, no GUI.

That requied the Nvidia repo adding to YAST and new drivers and a kernel update. Now, why didn’t they get added from the DVD I wonder?

The net result was that I had the server (this server) down most of the day when you’d have thought the update process would have been fairly streamlined.

Whatever, it’s still quicker than doing Windows!

Back to the Lottery site, I’ve emailed them and complained. I’ll report back when I’ve got something to report.

This week’s great timewaster has been Bejeweled Blitz on Facebook (thanks for that, Mirielle).

Ok, I’ve been busy twittering, facebooking and trying to get BT to sort out the chronic cap on my broadband connection, so my blogging time ahs been diverted on to other things. Mt broadband is now ripping away at nearly 5Mb, faster than it ever has done before, so mission accomplished there! Today, Google released StreetView for the UK and Sheffield is included. The images are from last year. I know this because my previous car is parked on the drive outside my mother’s house. The Googcma didn’t get this far out of town, so we’re spared that!

I’m back working with JUppy again for the Geograph project. Version 2 will include an embedded SQL database engine for storage of the image upload queue (much more secure than my previous version) and will have some rudimentary image editing capability.

Last week, I had a failure with the pushbike. The back wheel rim split. Fortunately I realised before any serious personal damage ensued. After a trip down to JE James at Chesterfield (their wheel builder was on holiday), I managed to get a new wheel built at RGH Cycles at Wales. The bloke there did a cracking job for me. New hb, stainless spokes and a Mavic rim all for £60. I’m absolutely delighted with the job. I’ll have to go soon with the front wheel as that’s down to the limit. Fortunately I won’t need a new hub on that. A good job really as they’re £66 quid before you even start with spokes, rim and labour!

Engage full gloat mode. I sent the picture I used on the last posting from the walk along the canal last Sunday morning in to the Sheffield Star for consideration for their “Readers Letters” page and it was published today!

It’s late Sunday evening as I write and it’s been a bit of a disappointing weekend in a couple of respects. We put in a poor performance yesterday in Bradford in the Regional Area brass band contest to come 10th out of 12. We should have been higher than this, but for my own part, I didn’t think we did ourselves justice.

The Scimitars got rumbled tonight by Peterborough for a 2-6 scoreline at home which rounded off the series of disappointments.

This morning was  a pleasant experience though. Daniel, Pebble and I went for a walk from Shireoaks up to Turnerwood along the canal towpath. I’ve not seen Daniel’s pictures yet, but I got a couple of nice ones. It was a very clear day (up to around 11:30am at any rate!) but deceptively cold with a chilling wind.

Quarry Lock down towards Cinderhill Lock

This was the view from Quarry Lock looking down towards Oneslide and Cinderhill lock in the distance (where the bridge is). An idyllic setting, but if you’d been on a boat today, you would have needed thermals on and the wind would have been playing havoc with steering.

Whilst up at Turnerwood, I had a chat with a couple of the residents I know to talk to through boating, asking them if they knew we’d be up there around 25th April. We’re taking the boat up to coincide with the unveiling of some new interpretation panels at Dog Kennel Bridge near Kiveton Park railway station on the canal.

I know I’m notthe most frequent blogger in the world. These days, you’re probably just as likely to find me microblogging via my twitter account as anywhere, but there are some times when I feel the need to write an essay!

I’m in sunny Dusseldorf at the moment. The rest of the office have gone out for lunch so it’s nice and quiet and I have a few minutes to myself. When I left Sheffield yesterday, the new red wine kit was bubbling away to itself in a pleasingly regular fashion. The relocated Killamarsh Forum was working fine on its new hosting service. People have been updating it as well, so I know it’s capable of being found. I did take the liberty of putting a customised 404 error page on my home server to point people at the new location before I renamed the directory containing the forum.

I’ve had the nod to move the Seth Ellis site as well, and I’ll shift that over to wiserhosting.com as soon as I’m happy that the KF site is robust.

The Scimitars are away in Bracknell on Saturday, but I’ll be watching Daniel scuba diving. That’s after I’ve played in the 3rd Section Regional Finals (aka The Area) at Bradford on Saturday morning. We’re rehearsing at something like 8:30 in Bradford, so an early start is in order.

First, one of my dear wife taken last month when we had all the snow on the ground. We’d gone out for a walk on Westthorpe Fields with Pebble and this shot shows Pebble trying really hard to be a good dog.

Caroline and Pebble in the snow

Caroline of course would be able to wax lyrical about the hat.

The second image was one I took today which I’ll probably share with Network Rail, purely because of the idiocy of the man…

When not to cross the track

Note here that the barriers are in fact down, usually signalling the impending arrival of a train. The barriers had in fact been down for some time without a train appearing… in total a good ten minutes I’d reckon. This guy ran out of patience. It’s probably a good job the train never arrived. The barriers subsequently went back up without a train making an appearance. Once upon a time there used to be a phone number next to the crossings that you could ring for ‘large or slow moving vehicles’. Now, I assume the crossing is monitored from Worksop by CCTV so any abnormal loads will be visible on the camera.

Over the weekend, I started the first stage of the process to get a lot of the web sites off our home server. I’ve been looking around for a cheap full-featured hosting company and eventually found wiserhosting. Time will tell what their availability is like, but they’re a UK company and for £25/year you get a full hosting package with mySQL 4, php 5, sub-domains and a decent control panel.

The first web site to move is the Killamarsh Forum. I’m getting a few problems with DNS, but if you go for killamarsh-forum.co.uk rather than www.killamarsh-forum.co.uk everything’s up and cooking. I daresay the www. bil will work its way through in time. I’ve put a custom 404 error on my web server to point people to the new location, so hopefully that will catch everyone.

Out of the blue yesterday, I got an email from a Geograph user asking whether I’d be prepared to take up the reigns with JUppy again. JUppy is the J2SE-based bulk image uploader I wrote a couple of years ago (is it REALLY that long ago?). I haven’t geographed in ages which is daft when you consider every time I set foot on the boat I come back with a pile of photos. Anyway, when I get back from Germany next week I’ve promised to dust off the old version of the site and software and have a look at it. I seem to remember it needed some refactoring to properly implement the plans I’d got for it. I did start to implement some basic image editing (crop, pan etc) and this is where I got bogged down with the basic class structure. From memory, I’d decided that the best way of moving the thing forward was to set up a dedicated image class. I’m also idly wondering as I write this whether I could get away with using Derby as an embedded SQL server in JUppy for the file handling. It would certainly make things a lot easier; at the moment I think it’s using CSVs. It needs a nice easy way to serialise the image class into and out of the local image database, and the other thing I know needs doing for sure is that the image upload needs to be shifted off the GUI thread and on to its own thread. Ah, the benefits of two years of Java development hindsight!!!

Finally, I hit the brew shop yesterday and I’ve started a red wine kit. It works out at around £2/bottle when complete. It’s a Californian red. If it works out, I can see our wine bill being significantly reduced!