Just to let you know I’ve tidied up the old blog entries, so they now look much nicer and most of the photos have captions. The hotel in Banff also allows me to upload photos from my memory cards, so I’ll hopefully do a ‘best of’ collection for you soon.
This evening I have more than doubled my quotes collection into a burgeoning list of things I’ve found to be funny, thought-provoking, inspiring, interesting, enchanting, insightful, stupid or just plain cool. Keep refreshing a lot to see them all, or check out the handy quotes page to see the entire collection.
You can probably work out more about the kind of person that I am from the quotes than from anything else, so go knock yourselves out.
Today our great and extraordinarily expensive VLE goes down for some upgrades to prepare it for the next academic year, where it’s taken out of the hands of the unfortunate computing students who have been giving it a thorough hammering and replaces the venerable and admittedly shit Virtual Campus.
Will we get features we have been asking for like RSS feeds of course content? Will we finally be able to use the message boards without Java? Will the university finally get it into its head that not everybody uses Word, and perhaps some form of PDF document would be far nicer? Will the academic staff decide on a single, sensible format for all the content so you don’t have to remember how each individual tutor stores their notes?
Probably not. Still, any update which requires the entire system to be taken offline for several hours is either going to be a nice improvement, a major behind-the-scenes set of tweaks, or a total cock-up. I await the results with great anticipation.
As you may know, I run a small web server by the name of Inca. I’ve also just gone and done a huge set of updates - it now has the latest versions of just about everything.
Hooray for cPanel, it makes my life easy.
Just so you don’t worry too much, I am currently running the v2.6 bleeding-edge version of WordPress whilst I prod some features. This means there will almost certainly be some problems somewhere around the site (I’ve spotted a couple), but they shouldn’t be show-stopping. I’m also going to be doing regular SVN updates from the trunk so it should be as stable as any development version is going to be.
Go WordPress! Go SVN!
My iPhone has been playing silly buggers for a few days now, so I decided to bite the bullet and do a restoration on it. Having had some experience of restoring various gadgets to factory settings and the subsequent pain of getting them back how I liked them, this was something I approached with no small amount of trepidation.
Dock iPhone… it shows up in iTunes and predictably throws up an Unknown Sync Error (-39). No worry, I’ve already decided to click the “Restore” button. A single approval window appears, and I confirm my intent.
iTunes goes away and unpacks the new firmware, wipes my phone, re-flashes it and then restarts it without any input from me. I even went and played on Facebook whilst it was getting on with it. Next thing I know, the iTunes icon is merrily bopping away in my Dock and asking me if I would like to set my iPhone up as a whole new device or if it should just restore my backup.
Simply put, I restored my backup and it’s currently got all my settings (As far as I can tell) absolutely as I left them and is busy restoring all my media/contacts/email and so on. Apple wins for easy fixing of mildly broken phone, infinitely easier than fixing most other broken devices, even those with so-called ‘one-click recovery’. Even so, it worries me that people feel the need to put in a big “Fix It” button no matter how easy to use it is. Perhaps a more elegant solution would be an option tucked away in a menu, and a ‘cock-up counter’ which automatically asks you something like “Your device has failed to sync properly the past 10 times you have docked it - would you like to run an automated recovery and restoration of your backup?”
This is the BT Home Hub. It’s a nice white box with blinky lights on the front, a phone, and a load of cables coming out of the box. It is also one of the singularly worst pieces of communications hardware it has ever been my misfortune to have to deal with.
The Home Hub is BT’s “plug-and-play” router for home users, and indeed it does have some plug-and-play elements. If you plug in the power supply and the ADSL cable, it connects to the internet for you with zero configuration. Shove in an ethernet cable and it sets itself as a default gateway router through DHCP, or it serves as a WiFi hotspot. At least, all this happens with the latest software.
When we got it, it had the original software. Oh joy of joys, this needed configuring through a terrible user interface. We were promised it would get better though, it had automatic updating! Sure enough, a few weeks later, it was updated with the new user interface, better stability, automatic configuration and so on.
Well, automatic except for everything else. Whenever your hub is reset to the factory settings, it forgets extra things you have as addons. This means that our IP phone stopped working until we re-activated it.
I’ve just updated my blogging software - WordPress - to the latest 2.5-RC1 SVN trunk version. In English, I’m playing with the latest bleeding-edge development version. Apparently it has some cool new features to try out, such as integrated media galleries:
They also seem to have fixed the amazingly irritating line-break issue in Safari, something which was beginning to get on my nerves in the most amazing way.
Anyway, this means nothing much for you if you’re reading, but you may see a couple of glitches caused by me running unfinished code, for example if you’re viewing media galleries the back and forwards buttons seem to be a bit borked. I’ll keep you up to date with anything new and amazing.