Life is grand

end of the line

Originally uploaded by chelseagirl.

Reading Joel’s long piece on the Windows Vista shutdown menu, which took 48 people a year to implement, had me thinking; the answer is pretty simple. It is three choices. Sleep, Restart and Shutdown. ala Mac OS X.

Miami Vice is the worst movie I have watched this year. I cannot even begin to tell you how poor it was. Flat. Dull. Boring. Cheap. Wandering. Vacuous. What were you thinking, Jamie Foxx?

Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Mans Chest on the other hand was good fun. Not as fresh and fun as the first one but worth a watch.

A simple but essential addition to Google Reader; while reading you can now move subscriptions to different folders.

Previously it was a pain to subscribe to a feed and then have to go into Settings to move it to a folder.

“Below is a Science Fiction Book Club list most significant SF novels between 1953-2006. The meme part of this works like so: Bold the ones you have read, strike through the ones you read and didn’t like, italicize those you started but never finished and put a star next to the ones you love.” from mamamusings.

1. The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien*
2. The Foundation Trilogy, Isaac Asimov*
3. Dune, Frank Herbert
4. Stranger in a Strange Land, Robert A. Heinlein
5. A Wizard of Earthsea, Ursula K. Le Guin
6. Neuromancer, William Gibson
7. Childhood’s End, Arthur C. Clarke
8. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Philip K. Dick
9. The Mists of Avalon, Marion Zimmer Bradley
10. Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury
11. The Book of the New Sun, Gene Wolfe
12. A Canticle for Leibowitz, Walter M. Miller, Jr.
13. The Caves of Steel, Isaac Asimov
14. Children of the Atom, Wilmar Shiras
15. Cities in Flight, James Blish
16. The Colour of Magic, Terry Pratchett
17. Dangerous Visions, edited by Harlan Ellison
18. Deathbird Stories, Harlan Ellison
19. The Demolished Man, Alfred Bester
20. Dhalgren, Samuel R. Delany
21. Dragonflight, Anne McCaffrey
22. Ender’s Game, Orson Scott Card
23. The First Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever, Stephen R. Donaldson
24. The Forever War, Joe Haldeman
25. Gateway, Frederik Pohl
26. Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, J.K. Rowling
27. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams*
28. I Am Legend, Richard Matheson
29. Interview with the Vampire, Anne Rice
30. The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. Le Guin
31. Little, Big, John Crowley
32. Lord of Light, Roger Zelazny
33. The Man in the High Castle, Philip K. Dick
34. Mission of Gravity, Hal Clement
35. More Than Human, Theodore Sturgeon
36. The Rediscovery of Man, Cordwainer Smith
37. On the Beach, Nevil Shute
38. Rendezvous with Rama, Arthur C. Clarke
39. Ringworld, Larry Niven
40. Rogue Moon, Algis Budrys
41. The Silmarillion, J.R.R. Tolkien*
42. Slaughterhouse-5, Kurt Vonnegut
43. Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson
44. Stand on Zanzibar, John Brunner
45. The Stars My Destination, Alfred Bester**** (probably my favourite)
46. Starship Troopers, Robert A. Heinlein
47. Stormbringer, Michael Moorcock
48. The Sword of Shannara, Terry Brooks
49. Timescape, Gregory Benford
50. To Your Scattered Bodies Go, Philip Jose Farmer

In Rails you can’t have a column named format in a table as it is a reserved Ruby word. Fair enough. But how then can you handle a database that has a column named that in Rails without using views?

It turns out to be surprisingly logical; modify your Rails model with two new methods. You need a getter and setter so for example:

def dialect
  return self.format
end

def dialect=(value)
  self.format = value
end

Now my model has a method of dialect which gets and sets to format in the database.

Interesting. In the past month or so I have had 4 hits from professional publishers wanting to use photos of mine they found on Flickr. I am not a professional photographer, don’t advertise my photos and have had fewer hits in the past year than the past month. I wonder if Flickr is becoming a viable stockphoto choice for publishers?

I am rarely excited by modern mobile phones. They tend to pack too much into an unusable interface and end up being slow at what they are meant for; voice calls and text messages. My current phone is a bare-bones Nokia; it doesn’t have a camera, radio or 3G, it doesn’t double as a PDA or an MP3 player (I have an iPod nano for that.)

This Sony Ericsson W950i though is giving even this mobile-phone troglodyte heart palpitations. It looks good, the flush keyboard is gorgeous (and I hope usable), and has dedicated controls for the music functionality. That is an absolute must, the dedicated controls. It has a lovely 2.6″ touch sensitive screen too. It is also slim opting rather to be wide which is a form factor I prefer (and which Motorola are doing well with in their Razr phones.) It has 4gb of memory, twice what my iPod nano has and apparently will work like a USB drive which makes transferring files a doddle.

A plus is the lack of built in camera. Well done Sony Ericsson for not trying to shove in a crap mobile phone camera.

All in all it looks like a winner. My only reservations are interface speed, voice quality and whether the interface might be too crammed with options. As soon as O2 Ireland get it on their shelves I’ll give it a go.

Outback fun

Originally uploaded by beeater.

We are thinking of getting a 4×4 of some sort and have been looking at Subaru Foresters. Check out the Subaru Outback above though. The driver flipped it at 100kph, it rolled 4 times and she then got out, picked up her camera and took a photo of the crash. That is seriously good crash protection from the Subaru and pretty amazing robustness from the Nikon DSLR.

It would seem from Read/Write Web’s wrap-up of the Web 2.0 Summit (previously the Web 2.0 Conference) that $3000 and a few days of your time is not worth it. Apparently the Web 2.0 Expo will be more of a technological show case but I have to wonder if any conference, expo or summit is going to tell you anything that subscribing to TechCrunch, Read/Write Web and other sites don’t already tell you. Plus they do it a lot faster and are more responsive.

If you want to network, strike deals or idolise some smart people then by all means keep on attending conferences. And if you speak at them, keep it up, but otherwise are technological conferences outdated in favour of the realtime web?