Life is grand

With regards to that anthem problem you are having. I would like to draw your attention to a little country on the southern tip of Africa who had a similar problem. Like you our country was divided and the national anthem was that of the now ousted ruling elite; the Afrikaaners and their anthem, Die Stem van Suid Afrika.

By in large the anthem’s contents were not offensive but by association it was. It had to be replaced after the democratic elections in 1994 and it was.

We resolved our problem in quite a surprising manner. The new black government chose an anthem that included stanzas from Die Stem and Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika. Instead of throwing out the old anthem completely they included the old and provided a continuity with the past.

The new anthem is very inclusive with 5 of our 11 official languages but it walks a very fine line and has been adopted by everyone.

regards,
Paul

Installing Trac on an x64 machine is a bit of a chore. The problem is a dependency called ClearSilver which has some issues with x64 machines. I finally found these instructions which worked. I tried the instructions with Clearsilver 0.10.5 but that didn’t work and I finally regressed to Clearsilver 0.10.4 which did work.

I have been looking around for a suitable hosting system for awhile now. I currently use TextDrive and they are very good at what they do but they have outgrown me in many ways. I am on shared hosting with them and find it too restrictive while their other offerings that would suit me are a bit too complicated or expensive. Their focus has moved to commercial properties rather than the lone developer who wants decent hosting.

So what do I want? I want root access, I want my own CPU time, memory and HD and I want an IP address. Nothing more, nothing less. My DNS is handled fine already, email is sorted and I’m not in the market for load balancing or auto-expanding resources. Preferably I want to be able to build up my own OS image and use that.

SliceHost (referral link) is pretty much all that and it is at a decent price, $20 per month. Five minutes after signing up with them last night I SSHed into a fresh build of Ubuntu Gutsy on a dedicated IP address. They are a VPS provider running Xen which means that what I am logging into with root access is for all intents and purposes the same as if I had my own dedicated box and had set it up myself. Every command I tried worked without a hitch, no restrictions, no permission problems and nobody else’s misbehaving application intruding on my resources (or my misbehaving application intruding on their’s.)

The web console SliceHost provide is also just right. They built it themselves and it does everything you need quickly and easily. I tested the rebuild feature and 2 minutes later I had a fresh slice.

Over the next few weeks and months I’ll be building a Rails app. on my slice and I’ll report back on how it goes. I also want to test out the backup and clone feature which lets you build one slice and then clone it to other slices. i.e. install nginx, Rails, MySQL, Mongrel, SSL etc. and then copy that installation to other machines for a load-balanced system. I’ll also have a go at using my SliceHost slice to control on-demand Amazon EC2 instances and use Amazon S3 storage. Maybe even some Amazon SimpleDB (got my beta invite yesterday.)

So far SliceHost (referral link) are simple, cheap, easy and fast. Reliability will be gauged in the coming months.

While Yahoo!’s support of OpenID is a good thing they have only written half the story. Their support is purely the provision of OpenIDs. You can now use your Yahoo! account to log into other websites that support OpenID. What you cannot do with Yahoo!’s announcement is log into Yahoo! properties with an OpenID you may already have.

With my Yahoo! OpenID I now have several OpenIDs. When I use Yahoo! sites, like Flickr, I am forced to use my Yahoo! login and not my, say, LiveJournal OpenID. I want to log into Flickr with my paulmwatson.com OpenID powered by MyOpenID.

David of 37Signals likens it to having multiple IDs in real life and he is right. I disagree it is a good thing though. Yahoo! won’t be around forever which means that at some point in the future all the sites you log into using your Yahoo! OpenID will stop working for you. You will have to get an OpenID from another site.

So with several OpenIDs by several companies you may or may not use for life you end up pretty much in the same situation we have now with individual logins per site.

Yahoo! needs to consume OpenID as well as produce. OpenID needs to let me choose different profiles from within my one OpenID. I don’t want real world identity problems to be a problem in the virtual world.

“Some people, when confronted with a problem, think “I know, I’ll use regular expressions.” Now they have two problems.”

The only redeeming* feature of Bugzilla is the quip system[^].

* Redeeming is too strong a word. Bugzilla is still a fruit cake to work with, the quip system doesn’t make me want to use Bugzilla. It just mildly alleviates the pain. Like an aspirin when someone has put a nail through your head.

I spent many an hour reading Fray when I was younger. With it’s return comes a new format and a quarterly printed book that looks fabulous. You can get all the content for free on the Fray website but to support them and enjoy the craftsmanship that Powazek is reknowned for I decided to pony up for at least the first issue. $25 with shipping to Ireland.

The most human website has returned, no 2.0, no format wars or walled garden nonsense. Just a bunch of folk like you and I telling their stories and putting love back into the web.

While Flickr and other sites have supported geo-tagging for awhile now I have to admit I just can’t be arsed. Without an automatic system I’m not going to dick around with dragging photos onto maps or cutting and pasting lat and long. I always give my photos a textual location description (e.g. “Ireland, co. Waterford, Aglish, The Stables” would be where I am right now) which suffices for most cases. But I do wish for a seamless location system for my photos. Twenty years from now I’d love to look back at my photo history and get a location history out of it.

A camera with GPS built-in is pretty much ideal but there aren’t many cameras like that and I already have a handful of cameras without GPS. So companies like Sony made separate GPS devices that use time and date to sync with your photos. You can use any camera so long as it has the same time and date on it that the GPS unit does. Brilliant idea and I reckon better than embedding it in the camera. Unfortunately being Sony they decided to make the software tortorous. You have to run all your photos through their software. I’d rather rinse my eyes in vinegar.

Thankfully there is something that is close to perfect; the ATP GPS Photo Finder. You carry it around and like the Sony it correlates time and date of locations to time and date of your photos. But instead of forcing you to download your photos to a computer and run it through software you just pop your camera’s memory card into the device and it embeds locations into the files. You can then do your usual process with your files.

Simple but marvelous idea. The only fly in the ointment is that it only supports JPEG files. So it will ignore your Canon and Nikon RAW files. Hopefully they get that sorted soon though. I’ll happily geo-tag all my photos then.

Paul Boutin of Slate is disappointed that the MacBook Air didn’t feature a built in wireless network system. WiMax or 3G or GPRS/EDGE, anything would be usable. The iPhone may be slow out on the beach but it still works. You can get cell-based USB dongles for your laptop but they are incongruous connected to a MacBook Air or even a Macbook Pro. Mine has dislodged itself a few times in mid-file-transfer.

So how about a MacBook that gets ubiquitous wireless through the iPhone sitting in your pocket? Both have WiFi or BlueTooth. Just route the traffic through the iPhone.

There are existing phones and laptops that do this but the experience is less than ideal. An Apple-style “it just works” system is neeeded, like the Time Capsule is going to provide for Time Machine. Make any capable device work through your iPhone.

Hopefully Apple come up with this but with the iPhone SDK arriving in February we may get it from a 3rd party. I sure hope so.

I wanted to dash this off so that when I wake up tomorrow and see a MacBook Air I am reminded why I shouldn’t get one.

It is arguably the finest looking laptop ever made. Twiggy is jealous of the 0.16″ waist, the 0.76″ chest. Weight watchers should award it a Lifetime Fat Fighter Achievement award. It fits in a manilla envelope and apparently gets 5 hours of battery life. Splash out for the solid state hard-drive and shrines will be setup in honour by your local geeks. Legend has it can glide across the room if thrown by an Olympian frisbee athlete. Mortals can settle for a well placed couch toss. Within such a divine mould lies a truly useful machine. Powerful processor, decent hard-drive, usable graphics-card, wireless mojo, the right connections, a lovely screen and the capability of running every application I need on a daily basis, from the terminal to Photoshop.

Yet I should not buy it.

You see I already have the MacBook Air’s dowdy but workable sister, the MacBook Pro. She is a bit thicker at 1″ but hardly portly. The 15″ screen makes for a wider and deeper body but the prettier sister is actually slight larger in area than the cute and fun sister, the MacBook. Thin matters but I’m still going to have to jam lovely Air into the driver’s seat pocket on the way home. I can’t slide her into the cubby or door pockets. Nor will she make much difference on a plane or train, elbows will be bashed.

The Air is the sister I should have bought a year ago, only she was still seeing Steve at that point and just wasn’t available. As it is I picked the MacBook Pro and life has been, and still is, good. Would the Air make me happier? Sure, but I’m a committed guy and can’t afford to be switching willy nilly at every flash of shiny.

The problem is the Air is just too similar to the MacBook and MacBook Pro. Sounds daft but usage wise it will get the same treatment. It would be my desktop replacement, the laptop I took to meetings and brought home. I’d poke photos in Photoshop on it, code websites and surf the web. There is nothing I can do with the Air that I cannot do with the MacBook Pro. Except invoke wobbly legs in nearby geeks.

If Apple had released an Asus Eee sized laptop today I would be several hundred Euros poorer already. That is the Apple laptop I wanted and which would complement and not replace my MacBook Pro. The usage would be different and would justify the purchase. It would be the scrappy pal next to my gorgeous mistress.

I’ll end by saying that the MacBook Air is going to fly out of the shop. The poor MacBook has little chance except with the most pragmatic purchaser (all one of you.) At €1699 it is going to easily sway many MacBook buyers looking at a €1200 bill. If I were in the market for a MacBook or MacBook Pro I’d be thinking hard about the MacBook Air. The light weight and the slim for factor will do more for you than a few more imps in the processor.

As it is, I’m thinking hard about the Asus Eee instead; €400, fits in a jacket pocket and does everything but Photoshop. A shame it looks like the hired help.

The highlighted button lets you control optical drives on other computers since the MacBook Air does not have its own optical drive.

I’d wait in the shadows with my Air and at prize winning moments hit the eject button furiously, sending a co-worker into fits as their optical drive ejected. Oh the fun we can have!

Oh so worth €1699 don’t you think?