Nom Nom Nom

New Home

If you’re reading this, then the site has been successfully moved to it’s new home!

I’m now running on my own custom blog software, so if you find any problems then let me know!

Phone Idol

I’m a bit annoyed with Orange these days, and have made the decision to change my mobile phone provider, or at least to compare the options. I’m also looking for a new phone to replace my Nokia 7610.

I’ve not yet started any in-depth research on this, but I plan to report back semi-regularly with updates on my findings. Previously, I’d always selected my phone based on what was needed to test games on, but I don’t have that restriction this time. I also don’t particularly care if it is a smartphone or not, since all I really need is Opera Mini. The phones that have sprung to mind immediately are the Nokia N70, Motorola RAZR and the SonyEricsson W800i. However, if you have any suggestions as to other handsets I should check out, please leave a comment.

Similarly, I’d be interested to hear about people’s experiences with the various UK phone operators. I’ve only ever used Orange, and have done for around 10 years, so please let me know about your praise or otherwise for their competitors!

Imagine My Surprise

As I browsed through my RSS subscriptions, I noticed my name being mentioned:

David Thomson recently did an interview over on the Business of Success blog. It’s based on his new book Blueprint to a Billion…

Combine this with my recent history of Hollywood, and you can see that I’ve been ever so busy…

Tags: books, businessbooks

Book Reviews

I’ve been a bad blogger this year – after approximately 200 posts in each of 2003 and 2004, I’ve only posted about 70 so far this year. Given that I’ve been blogging more regularly over at the Slam blog (about games), it had crossed my mind that I needed more impetus to write here.

Given that I read a lot of books, as well as the fact that I write book reviews for Scotland IS, I’ve been encouraged to start posting my thoughts on my reading material here. So I will, starting this week.

On the technical side, I’ll be using the hReview microformat and you can subscribe to a book only feed. I will be going back and revising the existing reviews I’ve done to use hReview as well, just in case if you were wondering.

The Guessing Game

I’m (mostly) still alive, and I’m working on something in Rails:

~/projects/cheddar/trunk dwlt$ rake stats
(in /Users/dwlt/projects/cheddar/trunk)
+----------------------+-------+-------+---------+---------+-----+-------+
| Name                 | Lines |   LOC | Classes | Methods | M/C | LOC/M |
+----------------------+-------+-------+---------+---------+-----+-------+
| Helpers              |    63 |    52 |       0 |      10 |   0 |     3 |
| Controllers          |   194 |   159 |       4 |      14 |   3 |     9 |
| Components           |     0 |     0 |       0 |       0 |   0 |     0 |
|   Functional tests   |   240 |   166 |       6 |      27 |   4 |     4 |
| Models               |   239 |   160 |       6 |      20 |   3 |     6 |
|   Unit tests         |   260 |   185 |       6 |      21 |   3 |     6 |
| Libraries            |    87 |    35 |       0 |       9 |   0 |     1 |
+----------------------+-------+-------+---------+---------+-----+-------+
| Total                |  1083 |   757 |      22 |     101 |   4 |     5 |
+----------------------+-------+-------+---------+---------+-----+-------+
Code LOC: 406     Test LOC: 351     Code to Test Ratio: 1:0.9

I wonder what it could be..? Most of my time, however, is being occupied by this top top secret project:

Access to a sophisticated toolset will mean that games can be put together more easily and predictably, reducing development time and costs, leaving developers to focus on the more creative, and lucrative, side of game development: design and playability.

Hard work, but mostly interesting. Mostly.

Technorati Tags: rails, rubyonrails

What's wrong with the old words?

I discovered upon reading a magazine recently (I’d tell you which one, but I didn’t keep track of that information) that apparently I’m a flexitarian:

Flexitarianism is the practice of being flexible about the degree one practices vegetarianism or veganism. A flexitarian might make only vegetarian dishes at home, but eat dishes including meat at the home of family or friends.

What was wrong with the good old-fashioned word omnivore?

An animal that eats both plants and other animals.

Do some people find it offensive?

Pocket Shorts Scotland

Pocket Shorts is a funding scheme which has just launched in Scotland for people who want to experiment with making video for mobile handsets. I sat on the panel for the launch at the Edinburgh International Film Festival in August, and again for 3 of the 4 workshops which ran in Edinburgh, Dundee, Aberdeen and Glasgow in September.

You can apply for up to £3,000 in funding, to create up to 60 seconds of whatever kind of video footage you want (animation or live action), although there is a judging process and only 8 projects will be funded. The closing date is November 1, with the successful applicants known by the end of the year. The video must be ready in May, and they will be launched at the Film Festival next August.

You have to be based in Scotland for this, obviously, but if you are even vaguely interested, do check it out. I’m not sure what my future involvement will be on this, but feel free to try and bribe me anyway ;-)

Where am I going?

Flight CO109 to Newark. The first time I’ve flown direct to the US from Edinburgh, a mere 4 years after I emailed them my support for the service. I never claimed I’d be a frequent flyer though ;-)

Pixar Merchandise

I must have these Pixar items (postcards and book). Cartoon Brew says the postcards will be out in November, but Amazon thinks January 2006. Either way, put me down for one of each.

I would add these to my Amazon wishlist, but apparently you can’t have more than 1,000 items on it…

Tall Buildings

With Alan Yentob’s Short History of Tall Buildings having finished its run on BBC1 last night, I can now get a far more regular skyscraper fix via SkyscraperPage.com. w00t!

I’m a particular fan of the Shanghai World Financial Center, in case you were wondering.

(Via)

Are You An Entrepreneur?

Perfect: Are You an Entrepreneur?

Number 8 seems particularly relevant, since one of the things I can most often be found saying is “oh… you could have a business which does that…”:

8. Instead of saying “there ouugtta be a law”, you say “there could be a business…”

Another hero gone

American playwright Miller dies:

Playwright Arthur Miller, the creator of The Crucible and Death of a Salesman, has died at the age of 89.

Fittingly, there are no words.

Birthday Sharing

Seems that I share a birthday with a certain Mr Scoble. I’ve got some catching up to do in terms of years elapsed though…

It Happened Again

My laptop is seriously ill again :-( And once again Damn Small Linux came to the rescue.

I’m thinking that something is up with the hard drive, so I’m switching to an older laptop, one which doesn’t store charge in its battery, so I’d best be careful not to trip over the power cable…

Busy Week

Lots of stuff going on, none of which I can write about :-)

Except that today my laptop decided it would be a good day to die :-( Thanks to some helpful Mobitopians, I’ve got a strategy that should allow me to dig out as much data as possible. Co-incidentally, I also was given some new ideas for OneLineBio which should help with its overall usefulness. Expect more on that in due course…

New Cards

My new blogcards arrived this week (click here for a grainy picture of said cards :)). I need them given my new-found unattached, freelance, available-for-hire status.

Many thanks to Hugh “branding is dead” MacLeod for making these available, I think they totally rock. My only wish is that you could choose from the entire range of cartoons for them, instead of just the 44 on the Streetcards site.

Hibs 2-0 Dundee Utd

Steven Fletcher gets Hibs second goal

Ofcom

I just applied to be a member of Ofcom’s Advisory Committee for Scotland, whose role is "to provide advice to Ofcom about the interests and opinions of people living in Scotland on communications matters."

Ofcom, for those who don’t know, is the relatively new super-regulator for the UK communications industries; yes, all of them. Apparently, it exists to "to further the interests of citizen-consumers as the communications industries enter the digital age." Funny, I thought they were already in the digital age, even if they haven’t realised it yet. I know I’ve been living there for several years already…

I was planning to apply for this before I went to see Cory Doctorow, but his talk made me realise just how much I need and want to get involved with this kind of thing.

Cory's Speech

I tidied up my write-up of Cory’s talk earlier, but let me try and say something a bit more coherent about it.

As I may have mentioned, the audience was mostly made up of law students with a fair few geeks thrown in for good measure, and the talk was centred around his work with the EFF, and the battles ahead to keep the tech industry open. Although I was kind of aware of this before, now I’m very aware of it, and more than a bit worried about what the future holds.

It was a great talk, and I think I may finally have been inspired to actually do something about it all rather than just thinking that I should get round to it at some point, some day.

Cory and I talked a bit afterwards about Tapestry, and the cease and desist I received last year, and agreed with my viewpoint that I wasn’t breaking their terms of service per se. I really need to get round to working on that again, as I’m sure many people will agree :-) Cory wondered aloud if having a tarball of all the comics available on the web could then be a torrent when it was big enough to make a difference, and take some of the bandwidth burden away from me.

Cory Doctorow in Edinburgh

I’m off to this in a minute: Web 2.0 == AOL 1.0? How the Sinister Forces of Darkness are Conspiring in Smoke Filled Rooms to Make the Web Illegal, and You’re Not Invited, and will try to moblog my way through the event. No guarantees though, since I only just set that up rather hurriedly in the last five minutes!

Martin Was Right...

After my post about Instiki, Martin said that "Where he goes, others will follow."

And it seems he was right! Mena Trott is copying my trailblazing work methods:

I have recently found that I enjoy using Instiki to keep notes. I don’t like using wikis for collaboration. We keep one internally and I’m at a lost when it comes to finding data quickly. I’m a chronological, categorical sort of person. However, I’ve been able to use Instiki for collaboration with the person I know best—myself.

:-D

Instiki helps me work

A few days ago, I grabbed Instiki since I’d seen it mentioned in a couple of places. I’ve been after something that I can use locally (for security/privacy purposes) to keep track of all my ideas and related links and other bits and pieces, and I can say that Instiki is it!

I have to say that I certainly never used a word processor for this kind of thing, though…

I Love You, Mum

Four years ago today, at the timestamp of this entry, I made my first appearance on television. It was a 60-second segment called Business Bites, shown on Scottish TV (the regional ITV channel). Considering that The Games Kitchen was still less than a year old, it wasn’t a bad little piece of publicity (it ran again in August and September). I still have a tape somewhere, and I’m sure I’d be better at that kind of thing now, but never mind – the highly interconnected Scots businessperson/investor/adviser network certainly knew who we were after it ran.

I haven’t watched the tape since we ran it in the board meeting that day.

7 hours and 49 minutes after my television debut ended, my mum passed away at the age of 47. She never saw the tape.

Many people said to me at the time that being with her at the end was the hardest part, and it would get easier; I disagree. I would never have not been there, so for me that was the easiest part.

The hardest part was realising that I’d be spending the majority of my life without her encouragement; without her guidance; without her laughter.

Without her.

And that hurts like nothing else I’ve ever known, or could conceive of.

I love you, mum.

Hibs

I’ve just been and renewed my season ticket for the (once and soon to be again, I hope) mighty Hibernian football club of Edinburgh. We’ve just got a new manager (Tony Mowbray) and although it is his first managerial role, he is a highly respected coach and I believe it is a fairly insightful and innovative appointment by the club. That’s not to say that it could all still go wrong, but it has certainly fired the imagination of the support moreso than most of the other alleged candidates did.

In other news, Hibs now also have an RSS feed of their official news stories (updated daily during the season, and every couple of days at the moment). Possibly one of the first official football feeds anywhere?

Final football related note: Euro 2004 starts this weekend, and I’m looking forward to it. Although this marks the end of the season for most people, it will actually overlap with the beginning of the new Hibs season! The reason for this is that Hibs have entered the Intertoto Cup, and will play their first game on July 3, the day before the Euro 2004 final.

I am around...

...just mad busy. Am 10 days behind in my aggregator, and counting…

Away Away

I’m heading out to Sweden tomorrow for Carrick and Ulrika’s wedding (whose 11-month-old daughter, Elsa, recently invented the 4-wheel Segway which Gizmodo reported on a few days later), which is in Uppsala. Really looking forward to it, and thanks again to Gustaf for providing a list of things to do in Stockholm.

I wonder if there’s ever been a kilted invasion of Uppsala before?

Public Service Announcement for Martin: I’ll be back online on Tuesday :-)

Blogiversary

Today is my first blogiversary! To celebrate, I bought the new Franz Ferdinand album.

Also, I had hoped to unveil a new project today, but you’re going to have to wait a little bit longer…

Dirty Old Town

Back at my desk again after a luvverly weekend in London town as a guest of Hewligan and Wife.

When we left Edinburgh, there was nary a cloud in the beautiful blue sky; when we arrived in London, it was all cloudy and wet (but not raining on the Friday; it didn’t stop thereafter, however). So, contrary to Grant's post, we didn’t bring the rain with us: it was already there. Harumph.

A great weekend was had: great food (pizza; chorizo sausage and waffles at Borough Market; okonomi-yaki at Abeno; breakfast paninis at Starbucks), fine drink, and perfect company. Yowser!

Grant and I bounced ideas at each other, the Wife and I wandered round Tate Britain, Grant triumphed at a game of Monopoly thanks to an unhinged rule alteration that I don’t like combined with a fatal mistake by my Wife to drain everyone of all their cash as soon as we hit Bow Street, we all spent too much money on CDs (including a Pogues hits compilation, hence the name of the post), and walked around in the rain a bit.

In the words of the catchphrase of the weekend: “Yeah. Slow.”

Behind

Well, I’m way behind in my blogging—there’s a whole bunch of things whizzing away in my head and in my notes, but I don’t have time to post them all yet.

Maybe later on, if you’re lucky…

I don't need no steenking RSI...

Simon Willison posts about Avoiding RSI.

Based on his experiement with WorkRave , I’ve also downloaded it and will be giving it a try. I already switched to a Natural keyboard about 3 years ago, and noticed an immediate difference (I was starting to get pains shooting up my pinkies into my wrists—v. painful), so hopefully this will keep me even safer.

He Is Two

Martin remembers his blog’s birthday, and also notes that it is 10 years since we first met and got hooked on this ‘connectivity’ stuff we bang on about all the time ;-)

Reconnected

I’m back, and have a mobile phone signal and Internet connection for the first time in a week. Bliss, for about 4 days, and then my brain needed a reboot ;-)

And only 4 TV channels. Imagine that!

More soon, including pics, after I wade through the 1500 emails waiting for me (approx 1420 of which are spam or newsletters or email I’m not interested in reading now).

Away, away

I’m going to be away for the next week, so if there are any problems with Tapestry, tough ;-)

There have been some issues with Comics.com and Ucomics.com timing out this week when the scripts run, so there may be days when you don’t get new comics, and then days when you get 2 or 3 new strips. Can’t be helped, I’m afraid.

Congrats to Grant & Maki!

So the last couple of days were spent celebrating the nuptials of my good friends Grant and Maki!

Sunday was spent in Edinburgh with a lot of the happy couple’s other friends, touring Edinburgh Castle, supping whisky, ale, and coffee, taking ghost tours, and having a nice meal at Viva Espana.

The main event was yesterday, held at Dalhousie Castle, just outside Edinburgh. Much fun was had by all (certainly by the Wife and I!), especially once the dancing started!

Photos will be posted shortly.

I must also write here about how the couple couldn’t have a better set of family and friends; Stella and I feel honoured and privileged to have been in attendance and to have met the whole group. Thanks for letting us take part in your day, guys.

[Update: (14 July) The gallery is now online,. Check it out, then enter the caption contest!]

Current Reading

Well, since my current book isn’t listed on Amazon.com’s feed, this is what I’m reading: The Scottish Enlightenment: The Scots’ Invention of the Modern World.

Wish me luck…

Which Videogame Character Am I?

I am Mr Do. I am sedentary by nature, enjoying passive entertainment, eating when the mood takes me, and playing with my food. I try to avoid conflict, but when I’m angered, I can be a devil – if you force me to fight, I will crush you. With apples. What Video Game Character Are You?

Fancy seeing you here

Also yesterday, I bumped to an old colleague. A coincidence, since he’d just emailed me on Friday… Anyway, he pointed out this site to me: Knoppix. Very cool.

Coffee and Mobiles

Yesterday, I met up with Martin for a coffee and to discuss some ideas. A reasonably productive session: he’s got a few cool ideas, which I’m not at liberty to reveal. We also decided that despite the hype, Web Services and XML were the future, along with other, specialised & mobile devices compared to the juggernaut doesn’t-do-anything-particularly-well PC model that we have now.

I think Larry Ellison claimed recently that we now have all the tech we need, and there was no more innovation to come out of Silicon Valley. That may be true of Oracle, but there’s lots of cool innovation going on all over the world, even if there’s not much activity in the Valley itself (and I don’t believe that there isn’t anything cool happening there).

I do agree with him to a point, however: we do have several truckloads of technology that we haven’t really gotten the best use out of yet. If you were to take what we have right now, and re-apply it to the real-world as though we were building from scratch, we could achieve Great Things.

Oh yes, Great Things indeed…

Am Back

You’ll be glad to know that I’m back! In case you didn’t know I was away, I was at the E3 show in Los Angeles last week. I return with a general feeling of anxiety about the atmosphere in America right now, and some scary stories.

Amazon be thy name

Books are good. I have 220 items in my wishlist at Amazon (I hope they don’t lose it :-O), though not all are books. Just a mere 85% or so. And I have more to add to it.

I like to learn, and if it wasn’t for Amazon, I would never have realised that books like this even existed, far less that I was actually interested in reading it.

The problem with being in the UK, of course, is that not quite the same range of books is available as is from the US site. I’m surprised that Amazon don’t have some sort of hook through for that.

As much as I’m mad at Amazon for having a broken Web Services feed, I have to thank them for putting so much knowledge in front of me. And I’ll sook it up like the information sponge that I am…

Reading

You may notice that my ‘Current Reading’ entry on the right side of this page seems to be empty. I’m not sure why this is, but I’m using the MTAmazon plugin, and it worked for other books.

I am reading this book, however, which I believe I borrowed from Hewligan many moons ago…

Update: The MTAmazon plugin only works with Amazon.com, and not Amazon.co.uk. I thought maybe the book wasn’t listed on Amazon.com, so I checked. It is. But it doesn’t have a cover image, which is all I am trying to display. I’ve just hacked at the MTAmazon plugin to make it accept the ‘locale’ option which the Amazon API uses to connect to international sites. I’ll try it later on to see if it actually works!

Blogchalk

This is my new blogchalk:

United Kingdom, Edinburgh, English, , David, Male, 26-30. :)

Eating Out

Had a very nice meal on Saturday evening with the Wife and some friends, over at rogue (at Martin’s prompting).

I wasn’t particularly taken with the Foie Gras (never had it before), but for my main course I had Sea Bream with Shallots in a Port Sauce. Heaven. The wine I selected was very nice as well (worth noting, since it was white, and I don’t normally like white wine), service was excellent, and it didn’t cost much more than your average Edinburgh restaurant.

Picture Perfect

This morning, the Wife dragged myself, my brother, and our dog to venture, to get some photos taken for presents.

Rather than just sitting and standing around a chair, you’re encouraged to mess around while the photographer snaps away mid-flow. Although sceptical at first, I have to admit it was kind of fun.

We go back to see the images on Thursday, which I’m dreading, as the price list seems a little on the high side…

Weekend

Good grief! Scotland won at the rugby! Coulthard won the Grand Prix! Hibs didn’t lose!

I’m almost overcome with joy…

Ouch

I play five-a-side football on Wednesday evenings, on astroturf. Not content with that, the facility also likes to add as much sand as possible to the surface, just so you can’t actually get a grip on it.

I regularly tear open my elbows and knees, but last night was a lot worse than usual, since I saved a shot which scraped my right knee wound open, and created a new one on the back of my hand. Beautiful. A while after that, I took a full hit of the ball straight to the same knee, causing it to actually bleed (just a scrape before). As a result, my knee is pretty sore this morning.

However, The Wife would just tell me that its my own stupid fault for playing in the first place.

Except this time it isn’t: who hit the original shot and kicked the ball into my knee? My own brother.

Harumph.