A big many happy returns to my lovely Siân who turned 24 today. In the immortal words of herself, “at least I’ll never be as old as you!”, I wish you a happy 24th year and support you all the way through your 25 therapy.
x x
30.Jan.07 
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On a more serious note today, please download this short film; put it on your iPod; link to it from your blog; mention it on MySpace or YouTube!; show your family; show your friends; show your colleagues at work; wear it on a T-shirt; wear it on your pants!
By doing this you will be making people very aware of the huge problem the world currently has with illegal arms trading. The UK is one of the world’s largest arms dealers, and with recent allegations of corruption aimed at our largest exporter, BAE Systems, it is now very appropriate to refresh everyones memory about this disgusting trade operating from within the UK.
29.Jan.07 Uncategorized Comments (0)
Tim Minchin, comedian, actor, composer songwriter, pianist & musical director, Rock n Roll Megastar! On Saturday night Siân and I went to see Tim Minchin live at the Lowry Quay Theatre in Salford. I had previously seen a brief interview and performance from Tim on the Culture Show on BBC Two. The song he played was ‘Dark Side‘ , a song that shouted dispair at the record industry for not taking him seriously because his songs had no apparent depth and wouldn’t sell to the ‘teenage market’. Okay, so the song is a little more than just that, but it certainly caught my attention on a saturday night in.
At the end of the performance, Lauren Lavern announced that after a highly successful three-show stint in London, Tim was going on tour, playing amoungst others The Lowry Theatre in Salford. Seconds later two tickets where brought.
28.Jan.07 Uncategorized Comments (0)
Soup of the day is now gaining some notoriety it seems. In the last month, this blog has received 6085 unique hits, averaging roughly at 324 visits per day. This may not be up in the clouds with the BBC, but for an independent blogger, I must say I am quite impressed.
Even more impressing is that you guys have requested (and my servers shifted) and whopping 18.65 Gigabytes of data in Janaury, mainly in video form.
This month this blog also gained an extra Google rating point, now scoring 5/10 on average. This means that a search for ‘Soup of the day’ now appears on page two of the results, in second position… Not long until I’m on page one!
27.Jan.07 Uncategorized Comments (0)
If you replace British Broadcasting Corporation with Polaris Digital and Alexandra Palace with The Green Building, Manchester then we’re close.
After a night of hacking at some shell script, plus a little tinkering with some AppleScript, I managed to create a program that every 60 seconds five minutes takes a picture and posts it on the internet, effectively creating a live web cam.
I know these are so 1996, but what the hey. I wanted to learn some shell scripting and AppleScript’ing for no particular reason and chose a web cam as the project.
21.Jan.07 Uncategorized Comments (0)
Download PDnH Server roadmap (PDF)
Today Polaris Digital are officially releasing the roadmap for PDnH Server up until version 1.0 is released and the branch to 2.0 begins. Because PDnH Server is open source, released under the GNU General Public Licence Version 2 and PHP Licence Version 3, we actively encourage thirdparty development and comment. To this end we are currently moving development in Eclipse to a Subversion repository allowing everyone to get access to the source code.
In related news, the PDnH Server project is shortly going to be migrated from SourceForge to Google Code.
18.Jan.07 Uncategorized Comment (1)
So 2007 has started rather poorly. Firstly one of my molar teeth has decided to chip itself, although it did that back in Nice last August, and now it is dying a slow and very painful death. After some emergancy surgery I now know that I have to have more to finally kill the blighter and relieve the pain, then some crowning action should preserve it for life. Unfortunately they almost failed to mention the fact that they’re going to have to put me under a general anesthetic to do it, which is a little concerning. I’ll would go into detail at a later date, but I doubt I’m going to remember anything.
16.Jan.07 Uncategorized Comments (0)
So Apple Computer, Inc. lives on, without the ‘Computer’. It was the last announcement at what was a relatively surprising Macworld keynote speech by CEO Steve Jobs. Apple have dropped the ‘Computer’ because they do so much more than just computers now, including their launch this year into the mobile phone market. But more on that in a bit.
The first product announced was the ‘iTV’, now rebranded to Apple TV to avoid confusion in the UK with the televisions company ITV, plus a few associated lawsuites. Along with this announcement came the news that Paramount was joining Disney in distributing films through the iTunes Store, although unlike Disney, Paramount were limiting their releases to the back catalogue. But that isn’t so bad as it includes the Indianna Jones Series, Star Trek (TV and Films), The Godfather I II III and Mission Impossible (although the first is the only one worth watching) to name a few.
09.Jan.07 Uncategorized Comments (0)
Purchase To All New Arrivals from iTunes
To All New Arrivals, the new album by Faithless only arrived in our household two weeks ago. With this is mind, hopefully it will come as no surprise to you that it was only yesterday that I had been able to give it the attention it deserves and listen to it properly. To do this I decided inadvertently to walk the five and a half miles back from the Trafford Centre to Oxford Road at 12:00am through wind and rain after a production meeting. Why would I choose to do this? Simply, because I could! With my HD-25 headphones on, the world outside becomes obsolete, only the music matters.
09.Jan.07 Uncategorized Comment (1)
Users of Google Earth on the Mac will know how wonderful a program it is, as will all the other users on other platforms to. This week I was reading the Google Mac Development blog and discovered that when Google Earth auto-centres itself on the UK (or US if you’re there), it doesn’t quite centre itself geo-graphically.
Usually the developer involved tweaks the centre slightly (this is different between operating systems I am informed) so that the geographic centre is over a town or city. In the States, Windows and Mac Developers choose their home towns in Texas albeit a different one for each platform.
In the UK, when using a Mac and Google Earth, the camera positions itself over the UK and if you press the + key, or zoom in without moving you will find yourself zooming into the town of Leek in Staffordshire. If anyone out there is using Windows and Google Earth, could they confirm if Leek is also the town they zoom into?
09.Jan.07 Uncategorized Comment (1)
