iPlay on Windows only!
As a British citizen, with a Television License, I’m shocked to hear that the BBC - which has always supported European technology developments (remember the BBC Micro from the UK’s Acorn Computers?) is bring out software to view it’s television programs that will only run on Windows…
If you feel like me then take action! Sign the petition and tell your friends!
Operation: Doggy Be Gone!
I work for a company that is part of a large group of other companies… all of which, at various times, have had corporate web sites independently developed for them by different developers using varying technologies and producing varying qualities of code.
The result of this is Doggy Day. This is a day that happens once a month when we get emailed a digest of all the press releases and copy changes that need to be added to the various different web sites because the required content management systems are either non existent or too buggy to be used by non-developers.
Now, the result of Doggy Day, no matter how well we thought we documented it last time, is always chaos (rampant in an age of mistrust) as: No one ever set up an FTP server up on the MS IIS box, so all changes have to be made over VNC… The press realise is larger than the varchar(4000) limit some muppet put on the MsSQL database… The Cold Fusion box’s been crashed for six months and no one noticed…
Need I go on?
The answer to Doggy Day is something dreamed up by Rob and myself (well mainly Rob actually) and it is called Operation: Doggy Be Gone!:
- Step 1: Set up a central Word Press blog with a Category for each site.
- Step 2: Use wget to recursively spider the sites in question, download all links and rewrite then to .html files with relative paths.
- Step 3: Check the newly flat sites still work as wget won’t have wgot files linked via JavaScript (rollover states etc) or files loaded in via SWFs.
- Step 4: Put the files in some kind of consistent structure (like ‘domain/subdomain/files/’).
- Step 5: Rip out all the pages that need CMSing and rewrite them in PHP with a RSS aggregator like Magpie that looks at the feeds of the sections on your central Word Press Blog.
- Step 6: Check into Subversion and deploy.
- Step 7: There are no more doggy… I mean steps.
All the above took less than a day… thanks to the sheer hackibility (sorry I mean flexibility) of PHP, the neatness of Word Press and the always amazing wget! And the best bit is: No more doggy days!
The hole is where the heart is…
Anticipation for Manson’s Eat Me, Drink Me seems to be gathering pace fast. The MTV in Italy has the realise date pencilled in for March 23rd, which is not that far away.
Then Kerrang in the UK announced that Manson would be performing, as I suspected, at this year’s Download Festival. I hope they do a gig in London too… as much as I want to see them live again, I’m not a festival goer and never will be! A full list of (pretty much) confirmed dates can be found on The Heirophant.
The most exciting thing so far was this interview in Rolling Stone, reported by The Heirophant today:
Things got really interesting, though, on Saturday when the S.S. Drove out to the Valley at the behest of Marilyn Manson. The S.S. joined Manson in his rec room, where we worked our way down the belly of a bottle of German absinth, and were blown away as Manson debuted his new album, Eat Me, Drink Me. The key cut is “If I Was Your Vampire,” a six-minute epic with the lyric “The hole is where the heart is.” If anyone thought Manson was down for the count, think again.
I wonder how much for the new album was written post Christmas Eve?
Subversion: Please cut the crap!
I don’t know about you, but on our development environment we have lots of files that aren’t under version control and never will be… they are tests… they are temp files… they are just there.
I know it could be argued that they shouldn’t be there but they are - it is the development environment after all!
The only problem I have with this is that when you ask to see the status of your files you have to sift through loads of unknown files with ‘?’ in front of them… so I wrote the below shell script to only list files that have been modified and then just tell you how many unknown files there are!
echo "Modified files:"
svn status | grep ^[^?]
echo "Unknown files:"
svn status | grep ^[?] | wc -l
It’s pretty simple and not perfect but it’s made my life easier!
Ceros in Media Week… again!
The art of not getting lost in translation…
This was in by inbox this morning, it’s another article that (I think) is based on Dennis’ keynote speech about the success of Monkey at Publishing Expo.
Having handled a lot of questions at the Expo from people who’d seen the keynote, I know how much of a stir it caused. I think that the ABCe audited visitor figures surprised a lot of people, who’d (especially those in the industry) dismissed the medium. Few people believed Dennis would get the numbers or the dwell time that they did.
As I said at the Expo: In the auditing process ABCe used the web-servers’ log files, along side Ceros’ own logs, to come up with their figures… so as much as they are surprising, they are the certified figures!
If the link redirects you to the search page just search for Ceros… Cold Fusion, what a plat form! sigh.
Clerks Movie Poster: That’s what I call history…
I went for a shopping session on Oxford Street this evening (more on that to come) and when I was walking down the tunnel to the North bound Victoria Line I spotted the above!
They’re redecorating the tunnel and had striped away all the paint and posters from all the years… and there it was for all to see! A bit of history from all the way back in time… well 1994 any way.
Kevin Smith’s Clerks is one of my favourite films so I had to take a picture despite it being rush hour… I’m giving serious thought to taking my SLR back there tomorrow night to try and get a better shot!