A Donkey on the Edge

I had so many bits, bobs and backups tied into my blogging engine that it was taking me forever to migrate safely to Movable Type. A negative side-effect of running what was a truly nasty hack in the first place was that the whole site got bogged down.

The family has been begging for pictures of Clemmie, but I couldn’t deliver as the process of updating the scrapbook had become so tortuous as to make it impossible.

Simply posting meant sending several emails, struggling with my rubbish editing interface and waiting hours for the poor old MGI app server to crunch through miles of slow-moving database records.

So in the end, I decided to just kill the thing. I exported the database, hacked it up as best I could in bbedit (if anyone needs the grep pattern to change date formats from euro to us in an MT db export, drop me a line) and bumped the dns. So to cut a long story short, the data’s all here, but there will be many, many things that don’t work properly. I’m as stuck-in as possible and will try to do fixes daily until everything is working ok. As usual, feel at liberty to hurl abuse my way via email (as I don’t think the commenting is working correctly yet)

I’ve just noticed the access logs filling up with calls to “permalinker”—this is a pretty major oops as I’ve always believed URIs should be permanent.

Unfortunately, while I could probably cobble a perl script to handle permalink requests, the unique id was an MGI-specific thing and got lost in my hasty translation:-(

If you were expecting a particular post, please use the search box instead…

First things first—If you’re one of the many people who come here from A List Apart please read this.

• The sample page is still linked to from ala. The page is at http://www.donkeyontheedge.com/ala.html
• If you’ve come for the design, you’ll need to wait a week or two as I migrate this beast (live and on-stage like XVIIIth century surgery) to the new blog engine (Movable Type)
• As part of the migration, I’ve decided to push the method I describe at ala a bit further, so stay tuned.
• Once the design has changed, the original ala sample file will remain unchanged, as per the original article.

Just got this from Demon, my ISP of choice for a number of years:

Please note that with effect from Tuesday 24th. August the
customer cacheing DNS servers (158.152.1.43 and .58) will no
longer respond to queries unless they come from a Demon Customer IP address. This will have no effect on the majority of our customers who connect to our services via Dial Up, ADSL or Leased Line.

Is it just me or does this really suck? Are we seeing the first steps towards a non-collaborative network? A network of compatible but segregated virtual spaces? Kind of defeats the whole concept of the internet really (but then that’ll just be my paranoïa kicking in again)…

I mention Clem’s adventures on swings in an earlier post. If you read this blog on your mobile phone (or indeed just download stuff via the web and then copy it over), you’ll be able to see very bad Dad In Action (3gp format—86k)

(best with sound turned on)

As long as I’m messing about with the video capture on the ixus, one of the nicest things (well, one of many many nice things, but one that stands out in a particular way) about having a young child is the way they fall asleep on you.

More specifically, after all the time you spend reading stories, making hot milk, cajolling, singing, bouncing and otherwise exercising your most potent diplomatic muscle in an incessant battle to get the reluctant toddler to bed, one of the nicest things is the way your baby’s hair smells when you wake her from her lunchtime nap and she nuzzles into your shoulder:-)

(alt-click on a picture to download the movie)

I love this post by Chris, and because I can easily post a link to it, I shall;-)

It’s nice when a blogger says something short and to the point:

Why is Big Media Losing viewers? (…) The actual answer, which lies unspoken between the lines of all discussion on the subject, is much simpler: people are abandoning Big Media because it sucks. (From a great post by Aaron Swartz)

I’m still struggling with that document I’ve been writing—sort of a Pelican Brief for ad agencies prompting them to start shaping a new kind of creative. Big media losing eyeballs is one of the bigger reasons they need to get a move on…

I’ll post the damn thing if I can ever get it somewhere in the region of coherence.

The French have a wonderful knack for keeping it simple.

(This is a diagram of the correct stroke sequence required to shave a man’s face.
No, really.)

Just had a lovely morning in the rain with Clem. We were gonna do the painting thing, but then I remembered the stables at the London Equestrian Center (Clem liked Albert best I think—lots of fuzzy mane in the face etc) in Lullington Garth, Woodside Park (you know, near Finchley). Funny thing little girls and horses. In any case, this week is Pony Week at the L.E.C. and the place was packed with nine-year-old girls in very expensive leathery riding stuff so Clementine got a major close-up display of horse grooming with all the trimmings (droppings, mud and rain).

After that, the trip to Tesco didn’t seem that exciting really…

…and go here now.

thanks billy

Met a nice man called Mark Panay at a company in Bristol last week and he kindly asked me to do some CSS for a white-label system he’s developed.

It’s always fun to put the standards-based stuff to the test on a real commercial system with real-world limitations and a stroppy client (actually, Mark couldn’t have been more charming, but you know what I mean). Luckily, these guys had done a nice job of writing stripped-out semantic XHTML. The system has a few different parts and my only concern was that certain logical objects get redefined rather that simply re-used so the style sheet was a little longer than it needed to be. Browser spec requirement was Mozilla-like on PC and Mac, with IE6 on WinXP and Safari on OSX. Finally, the stylesheet had to override (if necessary) a ‘base’ stylesheet that was used to display:none; some parts of the document…

The system is now live over at http://www.twocultureclash.com except I don’t think they’ve got their Futuresplash designer to update his 200 Megabyte .swf file so in the meantime, here’s a Javascript popup window. Try turning stylesheets on and off for extra edification or amusement (if you’re a sad web-designery-type-person…)

I’ve always found overflow:scroll to be a source of considerable grief and have usually coded around it, but it seems to work quite well here… queue irate comments from Opera users ;-)

I think this chap has been reading Donkey for a while, and now that comments are on he’s even said hi. I thought I’d mention his blog, cancergiggles because it’s one of those look-in-your-referrer-logs-and-be-pleasantly-surprised kind of things.

…I get bored and ratty as quickly as Gordon Brown waiting for the Hutton report…

I love the way this guy writes, let alone thinks. Check it out :-)

Sorry about the dates jumping around guys, just messin’ with the MT date formats. If you can muster any strong feelings about it, comments with prefs or recommendations on date formats for a diary-style blog (which I guess is what this is) are welcome…

Can be as confusing as it can be extraordinarily painful. I am having an uncommonly shitty morning and it really hurts—arse. Arse, arse, feck.

I would just like to put my 2¢ into the indeterminate gender thing. I think alternating between ‘he’ and ‘she’ more or less at random through a text (I’ve been reading about babies and this is done A LOT in these texts) is both annoying and unnecessary. I’d be happy for indeterminate to default to feminine. If that doesn’t work, we could have a year on and a year off, so 2004 could be “she” and 2005 could be… no, wait that’s even more stupid.

Anyway, I’m sure there are good reasons for the practise, I just think the end result isn’t working…

Well, it had to happen sooner or later, little girl vs bee (or wasp, I’ll never know). Have you noticed how this August, London has been overrun by wasps? A friend of mine has an alleyway down the side of his house where for the last three weeks, the floor has been literally carpeted by wasps. Apparently they eat the sap that drops on the pavement.

So Pamella (…all of our staff are first-aid trained… why do they need to lie and how do they do it so quickly and easily?) called just as I was heading out the door for lunch with Chris. She’s the nursery manager at Asquith, where Clemmie goes three days a week and a call from her is generally bad news.

Clemmie has been stung by a bee and we need you to take her to the doctor

Quick call to our doctor: surgery’s at four O’clock this afternoon, bring her around then which is nice, because Ruth, my mother, carries a syringe of adrenalin around in her purse so that when she gets stung by a wasp and stops breathing she can jab herself (I’m thinking Nicolas Cage in The Rock here…) and hope to survive the incident.

So now little Clementine’s heart is going to stop and I won’t be there to help (like I’m qualified—note to self: sort the ****ing first-aid course TODAY). I’m running around the house trying to find the car keys, Clem’s blankie to keep her warm so she doesn’t go into shock and looking for apple juice and biscuits and I call Pamela back from the mobile in a panic.

ring…ring…ring… pause… fax machine brrrruiiiiiiiii

So Clemmie is lying on the floor in the toddler room and everyone at Asquith is running around like the headless, under-paid, under-qualified chickens that they are and NOT ANSWERING THE DAMN PHONE so I rush out the door and try again on the mobile

Hello, Asquith Court Pamela speaking

So I scream at P that someone needs to stay with Clemmie every second that they need to be ready to rush her to A&E should there be any change in her breathing or swelling or…

So as we drive back from the Royal Free, with Clementine’s tummy full of yummy paracetamol we dose by weight—the amount may seem a little larger than what you give her at home (13.4 Kilos) and antihistamine elixir Clemmie keeps asking for more pine nuts and drinks her apple juice with satisfied little squirts.

She was born at the Royal Free, she drove me over there two weeks ago when I tore my little toe open and held my hand when I got stitches, she keeps going back and we’re getting to know the place quite well. I know it’s corny, but for an under-funded NHS facility, it’s brilliant. Everyone at A&E is friendly, patient, understanding and supportive and the separate pediatrics waiting room is brilliant. Seeing your daughter muck about in the ball-pool really takes the edge off a frightened parent’s nerves.

So, Doctor Davina and Nice Italian Nurse Man, thanks:-)

So it’s sorted
Lifesaver Baby and Children
Saturday 4 September
09:00 to 13:00
(in Romford)

Wish me luck :-)

What does a little girl who has just had a three-and-a-half-hour antihistamine-induced nap do when she wakes up? (alt-click to download vidjo)

What a day.

I’m not normally so hyper, I think I’ve been affected by the BBC1 Nurseries Under Cover programme (broadcast on 12 August). It really did reinforce all a parent’s most primary fears. In one incident, a child is given food he is alergic to. As his condition rapidly detereorates, the staff are seen handling him and pointlessly fussing. No staff member thinks of dialling 999 and none was equipped (or aware enough) to keep oxygenating the child’s blood with CPR long enough to get him to hospital. The nursery staff call the child’s mother and wait for her to collect her nearly dead baby.

In a gut-wrenching (reconstructed) scene, the mother is left to rush her child to the local GP’s office. The tiny chance of survival the kid had was whitheld from him by the nursery staff. He died.

I’m just about to join a trial with a company called Cognima. The have a technology called Cogima Replicate™ which, in essence, creates images of all your stuff on all your devices. It copies images on one phone to your other phone, your website, your pc and your pda—it replicates (creates replicants?) your data.

Now, having been trained in these matters by a fierce and determined guru of the server-side, at first I thought Replicate™ was a bad idea. I’m loath to admit this as—not surprisingly—Cognima is also a client of mine. I’ve worked with them for a long time now and rekon they’re a pretty smart bunch of people:-)

But it’s a hard habit to break—where I come from, you never create duplicates—you distribute one master dataset (or a limited number of ‘images’) using the network. You have one web page viewed by many browsers, one database queried by many clients and so on.

What I think I’m going to find on the Cognima trial is that dogma isn’t always a good thing. I’m guessing that what these guys have done, is truly understand the way integrated mobile devices have changed the way we use our data. They not only understand the underlying technology, they are suggesting ways to make it work in a real-world context—they are guessing what we’ll be using tomorrow and what impact that use will have on us.

In reality, the Replicate™ techology does a lot more than make copies of your stuff. The bit that makes it work, the bit that makes it right in the context of replicate vs. distribute is the way the system monitors your data. it uses the always-on network that connects your mobile devices to do all the legwork in the background, so that the stuff is just there when you need it. It’s these advanced management skills that are going to make me love this product.

You can read more about this stuff on the Cognima website (see Snap, Safeguard, Refresh, Repair)

A search on Jiwire for Teatro Greco, Taormina, Italy reveals that there are five WIFI hotspots in town, and that the closest one to the amphitheatre is at the Grand Hotel Timeo & Villa Flora which is actually on Via Teatro Greco so presumably very close to the Theatre itself.

Discounting the fact that the Centrino advertising seems to be suggesting that a PC with a Centrino chip is ready to access WIFI hotspots—that the 802.11 hardware is somehow built into (included with) the chip, which of course it isn’t—and that it also suggests that you can use a laptop outside—which we all know to be untrue ever since we all tried to take our 1400 Powerbooks to the beach in emulation of Sandra Bullock’s character in The Net, I thought I’d get the wireless access info from the horse’s mouth and asked customer support at the WIFI access point nearest the Teatro Greco if it would be possible for me to send emails or connect to the internet while actually in the Teatro (like in the ad)…

From: dug@pumpernickle.net
Date: Fri 27 August 2004 15:58
To: reservation.tim@framon-hotels.it
Subject: Una pregunta sul accesso WIFI nel’albergo

Buona Sera,

Sarebbe possibile darmi informazionni a proposito del accesso WIFI in
il suo albergo?

Vorro sappere si el Teatro Greco e accanto a lei?

Piu precisamente, il punto di accesso WIFI che si trova nel Gran Hotel
e abastanza vicino dal Teatro Greco per usare il mio laptop nel teatro?

Grazzie tante a lei (and forgive my atrocious italian),

Dug

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

dug falby

creative director
pumpernickle.net
http://www.pumpernickle.net

The manager in Taormina replies:

From: reservation.tim@framon-hotels.it
Subject: R: Una pregunta sul accesso WIFI nel’albergo
Date: 27 August 2004 20:01:57 BST
To: dug@pumpernickle.net

Egregio Signor Falby,

Il nostro Hotel dispone di un sistema WIFI ma purtroppo non è accessibile dal Teatro Greco che comunque si trova a pochissima distanza dall’albergo.

Nel restare a disposizione per ulteriori chiarimenti l’occasione ci è gradita per porgere cordiali saluti.

Best Regards

Manlio Mul
Grand Hotel Timeo & Villa Flora
Reservation Department
Direct Fax +39 0942 625313

www.framonhotels.com
e-mail: manlio.mule@framon-hotels.it

Which, in English basically means that you can’t really do what the ad suggests you can do (no big surprise there).

I thought big US corps like Intel were getting very law-suit-phobic and generally tried to keep their advertising claims comparatively realistic. I was also under the impression that the current marketing zeitgeist was The Honest Company, that by treating customers with respect, you built a better relationship.

In other words, I am very surprised to see advertising in August 2004 that makes claims that still need to be accompanied with lots of small type (a TV screen isn’t that big for Pete’s sake).

Bonusprint, the UK’s leading mail order photo processor, will be launching in November with a Cognima Snap powered service. The system I’m currently trialling will be available to members of the public—just head on down to Bonusprint and request the “mobile” service.

So far I’m very impressed.

The devil being in the details, I expected the installation to be clunky at best. The Cognima team have spent a lot of time getting the configuration and interface information up to date, so instead of gobbledegook, I received a well-writen SMS alert with precise and correct instructions on how to install the Replicate(t) client software.

So much so, the text had instructions for menu items I didn’t even know existed (like scanning an SMS for a web address and then directing Opera to load that address).

Once installed, the client starts up and the runs as a deamon in the background (cognimad?). As far as I can tell, the software doesn’t have a direct impact on battery life, OS responsiveness or Internet conectivity.

So far so good.

Never before in the history of trivial snapshot production has there been a more potent way of assaulting the world with your pictures. There is nothing technically amazing about the service itself—what is amazing is how effortless it is. It isn’t there, it’s invisible, it just happens in the background when your busy doing something else.

In the end I did find one of the few configurable options on the client (though I’m guessing most users won’t even know they have a client running, let alone want to configure it) which is to turn off upload confirmation. With this set to “upload automatically” it is possible to chase your daughter around the garden centre, drive home, put her to bed, crack open a beer and look at the pictures online. Without an intermediate step—no fiddling with the CF card, no USB cable hookup for the card reader, no arsing about with the discoverable settings in the Bluetooth control panel.

At this rate, I’m going to be kicked off the trial for clogging up the GPRS network with my idiotic photographs—I’m just loving this:-)

Next stop, the contacts application…