Dave Coveney’s Geek Out

No really…

As anyone who knows me can confirm, I’m always interested in the latest tech and software. So at the WordCamp UK at the weekend I was interested to learn about a new iPhone client for WordPress. And this is the result.. I’m blogging by phone.

Ok, so it’s not perfect…formatting is limited and the picture ends up browser sized rather than using a correctly sized thumbnail. But it’ll have it’s uses..both in journalism sites and for keen personal bloggers.

I’m also having a fiddle with WP2.6’s new image handling features, so what you see above isn’t exactly what the iPhone did, but close.

I was reading a BBC News article about a teenager who was stabbed and nearly killed. Horrific enough in its own right, but it was the following comment by the Metropolitan Police that annoyed me:

“We take any crime reported to us seriously and we will investigate everything fully.”

Here was a young man, nearly killed, and the case was dropped far too readily by the police. The statement says nothing. They didn’t investigate everything fully at all.

It’s rather like me, when I get a parking ticket (which I appear to have a lot of right now), saying that “I check local parking regulations and react accordingly in full.” and saying nothing more. It’s putting up a smokescreen against the reality that by and large I have to accept responsibility when things go wrong. Organisations have to do this too. By issuing these sorts of bland statements they do nothing but reduce respect for themselves. It’s sad, dangerous and won’t help to put an end to the dangerous crimes that happen every day.

Although by and large violent crime has dropped since I was a teenager, there are appear to be rises in certain areas and amongst the teenage age groups. It’s still important these crimes are taken seriously.

Interestingly, when I reported the theft of a Satnav system from someone’s van (and had a number plate for the perpetrator) it was taken very seriously and statements were taken quite promptly. So I suspect quality of response varies markedly from area to area. It’d be nice if organisations that have made mistakes stop giving bland responses like the one above, however. It would just annoy me a little… less.

The chaps at Cam-Trax have come up with a rather nifty bit of software that can turn practically any easily visible object and a cheap webcam into a game or PC controller.

I wish I could code that sort of stuff….

Now I’ll get back to working on SQL queries when I should actually be out partying…

I chanced upon a site listing the first 100 .com registrations ever made - and it rather startled me.  I started my IT career in 1987, first working as a printer operator on the mainframes at ICI, before moving to systems operations in at the beginning of 1988.  Later in 1988 I became a trainee programmer (my career never moved as fast as that first 12 month period!) and so I continued.

So when I took my first tentative steps in professional IT there had been fewer than 100 .coms registered.  Today there are over 76,000,000 active domains and over 280,000,000 that have been deleted, according to Domaintools.com.

Things have changed markedly in this industry.  21 years is nothing.  The internet has quite literally exploded around us.  I started surfing the World Wide Web in 1993 and frankly there was nothing much there.  It was hard to find sites, and performance was painful.  Running your own site was difficult, and it wasn’t until 1996 that I first registered a domain - at-speed.co.uk with the intention of creating an online resource for motorsport news.  It was a difficult but exciting experience, but I felt that it was too early - the Internet wasn’t really a mass market item yet, even though the potential was starting to be realised.  I had bugger all money at the time too, so needed to go out there and get a better paying job.  Interestingly I used to get e-mails from the UK Motorsport Index (which still has the same design as it did then!) complaining about our high budget approach being against the spirit of the web.  I doubt he realised that we had absolutely no money and everyone contributed their work for free.  One thing that was as true then as it is now is that good <> expensive.

So now where are we?  We have applications delivered via the browser, high performance search engines that actually work, and we enjoy the power of a huge number of free social services.  Many of these services are heavily funded and will require monetisation at some point, or they’ll close… that could be interesting.  Google managed the transition from a giveaway to a fee earning service without ever charging the people that made it successful.  Can the likes of flickr, Facebook and WordPress.com?

Time will tell…  What’s certain is that the pace of change, so marked over my career, is probably going to continue accelerating.  The next 21 years could be as equally fascinating…

I’m not going to be challenging for anything much this year, but on April 26th I ambled along to the Aintree Spring Sprint and took some snaps. A selection of them are available here. Use them as you like, but don’t remove the tag. If you’d like to receive a higher quality image, just let me know and I’ll mail it to you.

Such a shame, really…

My excuse is that I was giving myself a break from writing reports and needed to do something at least slightly creative.

And one that I don’t think worked, but heck, let’s put it up:

Pleasant break, now I think I’m going to try and do more WordPress mangling….

When my bed shakes enthusiastically I tend to assume that something’s going well… but this time I was woken by the clatter of a radio wobbling on the sideboard at 1am this morning.

When you wake up to an earthquake you don’t really understand what’s happening at first. There’s a bit of noise as things move, and it’s rather odd to feel that all has gone wobbly. It lasted for about ten seconds, but there were no alarms going off, nothing crashing to the ground… as the tremors slowed I realised all was well. I went back to sleep before waking at around 3am. Curious, I ended up whipping out the phone and checking BBC News. Sure enough, the North East of England had been hit by a substantial quake measuring 4.3 (or 4.6 depending on the report at the moment) on the Richter scale.

This morning I wandered around the house checking for damage but there’s nothing visible - not even any new cracks in the plaster.

Would have been great to have been up St John’s tower though - bet the DJ’s had something to say!

Almost worth it for the ooh-la-la.

Sorry David Coulthard, but when I saw this:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/motorsport/formula_one/7191512.stm

I saw red.  I mean, apart from some of his astonishingly patronising comments directed towards younger drivers, he did nothing but confirm that his F1 career has been a long period of journeyman mistakes.

His ability to spin off during warm up laps was once something quite special in F1.  Of course, with traction control and other driver aids this era finished.  And now TC has gone, he’ll have to learn throttle control once more.

Good.

I’m looking forward to F1 that could actually be exciting for once.  And as Nick Heidfeld put it - ”For me, it doesn’t cross the line of being too dangerous. If you want you can just sit on the outside, and then it’s safe.”