How My brain works!

As I was waiting to get off the tube tonight my eyes strayed to an advert. I only glanced at it, didn't even read it. But my brain obviously picked up something because the though popped into my mind "Legoland General". Thats a bit odd I thought- some kind of game perhaps and looked back at the poster. 'Legal and General". D'oh!

Everybody Needs something but

Is there any difference between a religion and a cult? Back in the good old 20th century, the future was bright and shiny with promises of hovercars, a lifestyle like the Jetsons and yet now we're here it seems we seem to have a surfeit of religion with religious nutters in the USA, Middle East and even the East end of London.

Christianity in this country seems ashamed of itself. They don't dare mention God but try and get new converts through courses on spirituality like the Alpha course or hold events like Signsevent.com which has been popping up on the tube. 18,000 people on July 2nd at Upton Park. That would be a big turnout for a West Ham match! It's only in the small print (well FAQ) that the word Christianity popus up out of the woodwork. But the adverts give it away with the F word. Faith = Irrational belief. Superstition.

I commend Richard Dawkins for his all guns blazing assault on religion. Let's Praise the man! If you haven't seen it, The root of all evil Part 1 and Part 2 and Part 3.

This is a man who knows what he's talking about. Oh and while we're at it, lets free Xenu.

Programming Language Survey

Every programmer in the world takes an interest in their favourite language or languages and how popular or unpopular it is. People have flame wars about the virtues of "their" programming language's strengths and weaknesses. My favourites are C++, Delphi and PHP, but I go by the "Horses for Courses" adage- use the best tool for the job.

Just recently I came across the Tiobe survey, a monthly look at the popularity of Computer Languages by results for several search engines. It makes interesting reading and its surprising just how far ahead Java is from C#. Its good to see that C++ is increasing in popularity though long term (see the charts on Tiobe's page it too is in a long term decline). I wonder how closely the survey relates to the job market. All the legacy code must have a big lag effect.

Sadly Delphi's decline appears to be terminal. Borland's decision to sell their IDE development part of the company off was the last nail in the coffin but many of the other nails there could be attributed back a few years to the Inprise episode when Borland changed name and not a little to Microsoft's staff recruitment policies which saw them pinch Anders Hejlsberg, the architect of Turbo Pascal, Delphi and C#.

I did an "Programming Language by Jobs" survey a year ago and its probably time to do another so in a few days. This is done by counting the number of job vacancies for a given language in a country and dividing by 5 to get the true number of jobs. Watch this space!

My PC is too hot!

London has become a bit warm- its that time of year thhough thasnkfully there seems to be more of a breeze the last couple of night, so overall not as muggy and sticky as previos years. My new PC has just started throwing hissy fits. Machine Check Exceptions to be precise. One of those and it resets. No clue as to the exact cause- its a munfacturer's supplied box, AMD 4400 running Windows XP, SP2 plus the usual collection of stuff- firewall, Anti-virus etc etc. I even run Sys Internals Rootkit Revealer now and then. You just can't be too paranoid.

But its clean, patched and the only difference is that I added a 300Gb IDE disk just after I bought it. Its been running fine until the warmer weather. Very annoying. I used to get this with my old PC but it was hand built and was running a lot of stuff so the 12V line might have been a bit overstressed. But a box thats only 3 months old. Very annoying. How do PC owners in much warmer climes manage? Do I need air conditioning for 4 months a year?

A website that doesn't allow links to it!

This is the subject of the internet mega blog boingboing.net

But its not just Podcasts. The British Metro newspaper's site has terms of use at http://www.metro.co.uk/terms (its not a link chaps honest!) says "You may not provide a link to this web site from any other web site without first obtaining Associated's prior written consent." Yet, if you search via Google or Msn you'll find them pretty easily. Want to bet that Google etc wrote asking them for permission?

So maybe we should write to all search engines that have the Metro site in their search index and ask those search engines to comply with the terms and remove the Metro's links? Wouldn't that be a great idea!

I like the Metro BTW but think they should be a bit better informed about the nature of the web and what links do for websites.

The Mensan Blog

As well as this blog I look after the Mensan.eu blog. I am the main blogger but we have a few other bloggers signed up, so I remain hopeful that as the site gets better known, a few more will sign up.

I've also been promoting, marketing the site if you like and have set myself a challenge. To see how high I can take the site for these three phrases. No tricks- just making sure relevant content is added every day or two.

• Mensan Blog - 1st out of 930 results (on Google)


• Mensa Blog - 3rd out of 1.4 million results


• Mensa - No Idea out of 9.8 Million results!

I managed the 1st place exactly 31 days after the domain was registered. No black hat methods either! All legitimate. PR BTW is 0. Webserver logs indicate 190 MB of traffic so far but thats probably me! (True story- On another site I'm working on, I mucked up a sql query- each run output between 30 and 70 megabytes. Do'h! 1.85 Gb in all.

I've extended the Mensan.eu site this week, not just with more blog entries but with a Google map of events and bloggers, bios of bloggers and a live feed from Google News on Mensa stories.

Pivot - Blogging Software I use

One of the sidebar links is to the the Mensan Blog and I host this on my (reseller) server. Its handy doing it that way because I can add the type of enhancements like a google map page that just isn't possible with the likes of Blogger.

The mensan blog uses Pivot, open source blogging software. I just wanted something easy to install and Pivot is excellent. It is very nippy- possibly because it uses flat files rather than a database... though of course how well that scales remains to be seen but I think not a while. Its very easy to customise - I've added Google Analystics, a Flickr link and Technorati to it. So if you're looking for a poweful but easy to use, install and configure multiple blog system, give pivot a try.

The version of Pivot I'm using - the latest is 1.3RC2 (Release Candidate 2) which means well past Beta and almost full release. I've found (possibly) one bug with the pinging urls but that easy worked around using the 3rd party Pinging services of Pingoat.com or pingomatic But Pivot itself has proved very stable and robust.

A taste of Chocolate

Chocolate is by and large a bad thing for me. I seem to be able to consume it in vast quantities. Last year I stopped eating it for a while and lost 50 lbs-though to be fair weightwatchers helped. Trouble is I love chocolate in all its shapes and forms- from Cadbury's through to Lindt.

Onm holiday recently in Keswick, I discovered 99% pure Chocolate. The normal Lindt dark chocolate is 70% and 85%. But 99%? Madness! Folly! And yet there it was as you can see. The packet had a warning that only experienced choclate lovers should try it. I laughed with disdain and tried a piece. Yeeeeuch! Well not immediately but within a few seconds. Not a terribly nasty taste, not that bitter either but almost pure cocoa butter. It was a plant type taste.

Ah well, back to 70%/85%.

The 99% didn't scan in too well compared to the 85%- Shiny lettering but it is real not photoshopped.

Installing Suse Linux

I was asked to setup a brand new empty box with Linux, mysql, php, webmin. Luckily I had a copy of Suse 9.2. Now I am not a Linux expert- I can get by, know most of the commands, even how to wget stuff, make and install. But I'd forgotten just how good YAST the Suse installer really is. Getting Suse installed on an empty box took under 20 minutes- it identified everything- not bad for a Pentium 4 box, 1Gb ram.

Network configuration was a doddle and I updated several packages from the internet- well YAST did that automatically and a newer version of the Kernel is well worth a reboot. I've used Webmin before- if you are struggling with Admin of a Linux system, Webmin is just superb. Once I browsed to the downloaded rpm file, YAST took over the install and before I knew it, Webmin was up and running- it uses a web interface on localhost:10000. If you're configuring virtual sites, setting up Mysql users, etc, its very hard to beat.

Then one final test- create an index.html in the htdocs folder - yup that showed up fine and a small php file with the one line inside a php block

 phpinfo();

and that worked fine. Result! In about 2.5 hours.

Book Review Definitive Guide to Apache mod_rewrite

So how many book titles have an underscore? Rich Bowen's book (DGAm) has started a new trend. Well none according to Amazon, if you search for _ but they do have it!

Published by Apress, the shortish (120 pages) hardback covers one of the most complicated and arcane subjects. mod_rewrite. This is a module for Apache web-servers that lets you do all sorts of wonderful changes to urls dynamically. Its used for instance to simplify urls, making long complex urls with parameters look like a directory structure.

mod_rewrite is a very complex module- i reckon anyone who is fully at home should be given free entry to Mensa.

Content wise its a combination of cookbook and how-to in 12 chapters from an introduction, look at regular expressions, installation with the bulk of the book explaining the various rewrite modules and how and when to use them and not use them.

This is a book that remains on your shelf until you need it, but when you need it it is invaluable. Rating 8/10. Link to On Amazon.co.uk

CocaCola Zero

Every morning I stop in the newsagents near work and buy a soft drink (sugar free of course). It's usually the Lemon and/Or Lime diet cokes but this morning I saw a new product. CocaCola Zero. It has just been launched here - according to Wikipedia. Of course not everyone is happy!

I've been here before- not New Coke (which I never tasted) but with Tab and Diet Coke. Tab was the first zero (or low) calorie drink they offered back around the late 70s (in N. Ireland). More info as ever on the ubiquitous wikipedia.

In 1981/82 diet coke came on the scene and Tab just disappeared. I think Diet Coke is too ubiquitous now to vanish. So CocaCola Zero is presumably a counter to Pepsi Max. Diet Coke was possibly a bit bitter say compared to Diet Pepsi so this addresses that by sticking with the Coke taste, just removing all the sweeteners.

So what does it taste like? Coke.

Something I've wondered about is, what does Coke taste like in other countries? That's not a silly question. Here in London, over the last few years, there has been a massive grey import market in Diet Coke, or Coke Light as it's better known.

I've drunk cans made in South Africa, Poland, Germany, probably half the countries in Europe. And the taste is definitely different. Also, a funny little quirk. All the cans were the standard 330 ml except the S. Africans which were 340 ml. You can still buy these- many small newsagents, chicken shops stock them. I guess the wholesale price is cheaper than the licensed bottlers.

Beyond Tuckerization

Tuckerization is the use of a real person's name as a character name, place name, or equipment name in a story. Its also spellt tuckerisation - I suspect that us Brits anglicising it. Its not unlike a company paying an author to include their name in a piece of fiction or product placement in a film.

If you're famous like David Beckham then (forgetting about the use of celebrity names- akin to committing suicide legally and financially) then the Tuckerized name would be recognisable, but my name David Bolton- well theres loads of us out there so how do you know which it is? So I guess I won't be looking for to be tuckerised anytime soon.

Now the point about Tuckerization is that it only includes the name, not appearance or other characteristics of the named individual. Why not go the extra step and put a real person in. Hey we could call that Boltonization ( Boltonisation!) rather than the reference to John Bolton/UN.

The alien female purred as she approached David. "You may think of yourself as fat, bespectacled, asthmatic and ugly, David" she whispered, as her 4 tentacles unbuttoned his shirt. "But that is on your world and in my world you are what every ur-woman desires as their partner (and dinner)." She stepped out of her skin and ...

Me and my PSP - Mobile Cinema

At home due to my son-in-law living with us, we have a very extensive DVD collection. But I never really had the time to sit and watch one more than once a week if that (and that when TV wasn't being used by anyone else). I love films though and realised that if I could get a PSP, put films on it then I could watch films during my commuting. I've been playing catchup!

It works very well. I bought the PSP Gigapack- One GB SD card, usb cable, plus headphones and a game that cost £219- probably cheaper now, plus the £15 case with screen protector from game.co.uk and a set of Creative Noise Reducing headphones from Dabs.

After much searching on the web, I found DVD Decrypter. which takes a DVD and produces a set of vob files. And PSPVideo9 here. Both are free.

So that's it. To convert a DVD and put it on a PSP, insert the DVD run DVD Decrypter. I've found the best way to do this is the re-author option. There is usually a title part which is about 4GB in size. Just copy that and let DVD Decrypter run. It takes sbout 15-20 minutes to rip the DVD and create the VOBs. The longer bit is PSP Video 9 which processes the VOBs and produces the .MP4 files (and then copies them over if you plug in your PSP).

Expect to take roughly an hour from start to finish though it depends on film size. Some DVDs have extra protection and you can use the free utility DVD43 for those. Many of the DVDs given away with the newspapers have no protection on anyway.

As for UMD- Sony's equivalent of DVD- A bit of a failure I think. Why pay more than a DVD for a poorer quality version? Depending on the film length and quality settings for PSP Video 9, you can get 1 or 2 films on a

The headphones are fantastic- especially as they cost just £25. You can pay up to £300 for really high quality ones like those that Bose sell. Without these the train background rumble frequently masks dialogue. With these its crytstal clear.

Seatbelt Football

Part of my daily commute is by bus. Oh I could walk it- it's less than a mile but it doesn't cost anything extra as I have a monthly Oyster card.

Coming back at night there's sometimes a 5-10 minute wait and a lot of slow moving traffic past the bus stop at Leyton tube. So I play Seatbelt football and count the score. How many drivers wear a seatbelt, how many don't. Last friday the score reached an amzing 17:17. Yup, 1 in every 2 drivers was without a seatbelt. Yesterday it was 13:5 (thats 5 without). It amazes me that 23 years after this became compulsory (1983) so many still risk it.

I've noticed though that the drivers who flash buses out seem to be in the ranks of the unbelted. I wonder if this is because the belt wearers tend to drive faster and so are more likely to overtake than brake and flash - that old chestnut risk compensation theory.

Thoughts on the London 2012 Olympics

I live in East London, Leyton to be precise, approximately one mile from the 2012 Olympic Village. It is quite a busy area traffic wise, especially when the local football team Leyton Orient are at home. (Well done getting that promotion!) I imagine there is going to be considerable disruption for locals in the next 7 years.

Today I discovered a new phrase "Ambush Marketing"- it originated in the 1996 Olympics where companies who weren't associated with the Olympics managed to get mileage out of the Olympics to help sell their products and services. This kind of upset the official sponsors and the Olympics organisers. So to head this off, LOCOG (London Organising Committee of the Olympic Games) have got a Royal Bill which basically gives them Carte Blanche to go after anyone using the word "London Games" or various combinations. Fines of up to £20,000. This bill wasn't without opposition. you can read LOCOG's interpretation of the law here (Warning PDF).

However things may not be quite that bad. According to Pinsent Mason's excellent web-site "Factual references to London and the Olympics will be legal and phrases such as 'Come to London in 2012' are not subject to a blanket ban, according to the Department of Culture MS." In general terms, the Act restricts the use of the words “games”, “Two Thousand and Twelve”, “2012”, and “twenty twelve” in combination with each other or in combination with words including “gold,” “silver”, “bronze”, “London” and “summer”. These restrictions will last for six-and-a-half years.

I can understand the logic behind LOCOG but I can't help feeling a bit uneasy about the approach. It extends into other areas. Coca Cola is an official sponsor so if you try to enter the stadium with a Pepsi Cola bottle they will make you throw it away. This type of thing happens increasingly these days. The organisers can't have you "Dissing the Sponsors" or "doing a Britney" (having a contract with one sponsor but being seen with a rival's product)

What LOCOG conveniently omits is that traders and local businesses who aren't "Supporting the Olympics" but who are affected by it due to proximity, disruption etc are not allowed to gain any recompense from it. Now that seems unfair. Yes some are bound to gain extra trade but they aren't allowed to advertise it.

Me and My Blog(s)

I reckon that a large part of the popularity of Blogging is because it addresses a human need. To say something- its the old "Write a letter syndrome" brought into the 21st century. It didn't matter if you posted the letter or not. Writing the letter was the thing; it concentrated the mind, focussed your thoughts and the act of creating the letter was in a sense therapeutic. You got it off your chest.

So as well as the web developing and my full time job, I'm also doing three reasonably frequently updated blogs ( Mensan.Eu - a blog for mensans- interesting things about Mensa ), this blog and the Squidoo Mensa lens. My old website is at www.dhbolton.com but slowly rising from the ruins is a new look, xhtml validating site at www.davidhbolton.co.uk