01.31.08
Posted in blog, technology at 12:13 am by coldclimate
Looking though the logs for this place tonight I noticed how many people are going to old URLs which haven’t been active for months, years in some cases. 500 people a month were accessing www.coldclimate.co.uk/blog, which I retired about a year ago. Another 500 people were munching down on 2 of my homebrewed feeds www.coldclimate.co.uk/1.xml and /blog/feed.xml, neither of which have been around for about a year minmum. Throw in another few links and suddenly 1000 more pages are actually being served each month.
So I’ve added a couple of lines to my htacess file to redirect people. It’s dead simple really, add a line like “Redirect oldplace http://wwww.newplace.com/new” and any traffic that comes to /oldplace gets redirected. You have to fully qualify the new place however. Also, you htaccess file is parsed top down, you redirect /oldplace http://www.newplace.com and then in the line below redirect oldplace/really_old http://www.someotherplace.com then any traffic for oldplace/really_old will actually end up at http://www.newplace.com, not www.someotherplace.com.
As that explaination probably made as much sense as Northern Rock shares, I’d recommend this comprehencive yet easy to understand guide to htaccess. Also rememeber that htaccess can really bugger you up too
Lord knows who was visiting these long dead pages, and I suspect most of it is feed readers blindly grabbing my 404 page and not realising it, but hey, if I’ve suddenly reappeared on your radar, I’ve not been gone, honest. You may thank .htaccess’s wonderful Redirect command.
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01.29.08
Posted in music at 10:58 am by coldclimate
Here’s one of those crazy facts, which makes perfect sense to ecomonist, and mystifies the rest of us.
EMI pays £25m a year to scrap unsold CDs, yes £25 million. They pay to make them, and then they pay to scrap them. If ever there was a motivator to move to a digital distrobution method, this would appear to be it.
Why don’t they just give them away, I hear you say? Or sell them really cheaply? Because by doing so, they would undermine the value of their product, and no longer would you be willing to pay £15 of a cd, because you know that they COULD sell it for a fiver. Or £3. Or in fact have to pay somebody to take it away.
Now here’s the interesting bit, in my book; why would you ever pay £15 for a CD now? Why not download it illegally, or better yet buy it in digital format for far less, either through 7digital, or CDBaby or even iTunes. best option, buy it from the artist themselves in whatever format you like. I love getting cds in the post from fakeIndieLabel and Distraction
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01.28.08
Posted in randomosity at 8:51 pm by coldclimate
**technically** now the second page, but all the same - ONE OF MY PHOTOS MADE THE FRONT PAGE OF MAKE!!
This is the best thing to happen all day!
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Posted in business at 12:06 am by coldclimate
After a minor rant about the genius of Seth Godin, and how cynical mass markettign will never make effective use of toold such as Digg and Delicious if they do silly things such as pay idiotic companies to blog, Digg and submit to Furl every bloody article they write online, I lost control and splashed a fuck load of cash on Amazon buying books about permission marketting and the new economics of the internet.
Why oh why?? Whilst they are interesting in themselves, most of the books I’ve bought are written by people who give most of their best stuff away online anyway! I could have read a bunch of blog article archives and got much the same information!
Maybe that the point though? The product is great, and speaks for itself, so I actively go and buy it even though I could have it in another (all be it less useful) form, for free.
Imagine if other products were like that? If you could get sticky tape from WHSmiths for free from a big roll in the shop, would you buy the little take away rolls they were selling for profit, or would it have to be a remarkable product to make you spend the cash?
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01.26.08
Posted in interweb at 9:52 pm by coldclimate
otherwise I’ll never make a great geek?
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01.23.08
Posted in food at 9:39 pm by coldclimate
Aparently you should do the following…
Eat breakfast like a king (one assumes this it talking of fresh fruit, yoghurt and such like),
lunch like a prince (a salomon sandwich),
and dinner like a pauper (rice and veg).
However, working away from home is more conductive to the following:
Eat breakfast like an artic explorer (ceral bar eatten whilst on the move followed by coffee as black and strong as Mike Tyson),
lunch like an aging debutaunt (soup and a sandwich from some small and fashional deli as close to the office as possible),
and dinner like a binge drinker (take away curry eaten late night in a hotel room).
Gillian Mckeith would scowl at me I’m sure.
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Posted in music at 5:59 pm by coldclimate
Nothing beats sitting in a huge open plan office, looking at a bunch of cival servats, with Pendulum’s Slam thumping into you ears on the headphones, content nobody else can hear it. The juxtaposition is brilliant.
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01.22.08
Posted in randomosity at 10:35 pm by coldclimate
My laptop took longer to boot than it took me to eat a mixed tandoori grill, naan and riatta. Might be time for a reinstall when when system initalisation takes longer quality indian food.
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01.20.08
Posted in randomosity at 10:34 pm by coldclimate
The Borne Ultumatum, starts with a dose rendition of UK citzens (kidnap - lets not mince words here, it’s kidnap), water boarding (partial drowning torture to extract information, lets not mince words again) and the CIA shitting on our doorstep. Considering it’s a US film it must be touching a raw nerve with a few boys in the America.
America, listen up. People around the world are fucked off with your self rightous, smug attitude. Stop trying to dictate to the world, and stick to fucking about INSIDE YOUR OWN BORDERS. You have no rights outside of the US of A, and if you have to kidnap people and take them to foreign places to beat, torture an humiliate them, maybe you should consider what you are up to Anything you can’t do on your own shores, you certainly cannot justify else where. Keep it up, and nobody outside of your shores will be on your side, except maybe Tony, but he’s not exactly popular these days is he.
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01.17.08
Posted in randomosity at 4:07 pm by coldclimate
I’ve been meaning to go an read and understand dynamic range and various other bits of audio science surrounding music, but I’ve just not got round to it. Whilst I had music on random this afternoon however, it picked the album “Music For A Strip Tease Party” by “Bald” Bill Hagan And His Troc. I didn’t remember where it came from, so had a glace at the file location and found these fabulous covers, aparently scanned from the original LP. Take notice of the right hand side of the back - pre-mp3, pre-cd, the buying public had an idea about the technicalities of audio aparently. 
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01.16.08
Posted in randomosity at 11:06 am by coldclimate
54 books in total it would appear. The usual mix of business texts, fantasy fiction, graphic novels and pulp fiction.
Life Support
Gerritsen, Tess
Joel on Software: And on Diverse and Occasionally Related Matters That Will Prove of Interest to Software Developers
Spolsky, Joel
Dreaming in Code: Two Dozen Programmers, Three Years, 4,732 Bugs, and One Quest for Transcendent Software
Rosenberg, Scott
God Explained in a Taxi Ride
Arden, Paul
Destination: Morgue
Ellroy, James
Exit Music
Rankin, Ian
Incompetence
Grant, Rob
Skunk Works - Personal Memoir Of My Years At Lockheed
Rich, Ben R.; Janos, Leo
On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (James Bond Novels)
Fleming, Ian
The Mephisto Club (Jane Rizzoli, Book 6)
Gerritsen, Tess
Chicken with Plums
Satrapi, Marjane
How Starbucks Saved My Life Michael
Gill, Michael Gates
Diamonds Are Forever (Penguin Viking Lit Fiction)
Fleming, Ian
Small Giants: Companies That Choose to Be Great Instead of Big
Burlingham, Bo
The Distant Echo
McDermid, Val
World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War
Brooks, Max
Purple Cow
Godin, Seth
The Devil’s Alternative
Forsyth, Frederick
The Tenth Man
Greene, Graham
The Undercover Economist
Harford, Tim
Trouble is My Business
Chandler, Raymond
Persepolis: v. 1 & v. 2
Satrapi, Marjane
From Hell
Moore, Alan
Past Mortem
Elton, Ben
No Comebacks
Forsyth, Frederick
Live and Let Die (James Bond 007)
Fleming, Ian
Black Orchid
Gaiman, Neil
Rogue Trader
Leeson, Nick
Stardust Neil Gaiman
Gaiman, Neil
Cabal Clive Barker
Barker, Clive
A Scanner Darkly (Graphic Novel)
Dick, Philip K.
The Book of General Ignorance
Mitchinson, John
Fragile Things: Short Fictions and Wonders
Gaiman, Neil
Atomised
Houellebecq, Michel
Strangers In Paradise Pocket Book 2 (Strangers in Paradise (Graphic Novels)
Moore, Terry
THE QUEEN AND I
Townsend, Sue.
Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim
Sedaris, David
Lullaby
Palahniuk, Chuck
The great Gatsby
Fitzgerald, F. Scott
I, Lucifer
O’Donnell, Peter
Promise Me
Coben, Harlan
I Know You Got Soul
Clarkson, Jeremy
Cocaine Nights
Ballard, J. G.
The Long Tail : Why the Future Is Selling Less of More
Anderson, Chris
Getting real
37signals
At Risk
Rimington, Stella
The Wisdom of Crowds
Surowiecki, James
A History of Violence
John, Wagner
Hello, America
Ballard, J.G.
The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference
Gladwell, Malcolm
Bunker 13
Bahal, Anirudha
Anansi Boys
Gaimen, Neil
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01.15.08
Posted in music at 3:38 pm by coldclimate
MostlyI play whole albums. I rarely can keep playlists up to date. Very rarely do I have my music on random because it’s just too mixed to not sound terrible. At the moment im using the seach function of Windows Media Player to find tracks. All todays music has “dog” in it somewhere.
Dogmonaunt 2000. Danny the Dog by Massive Attack. Snoop Dogg. Resvoir Dogs soundtrack. Dog chewed the handle by terrorvision.
So far, DOGday is working out ok.
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01.12.08
Posted in business, randomosity at 12:56 am by coldclimate
I keep seeing adverts which are making great offers, mobile phone deals better than mine, bank accounts with higher interest rates, even home insurence which whoops mine. Home insurence is the most boring thing in the world, its so boring it makes watching Jeeves polish the gravel outside, so anything that gets me excited about home insurence must being properly exciting.
All of the offers above, which I saw in about 10 minutes of this evening tv, were only open to new customers. This makes perfect sense for many businesses, new customers bring in new money, and so long as you’re not completely screwing you existing customers too much, they probably won’t move on, so by offering short term deals which look very tasty you get some new blood, and so long as they don’t move on, your customer base is up.
The problem with this is two fold. Firstly, if your existing customers twig that you love them less that you love new blood, they’re going to be pissed off. They’ve given you X squillion pounds for donkey’s years and what do you do, you offer Joe Smo a better deal! They get pissed off, they spot another deal, and they move on.
Secondly, this process is getting easier! The Internet makes finding a better deal easier (moneysupermarket and moneysavingexpert are both well known), and your rivals are making it easier to switch. Halifax bank will apparently making moving banks as easy as one signiture, First Direct will even give you £100 to move to them.
So, if this cold war of cheap deals for new customers to steal them from your rivals continues, whats the problem? Your customers are getting a great new deal (this week) and movings so easy is not a problem for them to switch, and you’re getting new customers every day, and some of them won’t be bother to switch so hopefully you’re gaining right?
Wrong. Customer loyalty is worth so much more than the the sugar-high quick hit that are new customers. Loyal customers talk about you. Loyal customers will forgive you’re minor mistakes and if you handle them well they’ll even sing your praises. Loyal customers get their family to come to you. Loyal customers will drip feed you money over a massive period of time.
Why not offer your long term customers your better deals? I’m sure I’ve read of smaller banks only offering their higher interest bonds to existing customers, and O2 phone customers seem to be able to access deals that are advert, but apart from that I’ve not seen any thinking other than short term “smash and grab” techniques and this seems to be self defeating in my book.
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01.11.08
Posted in rant at 8:50 pm by coldclimate
Of late I’ve reached near nuclear levels of frustration dealing with people on the phone. This is nothing new, if you’re one of the call centre workers who’s rung me to try and sell me a new mobile phone contract and I’ve either used the airhorn on you or put you on hold by leaving the phone next to the radio, you’ll know how much phones infuriate me.
No, the new thing driving me crazy, is ladies of a certain age not announcing who they are. Calls then fall into one of two patterns, The Repeating Hello or The Insulted.
The Repeater:
- (pick up phone)
- (me) Hello Coldclimate Towers
- (them) Hello
- (me) Hi
- (them) Hello
- (at this point this may loop round the cycle again as many times as need until my patience breaks and I move on to..)
- (me) Hi, who’s speaking?
- (them) What?
- (me) It’s Coldclimate here, who are you trying to get through to?
- (them) Coldclimate? (or at this point, they name a random member of the rest of the clan)
- (me) Yes, Hi
- (them) Hello.
Eventually They get confused and just start talking, sometimes I’m none the wiser who it is, and very pissed off.
The Insulted:
- (pick up phone)
- (me) Hello, Coldclimate House of Love
- (them) Hello, it’s me, im wondering if you’re making it to the Magic Circle Spider Organizing book club this week, because Sid’s not going to make it and we’re…
- (me, interrupting) Wow - wow - hang on a second, who’s speaking please?
- (them) It’s me, anyway, the Spider Organising thing are you able to
- (me, interupting again) Sorry, you’ll have to bear with me I was just doing the accounts, who’s speaking, I’m a bit lost?
- (them, now insulted that I don’t know them) It’s me Lady Jeff jeff de Jeff, we met last year at that Teaparty in the Forbes Hameltons?
- (me) Oh, yes, hi, how can I help you? Sorry about that I was in the middle of something a bit complex and didn’t have my brain wasn’t in gear.
- (them) Well, I’ve said, we need you to…
And there the sad tale end, they’re pissed off, I’m confused, and the level of rage in the world has gone up just a bit more.
The problems all stem from the fact that these people all expect you to recognise who they are form their voice, probably because they don’t call that many people, and don’t receive calls from that many people, and thus recognise everybody who rings them. It never occurs to them that I speak to upwards of 30 people a day, many of whom a have never spoken to before, and who have a multitude of accents.
So, some simple lessons when ringing somebody:
- Say who you are
- Say who you want to speak to
- Say slowly, when you rang them they were probably doing something else,meaning they will need a little time to come up to speed and switch paradigms from whatever it is they were doing.
- Don’t launch into a massive diatribe about whatever it is you rang about until the person you’re ringing has acknowledged who you are.
There - simple - use that script when you ring somebody, and no matter who it is, they won’t end up wanting to poke you eyeballs out with a broomhandle.
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01.10.08
Posted in technology at 10:00 pm by coldclimate
I spent ages (nearly two years) researching boids, flocking and autonomous character programming, but I still find articles such as this one about giving each member of a digital crowd its own personality could make animated mob scenes more realistic facinating. I’m sur e the name Demetri Terzopoulos is familiar too.
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Posted in food at 4:16 pm by coldclimate
The other day I had a brainwave. Pickled onions are great. Cheese is great. Pickled onions and cheese together are really great, but is it possible to pickle cheese? I’ve never heard of it, but much like smoking, I think it’s a process that can be applied to many things. Everybody has heard of smoked fish, smoked sausage and smoked cheese, but have you ever had a smoked egg? They’re amazing - whole boiled eggs, smoked in the shell (which has been cracked a bit), just fantastic in salads and I suspect would make fabulous kedgeree (though I’ve not tried it). Could pickling be in the same realm as smoking?
So, there’s only one way to find out. I’ve chopped up a block of really cheap supermarket cheese (no point completely ruining good cheese yet) and submerged it in the vinegar from a jar of pickled onions. The pickling vinegar has a good dose of dried chillies, black pepper and cloves (as was used in the original pickled onions), and I’m hoping the cheese takes up some of the flavour.
A bit of research on the net doesn’t give up much for pickled cheese. The Romans pickled cheese in vinegar and honey, but they ate mice, so I’m not getting my hopes up. Fete cheese is considered pickled by some because it is stored in brine, but I was looking for cheese pickled in vinegar. Maybe I’m a first here.
Discussions with my lass and her friend, both of whom are chemists ended up with them being convinced that the acid of the vinegar will cause the cheese to break down. I countered that eventually pickled eggs start to break down too, but not for ages. Acid after all conjugates proteins much like heat does, and cheese is mostly fat and protein chains, but who knows, we’ll just have to wait and see.
A quick look after 24 hours and the cubes of cheese (about an inch across) are taking on a light brown colour, much like pickled eggs do very quickly. The flavour - well - pretty much just cheese and pickled onion at the moment. More news as and when I dare to re-try.
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01.08.08
Posted in business, shiny, technology at 1:04 pm by coldclimate
In the last week I’ve come across some brilliant tools to make my digital life easier, so I throught I’d better share. The Refresh Newcastle group put me onto some, and Google did the rest as and when I found I needed something.
MAMP
I do most of my development work on a php/mySQL stack, and normally I do it here on coldclimate, which is all very well and good, but it has all the problems of working remotely. Latency, need to be online, slow debugging, the potencial for a rogue piece of sql to drop my comments table etc, so some local development area was needed. My iBook has a local copy of Apache, and PHP installed, but installing mySQL was a ball ache, and upgrading to php5 looked like a nightmare. Step in MAMP, and all in one install which is easy as pie to get going with, but where each item in your tech stack is separate, meaning it’s much much easier to install upgrades, downgrades or even have multiple installs at the same time. Out of the box, it works a treat. (Mac only kids)
CodeIgniter
Following on from discussions about Ajax development kits, I was pointed to CodeIgniter, which is a php framework. MVC based (as all good code is in my book), I was knocking up a blogging site from scratch inside an hour as a play thing. Impressive, and means you can stop rolling all your own libraries. (Cross Platform - php based)
Musorg
Having set about getting my music collection under control I needed a method for batch editing mp3’s ID3 tags. Under Windows I use Tag and Rename, and it’s ok, but slow. On my Mac I’d just use iTunes, except then I’d need to import all my stuff into iTunes etc. ball ache city. Step in Musorg, which lets you pick I directory, and easily edit all your tags in one go, or file by file, quickly and easily. Remember to hit save before moving directory though! Once all the tags are sorted, I can throw the files as the Synology Cube, and forget about them. (Mac only)
jQuery
Another framework, this time proving aJax functionality quickly and fairly easily. I’m yet to really get going with this yet, but I’m hoping to use it and CodeIgniter to get my next project up and running quickly. (Cross platform - browser based)
coComment
Another handy tool born out of dicussions on the Refresh mailing list. I woke up with an idea which I hadn’t the inclination nor talent to write, so posted it up to see if anybody fancied a go at it. Somebody pointed out it existed already (always a good sign). coComment is a Firefox plugin which keeps track of all the comment you post on blogs, so you don’t loose track of where you said something and makes finding peoples replies easier. Now coComment+Google reader +rss = perfection. (webbased)
Sharepoint
Yes, I hate virtually everything about Sharepoint’s ideology and methodology, but once I got down off my high horse and stopped trying to have full control of the code it generated, I was able to get so much more done. Much as I don’t like working in it, if you use it in a completely point and click manner (even abstaining for FrontPage if possible) with some good templates, somebody with no technical experience can have a website with document stores, chat rooms, message posting, blogs and a wiki up and running in a few hours, which is quite incredible really. Yes, the code it generates is vile, portable as a breezeblock, fugly as mutant pug dog and only works on IE with a fixed screen resolution, but in a corporate environment with browser monoculture and fixed machien builds, this doens’t matter. It just works. Scary. Getting off my high horse was like biting off my own tongue though. (Microsoft only)
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01.05.08
Posted in technology at 11:56 pm by coldclimate
On my Windows boxes I install PDFCreator, which is generally very good. Tonight I went looking for an equivalent for Macs and luckily ran across a screen grab showing that… it does it natively! In any program which can print (and I only need to make flat PDFs, nothing exciting like links or embedded programming), you can simply pick “PDF” from a wee drop down, and then select “Save as…”. It even picks up the document title for the file name, so saving webpages for learning offline on the train is dead easy.
I love my iBook.
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01.04.08
Posted in randomosity at 9:49 pm by coldclimate
I love these posters for 80/90 hip hop gigs and roller discos. Especially those that for gigs at highshools!
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Posted in technology at 12:16 am by coldclimate
I love bashing Windows, but having nearly finished reading Joel’s books, he makes some excellent points about Windows and the rigiour of the Microsoft testing process (I’m taking it with a pinch of salt, but I’m willing to believe it, especially the amazing story about Simcity and Windows 95), so I might slow down a bit. Linux is excellent at what it does, and Windows is fine for desktop computing, so maybe I should back off a little.
However, maybe this is starting to change. I use an Apple for most thing, as do my family, but articles like this little ditty from Tim Bray entitled 2008 prediction 2: Things look bad for Windows make for interesting reading.
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