magpiebrain

And no apologies:

• Rice Pudding & Red Wine
• The books of Terry Pratchett
• Cheesecake
• The Films of Adam Sandler
• The film Hackers

Yours?

The MacBook Pro has arrived, and given the expense of purchasing it I’m starting to get worried about taking it out of the house. AppleCare for it will be arriving as soon as I’ve paid for christmas, but prior to taking it back home for the holidays, I’ve been considering getting cover for it.

Options right now are either to try and get extended all risks cover for it on the contents insurance, or go for a specialist. The helpful MoneySavingExpert forums turned up mentions for Compucover, and google turns up many more – but I wondered if readers had any advice? I’m resident in the UK but do plan to travel with it.

I’d lagged behind the latest WordPress patches so finally bit the bullet and upgraded today. The “unzip the new files over the old” barfed for me, so I went for the slightly more complex “delete the old files first” approach, and all was well. I also ditched my (badly) tweaked Hemmingway theme for the current Web 2.0 one. Expect it to remain fully functional for as long as it takes me to start editing the theme… As always, feel free to report any glitches.

I had an enjoyable couple of days at XPDAY 2006 in London earlier this week. Stand-out presentations for me were Joe and Dan’s Awesome_Acceptance_Testing and Chris Matt’s Managing Uncertainty & Risk Using Real Options, more of which later.

Ivan’s Are We Nearly There Yet? has the makings of an interesting presentation, however I think he was slightly knocked off track by the larger than expected attendance. I personally found the discussion around using actual days for iteration-level estimation warranted the whole session.

Keynote Controversy

The second day’s keynote, Love in the Age of Software by James Noble and Robert Biddle was by degrees entertaining, annoying, embarrassing, enjoyable but not quite educational enough. It was a shame to see some people leave during it (which could be down to either the previous night’s free drinks or the unconventional presenting style) – all that did was remind me that many people in our industry are actually far more conservative than we think.

dbdeploy

Theoretically mine and Graham’s dpdeploy presentation was the official launch of the database refactoring tool. The talk went well enough I think, but I think some much of audience were looking for a silver bullet that just doesn’t exist. dbdeploy is nothing more than the latest in a long line of process change hiding behind a tool (CruiseControl being an excellent example).

Anyway, the dpdeploy website is up and the documentation is being improved all the time.

Once upon a time, the Internets was about two things:

• Kittens
• Porn

Then, things changed, and the Internets became about these things:

• Kittens
• Porn
• Gambling

Then blogging happened, and things changed again. The Internets was transformed into a media concerned with:

• Kittens
• Porn
• Gambling
• People talking about their macs

Yes, for those still listening, I’m awaiting the delivery of a shiny new MacBook Pro.

As Steven D Levitt and Stephen J Dubmner’s book Freakonomics explains, Economics can be considered as nothing more than the study of how incentives affect people. Broadly split into three types – Financial (What’s it worth to me?), Moral (Is it the right thing to do?) and Social (Will society act in a bad way if I do this thing?) by understanding the incentives available to someone, you can understand how they will act in a given circumstance.

Taken further, Econmics allows you to alter the available incentives to alter how people act. Want people to reduce their carbon output? Well, you could explain how they’d save money by reducing their energy use (financial incentive). You could also create a groundswell of opinion stating that society views excessive energy use badly (social incentive, which could ultimately become a moral incentive).

A good example of changing incentives to change behaviour could be seen on BBC Breakfast this morning. Since 1998, using a mobile phone whilst driving has been illegal in Jersey. The simple act of making something illegal attempts to act as a moral incentive – with the punishment of a £500 fine acting as a financial incentive. On it’s own, this wasn’t enough. There wasn’t enough stigma associated with the act of using a mobile phone whilst driving for it to stop altogether. In the end it took a campaign, started by Paul Newman (no relation) and backed by the local Jersey Evening Post and more surprisingly mobile phone company Jersey Telecom. The resulting Hands Off campaign is attempting to create the social incentive – using a mobile phone when driving is unacceptable to society.

I spotted some “side by side photo’s”:http://www.engadget.com/2006/10/01/zune-vs-ipod/ of Apple’s latest 80GB iPod, and Microsoft’s Zune MP3 player.

For me, the decision about which one I’d rather have comes down to this – would I rather have a 5th generation product from Apple, or a 1st generation product from Microsoft?

First came the worlds first most modernist computing conference, “PoMoPro”:http://www.bcs-spa.org/pomopro.html, then came this great bit of post modern spam:

Are you looking for bulk email software to promote your online

business and increase your profits?

Seeking ways to promote your web presence?

Do you need bulk emailing software to send the ads?

If so, our e-mail marketing utilities can help you reach your goals.

Let’s ignore the fact that I often blog about blogging, shall we?

I’m in the process of saving up for a new Mac (probably a MacBook Pro) for photo editing. I’m seriously considering getting Apple’s “Aperture”:http://www.apple.com/aperture/ software. I know the history of the project has been “beset by problems(ThinkSecret – Aperture future in question as Apple axes bulk of team)”:http://www.thinksecret.com/news/0604aperture.html, however with things having stabilised (and the price being slashed), I was thinking of giving it a go.

Does anyone have any experiences with it? Should I consider it? Or should I wait for “Adobe Lightroom”:http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/lightroom/?

Is, to put it simply, *driving me nuts*

h3. Lovely Code Highlighting

Geshi was annoying me. Not driven by stylesheets, it uses some pretty bloated markup which makes it very hard for you to do much about changing how the code looks. That markup is being pushed from my server, increasing my bandwidth use and increasing page load time.

“dp.SyntaxHighlighter”:http://www.dreamprojections.com/SyntaxHighlighter/ is a Javascript library which performs syntax highlighting on the client side. It supports all the languages I’m likely to post code snippets in, and best of all it’s driven by CSS. To use it, I need to put my code sample in a textarea, like so:

   
   ... some code here ...
   

h3. Evil Textile

Textile is great – and evil. On the one hand, it makes writing post pretty easy – I can use Textile shorthand to quickly churn my useless drivel out. Textile performs its substitution on the server side – and it seems was clobbering my textarea blocks. To be fair it was trying to be helpful – it was escaping ‘<' characters as '<' and the like.

There are two ways which _should_ enable you to escape Textile – that is to turn off Textile formatting for a given block. Both wrapping your block in '==' or with 'notextile' tags should stop the formatting. This didn't seem to work for me. A search on the web (I'm avoiding using the verb 'Google' in case I get sued) showed that even in Textile friendly Textpattern it’s “far from simple”:http://forum.textdrive.com/viewtopic.php?pid=78277, however it should still work.

I followed all the instructions given – and indeed I can use ” to stop formatting of things like ‘(C)’ which normally turns in to a ‘(C)’ – to no avail.

If anyone out there can work out how to stop Textile formatting angle brackets (or can think of some other way for me to render a textarea with a specified name without Textile interfering) then I’m all ears.