Just a heads-up that I’m moving my feeds to Feedburner to get a better understanding of my readership, it should be seemless if you’re RSS reader impliment the basic HTTP redirects etc. If however you do notice problems please let me know and I’ll try to fix them.
I’ll post more later on about my experiences using Feedburner so far I’m quite pleased as it seems to be answering a question I’ve had for ages, more later.
So everyone knows Google released their IM System today based on Jabber. The client is a bit low on features and the audio isn’t great.
More on this when they start talking with more jabber servers, till then it’s Just Another Jabber Server. I want to run a corporate Jabber server with my own security policy and encrypted links, but people should have the option to speak to Google Talk users etc if they wish.
What’s more interesting is that they’ve recently allowed you to set your own From address on gmail, this is great news and something I would have thought would get more press.
Just click Settings -> Accounts and there should be an option to add more From addresses.
If you then compose a mail you get to choose the From address. It is pretty nifty but does not change the envelope address, just the From header so its not 100% ideal but I can understand why they did it that way.
One step closer to being able to use gmail as a primary mail interface.
Or not, well perhaps a tiny little bit of fame. Recently two of my images were chosen to be used on other websites.
One is a UK based support site for the national schools network, they used my image of a Lancaster Bomber dropping 1 million poppies on a blog entry about the VE and VJ day celebrations in London.
The other is by The Digital Photography Weblog who chose my image of some deck chairs as their Digital Photo of the Day for 17th August 2005
Both were very kind to let me know they were using my image and gave due credit, exactly as required by the Creative Commons license I put my content under.
I have had a number of cases in the past where my images were just blatantly stolen and people claiming they took them, or worse even direct linking to them on my server. A bit of mod_rewrite magic replacing those images for visitors to their sites usually do the trick nicely for getting them removed, but I do wish I don’t have to resort to this kind of thing. Kudos to the above sites for doing things right.
I’ve taken up cycling again, its been a while since I last cycled anywhere – about 8 or 9 years – and I’m surprised to see I havn’t lost much in speed etc. I manage to do 20 km on a MTB in just over an hour and that’s with stopping and taking 99 photos too. Usually I average around 25 to 30km/hour which seems to be a pretty good speed to get in an urban setting on small back roads and paths.
I have one of these little bicycle computers but I find them a bit limiting, they are only really good for on the spot checks, no good for gauging improvement over time. So last night I took the GPS with and imported the data into OziExplorer which gives me much better view of what is going on. I can see average speeds between specific points of the route, elevation maps and with some add on tools even rate of climb/descent. I’ll store a track file for each time I go cycle and it should give me a good way to gauge if there are any improvement over time in my abilities.
The upshot of having the cycle is that I can get places at times that I wouldn’t have had the ability to get too before, last night for instance I got some great shots along the South Bank on the Thames Path.
For an idea of what OziExplorer gives me here is a screen shot of the track and also speed over distance. Click on it for a full size version.
I’m always intrigued by the classifications of movies on the websites of cinemas here, you can almost use them to decide what to see never mind the titles of the movies.
From the movies currently showing at my local cinema:
Contains strong bloody violence
Contains moderate fantasy violence and scary scenes
Contains mild bad language
Contains strong language, horror and violence
Contains very strong language and drug use
Contains strong bloody violence
Contains moderate language and sex references
Contains moderate fantasy violence and scary scenes
Contains mild comic action violence
Contains one scene of drug use
All the ‘strong bloody violence’ movies are on my list of movies to watch, great.
FreeBSD today released version 5.4. This looks like a pretty good release mostly for some changes to userland tools and some firewalling bits, some of the highlights for me are:
There are a whole bunch of other interesting changes, be sure to read the Migration Guide before attempting to upgrade.
