What has now become an almost Annual event

This blog that is. For many and varied reasons I dropped off writing in this. I may begin again, I may add new exciting content.

Or I may not.

Anyway, the blog itself though the same Zope software as before is now running on an entirely more reliable host. More reliable because it isn't mine and I'm not having to adminster to it and because its not throttled to death by MSN at 11am every morning the way the objective2k.com server is.

What probably isn't connected yet is the automatic post to the Livejournal original journal.

Belgium Man, Belgium!

Now I know why Douglas Adams coined Belgium as the worst swear word in the Universe.

I've just come back from Fosdem, which I think was my fourth and very pleasant and interesting it was meeting people again and for the first time.

But in travelling up from Leiden to Brussels on the train we stopped at Brussels North and a couple of guys (some said 4), came up the corridor, dropped change distracting everyone and made off with my laptop bag with the two laptops in it.

So thanks for that.

Belgium!

A walk in the woods

As I said, yesterday we went for a walk in the Wyre Forest. Given the nature of our winters now, the ground is still waterlogged and the churning of mountain bikes can make some of the paths off the wide limestone roads a thick chocolate cream. Its when you walk in the woods at this time of year that you really want it cold and the ground as hard as iron.

We didn't see any deer in the Forest, which given the number of dogs roaming around isnt that surprising. Sometimes its the owners that need putting on leads.

This is one of the photographs I took and I've messed it about a bit with Photoshop, the rest of the set are completely untouched apart from the addition of the watermark with Imagemagick. If you bother to go look at them, yes they are dark, it was fairly gloomy and I shot them at ASA 60. I'm still pondering whether to warm them up a little.

Boxing Day and wound down

Apart from Agatha winding down waiting for the birds to come take the seeds from the bird table, we went for a walk in the Wyre Forest and just now we're preparing to go to the panto.

I'll post the photographs from the Woods tomorrow.

Five things

Pushed to do this by Andrea

• I was a Student Union President at 16.


• I have lived fewer days than I've been alive by the calendar.


• I have one book published, too remote of interest to be of any interest.


• My hair was, for a period during the reign of Pope Paul VI, longer than Sander Striker's, there are no known photographs to prove this.


• I was called Mick at one school I was at.

There are other facts so little known about me that even I don't know them, like the size of my big toes but that's probably not what you're looking for.

Applications are now closed...

The form where you could apply yourself to join the Beta test for The Venice Project™ is now closed. Those that have already applied should either have received their invites now or will be in the very near future.

This doesn't mean you can't get to play with it, but you will need a direct invitation either from someone involved directly in the project or an existing beta test user that have been granted their own set of invitations. This is pretty much similar to the way that gmail was given wider exposure by Google.

So if you have already applied don't panic, you will get an invite. If you haven't then being nice to me probably isn't going to work (like that's a surprise). Yes I will invite people when I have spare invitations but I won't acknowledge it here and they're scarce even for me (for good reason).

I've seen pleadings for invites in a few places, JOS and one Ebay auction (nothing to do with us), which just goes to show that this method does work. Yes of course we want to create a buzz about The Venice Project but at the same time we do need to manage the ramp up.

Webit, Webit, Webit

Monday night, in the Dutch Chinese Indonesian restaurant we have a habit of eating in, I may have contributed my own neolgism to the technical vocabulary. Or I may not.

I didn't purposefully invent it I just smushed two words together, web and editing and said webiting.

I haven't googled for it to see if it already exists, except in a poor spelling of Wabbit kind of sense, but it performs as a perfectly good verb.

So what does it mean to webit?

Well I was never happy with the term 'blog', this is a journal, I began it as a journal and not as a blog, I'm pretty sure when I started it the term didn't exist, even if it did its an ugly word and as an ugly word its just waiting for a presentable replacement.

So webiting is to purposefully editorialise on the web:

Webit
Webited
Webiting

Use freely. Donations welcome.

You are cordially invited...

So yesterday evening with the usual attendant last minute quivers and quobbles around releasing we pushed out 0.7.1 and started increasing the number of possible users by sending invitations.

Releasing software is 50% anticipation and 50% dread, so today will be slightly unreal. Even if it is 0.7.1 and not 1.0 in a lot of ways we have made a 1.0 just because an ever larger population of users is going to be exposed to it and are going to be expecting 1.0 delivery.

So its keeping feet on the ground time.

Oh and watch the press.

Desire Lines

J taught me something yesterday. We went to Worcester to shop and have something to eat before going to the ballet and parked up in the car park towards Shrub Hill which is just by the canal. Its a relatively new car park and there's a path that runs from the bridge over the canal down onto the towpath that passes by at the lowest point and the most direct path to the road for the pedestrian. And its fenced off, there is no way round except by the planned entrance.

If it wasn't fenced off then there's no doubt that there would be a well worn, if muddy in the wet, path tramped by all the people that used their heads and worked out which was the best route for them.

In Planning these are called Desire Lines, the routes that people prefer over and above whatever it is that Planners would themselves prefer.

Which started me thinking as we trundled around Worcester how that applies to software and to the interfaces we allow people to use.

Continue reading "Desire Lines"