Archive for December, 2007
So over the past two nights I’ve ended up on the tube after 2200. Last night was one of the latest tube trains on the jubilee line and I encountered the following:
A train carriage with myself, a can of Stella and a bottle of Coke:
A woman who had badly fitting Converse trainers and didn’t care:
A guy who found an innovative way to sit when there were no seats:
And tonight a new reason for things being broken in stations on the central line:
Full images can be found on my flickr page.
Tags: central, jubilee, london, underground
Having visited the family over Christmas I brought my laptop back down to my flat with me in case I found a use for it. The first use was on the train where I took advantage of National Express’ free wireless on the trains. It wasn’t too bad, aside from a couple of internet drops and a bit of lag; but on a train I was hardly expecting wonders and it certainly helped alleviate boredom.
Once back in my flat I figured it’d be sensible to connect it up to my wireless network provided by my BT HomeHub. This all went simply enough, but the connection (despite seemingly being strong) was never reliable; even when sat next to the wireless access point. This is something I had previously experienced with my Nintendo DS, and I’m putting it down to the mass of interference that is no doubt being given off by my TV/PC (with bluetooth adapter)/XBox/BT-Vision box.
Thinking about this a bit more I decided that chances are I’d never really want to use my laptop in the lounge anyway, and that therefore the only room that I would want to use it in would be the bedroom. I also remembered that I had a set of homeplug adapters that I got with my BT-Vision kit that I never found use for. Clearly this was a perfect opportunity to try them out.
They were remarkably easy to set up, plug them into power, plug the one in the lounge into the network and plug the laptop into the other. Done. Their box claims speeds of up to 200mbps, and while sceptical I’ve got nothing over 100mbps to test them with, and don’t really care as I’m only going to be using it for web anyway.
As a result I’ve also killed off my wireless, as I’m not likely to use it (and couldn’t with the signal dropping as much as it was), and now have a single wire going along the wall in my lounge until I get another 4-way to go with the rest of the stuff by the TV… still, beats having to run a wire all around my flat and does the job.
Tags: homeplug, networking, wireless
I was listening to Radio 1 a bit over the past few days, and on Boxing Day encountered a show counting down their selected Top 40 Movie Songs, listed here.
Some of the songs are fantastic (I turned in to hear Huey Lewis & The News - ‘Power of Love’ from one of my favourite films - Back to the Future), and while I enjoyed listening to it, but this is by no means a list that I’d agree with in its entirety.
To my mind the track from High School Musical shouldn’t have been in there. It was a straight to DVD film that clearly doesn’t merit its inclusion in this list. I’m not too sure about the inclusion of the South Park: Bigger Longer and Uncut track either; especially as high up the list as 23. Of course, that would probably have been replaced by a song from Team America: World Police had the show been broadcast at a later hour.
Aside from these inclusions that I disagree with, there’s a whole manner of songs that are - in my opinion - missing. Where was Steppenwolf - ‘Born to be Wild’ from Easy Rider? or Kenny Loggins - ‘Highway to the Dangerzone’ from Top Gun; both classic songs. Of course I’d have liked to hear anything from another of my favourite films - The Blues Brothers as well. I suppose that in order to make the songs selected appeal to a greater range of people they decided to sacrifice some classics.
Tags: bbc, films, music, radio 1
Following up from my blog on IM Applications, mulletron linked me to the KDE Windows Project installer, which was recently released in a pre-release state. I had a rummage around and also found the instructions.
I therefore decided to give this a look and have installed some of the things that I use on my KDE install at home. First up, naturally, was the kdenetwork package containing Kopete. The installer itself is quite simple, you tick the packages you want, and it goes off and grabs the right dependencies and whatnot. These packages are then downloaded into a folder of your choosing, installed (again into a folder of your choice) and away you go.
As the downloaded files included Qt, kdebase and kdelibs it took some time, but this was not unexpected (especially over the wireless connection on this machine).
In the previous post I did suggest that ideally I’d be after a portable solution. Unfortunately KDE doesn’t really fit this at the moment due both to being over 1GB in size, and also requiring environment variable settings (which obviously won’t be possible everywhere).
Once it was installed and I’d set up my environment variables I ran kopete.exe… and it crashed. So, reading the other information on the wiki, I ran kbuildsycoca4.exe by hand and then re-ran kopete.exe, and hey presto there was the Kopete GUI (along with a whole host of other apps that I tested such as kwrite and konqueror - although that had some issues browsing HTML it seems).
Unfortunately it seems that there was something wrong with the Jabber implementation, as I couldn’t add that account, and there seems to be something else that’s not quite there with Kopete as it seems not to want to connect to the MSN servers.
Obviousy with this being a pre-release version I wasn’t expecting great things. The fact that it runs at all is a great indication to me that there is a chance of this all being pulled together very soon. I’d also like to see the install being more automated, with setting environment variables and whatnot, but we’ll have to see.
Tags: kde, windows
Being at home for Christmas, I’m using my family’s Windows machine for my computing purposes and as such I don’t have access to my usual suite of applications. For instant messaging this is usually Kopete, which allows me to connect to a multitude of different IMP protocols (MSN and Jabber in my case) from in a single client.
On Windows I have access to the official MSN client, but this fails to meet my requirements of supporting multiple protocols. That and it looks atrocious, failing miserably to fit into the style of Windows XP (even with the tellytubby theme).
So, after some rummaging around for something else that supports the protocols I need and is free. Ideally I was also after something that could be made portable (via USB stick).
Trillian was the first port of call, having previously used it, but this was soon ruled out due to not supporting Jabber in the “Basic” version.
I then moved on to looking at portableapps.com for a USB stick friendly client. This provided me with two options; Miranda and Pidgin.
Miranda seemed to be very lightweight, especially in terms of graphics, but was immediately obtrusive with asking for details for specific accounts for protocols I’ve never used. Investigating the options menu I found a mass of options (even more than Kopete it seemed - and people often say KDE apps are overloaded in terms of options), but not one to have multiple connections to the same protocol. Investigation on this matter resulted in a suggestion to copy the plugin and do it that way; hardly ideal.
So I was left with Pidgin, which used to be called GAIM. Again I’d previously used this back when it was GAIM, so I knew what to expect. Of course GTK on Windows is hardly ideal, but it doesn’t look that bad, aside from the large font used in the contact list (or “buddy list” as Pidgin seems to want to call it). Alas this doesn’t seem to do it right either, with the groups on my contact list being arranged in a seemingly random order - with no way of changing that.
Maybe I’ve just been using Kopete for too long and have got used to it, but compared to the other applications I’ve tried over the past few days it’s got them beaten hands down.
All I can hope is that when KDE4 and Qt4 make their way into the wild, a Windows version of Kopete also follows.
Tags: kopete, miranda, pidgin, trillian, windows live
Buses are the worst form of public transport in existence. This is a fact that I had grown to accept and understand during my time living in Leeds, I knew that they weren’t going to show up on time (if they showed up at all) and I accepted it. Unfortunately I’ve since moved to London where the public transport system (tube and DLR anyway) works more often than not.
So, when I come to head back to Leeds this weekend, I have no problem navigating from my flat to King’s Cross, nor from there over the hundreds of miles back to Leeds; even going so far as to arrive early! Happy with the progress public transport had allowed me to make thus far I wandered out of the train station and to the bus stop. This is where the problems arose.
At the bus stop is a sign with the next three buses, none of which were the one I wanted. I consulted the timetable, and it said “at least every 10 minutes” so I figured that’d be fine. So ten minutes pass. Then twenty. Eventually the sign now displays three of the bus I want, with the ETA of “due”… great. Finally, after about thirty minutes they all show up at once.
Ah well, I did eventually make it here, but I bet it’ll only be worse on Thursday when I come to make the return journey.
Tags: argh, braindump, public transport
While at home this weekend I saw, for the first time, the third of the Spiderman films. For the most part it was the usual superhero good vs bad stuff… but one point really had me confused. Anyone who doesn’t want to find out something that doesn’t really impact upon the main plot and has yet to see the film may wish to stop reading now - as here be “spoilers”.
–
So yeah… why the fuck was there a random dance sequence in the middle of the film? It, and the preceding sequence with the prancing around on the street, was just stupid. The only reason I can think it was in there was comedy; it certainly had me laughing at the time.
Tags: braindump, random
As mentioned in a previous post I went to see the New York Giants take on the Miami Dolphins at Wembley Stadium in the first NFL regular season game to be played outside of North America. As such tickets were hard to come by, but I got lucky and managed to get four when the third batch went on sale to people who had pre-registered (having just escaped from the meeting at work mere minutes before they appeared online).
Tickets secured I was rather happy, especially as I’d managed to get some seats in row 16 behind an end zone - which just sounded awesome without having ever been to Wembley. I then found out that we could also get tickets to the tailgate party that they were doing before the game - so why not!
Eventually game day rolled round and Dave, Phil, Nariman and I made the journey to Wembley. Outside Wembley Arena (where the tailgate was held to avoid being completely washed out due to the wonderful English weather) was the “Big JT” robot version of Dolphin’s defensive end Jason Taylor and a HGV full of XBox360s to play Madden on. We however wandered inside where there were NFL challenges that you could take part in (passing, kicking, receiving) some little areas styled to the two cities and also a stage with a rather poor cover band playing. Even at this stage the atmosphere was good with everyone seemingly looking forward to the event itself.
Not long after the gates opened for the stadium itself we wandered inside, and finding our way out into the seating we realised just how close we were. With the front 5 rows or so being closed off (due to the limited visibility that you’d get being that low down at an American Football game) we were about 10 rows back, pretty much in line with the edge of the pitch and very near the tunnel through which the teams would later enter at the start of the game.
Having taken in the initial moment of going out into the seats we wandered back inside and experienced the worst part of the day; Wembley’s “food”. At £8 for a meal it was expensive and rather crap. The burgers came in a disguise with nicer bread so as to hide the rest being crap - and the chicken was very dry… but this was soon forgotten about as the pre-game show started. This involved a performance by The Feeling, the national anthems and of course the coin toss - where the biggest boo of the day was heard as John Terry was announced as a guest captain for the Giants, and then the biggest cheer as Lewis Hamilton was also announced to be there (whilst being shown to be tiny next to the players).
Kick off and the game ensued with the game being quite scrappy. We saw a number of dropped passes and a missed kick towards the start of the game - with the rain not helping anyone (I mean, who designs a stadium with a roof that doesn’t close all the way). Even without a particularly great set of play on the field the atmosphere was fantastic with the crowd really getting into it and numerous Mexican waves going round and round the stadium.
Half time arrived with a half-time show. No Janet Jackson wardrobe malfunctions or crazy stages as seen at the Superbowl here; instead we had the band of the Royal Engineers play - opening with the theme from Rocky. It was soon over though and the second half started… well… after the streaker who had dressed as a referee and run to the 50 to do some exercise had been removed from the field.
With the score being 13-3 to the Giants and the game drawing to a close it seemed that the Dolphins were destined to continue on their losing streak - but there was a glimmer of hope towards the end when Lemon found Ted Ginn Jr in the end zone at the other end of the stadium to bring them within three points with only 90 seconds or so to go. The on-side kick then followed… with the crowd (or at least us and those around us) hoping that they’d manage it and we’d get to see some overtime… but it promptly slid over the wet grass and out of bounds for a Giants possession and a series of knees, which also attracted boos from the crowd who wanted to see some more action.
We then wandered back through the crowd to the tube and headed home having had an awesome day. With any luck we’ll have another game at Wembley next season and I’ll get tickets to that too.
During this whole thing I managed to get some (rather crap admittedly) photos, which can be found in my Flickr set.
Tags: dolphins, giants, nfl, sports
So, this evening I watched I Heart Huckabees after I recorded it from More4 last night, and well… it’s possibly the strangest film I’ve seen in a while. This probably started off with me having no real idea as to what to expect, having only seen the trailer earlier on Saturday when I decided to record it on a bit of a whim.
During the watching of it though, I was often left sitting with a confused expression on my face as something crazy happens - like Jude Law’s character breast feeding another character in some sort of strange mental imagery that the character is conjuring up. It was just… weird.
It’s this strangeness, however, that means I’ll probably keep it around on the BT Vision box so I can watch it again in the future, perhaps to gain some further insight into just what the hell I spent the last two hours watching. Still, that’s for another time on another day methinks.
Tags: braindump, weird
So, after a few months of my old site being somewhat out of action and me being lazy - I’ve finally got around to sorting out a new domain and whatnot; resulting in this blog.
In the time since I last did anything blog-wise there’s been a whole host of things happen:
- I graduated
- I moved to London
- I started work
- I went to the New York Giants vs Miami Dolphins NFL game at Wembley
and probably a lot more that I can’t think of at the moment.
I’ll try and post some stuff on these things as I see fit in the near future, along with endeavouring to keep this up to date.
Tags: stub