Getting personal for a moment
Posted by stephen on Sunday, 31st July, 2005 @ 02:42
I was reading an entry on my boss' blog the other day and it set me thinking about how I intend to use this site to discuss what's happening with me.
So far, my posts have been 90% geek related, as that stuff is a big part of my life, let alone my career. But I would actually like to post stuff about more personal matters from time to time, and there's a number of reasons why.
Primarily there's a selfish motivation. It's useful to me in two ways. It gets my thoughts out of my head and onto the screen, and that can be surprisingly useful in itself. It also creates a permanent record of those thoughts that I think will be interesting for me to look back at in a couple of years time and reflect how I've changed.
I've had a glimmer of that recently, through both finding my old sites on archive.org and also reading the odd email from between 2 and 4 years ago. And I've found it incredibly interesting to see how my language, thoughts and feelings have changed in that short time.
So, why not just keep a private journal? Well, there's two parts to that. There's a good chance that eventually a little digital decay would set in, I'd lose interest in keeping it up, and the data would eventually disappear. Archive.org has already provided me with a look back that I'd not have been able to do otherwise. And that needs me to keep this stuff public.
And next up, I think it gives anyone reading this some insight into who I am, more so than my geeky ramblings about some new technology do. If you don't really care about who I am, that's fine too, I hope you find some useful product of my brain here.
But if you do have some tiny interest in knowing me, then what better way than following a few of the ups and downs of my life? Seeing how I react to the stuff that I have to deal with can probably give you way more insight into me than actually having a brief conversation could.
I'm often rubbish at opening up my true feelings to people, as my former partners will testify. So maybe this will help me do that. Who knows?
I'm not quite sure what this will become, whether I'll ever post my deepest, darkest thoughts on here. But I can say that I'm at least open to the possibility of doing so.
My job at the moment is all about community regeneration and getting people in touch with their neighbours. And in some small way this site feels like a way I can personally do that. Maybe not with my physical neighbours, but with the people who know me already to varying degrees, and to my virtual neighbours who might stumble across the site.
Maybe it's a tacky clich?, but wouldn't the world be a better place if we all understood each other a little better? It's easy to fear difference, but the fear stems from ignorance. If you know who I truly am beyond the labels of white, twenty something British gay geek, then what's there to be afraid of?
Or maybe I should just stop posting late at night!
The Desire for a Mini
Posted by stephen on Friday, 29th July, 2005 @ 02:16
Off they've gone again, Apple have updated the Mac Mini and just when David M sent me a link to TivoTool, a bit of software that makes the whole experience of watching stuff off my TiVo on a Mac entirely more pleasurable.
Add to this my recent move of a couple of now redundant LCD screens to my "boy box", also known as my spare room. Made redundant now that the G5 is attached to my lovely lovely 27" LCD TV (burglars out there know who to target, though you'll have to get through the cats first).
Add to that my recent habit of acquiring televisual content a little in advance of the usual UK showtimes, the resultant of which requires more than just your normal TV to display and I feel like the universe is leading me to the inevitable conclusion that I should purchase a Mac mini, set it up in my bedroom with one of the spare monitors and watch TV from multiple sources whilst laying in bed.
While it's arguable that I should have better things to do in bed, I still find the whole thing rather too exciting. Especially with the addition of another little toy Tom Coates recently brought to my attention on his blog, the EyeTV for DTT.
I'm currently bored of switching between AV inputs of my main TV from the Mac to the TiVo etc. With the addition of a proper remote control (and maybe bluetooth keyboard and mouse for completeness sake), TivoTool and some work with WebCore and AppleScript, maybe I can make some kind of unified interface to All My Stuff®.
There's a much cheaper alternative at hand however, at least for the bedroom box. With a little more leg work and some less attractive boxes, I already have a tiny mini-ITX PC laying around that could serve equally as well.
Incentive to develop some kind of cross platform TV interface application? Maybe. Incentive to spend lots of money? Definitely!
Thing is, we already have things like MythTV and Freevo, so maybe I should think about just trying to bring the TiVo data into them? Especially as there's a MythTV client for the Mac. Then again, wouldn't it be great if the interfaces where HTML driven, especially given the power of AJAX (not the kitchen cleaner mind you).
And at the same time as thinking about this, my mind is buzzing with thoughts of Social Software for Set Top Boxes. Those of you who know me will know this fits in rather nicely with my day job right now.
Our client platform is rather limited unfortunately, but a big part of me is dying to waste hours of my life developing a PC-based STB with interesting interfaces and applications.
I shall continue to dream. And maybe if the inspiration comes, make a little reality...
Get your voice on the internet
Posted by stephen on Friday, 29th July, 2005 @ 02:13
...using only your telephone, at smashingbloke.co.uk
Life/Site News
Posted by stephen on Monday, 25th July, 2005 @ 00:13
As you might notice if you're reading this from the website rather than the RSS feed, assuming anyone is reading this (someone post a comment sometime!), I've finally got around to doing some tiny alterations to the site's design.
We now have some classic freakymousemats.com purple/blue stuff going on, and a gay-looking logo (appropriate enough really). It's better than just the plain site, but not sure how I feel about it at the moment. What do you think? Leave a comment!
On matters related to websites, I've assisted in the launch of two more Plone sites this weekend, my Zope server is starting to fill up! First off, my lovely friend Matt B has (re)launched his personal site, mattbryant.co.uk. And second, my boss Richard, hot on the heels of launching his girlfriend's site last week has begun construction of his own site smashingbloke.co.uk.
Work's going to be busy this week, lots to get done, little bugs to fix, etc. So one of two things will happen. The little time I have left will involve the total rejection of computers, in which case I won't be posting much next week. Or, all the deep down tweaking of servers and fiddling with set top box interfaces will inspire me to come up with copious volumes of nonsense to write about here.
Either way, sounds like the blog's going to be a little dull next week!
Am BBQ King!
Posted by stephen on Sunday, 24th July, 2005 @ 23:46
Well, OK, so maybe that's an exaggeration, but I can report I've successfully thrown my very first barbecue. With thanks to Matt B for his construction of 'put pole A into slot C' type things and patience in the barbecue acquisition process. And also many thanks to Matt B, Kat & Tom for being willing guinea pigs, risking life and stomach, and putting faith in my abilities. Luckily their faith was rewarded (by luck I feel) and everyone survived (I hope, not really checked in with them since!).
So, if it stops raining, many more BBQs to come this summer! Oh, and a big thanks to my dad who'll probably never read this, but whom without his help I wouldn't have a garden fit for the job (think tropical rain forest of grass and weeds). Though I'm not sure the cats are too happy with it as they can no longer stalk around the undergrowth and hide from potential prey. I'm sure they'll develop new tactics before long though.
And with new sofa coming tomorrow (thanks again to Matt B for his help in dispatching of the old one), I've got the drive to actually sort out the whole downstairs area of the house, make it presentable and have people over more often, yay!
Tasteful dinner parties, etc, here I come. Hopefully without any blue string soup though, but don't hold your breath.
This Week's Music
Posted by stephen on Friday, 22nd July, 2005 @ 00:44
This week, I have been mostly listening to...
Actually, it's been a couple of weeks since I bought these now, got the whole albums from iTunes. I love iTunes, and my iPod, and my Mac, and Apple. Oh dear. I don't want to think about how much of my money they now have and will continue to receive. Might as well set up some kind of automatic payout from my wages every month. Think they do direct debits?
Anyway, from the album Back to Bedlam, by the lovely James Blunt, we have...
Tears and Rain which is rather beautiful, if a little regretful, as with most of the tracks I've been enjoying from this album, and I have to admit, I've been singing along in the car to them.
The ubiquitous, yet no less great You're Beautiful, currently number one I hear (I really should be more in touch with these things), a sad little song about a life that never will be. And on to a song about a life that will never be the same again, Goodbye My Lover. That one has a lot of resonance for me, very end of relationship depression type stuff, but wonderful none the less.
Well, I was going to mention Royksopp too, but it's late, so I'll cover them tomorrow.
Today's Roundup
Posted by stephen on Wednesday, 20th July, 2005 @ 18:26
From earlier... I believe I referred to this as 'brilliant'... http://www.somethingwrong.co.uk/crazy_frog_baseball/ (from The Register)
And I've blatantly stolen two things from the site Richard's working on at the moment, the random photo portlet on the left here, and the webcam stream from where we work. You can find that on my About > Work page.
I really should get around to populating the whole about section soon. It's just not that easy to talk about myself, contrary to popular belief.
Also on my to do list is some amount of design for the site, though I'm quite liking the minimalism it has now, would like to get a little of my own styling in here, make it look less generic Plone site, come up with a better logo, make it a favicon, etc. No doubt it'll happen eventually.
Alternative to Spring-loaded Folders
Posted by stephen on Wednesday, 20th July, 2005 @ 18:22
There's was a rather interesting idea highlighted on Slashdot today. If you've ever dragged and dropped files about the place on Windows, you'll know about the frustrations of having to open up the window you want to get something from and the window you want to move/copy it too, and line them up so you can see both to do the drag'n'drop. Please correct me if this has changed lately, I'm not really a Windows user these days!
This methodology tends to result in minimal use of drag'n'drop. In fact, most of the way Windows is designed inhibits this rather intuitive interface concept. Instead, you get around it by finding what you want, cutting or copying it, finding the destination, then pasting it. Personally I think that's a little kludgy.
Apple's solution has for many years is the idea of spring loaded folders. I believe KDE and GNOME have inherited this too. Pick up the item(s) of interest, drag it over the hard disk icon, or any of the other shortcuts available, and in second, the folder will spring open, and you can root down to your destination and let it go.
It's surprisingly quick and easy, despite needing a lot of mouse work, it certainly feels very intuitive to me.
Which brings me to this new idea, fold'n'drop windows. Certainly seems like an interesting idea, not sure how natural it would feel. Have a look, there's a demo video, needs DivX plugin or Mplayer or similar.
A Brief Mention of Plone
Posted by stephen on Wednesday, 20th July, 2005 @ 18:21
Well, I've had great fun assembling this site in Plone, getting to know my way around it very well now. And just like when I learned Linux, and then when I started using a Mac, everything new I learn impresses me more.
And just like the Mac, I've managed to pass the bug on. I sat my boss in front of it at lunchtime and by this evening he's produced a website! Introducing nicolapritchard.co.uk (who isn't my boss, confusingly).
So, with him now loving it and our product website now built on it, we're hopefully going to change another big part of the project to using it instead of the dreadful phpNuke. Woot!
Upcoming Entertainment
Posted by stephen on Wednesday, 20th July, 2005 @ 18:17
A couple of things have been brought to my attention today, and it's all very exciting.
Starting with the return of Absolute Power to BBC2, Thursday nights at 10pm. The first series of this was absolutely brilliant, Stephen Fry and John Bird put on a fine performance as the founders of a large London PR company. So absurd yet completely believable. You must watch this! (thanks for pointing it out Dave)
And finally, the long awaited release of Star Wrek: In The Pirkinning, a low budget, high effects little spoof sci-fi number from Finland. Star Trek meets Babylon 5. The trailers are excellent, available to download now. And the film itself will be released on the 20th August, can't wait. In the spirit of the creative commons, it'll be available to download for free as well as buy on DVD. How great is that?! The production of a full feature film with massive effects, a tiny budget and most of it being shot in someone's living room is truly inspiring.
Off-the-shelf mindset
Posted by stephen on Wednesday, 20th July, 2005 @ 18:16
Carrying on from my previous post, I thought it'd be interesting to talk about how my mindset has changed in the last year with regards to building websites like this one.
Whenever I've wanted to build a website, or any web-based system before I've always felt the urge to write my own systems from scratch, be it in PHP or Python. I'd look around at what was available to do the job for me, but always feel like anything off the shelf would leave me in a straight jacket of either working within the limits of the original developer's ideas, or worse, working within someone else's code to make it do what I want!
I think that may be more of a reflection on what kind of programmer I am. I really don't like working on other people's code, perhaps because I've learned everything I know by myself so haven't really picked up the team work coding skills that I might have in university.
At the same time, I don't think I'm a born coder. I'm far too easily bored by doing the same thing all day! I've always found setting up servers, etc to be way more fun.
In February I changed jobs. I've gone from mostly coding all day long to mostly poking at servers and all kinds of other stuff. I hardly code at all these days, except bits of PHP and SQL to build interfaces for set top boxes and a few other things.
And an interesting thing has happened. When the time came to build the website for the current project I'm working on, the idea of writing pages of code to do it was really unappealing. Instead I revisited Plone and had a play with it, downloaded some modules to add some functionality and generally loved it. It's just like configuring a server!
That brings us to the restoration of this site, and so the natural choice for me was to use Plone again. I feel liberated! I've always accepted the Linux kernel is the way it is without wanting to write on myself, so why shouldn't I accept a prebuilt web publishing system?
So, I think I've concluded from this that I've found my natural role with technology, I'm an integrator, not a creator. Give me a challenge and I'll find all the building blocks and glue them together. And that makes me happy!
Though this does leave me with a sense that I'm not creating anything these days. And that's a big part of why I've brought the site back.
The Return
Posted by stephen on Wednesday, 20th July, 2005 @ 18:16
Today marks the return of freakymousemats.com and the senseless musings of one Stephen Robert Newey.
So I've decided that it was about time to bring back my website, and more importantly, to start keeping a blog again. Everyone's at it these days, so it only seems right, travelling in the circles I do, that I should have one too.
What's encouraged me more than that is that I've been reading my site from a couple of years ago, thanks to Wayback at Archive.org and it was really rather interested to reminisce about what was happening with me at the time.
I've also been feeling the need to express myself creatively lately, and this seems like a good place to start. For the first time ever, I'm using prebuilt software to keep this blog (Plone), which is really a reflection on how much mindset and professional life has changed. I'll probably go into that at some point here. Mostly I'm hoping it'll mean that I'll actually keep the site up this time as my focus is on the content rather than the technology and design.
We'll see how it goes!
