The ongoing struggle

I’ve not long got back from colo’ing the new server, obstler. Tonight was the only night I could do it before next week, and Graham very kindly offered to give me a lift from home at 6pm, aiming to be there by 8pm.

I left dayjob early and rushed home but unfortunately Graham got held up in bad traffic coming across London and it was more like 7pm when he got to me. The M25 anticlockwise was pretty clear though so despite my mere presence breaking the satnav and making the indicator relay go into overdrive (*click*click*click*click*click*click*click*click*click* …. *click*click*click* … *click*click*click*click* ………… *click*click*click*click* ……………. *click*click*!), we made good time and arrived at about 8.30pm.

As it happened, Andy Millar who was also colo’ing his server today had had some technical difficulties and so things were running late anyway. In fact we had some time to wait around while that was finished off. It turns out that his HP power supply was drawing 1.1A, which went down to less than half that when replaced with a Sea Sonic one. I shall have to investigate that for myself, as it looks like it would save me about £20/month per server!

obstler was pretty quick to colo, then we headed off to some Chinese restaurant near Canary Wharf Pier. As usual I became totally disoriented by the twisty turns around that place.

I couldn’t remember exactly when my last direct train from Waterloo was, but thought it might be 23:50. It was actually 23:58 so I made it with plenty of time, got home about 00:45.

A good night’s work; won’t be able to finish configuring obstler or doing much of anything useful with it for a couple of days, but really glad it’s finally in.

Thanks again to Graham for giving me a lift with the server!

Jake, absolutely! But there are far too many people with illogical ideas about the sanctity of corpses to stand for it, I fear. As Niven suggested, will we see this first applied to prisoners, and then the death penalty for jaywalking?

My MP, Alan Keen, finally wrote to me after about 6 weeks to say he had signed Early Day Motion 1155 on public photography. fanks mister! \o/

A cynical man may suspect that all labour MPs have been instructed to make nice after their local election hammering, and otherwise ignored communications from constituents have been revisited.

Just in case you are unaware, a planet in the blogging context is an aggregation of content from a list of individual sources such as blogs, journals, articles etcetera. Some examples of planets in no particular order:

• Planet Debian
• Planet Ubuntu UK
• Planet BitFolk
• Planet SysAdmin

Over the last couple of weeks there have been some heated words on various planets about what is acceptable content for that planet. I don’t run any of those planets so I’m not going to comment on specifics. I’ve also seen people who operate planets asking for people to join them, but only if they will post on a particular topic — in fact I’ve recently seen a request on a mailing list, which itself receives off-topic personal posts from members of its community, for bloggers who will only write on-topic posts on that community’s planet. And I’ve been added to planets which then later ask me to obey posting guidelines.

To me all this is very odd. I personally read various planets because I want to know more about the people who are in those communities and what they are up to. I appreciate the on topic posts they write but often I appreciate the slightly more personal ones even more. I like to see what people are interested in and what their values are, so to then restrict the posts to a particular topic to me seems to be counter-productive.

For the one planet that I do run, when I ask people if I can add them to it I sometimes receive the response, “Do you want me to use a tag?” or, “I’m sorry I don’t have a tag set up for this, you might get a lot of non-technical posts.” Great! If I was going to have expectations over what you are writing about then I would expect to be paying you to be a technical author for me. I don’t want that; I’m interested in what you are about.

Someone else said something like “in this day and age we have the technology to have the aggregator provide custom feeds with some people removed, and this is the way forward in dealing with people you really can’t stand to read”. I’m paraphrasing that, and I don’t remember who said it or where, but I couldn’t agree more. To me the planet is a view in to the community it represents and being a member of that community is usually all that is required to have a feed included. It does not mean that the planet operator endorses everything they say, that the reader should agree with their viewpoints or that the reader will find them an interesting person! We are presumably all grown-ups here and we can decide what to read or not.

If you are a paid blogger or if you want to make a name for yourself writing articles about a given subject then fair enough, I can understand why you might want to mark only certain articles for publication to a certain audience.

I don’t write much of value or anything contentious. I don’t write much at all, except links to strange things. I haven’t ever had a planet operator tell me that something I wrote wasn’t appropriate for their planet, but that’s probably because I’m not syndicated to many of them. But I would definitely ask to be removed before I would agree to tag posts.

Is it ever healthy to run an aggregator of personal blogs and then expect to exert editorial control over that?

I’m getting increasingly disturbed by reports of members of the public being harassed whilst innocently taking photos. I’m going to start keeping a list of links to this sort of thing here.

• 2008-05-14, Los Angeles, California, USA
• 2008-05-13, Spokane, Washington, USA
• 2008-05, Los Angeles, California, USA
• 2008-03-24, South Shields, UK

See also:

• Write to your MP - Early Day Motion on public photography (UK)
• A short guide to photographers’ rights in the UK

• Mad hair thing (via Why, That’s Delightful!)
• “Luckily, the butter knife that became lodged in his head did not pierce skull”

Perhaps this is widespread knowledge but I didn’t know about it, and in the short time since dg pointed it out to me I have been loving it, so I thought I’d mention it here.

A few days ago I made stupid typos twice in a row in emails of a professional nature that I really shouldn’t be making typos in. It’s easy to say that I should be spending an extra couple of minutes to proofread, but it’s also easy to forget to do that. I commented on IRC that perhaps it was time for me to sort out spell checking in mutt and / or vim. Straight away dg said:

<dg> grifferz: just use vim 7 and:
     au BufNewFile,BufRead /tmp/mutt* set ai et tw=70 spell
<dg> or something
<grifferz> dg: I have vim7!  and this appears to work.
           thanks for the tip
<dg> vim's spelling support is pretty nice

vim 7 is standard in Debian Etch so really not all that new. And yes, it really is very nice. Here’s what I added to .vimrc:

set spelllang=en_gb
set spellfile=~/.vim/spell.en.utf-8.add

au BufNewFile,BufRead /tmp/mutt*  setf mail
au BufNewFile,BufRead /tmp/mutt*  set ai et tw=68 spell

Words that it thinks are misspelled are highlighted in red. z= when over the word to bring up a list of suggestions. zg to permanently add the word to the spellfile.

• Shame on RSA
• Shame on Virgin Media

“Tee hee! Boris has had an affair! Arf! Now he’s offended the whole of Liverpool! Crumbs! He used the word “picaninnies”! Yuk yuk! He’s been caught on tape agreeing to give the address of a reporter to a friend who wants him beaten up! Ho ho! Look at his funny blond hair! HA HA BORIS LOL!!!! WHAT A LEGERND!!!!!!”

(OK, the Gogol Bordello guy is from Ukraine not Poland but I am lacking in inspiration at this time)

At mbm/Mel/Tom’s triple (yeah, really) leaving drinks Friday night, I was talking to Kvik about his forthcoming wedding. It went a bit like this:

Me: When is it you’re getting married?
Kvik: August
Me: Wow, not long to go…
Kvik: Yeah! I asked everyone if they wanted to come but only mbm replied…
Me: What!? I never heard about this. Where did you say this?
Kvik: In [obscure IRC channel]
Me: People go days without looking in there!
Kvik: Meh.. you want to come?
Me: Yeah! Of course!
Kvik: Excellent!
Me: Great..! Well, as long as it’s in London..
Kvik: No, it’s in Poland!
Me: [pause] Ah.

Today I’ve examined this to be sure it wasn’t just the effects of alcohol but, well, why not? So I guess I am going to Poland in August.