Danny O'Brien's piece about living on the edge set me thinking about data that I have stored out there, in 'the cloud'. For the purposes of this exercise data that is stored with my employer because they choose to have it that way (bug reports, expense claims, ...) is ignored, even though I do cache or backup some of that locally (expense reports mostly).

• Flickr has a couple of hundred of my images, but they are backed up at home. I only use Flickr as a way of publishing pictures, so losing access to them wouldn't be bad. Arguable more valuable are any comments or group postings that I've made or received. These aren't backed up anywhere other than Flickr.

• last.fm knows about a few thousand music tracks that I've played over the last five years. It would be annoying to lose this, but not serious.

• Tripit and Dopplr both have information about my recent and near future trips. All of this data is replicated elsewhere, either in its' original (less convenient) form or in my calendar.

• Google Calendar holds both my own and some family appointments in four calendars. This is my most used web application, and it's not one to which I am ever likely to have the source, though I can get my data out easily (I already do this for backup purposes). Having spent an hour looking for an open source alternative, Zimbra comes closest. Part of me still pines for DateBk5.

• Google Reader knows my list of feeds and how they are categorised. It wouldn't be terrible to lose this - I've used other feed readers in parallel with Google on occasion and could survive.

• Twitter, identi.ca, Tumblr, delicous and others also have a small chunk of my data, but nothing that I couldn't live without (or easily replicate, in the fine example of identi.ca).

In almost all of these instances it's all about convenience. Calendaring is the notable exception, as the others can die and I will hardly notice. Scanning around the alternatives suggests that producing good centralised web applications is hard. Producing good distributed web applications is unlikely to be simpler.

When these good distributed (web) applications have been developed, getting them deployed properly will not be simple. The most significant attraction to me of hosted services like Google Apps is that I don't have to keep my copies of Postfix, dovecot, spamassassin, etc. patched, up to date and perfect. The Zimbra desktop edition is an interesting answer to this, but it's not necessarily to everyone's taste.

Oh, you'll note that this weblog migrated back from Blogger to my own machine - I'm trying to find the edge.

[[!img Error: Image::Magick is not installed]]

Louis had some trouble with the computer at school yesterday. Apparently Windows locked up a couple of times - who knew? At least he got a sticker out of it.

A couple of days ago I gave in to a week of pressure and went out to buy a new colour ink cartridge for our printer. It took a week of pressure because I object to the prices that I'm charged for inkjet ink, but even more I resent the overall structure of the industry that is able to keep the prices so high.

In this specific case we needed to copy a couple of forms before sending them off in the post and print out a simple letter. In both cases only black-and-white (re)production is required, so why does the fact that I'm out of colour ink matter? The printer has separate colour and black cartridges, but refuses to do anything if either of them is exhausted.

Once I bought "clone" cartridges to try and keep the price down. I was cautious and only bought one colour and one black, on the basis that if it worked out well it would be easy to acquire more (by mail order). The colour cartridge seemed to work okay - maybe the quality wasn't quite as good as the originals, but very little of our printing is sensitive to having perfect reproduction. After a couple of weeks the printer complained that the printing head was "clogged" and needed to be replaced. Whilst it's not possible to definitively associate this with the clone cartridge, it's the only time it's ever happened during the five or more years of ownership. Back to branded cartridges (As a side note, some careful attention with damp kitchen paper and ink-spattered hands got things moving again.)

On another occasion a newly inserted colour cartridge was determined to be unacceptable, as it was "out of date". It is entirely possible that the cartridge was a couple of years old, though I'd have been surprised if this was true.

The printer, an HP OfficeJet d125xi, was originally chosen because it had some desirable seeming qualities:

• duplex printing, to save paper,
• sheet fed copying,
• network connectivity (with a bought later on Ebay module),
• two paper feeders, allowing nice and nasty paper to be loaded at the same time,
• separate colour and black ink, so that they can be replaced at different times.

It was a moderately expensive purchase at the time and has been unpopular for most of its' life. It's large, taking up a lot of room, and noisy. It's very difficult to get the paper lined up perfectly straight, so often the output is crooked on a page. Worse, the printer can only image over a subset of the A4 page, so something at the top or bottom of the page is often truncated. I've always regretted not choosing the version that included FAX capabilities, particularly over the last couple of years when I've been working at home (Kinko's in Hemel Hempstead charged me around twenty quid to send twenty pages to a US fax number once).

On the plus side, having easy access to a colour photocopier has been wonderful. Kids' homework often takes the form of a couple of sheets of A4 and it's now easy to copy them before they're mangled by the first attempt at completion. With good paper and a new ink cartridge we've had some nice prints from digital photographs even though that's not really the strong point of the machine.

Overall, it's time to replace it with something new. The requirements are:

• colour printing - photo quality is not a requirement, but it would be nice,
• single sheet flatbed copier - the sheet-feed copy facility in the current printer has been used maybe twice, so it's not really needed. I suspect that we could live without colour copying,
• FAX capability,
• built-in network connectivity - no add-on or external boxes required. Wireless is interesting, as it's much easier to choose where to put the printer,
• separate ink cartridges for black and colour - multiple different colour cartridges sounds good, but how does it work out in practice?
• the printer should be able to print or copy a black and white document if no colour cartridges are inserted,
• the device should be smaller than the current behemoth.

Any suggestions? I'm toying with the idea of buying a small "all in one" mono laser printer and supplementing it with a cheap colour inkjet, given that most of our printing would be fine on the laser and they appear to be significantly cheaper to run.

Printer ink itself appears to be one of the few true niche consumables of computing - there's nowhere else where I'm forced into a monopolistic relationship with a provider. Is there a viable way out of this?

Testing the emacs g-client interface to blogger.

Paolo Valdemarin Weblog: "Introducing Ring, the social application to rule them all."

Nice idea, particularly the application icon

US says it has right to kidnap British citizens: "AMERICA has told Britain that it can kidnap British citizens if they are wanted for crimes in the United States.
A senior lawyer for the American government has told the Court of Appeal in London that kidnapping foreign citizens is permissible under American law because the US Supreme Court has sanctioned it."

What's the phrase about power and corruption? Ahh, there it is.

rentzsch.com: apple's antiCAPSLOCK: "Unique among the rest of the keys, Caps Lock doesn’t activate immediately upon strike. There’s a very small time window — perhaps a quarter of a second — where if you release the key inside the window, the keystroke is ignored. "

On the new Apple Bluetooth keyboard, which is otherwise wonderful, this is driving me nuts, particularly because I remap Caps Lock to Control and use emacs a lot.

Nikkor updates 18-55 kit lens with VR: "...the lens is set to hit the shelves for around US $199 (£179.99 / €270.00)..."

(Via Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com).)

Remind me again of the justification for the markup when selling things in the UK?

Google tells me that 1 U.S. dollar = 0.489141068 British pounds, so $199 converts to £97.34. Not bad if you can get away with it.

Photographers and their legal rights: "A) You have the right to take a photograph where ever you are, though you must remain aware if you are on private property (like in stores or malls) as this will require special permission. "

(Via fotohacker.)

That's a definition of "right" that I'm not familiar with. If I have a right to take a photograph, why would I need to ask for permission?

As John and others already announced, our work of the last couple of years finally made it into OpenSolaris Nevada.

A couple of days before the integration I spent a couple of hours talking to some of Sun's Solaris engineers about what they were getting. You can get the slides here, and should feel free to ask questions.

After some fiddling around when upgrading to Gutsy, I broke Wordpress. Given how little I use it, I gave up and imported some of the old entries into a Blogger account. At some point I'll go back, find the rest and bring the comments as well.

The post today included a survey from Ian Oakley and Sarah Son, my Parliamentary Candidate for Watford and Conservative Spokesman for Oxhey, respectively. Broadly speaking, it seems to be an attempt to determine my opinion on a small number of issues, so that they can be parroted back to me in the right order. Presumably that’s the new style of “responsive” politics at work, but some of the choices are difficult. For example:

Please number the following issues in order of importance for you personally, with number 1 being ‘most important’:

• NHS
• Oxhey Pollution/Congestion
• Local Building Developments
• The Environment
• Road Safety
• Development of Taggart’s site opposite Bushey Station
• Crime and Anti-Social Behaviour
• Road and pavement maintenance
• Education
• Council Tax - value for money
• EU Treaty Referendum
• Other (please specify)

How is it possible to rank something like “Development of Taggart’s site opposite Bushey Station” against “The Environment” in a sensible way? If I put the Taggart’s site option first, am I saying that I’m in favour of the proposed development or against it?

Is there a difference between "Solaris Networking Strategy" and "OpenSolaris Networking Strategy"? At the moment the answer to that is probably "What is the OpenSolaris Networking strategy?", but I think that it bears some thought.

Moreover, I think that the two probably are different, perhaps even should be different. Solaris Networking strategy is tied closely to the general aims of Sun Microsystems as a business which means that it is strongly influenced by hardware developments at Sun (Neptune, ...), partnerships (Microsoft, AMD, Intel, ...) and relative priority decisions (IPv6 improvements over Bluetooth support, for example). The group of people that actively participate in OpenSolaris might have a completely different set of priorities based on alternative interests (both business derived and those of a more personal nature). Of course, many of the interest areas will be common - everyone wants better throughput, reduced latency, improved standards compliance, etc. Even work that has a particular focus for one business area tends to improve others as well.

In thinking about the OpenSolaris Networking community, it's difficult not to try and thing of ways to improve the level and quality of participation, particularly from people not currently employed by Sun. The networking-discuss list, for example, has worked well as a forum to support both new and experienced OpenSolaris and Solaris users. I think that it's been less successful as a place to discuss the detailed workings of the current and future implementation, though some of that has happened. A couple of networking projects have spun off separate project specific discussion lists, in large part to avoid the more "general" discussion that takes place on networking-discuss. Whilst that may make sense for the project team in the short term it leads to fragmentation of the community, as important conversations take place in smaller groups.

Perhaps what we should do is introduce networking-code for the nitty-gritty details and encourage its' use by all of the project teams for in-depth discussions. This would be easy to arrange from a technical perspective, though we'd have to carefully manage a transition and be sure that the intended use of the various lists is clearly described.

There's no doubt that developing for OpenSolaris has some barriers right now, including the lack of a publicly usable bug-tracking database and the fact that the "main" source tree is still TeamWare based, replicated to Mercurial. There is active work in many of the problem areas, but I worry that some of these significant barriers are hiding smaller problems that we could work on in parallel. For the OpenSolaris Networking community, what might these be? It's obvious that we should be producing more documentation about how the system works, but what parts should be prioritised? Improving the stability level of APIs is another good candidate, but which APIs are the most important? Which are we missing altogether?

Yesterday saw us at the VUE cinema in Garston to see "Mr. Bean's Holiday", the choice of a six year old for his birthday outing. The film was much as you would expect - slapstick comedy well executed with some nice touches. Either you like Bean or you don't, it's probably that simple.

Whilst standing around in the entrance hall I was struck at how badly it has been "made over". It happened a while ago, perhaps as long as a couple of years, but I'd never really stood there and thought about it. In the past the entrance hall had a bunch of screens showing clips from current and upcoming films, posters, etc. There actually seemed to be some kind of atmosphere that was part of the whole "going to the cinema" experience.

Now the ceiling has been removed, so there's a room between ten and fifteen metres high with nothing above but black painted walls, ceiling and air-conditioning equipment. All of the screens have been removed, as have most of the posters. The four sides of the room are:

• The entrance, where there's a box office which is almost always empty (with an A4 printed sign saying "Please buy tickets at the concession stand"),
• A new coffee bar with ten tables or so,
• The "pick and mix" range - around two hundred different types of sweets selected by kids at random until the box weighs enough to cause the parents to swear at the cost (4.50ukp in this instance),
• The concession stand, which is where you buy drinks, popcorn, chocolate, etc.

Overall the whole place is exceptionally dingy and boring. There's no sense of being anywhere special at all. Soul-less.

Virgin need to fly to more places - getting to Irving, Texas required the use of American Airlines for my first time ever.

Things didn't start out well. American don't allow online check-in for international flights, so I joined the back of the queue at their desks at Heathrow. The queue moved reasonably quickly, so it was only thirty minutes or so. Once at the desk things improved, as I was allocated (on request) an exit row seat, something that costs extra on Virgin.

The in-flight video service on the 777 to Chicago was pretty poor when compared to Virgin and the food was much the same (read "mostly awful"). The flight attendants were also a little surly, particularly with a Romanian family who spoke little or no English.

The 777 from Chicago to Fort Worth was mostly empty, resulting in the opportunity to stretch out across five seats and get a couple of hours sleep - relative bliss.

Hopefully the return journey will be as uneventful (though it's snowing in Chicago as I write...).

Update: The snow falling in Chicago was light - no ground covering. The flight back from Chicago to LHR was great - three seats to spread out across meaning that I actually slept for a few hours. That's not happened in years. Oh, and I noticed today that Virgin will start flying to Chicago O'Hare later in April

I was reminded again this morning about how annoying it is that Google Calendar doesn't have any useful timezone support.

It seems that Google does have employees spread across the globe, so how do they cope?

As an aside, is there a decent web-based calendar that does have reasonable timezone support? Roughly what I need is:

• The ability to associate a timezone with an event (including recurring). This specifies that the event occurs at the specified time in that timezone (i.e. 8pm Pacific time).
• The ability to set the current timezone of the viewer.
• The ability to display a list of events from the perspective of the viewer, including noting that the events are in a different timezone).
• Convenient, but not essential for me, would be the ability to indicate that an event is timezone neutral - it occurs at a time relative to the viewer's local timezone.

Both iCal and Evolution manage reasonably well in these requirements, but neither are web-based, obviously.

Sam is troubled:

I'm troubled by the A couple of things are lost though statement. Excerpting and filtering are meant to be one of the strengths of Venus. Can anybody explain more fully the feature that is missing?

There are two reasons that they're now missing:

1. I'm really pushed for time at the moment. Planet Sun has been mostly broken for several months and getting something working seemed important.
2. From the architecture diagram I understood that filtering happens before an item is placed in the cache. This seems to run contrary to the filtering that I implemented for Planet, and suggests that I'd need a cache per output site (i.e. distinct caches for each of filter/java, filter/solaris, category/java and category/solaris). Last time that I asked about this there didn't seem to be a reply.

If there is demand for the filtered/categorised feeds, let me know.

Planet Sun and Planet Solaris are now running the Venus branch of Planet. Thanks to Sam Ruby and friends for good work.

This improves the reliability of the sites significantly. Planet Sun in particular had been suffering a lot as a result of having a little over two thousand feeds. The architecture of the original Planet implementation required the cache for each of those to be open at the same time and a large memory footprint.

A couple of things are lost though:

• no abbreviated HTML or RSS feeds,
• no categorised or filtered HTML or RSS feeds.

Reviewing the statistics suggests that these were not heavily used, so I hope no-one is too upset. Redirects are in place to try and ease the transition.

The (new) atom feeds should probably be preferred to RSS 1.0 or 2.0.