bellyphant → page two

Just got back from a ride out to Richmond Park, via Fulham and Putney on the way there, and Hammersmith and Notting Hill on the way back. The weather’s been excellent all week — so warm, so nearly-summery. I’ve been making sure to spend every lunch hour in the park near work, but I saw the forecast for Saturday, and decided something must be done. (Being home alone with nothing else to do all weekend also helped force a decision.)

The weather looked a bit dodgy in the morning, but by 1pm the sun was out fairly frequently, and it got sunnier from there. I tried to use my London Cycle map, but that thing’s pretty big, and requires folding and unfolding (and stopping), so I just did my usual “point in the right direction” style of navigation (plus a few stops to look at the map; more for reassurance than anything else).

I was intending to go down to Bayswater Road, and west from there, then make my way along the bike path next to Holland Park. I didn’t get there, so I sort of ended up on Kensington High Street, and turned south from there. A few random turns later, I was at West Brompton tube; a bit after that I was on the highly trafficed North End Road, where they also seemed to have a market (with the stalls pretty much a meter from passing buses) — so that was pretty slow going. Then I went down past Fulham Broadway, Walham Green, Parsons Green (where the work Christmas dinner was), down New Kings Road, and across Putney Bridge.

From there I headed up to the London Wetlands Centre — the embankment seemed to be taken up by some sort of running event; not quite sure what it was. Then I sort of headed west along a bike path, then followed the random National Cycle Network signs to Richmond Park (it was actually pretty well signposted). (Other than that, I have no idea how I got there…) One of the slower parts of the trip was waiting for two railway level crossings (within 200m of each other). While waiting there for a total of about ten minutes, I chatted to a couple of other cyclists (Richmond Park seems to attract a lot of them!)

When I got to Richmond Park, I stuck mainly to the dirt shared cycle/pedestrian path. It’s good that there’s a park in London that actually lets cyclists in — on more than just the roads. I was pretty happy to be able to wander off into the countryside, although a couple of times I managed to make it onto non-cyclist paths (and I was really trying to look out for the signs!) There were a few people really speeding about, which I thought was a bit ridiculous. (There were also a few mountain bikers wandering off into the countryside; it looked fun, but it’s not allowed. So I guess that’s something I won’t be doing…)

After seeing all the “Warning Deer” signs (but no deer), I was starting to wonder if they actually existed. Well, they did — a couple of herds (or whatever you call a collection of deer) were wandering about, I got a few photos:

After that I helped a guy who’s bike chain was stuffed, and headed out of the park. At the level crossing I ran into the same cyclists I’d seen before; I ended up following them back into the city — they were heading a different way, which I thought might be interesting. So I ended up in Hammersmith; then despite some very good directions, managed to get slightly lost, and end up in Notting Hill. Which didn’t matter too much — at least it’s pretty close to home, and I knew the way.

So all in all, an excellent afternoon out on the bike! (It’s fun to do something other than commuting…)

So, Gordon Brown has announced the UK government’s draft climate change stuff. Full of ideas, certainly — properly insulating homes; good idea. Removing stand-by from consumer electronics; wtf? Seems like a good idea (possibly), but it isn’t.

Probably good for winning votes. Useful? Not particularly. It just seems like a way to introduce inconvenience into people’s lives for no reason. I suppose it could save the odd house-fire (which would be good); it would indeed cut power usage. And there’s the thing; they don’t need to take standby out of electronic goods to make them save electricity. There’s no reason standby needs to be a bad thing.

In fact, each year, companies release microcontrollers that run on less and less power. Those RFID swipe cards you use are a form of microcontroller, and they’re powered by the magnetic field of the reader! Sure, some electronic goods have ridiculously wasteful standby modes; but they needn’t. Your iPod goes into standby when you “turn it off” — Apple don’t even see the need to have actual power off on something that’s battery powered; I’m guessing that the microcontroller is fairly efficient.

The technology is already there; that should be the new law — make companies use current technology; introduce standards on how much power certain goods can use when they’re on standby (and while they’re on for that matter; some things are ridiculously wasteful). Make them ambitious if you like, I’m sure the engineers at electronics companies would like a challenge.

And while you’re at it, introduce requirements to use efficient power supplies (most aren’t); introduce requirements for automatic standby modes on certain equipment; try and reduce the losses in power line transmission (impossible, perhaps, but I don’t really know); and make power stations more efficient!

What’s the point of making a tiny dent in power usage (with the standby thing), when the same gains (and more) could be realised by making our power sources more efficient? This whole thing just seems like a way to seem more green without doing anything difficult. (Actually, telling companies to take stand-by out of things seems pretty difficult to me; but I guess government can just blame corporations when the whole thing fails. In the meantime, they’ve lost the opportunity to actually do something useful, though.)

The insulation thing is a good idea; the lightbulb thing is a good idea; this stand-by thing is just stupid.

Trying to use composed_of for something? Realising that it’s not quite working for you — you need to be able to enter things on forms and actually get them into the database?

You need the Composed Of Conversions plugin. Basically it lets you write a converter block with your composed_of declaration. This means that (to take a wildly relevant example — I’ve been trying to get this to work for a little while now) you can put “AU” in a text box on a form (or a <SELECT>), have that converted to a Country object, then write that to a string column in your database. Seems like a roundabout way of doing things, but it suits what I’m doing at the moment.

Interestingly, the author of that plugin submitted it as a patch to core Rails, but it’s basically been ignored (it seems?). Which is strange, since without it, composed_of is more-or-less useless. (If your attribute has a UI, that is.)

Perhaps you already knew this, but here’s my (first) hint for the day: don’t store Symbols (you know the ones — :my_symbol etc) in your database. It would seem that ActiveRecord doesn’t to a to_s on them. Instead it seems to do Mystery Operation X. This seems to basically convert:

:my_symbol

to something like

---- :my_symbol

Which could be fine. Possibly even useful — hey, I might actually want Symbols stored in the DB like that (assuming I never want to store strings like that…) Unfortunately it doesn’t seem to be paired with Mystery Operation Un-X. In that when it comes back out of the database, nothing is done; you just get a String (with garbage characters chucked in), not a Symbol, and it’s totally useless. My advice: don’t store symbols in the DB.

This could be due to my use of the Composed Of Conversion plugin (which I’m just about to write an entry about), but if so, since it happens one way but not the other, it’s an/yet-another example of deep-embedded Rails code cruftyness.

(Incidentally, if someone can explain this, that would be great. That whole explaining process would probably be made easier if I had comments on this blog… Oh well.)

Being that it’s technically spring, and today is actually sunny, I decided to go for a walk to “the other side of the tracks” — those tracks being the tracks of the Circle Line. Work is to the south, and Clerkenwell is to the north (here is a map — “ec1r 4pf” is work, Clerkenwell is near the middle). I’d never really thought about which side of the tracks was the wrong side; now I’m starting to think that I work on the wrong side, and Clerkenwell is the better side.

It’s now my new “I wish I worked here” area — it’s really quite nice. Nice looking pubs and cafes, a park (the grounds of St James Church, I think) — what more could you want? At least it’s nearby, so I can go and hang out there in the sun (when there is sun). Perhaps at night-time it turns into some sort of weird zombie-fest, but given how nice it looks during the day, I’m willing to ignore that possibility.

PS: Sorry I’ve been slack updating this (exciting) blog, lots of work to do… I think I may also split the blog into “tech” and “life” sections — similar to what I’ve seen done elsewhere. I’m reasonably sure that it’s a tiny minority of my readers (which are already a tiny minority in themselves) who’d like to read both, and perhaps I’d put more about living in london if I had a blog/section devoted to it.

Well, I never — never knew about Data URLs, that is. This is probably old news for a lot of people, but it’s something I missed; I have no idea when they came about. Data URLs lets you encode random data into URLs — essentially the URL is the data, rather than a link to it. Here’s an example:

data:text/plain,hello world

If you follow that link in Opera or Firefox, you’ll get a “hello world” document. Obviously you can also do HTML:

data:text/html,<html><body><h1>hello world</h1></body></html>

And you can use Base64 encoding (this is the same as the previous HTML example):

data:text/html;base64,PGh0bWw+PGJvZHk+PGgxPmhlbGxvIHdvcmxkPC9oMT48L2JvZHk+PC9odG1sPg==

Clearly by using Base64, you can actually encode anything you like. Such as this example from Mozilla.org:

data:image/png;base64,... long Base64 bit here ...

Lots of fun! You can also save your HTML <CANVAS> tag drawings to this format, using toDataURL(). Now I just have to think of some way to use this stuff. Note that (naturally) it doesn’t work in Internet Explorer.

It’s a strange feeling living here in the UK. There’s a strange sense that almost everywhere you turn, someone is trying to rip you off. Not in a “gimme all your money or I’ll stab you” type way — although in some neighbourhoods perhaps that’s the case. It’s more in a “thanks for being a customer, by the way, may we steal your money?” kind of way. Tonight we received our water bill from Thames water. “Please pay £254.65.” Yep, that’s right — Thames Water has decided to stop billing in six-months in advance (!) cycles, and has now decided it would be better for everyone (i.e. them) if we were billed yearly. So much for saving water — apparently Thames Water already know how much we’ll use.

I thought the whole BT bill pay three months in advance thing was rude; this reaches new heights. (Just to explain to British readers, in Australia you get billed for what you’ve used; you aren’t expected to basically extend credit to large companies. Or at least all the companies I dealt with were like that.) British Gas bills you in arrears (they have to, it’s actually user-pays; half the time it’s based on an “estimate” of course), but says “pay now” — there’s no “please pay by X” type arrangement. Just “pay up little-person, we’re here to screw you!”

Anyway, my immediate reaction was to call up and ask if we could get a bill for less than a year in advance; the only way was to get a Post Office payment booklet. So we’ll be doing that; I’m sure it costs Thames Water far more than billing us every three months ever could. Non-violent protest and all that; I’m sure Thames Water will be impacted massively (or not). Is there an open market for water in the UK — I wonder how I switch water provider?

Just to make my point more clear: big companies should never ask for money in advance; and the least often they should bill is quarterly. They should be easily able to absorb the cost of billing people for services they’ve used. I like my money to stay in my account; if I wanted to invest in big companies, I’d buy shares.

Well, it would appear that all forecasts about snow were correct. Today we woke up to a nice fluffy (frozen) blanket of snow covering everything. I decided cycling was probably not an option — it looked like the cycle lanes were pretty snowfilled. So, as if to prove the ridiculousness of most of the ideas I have, I decided that walking would be better. (Public transport in the UK seems to pretty much stop; or at least slow to a crawl. Even the underground, which you would expect might not — in fact you might assume they put the trains underground in order to make them weatherproof. Apparently you’d be wrong.) Also, I wanted to get some more photos than I did last time :)

So yes, I started off on my one-and-a-half hour trek to work. (I didn’t think it would actually take that long; I guess I didn’t factor in the snow…) I decided Regent’s Park might look nice, and it’s on the way, so I walked through there. It was pretty cool; I also wasn’t alone in thinking that — the park amply populated with Australian’s etc taking photos of themselves in the snow…

(That last shot is about all I could get self-portrait-wise; My coat was pretty well snow covered by the end of the walk. And I’m fairly sure my hair was frozen…) So yes, another ridiculous adventure, of sorts. It was pretty fun!

… a moron. Or at least deluded. Or perhaps just brainwashed by the strength of your own marketing. Or trying to make up for the fact that Microsoft (as it currently exists) is headed straight for the toilet. Or perhaps a misunderstood genius? Whichever way: I don’t understand.

I don’t normally blog about random things like this (since there’s no doubt more than enough coverage out there), but this is just so bizarre that I had to. Today Engadget highlighted highlighted the following amusing section of an MSNBC interview with Bill Gates:

Nowadays, security guys break the Mac every single day. Every single day, they come out with a total exploit, your machine can be taken over totally. I dare anybody to do that once a month on the Windows machine.

Obviously he’s referencing (or perhaps just thinking of) the Month of Apple Bugs, but come on, seriously: we’ve had about seven consecutive years of Windows bugs and serious exploits. (And many before that as well, but people didn’t try so hard.)

I don’t want to come across as some sort of Apple fanboy: I’m really not. This is just stupid. Some of the other things he says (or implies) in the interview are pretty ridiculous as well (like the bit where Apple actually took all its interface design ideas from Microsoft). I think Bill may need to learn to pick fights he can actually win.

Flickr has a map view of the photos that have geolocation data on them. If you want to see photos from around the bit of London where I live, it’s pretty useful. If only I hadn’t sold my GPS! (And if only it wasn’t totally annoying to try and link the data up with photos…) Maybe I’ll have to buy another one, this time one that has better battery life.