bellyphant → page three

I installed the Operator plugin for Firefox a few hours ago, and have been wandering about the web seeing what places have embedded microformats (not many). There’s a blog post that describes better than I could, but I’ll give it a go: it’s an interesting idea — basically it adds a toolbar that lets you do things with the little chunks of information embedded in microformats on the page you’re looking at — storing contacts, resumes, geolocations; that sort of thing.

Microformats seem to be catching on, I’m not sure they’ll totally change the face of the internet. For certain types of information though, they are pretty effective. I’ve already got XFN happening here, I need to add a few more things I think.

So I’ve been thinking about travelling again (as in, my thoughts have returned to travelling, not I’m about to head off again), and I’m thinking I need a smaller laptop. I found having my Asus W5F really handy; mainly for the photos, but also because I was able to get free internet around the place. The main problem was the size — it’s pretty small, but everything seems huge when you’re trying to live out of a backpack. (The camera is something else I’m thinking of downsizing…)

Anyway, Sizeasy makes comparing sizes a lot easier than trying to imagine what a difference of 10mm means. Here’s a picture I made of the laptops I’m looking at (none seem like a great choice at this point, but they’re the best options around):

Sizeasy is pretty cool; it’s a nifty idea. In terms of the laptops, the Kojinsha SA1 seems a little underpowered, and the rest a little scarily pricey. The OQO Model 02 should be on there as well — it’s tiny and awesome, but even more expensive. I’m thinking I should try and go a little cheaper… I’ve no idea how much the US702 will cost, it won’t be out for a while. Details (in English at least) are a little hard to find, but it looks pretty nice. In the diagram I’m assuming the Flybook v5i will be a similar size to the v33i — it hasn’t been released yet.

We decided to head out for a ride today — weather seemed good (i.e. sun was actually detectable, no rain). Hit Regent’s Canal just after the Maida Hill tunnel, and just followed it along. Was a pretty easy ride, except for all the pedestrians — and Islington, where there’s another tunnel! (You wouldn’t guess it, but I think Angel tube is pretty much on top of the tunnel for the canal — strange, it’s so busy on top…) The bit around Camden Lock was also people-packed, so plenty of walking there. Actually, a large part of the journey was on foot…

Anyway, now that I’ve checked out Google Maps, we basically made it all the way to the Limehouse Basin — which is pretty much the Thames. We only turned around because of the tow-path works they were doing; we couldn’t see an easy way back to the canal, so we gave up. If only we’d gone a few hundred more meters! Oh well, next time. (There were a couple of places where we had to go onto the roads around the canal, they seem to be fixing up the towpath.)

So yes, it was probably a more exciting day out than when we headed out west — although that was pretty cool. We ended up doing 30km — which is pretty decent. I reckon we could probably actually get out of the London orbit if we went 30km (and it wasn’t a round trip.) Another highlight was stopping at the Broadway Markets somewhere in Hackney for lunch — they seemed like proper markets, and there was a nice atmosphere around.

Not that I ever usually celebrate Australia Day at all — it’s really just a useful public holiday. This year it’s a bit different because I’m overseas, and the thought of something with Australia-related themes is actually vaguely appealing… James bought Pete and I cans of Fosters (which of course is Australian only by marketing these days — brewed in Scotland!), which was nice; and yesterday evening we went to a pub near Southwark tube that was having some sort of an Ernst and Young related Australia Day celebration — Christie (and Andy) being the link there. It was packed! They’d already run out of VB by the time we got there, but there was loud Australian music playing. Sort of just like being at home! (Except that I wouldn’t actually do much on Australia Day, as I said before…)

We woke up to the usual sound of the weird non-stop reggae radio station this morning. (Lazy on the tuning of the radio…) Except today, the DJ said something along the lines of “Don look outya winda! Don turn on da news!” Naturally, we looked out the window, and were greeted by this sight:

Excellent! You see, part of (in my mind at least) living in Europe has to be snowy winters. I know London may not be the best choice of location for that to occur, but you know… Anyway, we thought it was pretty exciting.

After getting over the whole mental-barrier thing, I decided to cycle to work. After all, I haven’t cycled in the snow before! (And the roads weren’t exactly covered or anything, so it wasn’t going to be that bad.) I put a few more layers on than usual, and popped out the front. There’s something strange about the idea of being able to hop off your bike and throw snowballs…

Turned out it wasn’t bad at all — Regent’s Park looked awesome! (Didn’t get any photos though…) It wasn’t even that adventurous — there were plenty of other cyclists around. Some even in shorts!

It seems that if you do:

rename_column :accounts, :username, :user_name
change_column :accounts, :user_name, :string, { :null => false, 
    :default => "", :limit => 25 }

you get a different result to if you do:

change_column :accounts, :username, :string, { :null => false, 
    :default => "", :limit => 25 }
rename_column :accounts, :username, :user_name

(i.e. the rename happens after the column change)

It seems your change_column gets forgotten about if you do the rename afterwards. The fix: do the rename first. I don’t know how to report ruby bugs, and I can’t be bothered fixing this particular one (it has a fairly simple workaround). Just thought I’d write about it. For fun. (I can also see how this bug came about.)

Oh yeah, the Rails migration thing is pretty cool.

Yesterday was really windy! Lords-cricket-ground-roof-part-blowing-offingly windy. Killing-peoplely-windy (which is really quite scary). 123kph gusts at Heathrow. Anyway, yes, quite windy. I still rode to work though, for some ridiculous reason. Well, the main reason was that it didn’t actually look like it would be that bad — it wasn’t really.

On the way to work, a few gusts blew me about a bit, but I also had the wind behind me through Regents Park, which was kind of fun. The way back was a bit less good, but actually possibly better than last Friday, when the wind was in my face for pretty much the whole ride home. Walking down Leather Lane at lunch wasn’t much fun though — I thought I might go for a walk in the (winter idea of) sun, but the wind was so annoying that I just retreated to the office.

When I got home, I was faced with the fact that the wind was so strong that it had actually blown the skylight in the bathroom fully open. There must have been some pretty serious Bernoulli action going on to lift it up — it’s pretty heavy! Anyway, we had to get a ladder and shut it — now it’s locked down as well.

Anyway, apparently this isn’t winter. I’m told by the weather reports that winter will arrive this weekend — with temperatures of zero reported cheerily as though they’re something to look forward to. Hooray! Better get me some leg warmers (for the cycling, of course)…

A while ago, my friend Andy wrote a plugin for Firefox called Screengrab that takes screenshots of entire webpages. So if you’re looking at a site that has a vertical scrollbar, you’ll end up with a screenshot that’s a normal width, but stretches for the entire length of the page. (I guess you could call it a ‘pageshot’ or something…) It gets pretty good feedback on the Firefox Add-ons site, as well.

Anyway, it’s incredibly useful (if you ever do that sort of thing) — stitching together screenshots by hand is just tedious. I’m always finding that random people seem to need to do this, and don’t know about the extension. So, if you read this blog, need to take screenshots of whole webpages, and I haven’t already told you about this plugin, go and get it!

OpenDNS provide DNS servers that they claim are faster than the ones your ISP provide. I’d have to say I agree. They’re probably also more reliable. I’m trying them out at work today, and I’ll probably give them a go at home. Seems like a cool idea anyway — they have servers is various locations around the US, and now in London. (No servers in Australia though, so probably won’t provide massive gains there, unless your ISP is really crap.)

They also block phishing sites, and do typo correction (e.g. “bellyphant.cmo” => “bellyphant.com”). They also do a search if you type in a totally wrong domain name that they can’t fix — this is where they make their money (they show advertisements). I think you can turn all these features off though.

It seems like a good idea to me. Anything that makes the internet slightly faster is good!

My bike has won an award! Well, not my bike in particular — or even the model of bike I have, come to think of it. But the same frame. And mostly the same important bits. And cheaper. (I got a special with LX components and Magura brakes.) After a bit more riding, I still think it’s excellent. I’ve now just actually got to take it offroad sometime — otherwise I’ve pretty much purchased the bike equivalent of a Chelsea tractor. (Actually “got to go offroad sometime” is probably exactly what the owners of those cars think… I have purchased a bike Chelsea-tractor!)

Anyway, well done Merlin!