Category: admin

Blogcast: a self-binding admin notice

Things I’d like to post in the near future:

A Critique of Pure Reason, James Reason – if there was nearly a run on Barclays yesterday, would we know?

Perhaps some more on the pathological firm – this is dependent on me working out whether the rest is worth writing.

Celebrating the genius of William Langewiesche – I was once asked at an interview for a journo job who I admired. I said Robert Fisk. I hadn’t yet noticed that Patrick Cockburn’s reporting is better, and I don’t think I’d read any Langewiesche. It was the Financial News and they gave me a telling off because Fisk was apparently weak on facts.

Design considerations and engineering requirements for m-health apps, from a pro-patient perspective – I am regularly horrified by this, and I think a rant might do it some good

My favourite aeroplane in 200 words for Hushkit – I’m planning something influenced by Erik Lund’s awesome blog, but I think it’s going to need writing and then cutting down.

Others: Something on AFOE about the fragmentation of the right, swinging off UKIP, the UMP fiasco, and a rather fantastic Le Monde profile of Alain Orsoni.

Admin: The move is here, at last

Our long national nightmare of bifurcation is over! Thanks to this guy for fixing the WordPress Blogger importer, the Ranter is moving. Our new home is here – you’re looking at it. Comments please in the new blog. I’d like to recommend Suffusion, not so much a WP theme as an HTML5-based design toolkit.

To-do list: fix the old picture and download links (should be one SQL statement), fix links forward and back within the blog, import the WordPress-only comments, do something about ManyEyes charts and the like, do something about the Blogger- and WordPress.com-hosted images, eventually tackle the problem of restoring the old Enetation comments (yes, I have backups). Faintly terrifying how much cruft has accumulated over the years.

Much of that TDL ought to be simple, if only WP can be relied on to output the same post title given the same input (i.e. just a question of replacing y.w.c domain names with h.o.uk ones). No doubt we’re going to find out. Similarly, if WP can be trusted to ignore all duplicate content, it ought to be fairly easy to get the TYR 2.0 comments – although I would be happier if I could find a way of exporting the comments only.

One upshot of this is that the older versions of the blog are no longer going to be updated, and I’m going to close comments in order to avoid creating more migration work.

slightly less lazyweb

So I couldn’t just drop the OAuth library into the plugins directory because I didn’t have sudo rights there, so I wgot and zipped it and uploaded it as a plugin via the web interface and changed the include to point there. And now the end of the bifurcation era may be in sight. Not there yet, but the first 25 posts got transferred out of a mere 2,725 and 1,943 comments (before we get to thinking about the Enetation ones, I’ve got the dump file somewhere, and that’ll make a python project for one of these days).

Meanwhile, has anyone got experience of running XBMC or one of the many other Linux media centres on a cheapo Android tablet or netbook device, preferably with the content somewhere on a network? I’m thinking of building a not-a-hifi system that lets me have different music rooms – just because I can.

lazyweb: terms and conditions

OK, so there’s a month to go before del.icio.us gets sold and anyone who hasn’t agreed to the new Ts & Cs gets zapped. I asked this on Quora but so far haven’t had a useful reply. I know the Ts & Cs are substantially different, but is there anything in them that should dissuade me from having the bookmarks transferred?

Another OpenTech result

I need to be more damn effective and better organised.

If it helps at all, I just bought the O’Reilly books on Android development and on JavaScript, as it’s getting increasingly ridiculous to not know it.

technical update

It has just come to my attention that both Dubai and Sharjah airports have redesigned their websites. Also, I’ve added 395 more meetings to the scraper this weekend, but for some weird reason the DFID disclosure isn’t actually being treated as a csv file by the csv module. Scraping, scraping, scraping, always bloody well scraping. I even had to write a scraping script for work last week.

Also, does anyone else find the OpenTech schedule a bit thin?

Meanwhile, I think I may be about to buy a laptop. Does anyone have experience of the new, cheap-end Lenovo ThinkPads or indeed their top-end netbook-cum-tablet?

links, the last refuge of really bored bloggers

This came up in my twitter feed recently. Charmingly 90s-ish, but I did like the point that it’s very difficult to get decent bass out of a mobile device/laptop/whatever, and this probably has consequences for the kind of music people will make with them. Come to think of it, there’s an interesting economic angle. The electronics will only keep getting cheaper, and the software can be free. But some things require a large physical lump that needs transporting and storing awkwardly. It’s a little like Baumol’s cost disease.

Meanwhile, I read the Grauniad interview with Adam Curtis this weekend and it didn’t make me want to see his next after all. This post sums up why. It’s TV thinking – if the edit is right, it doesn’t matter if the logic contains more handwaving than might be ideal.

What were the most successful public policies of the last 30 years? Apparently, the minimum wage, devolution, privatisation, and the Northern Ireland peace process. I suspect they may not use my definition of success, but even on their terms it’s telling that three out of four of them come from the 1997-2001 Labour government.

Finally, some music.

A lot of their other stuff seems terribly dated now but that one holds up.