Archive for November, 2007

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Jane’s operation today

Friday, November 30th, 2007

Surgeons in an operating theatre
Photo by asterisc21 at stock.xchng

Today is St Andrews Day — patron saint of Scotland and Russia. Which, this year, means one thing in our house: it’s the day for Jane’s IVF-related operation.

For those who don’t know: we’re on an IVF programme at Ninewells hospital, Dundee and a few months back during a routine scan the doctors discovered something – they’re not 100% certain what it is (a lump? a cyst? something else?) but know that it shouldn’t be there. Today they plan to investigate and remove it.

I’m taking her over to Dundee for about 08:00, then I need to get back to St Andrews for a meeting with the Director of Admissions, whom I met for the first time yesterday. I can then call the (an) hospital around 14:00 for a progress update and see if I can get my (fixed but presumably sore and drousy) wife back.

Delayed

A letter yesterday confirmed that it looks highly likely that our IVF treatment will be postponed until Spring 2008. But we’ll just have to wait and see what the surgeons discover and how quickly Jane recovers from the operation. The doctor told her to expect to be off work for three weeks.

Prayers please

Your prayers and thoughts would be greatly appreciated today, for Jane, for her family who will naturally be concerned, and for me too — not least cos my PC is playing up at work and I have an RSS feed to debug!

Update: 14:15

I’ve not long ago phoned the ward and Jane’s fine, still sleeping and they’ve asked me to go pick her up in a couple of hours time. I just have to wait to find out what they did and what they discovered, if anything. Thanks for the prayers folks.

Posted in Family, Fertility, General, Health, IVF, Updated | 6 Comments »

Weekend in Selkirk

Monday, November 26th, 2007

Borders General Hospital
View of the car parked at the Borders General Hospital; Mum has a blue badge so we could park legitimately in the disabled spaces.

On Friday evening I drove down to Selkirk to see Mum; the first time I’d been down for months.

My plan/agenda was:

  • spend some time with Mum
  • install Mum’s new BT Synergy 4500 phones
  • update the antivirus software on Mum’s laptop
  • put up a hook on the back of the kitchen door
  • hang some pictures
  • take a wreath to the cemetery
  • move some things out to Mum’s newly constructed shed

Here’s what we did:

  • spend some time with Mum
  • install Mum’s new BT Synergy 4500 phones
  • update the antivirus software on Mum’s laptop
  • put up a hook on the back of the kitchen door
  • hang some pictures
  • take my sister Jenni to Accident & Emergency at the Borders General Hospital, where she was diagnosed with shingles
  • take Jenni to the local pharmacy for her newly prescribed medication
  • take Jenni and her cat Myla to the vet for an emergency consultation. One quick injection of antibiotics later and we were driving back from St Boswells to Selkirk
  • move some things out to Mum’s newly constructed shed

It certainly wasn’t an uneventful visit, but I did get to spend some extra time with Jenni, which was lovely. I do love my Mum and my sister.

Accident and Emergency?

While sitting at A&E it occurred to me that the department might be better called Accident and/or Emergency, because Accident and Emergency implies that both conditions need to be met before a patient will be treated.

Scenario #1

Receptionist: Hello, can I help you?
Patient: Yes please, I’ve had an accident.
Receptionist: An accident, excellent. Tick. Now, can you tell me: is this an emergency?
Patient: An emergency? Well, no … I suppose it could wait until Monday to be seen by my local general practitioner.
Receptionist: I’m afraid that is going to have to be the case, you see this is an accident and emergency department.
Patient: Oh.
Receptionist: Don’t worry, it happens quite a lot. You see, what you are wanting is an Accident and/or Emergency department.

Scenario #2

Receptionist: Hello, can I help you?
Patient: Yes please, it’s an emergency!
Receptionist: An emergency, excellent. Tick. Now, can you tell me: was this the result of an accident?
Patient: An accident? Well, no … I was in a street brawl and my opponent deliberately attacked me with a variety of poorly executed moves he’d learned from a Playstation 2 game.
Receptionist: Ah … you see this is an Accident and Emergency department.
Patient: Oh.
Receptionist: What you want is the local Deliberate and Emergency department.
Patient: I see. Sorry to trouble you, I shall go in search of such a medical department, thank you for your assistance.
Receptionist: You are very welcome. I hope you stop bleeding presently.

You see, the government spend far too much money reorganizing the NHS in ridiculous ways every couple of years, without thinking it through. This method would allow some kind of basic triage to be determined before the patient walks through the doors. You’d have three departments:

  1. Accident and Emergency
  2. Accident and/or Emergency
  3. Deliberate and Emergency

Simple.

Posted in Family, General, Places, Selkirk | 3 Comments »

Is it Christmas?

Monday, November 26th, 2007

No

Online calendar applications, such as Google Calendar, Yahoo! Calendar and CalendarHub, are getting increasingly more popular these days.

They enable you to keep track of your busy schedule no matter where you are. With the right software or plugin you can even synchronize them with your main desktop calendar such as Microsoft Outlook or Apple iCal, or with your PDA.

Well, here’s a highly specialist calendar application: Is it Christmas?. It even has its own RSS feed.

It does only one thing, but it does it very efficiently and very well: it tells you whether today is Christmas or not.

My only criticism is that it doesn’t tell you in which time zone the site is hosted.

For example, San Francisco is 8 hours behind UK time, so if the site is hosted in London and some poor kid in SF might check out the site at 16:01 his time and spoil his whole Christmas experience by opening his presents a day early.

Maybe it should be called Is it Christmas (give or take 12 hours, depending upon in which time zone you live)?.

Posted in Blog of the week, General, RSS, Web, Web 2.0 | 1 Comment »

Give the gift of Metal!

Sunday, November 25th, 2007

Metallica - Give the gift of Metal

Stuck for a gift idea this Christmas? Metallica’s latest newletter is brimming with ideas, headlined: Give the gift of Metal.

I literally can’t think of anything better!

Posted in General, Music, Web | No Comments »

Finding the right CMS for my project

Wednesday, November 21st, 2007

Content Management
Photo by ravennce

Sorry about the lack of proper blogging over the last few days. I’ll tell you what I’ve been doing: I’m looking for the right content management software for a website project I’m working on.

So I’m spending the evenings either trawling through web pages of documentation, trawling through pages of books about specific content management systems, or trying them out for myself either at www.opensourcecms.com or on the vendor’s own website.

What I’m looking for

Ease of use
The clients that I’m working with are not technically-minded — they are ordinary human, sentient, non-geek beings like you and … well, like you (probably) — so the CMS that I pick has to be easy to use.

So that rules out about half the opensource CMS applications out there just now.

Customizable
I need to be able to completely customize the site, as though it was a traditional, static site. I don’t want it to look like a portal with limited blocks of content. Also, it would be great if it could be fairly easily customizable using a combination of mostly XHTML and CSS. I don’t want anything that I have to use an unnecessary amount of PHP just to generate an XHTML document, or translate swathes of code into XLST or YYZ or whatever before it works.

So that rules out about another 25% of systems!

Site structure
I need to easily build the information architecture in it, and (preferably) have the CMS manage and automatically build the sub-navigation lists. It would also be great to be able to see the site structure in some visual form.

There go the rest!

Ideally, I’d like to build it in TERMINALFOUR SiteManager — I could have it built and finished in a couple of days with SiteManager. But unfortunately my clients don’t have a spare £50k lying around to spend on web software!

My current short-list

At the moment my short-list comprises of (in alphabetical order):

Drupal

http://drupal.org/

To be honest, Drupal is currently on my list simply because I haven’t yet ruled it out! But I’m attracted to Drupal and have heard good things about it.

I also own a book about Drupal: Building Online Communities with Drupal, phpBB, and WordPress and Drupal is the only one of the three that I’ve not properly delved into yet.

ExpressionEngine

http://expressionengine.com/

This came as quite a surprise to me, because ExpressionEngine (or EE) is a commercial product, with a very reasonable pricing plan: free for the blog edition or US$99 for the full version if you’re building a non-commercial, or non-profit, site.

I also really like the documentation (there’s lots of it, and some of it is video). But most importantly the back-end looks simple enough to use, and it appears to have the customization features that I’m looking for.
I look forward to checking this out some more …

WordPress

http://wordpress.org/

And of course: my beloved WordPress. WordPress fits almost all of my criteria … and with the creation of some cunning templates I think I could get my customized navigation to work. It may need some cunning PHP tweakery but I know that it would almost immediately fit the bill.

Conclusion

But that’s the thing … I know that I could most easily build the site that I want, with the features that I want with WordPress — it just gets better and better — but I didn’t want to simply take the easy road: I wanted to take a step back and evaluate the opensource CMS scene once again to see what else is out there, and have their back-end interfaces got any better.

Sadly, I think on the whole the answer is a resounding no. WordPress absolutely rocks … I’ve yet to fully understand the CMS model that Drupal uses, and if I end up not going with WordPress then it looks (at the moment) that ExpressionEngine is the way to go … and that’s a commercial product.

Posted in Computer, Content Management System, General, Information Architecture, Usability, Web, Web 2.0, WordPress | 4 Comments »

Anapod – transfer files to your iPod via Explorer

Monday, November 19th, 2007

Black iPod

UPDATE: I’ve just created a step-by-step guide on how to install Anapod Explorer Universal Edition version 9.0.3. I hope that’s helpful to some folks.

ORIGINAL POST: Jane has an Apple iPod — it’s a fifth generation 30GB Video iPod — and while it’s all lovely and usable in its all-black designer chic look we have one major criticism of it: if you want to transfer files to and from it you have to use iTunes.

It’s not just that I don’t like iTunes; I object to being forced to use a particular piece of software to do something as simple as transfer a file from a PC to a peripheral.

Most other mainstream MP3 players let you drag-and-drop from Explorer so why doesn’t the iPod?!

Anapod Explorer

After a little detective work I discovered Anapod Explorer from Red Chair Software:

Anapod is the most advanced Windows iPod software available, offering iPod management through full Windows Explorer integration under My Computer

  • easy drag and drop iPod copy
  • iPod transfer and iPod backup
  • PDA function support
  • photo and video transfer
  • web page interface access to your iPod through a built-in web server
  • powerful search and reporting capabilities using a built-in SQL database

and much more, all in one compact package.

A great backup tool or iTunes alternative.

It sounded perfect, so I bought a copy and tried to install it.

Installer Expired

I double-clicked the installation file for version 9.0.3 (anapod_903_un.exe) and was presented with this rather disappointing error message:

Installer expired

The text reads:

This installer file has expired. Please return to our website at http://www.redchairsoftware.com to download the latest release.

If you are sure this is the latest release available, please contact us at install@redchairsoftware.com for assistance and give the following install code: JTJSBYHTAZIRBRHQAS

Well, I was sure that this was the latest release available. So I emailed Red Chair Software for assistance.

I then did a Google search and discovered that it was unlikely that I’d ever get a reply from Red Chair Software. Disappointing.

Installation work-around

However, I did discover that there is a work-around, but for that I’d have to visit the Expired Installer Assistance page (which strangely doesn’t seem to appear anywhere on the Red Chair Software support pages).

Expired Installer Assistance

This page told me that the problem was that the date was not set correctly on my computer. It told me that (foolishly) the date on my computer was set to “November 2007″.

“IT IS NOVEMBER 2007!” I shouted at the computer, in exasperation. Then I noticed the date at the top of the Red Chair Software page: November 15, 2007. “EVEN YOU AGREE THAT IT’S NOVEMBER 2007!” I screamed again.

I read the instructions.

  1. Correct the date/time on your computer.
  2. Double-click the installer file to run it again, but this time, hold down the SHIFT key while double-clicking.
  3. This will display a dialog box where you need to enter the following code: 082808363640364448

The installer will then continue as normal.

So I started to play around with the date and see which month it thought we were currently in. The website thought it was November, my PC thought it was November … the installer seemed to think that we were in August!

Finally installed

I got it to work by rolling the current date back exactly three months to 15 August 2007. With shift pressed I double-clicked the installation file, entered the 18-digit numeric code and Anapod at last began to install.

What a faff … which is a real shame because the application is great. We managed to manually update Jane’s iPod by dragging and dropping MP3 files to it via Windows Explorer. The way it should be.

Posted in Computer, Error'd, For Dummies version, General, Hardware, Reviews, Software, Updated, Web | 41 Comments »

10 reasons why I don’t need Windows Vista

Sunday, November 18th, 2007

XP vs Vista
Image from CustomPC feature: XP vs Vista

The Christmas edition of PC Plus arrived this week. This month’s issue contains a “Wishlist 2007″ booklet, at the back of which is an article entitled “Wow! 10 reasons why you need Windows Vista”.

  1. The interface looks amazing

    It does. I’ve used Windows Vista, not for long, but long enough to know that it does indeed look lovely and cool. But in truth, I don’t really care about looks. Windows XP looks fine for what I need.

  2. Simple but powerful photo gallery functions

    The tagging facility would be quite cool, to be honest, but it would require me to manually tag the 40,000+ images I already have stored on my PC, which is why I don’t use that facility with Google Picasa or Corel Paint Shop Pro Photo XI at the moment. I’m an information architect — I have a way of organizing my photos which works perfectly for me.

  3. Supremely fast file-searching facilities

    I really do know where most of my files are — that’s years of working out a filing system that works for me. For the few files that I can’t find I use Agent Ransack which is way quicker than the built-in XP file search.

  4. All you need for top class gaming

    The article argued that Vista treats games differently. So do I: I have my own dedicated games partition running XP.

  5. You can get Windows Media Center built in

    I don’t want Windows Media Center. I watch the odd DVD on my PC using WinDVD, and listen to MP3s with WinAmp. That’s about it.

  6. Speed up in a flash

    Does ReadyBoost really work? Besides, I’m quite happy reinstalling XP every year. I really am. I can decide what I want and what I don’t. It’s like a spring clean.

  7. Foolproof to set up

    The XP installation is simple. I’ve got it down to a fine art now. And with Norton Ghost 2003 the job is made much simpler and quicker.

  8. Parental controls

    I’m not a parent.

  9. The super-handy little Sidebar

    One word: Yahoo! Widgets. Okay, that was two words.

  10. A secure safety net for you to perform over

    I admit that Vista is more secure. But perhaps at the cost of asking too many questions: do you want to allow this? do you want to allow that? Some friends have said that it’s more annoying that ZoneAlarm’s ever constant pestering! If you’re careful though, you can make XP pretty secure.

So … that article hasn’t convinced me that I need Windows Vista. I may be forced to buy Vista in the future, but at the moment I certainly don’t need it.

I can do everything that I want to do, quite comfortably with Windows XP SP2, thank you very much. And besides, XP happily talks to my Psion via PsiWin 2.3.3 (some Vista users have had terrible trouble getting it to work).

Posted in Computer, General, Windows | 3 Comments »

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