DougWeb – Doug's home on the Web

According to BBC News, the St Stephen’s Tower clock (Big Ben, although technically that’s only one of the bells) has been stopped for about a day, so that maintainance can be carried out.

I don’t have a problem with that. However the caption to one of the ‘In Pictures’ photos, reads…

Trainee clock mechanic Huw Smith makes adjustments to the settings of the clock.

In my opinion, trainees have no place working on the most famous clock in the world. Only the most experienced should be given the job.

And can you imagine the outcry if the poor bloke makes a mistake whilst working on the settings of the clock Especially as the clock is renowned for its accuracy.

Obviously the government knows better than me…

No, it’s not a new competitor to blu-ray – it’s a very painful infection of the middle ear. And I’ve had it since about 11pm last night. It also means I’m nearly-deaf in one ear.

I’ve now got antibiotics to go with my ibuprofen, but apparently they’ll take 24-48hrs to work.

I’m on a dose of 500mg amoxicillin, which according to the patient information leaflet is the usual dose for severe infections – 250mg is the normal amount. It’s fine by me!

According to today’s newspapers…

• The parrot in the UK that was found with the disease, was located in Brentwood, Essex.
• Also in Brentwood, Essex lies the abbatoir where the first case of the 2001 foot-and-mouth outbreak was discovered. Right next door to the quarantine facility where the diseased parrot was found.

Another Brentwood resident? Lucky old me.

Some companies suck. Others go to great lengths to acheive happy customers.

There’s a company in Australia that makes a software program I wanted. It sells 2 different types of license – single user and server. These cost respectively USD349 and USD3800, which are way over my budget. They also sell half-price licenses to Academic institutions, provided the product won’t be used on a commercial basis.

I emailed the company to point out that their license offerings were excluding a large segment of the population – the home user.

Have you thought about offering a single-user personal-use-only license
at a much reduced price point?

<product> looks amazingly useful for several personal projects, but not at
a $349 price point. For $50, I'd buy it.

I received the following reply

Hi Doug,

>Have you thought about offering a single-user personal-use-only license
>at a much reduced price point?

This is something that we are still considering; sadly it's not easy to
come up with a pricing structure that works for everyone.

><product> looks amazingly useful for several personal projects, but not at
>a $349 price point. For $50, I'd buy it.

That sounds like a challenge! Very well, for this day only, we shall offer
a special "Discount for Doug", whereby you can purchase one (1) single
user license for <product> for a cost of fifty ($50) US dollars:

http://link.to.discounted.product.page.created.just.for.me.with.my.name.on.it

We like to see people do cool things with <product>, so I hope that you find
it useful. If you have any ideas for features that you would like added to
<product> feel free to bring them up on our forum:

http://another.link.was.here/

And if in the future you should happen to start a company to do amazing
stuff with several million in venture capital I encourage you to come back
and purchase a server license for <product>  : ) 

That’s an 86% discount. Needless to say, I took them up on the offer.

N.B. I’ve removed the name of the company and it’s product, because I don’t want to create any kind of public expectation that ‘you did it for this guy Doug I found via Google, so you can do it for me’. I will however recommend the company to people I know if they ever have a use for the company’s product.

Despite the tons of examples and docs, mod_rewrite is voodoo. Damned cool voodoo, but still voodoo.

Brian Moore

These words feature on the official Apache documentation for this very useful server tool. And they aren’t wrong!

I do however now possess a more-than-workable-grasp of the dark arts.

mod_rewrite for the 99.99% of you who don’t have a clue what I’m talking about, let’s me ‘rewrite’ the URLs your browser requests, depending on certain conditions – e.g. if I move the location of files on the server, I can ‘rewrite’ links pointing on the old location so that they still work.

It is indeed damn cool.

Congratulations to everyone involved, on the massive milestone.

If you haven’t downloaded it yet – why not?

LONDON (Reuters) – How many men does it take to change a light bulb in a church?

Thanks to the
European Union’s “Working at Heights Directive” the answer is four — over three days at a cost of more than 1,300 pounds.

Preaching at St Benet’s Church in Beccles, Suffolk in gathering gloom, Father Anthony Sutch had to call in electricians to change light bulbs that are 40 feet above the congregation.

Because safety regulations deemed the church ceiling too high for a ladder, scaffolding had to be erected for a lengthy and costly replacement operation.

I’m pleased to announce that when AWStats 6.5 gets released, it will feature a contribution from me.

Specifically, revision 1.23 of awstats_misc_tracker.js, is mine.

Woot!

The BCG vaccine offers more protection against tuberculosis than experts currently appreciate, say scientists.

A UK study suggests that BCG protects some people in a way previously unknown – by stopping them catching the infection in the first place.

Experts had thought it merely worked by preventing TB infection turning into an active disease.

BBC News

I hope these aren’t the same ‘experts’, who will be in charge of developing a vaccine/treatment for the avian flu. And what the hell is in the BCG, if doesn’t follow the same principals as other innoculations (inject with a weak strain, so body can learn how to fight a strong one)??

It seems that on October 8th, the site went through the 100,000 visit barrier.

Wow.

I’ve just seen the video to “My Humps” from the Black Eyed Peas. I’m not a fan of their music (mind you I don’t hate it either), but the lyrics to this song just ring ‘true’. You can see the video here.

What you gon’ do with all that junk?
All that junk inside your trunk?
I’ma get, get, get, get, you drunk,
Get you love drunk off my hump.
My hump, my hump, my hump, my hump, my hump,
My hump, my hump, my hump, my hump, my hump, my hump, my lovely little lumps. (Check it out)

I drive these brothers crazy,
I do it on the daily,
They treat me really nicely,
They buy me all these ice-ys.
Dolce & Gabbana,
Fendi and then Donna
Karan, they be sharin’
All their money got me wearin’
Fly gearrr but I ain’t askin,
They say they love my ass ‘n,
Seven Jeans, True Religion’s,
I say no, but they keep givin’
So I keep on takin’
And no I ain’t taken
We can keep on datin’
I keep on demonstrating.

My love, my love, my love, my love
You love my lady lumps,
My hump, my hump, my hump,
My humps they got u,
She’s got me spending.
(Oh) Spendin’ all your money on me and spending time on me.
She’s got me spendin’.
(Oh) Spendin’ all your money on me, on me, on me

What you gon’ do with all that junk?
All that junk inside that trunk?
I’ma get, get, get, get, you drunk,
Get you love drunk off my hump.
What u gon’ do with all that ass?
All that ass inside them jeans?
I’m a make, make, make, make you scream
Make u scream, make you scream.
Cos of my hump, my hump, my hump, my hump.
My hump, my hump, my hump, my lovely lady lumps. (Check it out)

I met a girl down at the disco.
She said hey, hey, hey yea let’s go.
I could be your baby, you can be my honey
Lets spend time not money.
I mix your milk wit my cocoa puff,
Milky, milky cocoa,
Mix your milk with my cocoa puff, milky, milky riiiiiiight.

They say I’m really sexy,
The boys they wanna sex me.
They always standing next to me,
Always dancing next to me,
Tryin’ a feel my hump, hump.
Lookin’ at my lump, lump.
U can look but you can’t touch it,
If u touch it I’ma start some drama,
You don’t want no drama,
No, no drama, no, no, no, no drama
So don’t pull on my hand boy,
You ain’t my man, boy,
I’m just tryn’a dance boy,
And move my hump.

My hump, my hump, my hump, my hump,
My hump, my hump, my hump, my hump, my hump, my hump.
My lovely lady lumps [x3]
In the back and in the front.
My lovin’ got u,
She’s got me spendin’.
(Oh) Spendin’ all your money on me and spending time on me.
She’s got me spendin’.
(Oh) Spendin’ all your money on me, on me, on me.

What you gon’ do with all that junk?
All that junk inside that trunk?
I’ma get, get, get, get you drunk,
Get you love drunk off my hump.
What you gon’ do with all that ass?
All that ass inside them jeans?
I’ma make, make, make, make you scream
Make you scream, make you scream.
What you gon do with all that junk?
All that junk inside that trunk?
I’ma get, get, get, get you drunk,
Get you love drunk off this hump.
What you gon’ do wit all that breast?
All that breast inside that shirt?
I’ma make, make, make, make you work
Make you work, work, make you work.
She’s got me spendin’.
Spendin all your money on me and spendin’ time on me
She’s got me spendin’.
Spendin’ all your money on me, on me, on me.

Tony Blair last night sensationally vowed to end the tradition of being presumed innocent until found guilty.

The PM pledged to turn the nation’s criminal justice system on its head and hand police sweeping new powers.

He promised fixed penalty notices for ANY crime — forcing suspects to prove their innocence in court.

Um…WTF? I know Tony Blair wants to be remembered for something other than the Iraq war, but this is insane. If our MPs have any kind of sanity, this won’t be allowed to happen. But I’m not convinced.

According to a news story today, 100,000 UK children run away from home every year.

Examining this ‘finding’ reveals the following.

According to the UK Office for National Statistics, the UK has approximately 60 million people, and 1 in 5 are under 16 i.e. the UK has 12 million children.

That 12 million encompasses everyone under the age of 16 – including babies, toddlers etc.

Let’s be generous and say that once you reach the age of 10, you possess the necessary skills to run away and survive (that includes being tall enough to reach the shop shelves with the food you want to steal/eat).

That is 100,000 in ((16 – 10) ÷16 x 12,000,000) run away from home each year.
That’s 100,000 in 4,500,000
That’s 1 in 45.

Put another way – 2 pupils in every 3 secondary school classes (and a lot of primary school ones) ran away from home last year.

Even counting babies and toddlers, that’s 1 in every 4 classes. The figures just don’t match reality.

But what do I know – according to the UK Disability Rights Commission 8.6 million people in the UK (14% !) are disabled….

Named in Planet tradition, and not through sheer ego, I’m releasing Planet Doug to the world.

What is Planet Doug I hear you ask?

Planet is a feed aggregator (i.e. it takes blog postings from numerous sources, and makes them accessible at a single point). Planet Doug simply takes the most recent posts of the people featured in the sidebar (in my brand spanking new blogroll), and makes a single page from them for easy perusal. Mainly a tool for my own convenience, it also lets anyone nosy enough gain an insight into my psyche through the presence/absence of feeds on a certain topic.

That’s if anyone cares.

Since (a) I get more Safari visitors than visitors using Opera, Netscape or Mozilla and (b) I can actually test on different versions, rather than ‘hope for the best’, I’ve hacked together another AWStats modification.

This one was more difficult than those I put together a month ago, since Safari doesn’t identify its version to a website – only it’s build – that is – Safari/312 is really Safari 1.3, and Safari/85 is really Safari 1.0. So after extracting the all-important-number, a comparison then has to be made against a list containing build number->version information (thanks Wikipedia!). This will also mean that whenever Apple release a new version, I’ll have to update the list*. The code for Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera et. al will continue to work as long as the information is kept in the same format e.g. Firefox/xxx isn’t changed at some point to Firefox (xxx).

* I do have fallback code, so if an unknown build is found, it will report the build number instead. I’d love to know why Apple chose to identify the Safari version in use, but in such a non-obvious way…

I’ve spent some more time getting familiar with Mac OS X, and am slowly getting used to the different paradigms that underly it when compared to Windows. But there are some things that still annoying me – mostly the wrong keyboard layout, and the lack of ‘jump to beginning/end of a line’ keyboard shortcuts.

I am impressed at the effort that went into the visuals – OS X is definately more ‘visual’ than WinXP.