One of my colleagues has a new ring tone from here: Ultrasonic Ringtones. He’s got the 14.1kHz tone, which is the highest he can hear reliably. I tried listening to the sounds on my headphones, and found that my hearing was dropping off at 14.9kHz and I couldn’t hear 15.8kHz at all. It was then that I realised that I’m nearly 29, and definitely meeting the requirements for what my younger self would consider ‘old’.
I was thinking about it a bit more on my cycle home — I’ve got a wife, three kids, a house (with mortgage), two cars (one’s for sale, anyone want an Alfa?), a cat and six goldfish. I think I can probably allow myself to be considered at least a little bit old :). Then I got home and found that I can actually hear the 15.8kHz tone quite easily through my speakers. So that’s all right then.
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I’m impressed with Dyson’s customer service. We’ve got a Dyson handheld, which is fantastic — it does a much better job than any of the other handheld vacuum cleaners we’ve had before, and has the added benefit of begin really easy to clean. There are two filters (as well as the usual Dyson cyclonic system) and both are washable.
The only issue we’ve had is that it’s recently started losing charge much more rapidly than usual. One call to Dyson later, and we’ve got a new battery. No hassle at all.
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My E71 came with Top Hits Solitaires pre-installed. The Freecell game is especially addictive:
One feature I especially like is that card stacks can be referenced by number or by moving the cursor using the direction keys; this makes moving cards simple.
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I like Nokia E-series phones. I started out with the E61, then got an E71. The Nokia phones support IMAP natively, including IDLE support (which means I’m notified as soon as a message arrives) and multiple account support. The only major omission is the ability to move messages between folders.
When I set up my E61, everything worked fine. While I use my phone to read mail most days, I rarely want to send email, so I’m not sure when it stopped working. I wanted to send a test message yesterday, though, and had to resort to logging in using SSH and sending the message on the command line. It was at this point that I realised that 3 have started blocking port 25 (now that I think about it, they probably started blocking port 25 at the same time as they unblocked port 22).
Anyway, having realised port 25 was blocked, the obvious thing to try was port 465, which is the port for SMTP-over-SSL. This port is usually only available for authenticated users, so it’s not opening a vulnerability for spammers to exploit. Unfortunately, when I tried it, it didn’t work. Lessons for today:
- Connecting to services rarely works when they aren’t running.
- While connecting from localhost may then work, connecting from a remote device only works once the firewall access rules have been set up.
All working again now.
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The people at no-www have, for several years, been campaigning for people to ditch the ‘www’ prefix from website names. Their rationale is that it’s unnecessary and takes too long to say and type. Their goal is that websites should accept traffic both to example.com and www.example.com, preferably with the latter simply redirecting to the former. I think they’re almost right, but that they’ve slightly overstepped the mark and have overlooked a security concern.
I have my website set up to redirect all traffic from http://aylett.co.uk/ to http://www.aylett.co.uk/. The no-www suggestion is that the redirect should go in the other direction, and this is a problem because of browsers’ support for cookies with subdomains. I have websites at http://www.aylett.co.uk/ and http://blog.aylett.co.uk/ and cookies set for either domain are not sent to the other. However, either could set a cookie for aylett.co.uk which would be sent to both. I don’t make use of this feature, but if I put my main website on http://aylett.co.uk/, then all the cookies for that website will also be sent to http://blog.aylett.co.uk/. That’s not a major problem in practice for me, as while I do have a few subdomains, I control all of them myself. It’s more of a problem for a corporate or academic setting, or whenever subdomains are controlled by other people. Suppose your employer has a domain, example.com. They start naming machines, srv1.example.com, srv2.example.com, ws15.example.com. If they put their main website, with its CMS, on example.com then whenever you ask the CTO to look at your test page on ws15.example.com, his browser is going to send you the cookies that allow him access to the main website. That’s probably a bad thing.
So, my recommendation is to not go quite as far as ditching the www. You certainly want to be able to type the raw domain to get to the website, but you probably want to redirect from there to your www (or other) subdomain for serving content. You don’t in any case want to be serving duplicate content on the bare domain and the subdomain, and you don’t want to serve content from just the bare domain unless you can be sure there will never be any less-than-perfectly-trusted subdomains.
A fully-qualified domain name should either have no subdomains (be a leaf domain) or it should not serve content over http and should preferably redirect any http traffic to one of its subdomains.
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We’ve written and released our 2009 newsletter. We’d usually post out paper copies with our Christmas cards, but I’m afraid that we missed the post we decided to be green this year. Sorry.
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I went up the Hopetoun monument this evening, hoping to see some meteors. Unfortunately, there was high-level cloud with almost complete cover. I did get a patch of open sky for about five minutes, but no Geminids.
Clouds to the south
Edinburgh to the west
A few stars above
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Are you sick of audio players that think they know how to organize your music for you? Do other media libraries choke and die after a mere 10,000 songs? Do you often find yourself thinking Boy, I wish I could grep my music? Or are you just looking for something that can tag your audio files?
Quod Libet is an industrial-strength music player and tagger. One of the key features that draws me to it is that it allows me to put music in multiple genres and to assign different rôles to people while being able to filter and queue music in a sensible manner. For classical music, this is great — many CDs are tagged by FreeDB using the orchestra, with the composer in the title. I can put the orchestra, conductor, celebrity performer and composer in the tags and filter on whichever I fancy. I can put music in genres based on time period and style. It is possible to make playlists, but I usually just create a new genre. The only problem is that adding so much metadata locks me in a bit — I’ve not found another media player willing to cope with it all (but then, I’m not looking very hard).
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Right now (noon on Friday 11 December) Accuweather’s 15 day forecast says it’s going to snow on Christmas day :).
"A bit of snow"
Okay, so the actual forecast doesn’t look that nice, but it might snow!
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MinTTY is a terminal emulator for Cygwin. It is based on the terminal code from PuTTY, which Andy Koppe (an ex-colleague) has taken and made to execute as a cygwin process, so it can host a shell without the trickery required with PuTTYCyg.
OK, so it’s a terminal emulator — nothing particularly ground-breaking. PuTTY is quite the nicest terminal available for Windows, though, and it’s nice to be able to use it for Cygwin and not to have to worry about cthelper processes (or have to log in to localhost using SSH). MinTTY also features simplifies configuration and has a really nifty (and possibly unique) feature — it allows mouse positioning within shell command lines, keeping track of valid positions by looking at whether a line is explicitly broken and passing in the correct number of cursor movements. It’s also got customisable mouse actions and will attempt to provide scrolling using the wheel to full-screen programs that don’t enable mouse-handling.
It’s one of the programs I interact with most day-to-day (being stuck on Windows at work) and I heartily recommend it. MinTTY is available through Cygwin’s setup or at http://code.google.com/p/mintty/.
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