I’m watching Fat Man’s Warning on Channel 4 and it’s fascinating. If you haven’t seen it, keep an eye out for any repeats.

It follows American comedian Steve Daly as he tries to educate the people of Britian on the evils of obesity through his first hand experience of being a fast food junkie.

He’s 30 stone.

30 STONE!

It really strikes a chord with me seeing as I’m still on my diet.

At my heaviest, at the beginning of the diet, I was not far from 20 stone.  So, I was two-thirds of this guy’s weight.  And he was 52% fat.

But it’s fascinating to see his journey to acceptance that he’s not going to be long for this world if it continues.

And that’s the grim Meat-hook reality of it, isn’t it?  We’re getting fatter.  And because of that we’re going to die long before our time.

So much for those double Whopper and cheese cravings.

BigAl

Just a quick word on the Iberdrola / Scottish Power deal which was finalised earlier this week.

Does anyone else find it a huge coincidence that on the same day the Chief Executive of Scottish Power, Philip Bowman, announced his leaving?

Coincidence?  I think not.

Oh, and watch where he goes next.  I guarantee it will be a company that isn’t doing particularly well, with a reasonable share price and a want to be taken over.

Not unlike Scottish Power…

BigAl 

A few years ago when we moved to a new flat, we decided to replace our old hoover with a shiny new Dyson (the DC04 Silver/Lime model, to be precise). I always liked the idea of Dyson – they seem to be the plucky, inventive underdog (although that’s more my perception, I guess).

Today, however, we went through 2 fanbelts in quick succession. There appeared to be a problem with the brushbar, so I thought I’d take a look at the website. And I’d like to praise Dyson for a number of things:

1. The website is clear and concise, and contains the right amount of information to be useful.
2. When you choose your model, you choose pictorially as well as by number (and colour )
3. If you get to a problem that might be complex, you get a freephone (remember freephone!) number to call.
4. The helpdesk is open 7am to 10pm, not 9-5 like many places.
5. The helpdesk quickly identified the problem (bearings in the brush bar) and offered a solution (replacement from the shop).

If only all customer service worked like this Well done Dyson.

mrBen

I’m in the middle of a fairly big Django project, but one of the problems was that I wanted to be able to use the Django admin section (which is brilliant), but wanted it to be easy enough for people to add “rich” content.* The biggest problem with this is getting a decent WYSIWYG editor into the admin, but also getting a way of managing media (images, etc) that isn’t too complicated. This turns out to be a lot easier than expected, as long as you know where to look…..

For your WYSIWYG editor, TinyMCE seems the best drop-in tool, mainly because it’s trivial to get all the textareas in the admin section to be replaced with TinyMCE editor panes. I recommend reading this and this in order to get this up and running.

The big problem with TinyMCE is that the default image button doesn’t allow you to upload an image – it requests a URL. Reading around the ‘net, it seemed there were only 2 solutions for this – the commercial plugin from the tinymce guys, or a plugin called ibrowser. I went with ibrowser, but it was a PITA to configure, and I never did get it working correctly. I gave up when I managed to get almost everything working (could browse files, etc) except upload. Given that the project is quite old, I thought my chances of getting decent support were unlikely.

I have finally found the answer – a wonderful Django admin plugin called FileBrowser – it adds a nice filebrowser into the admin tool, but also contains some code so that it can be called from TinyMCE’s image dialog – you simply clicked the ‘Image’ button in the editor, and then the ‘browse’ button from there, and it pops up the filebrowser. Magic!

Hopefully this is as helpful to you as it was to me

mrBen

* I realise that, in many cases, you don’t really want your end users having control over how content is displayed, but certainly for this project I felt it was an acceptable compromise.

Gaming under Linux has always been an interesting challenge. There are some really decent games out there (Quake4, Doom3, Unreal Tournament 2004, Enemy Territory), but many games don’t get released for Linux.

Open Source Gaming is even trickier – all the games I mentioned above are proprietary, although id software do release their older engines under the GPL when they’re out of date. For instance, the Quake 3 source was released about 12 months ago, which has led to a number of free standing FPS games for Linux (Tremulous is one of my favourites, but Urban Terror has just been released, and looks pretty good too.)

However, the other day a new game came on my radar. A game that had previously been released commercially by Eidos, but which was open sourced under the GPL a few years ago, and is now available on all platforms, and with some upgraded graphics now. The game is called WarZone2100, and it’s a top quality RTS (real-time strategy) game. Unlike many of this type of game, there isn’t an overabundance of resource management – it’s mostly about fighting the enemy, and battle strategy, but there is a goodly amount of researching artifacts, and designing new vehicles, and the suchlike.

The documentation is a bit lacking on the website – it took me a bit of hunting to find the keyboard shortcuts, but the game is still great fun. Plus, and this is often what separates commercial games from open source, there is a single-player campaign mode, which I’m playing at the moment.

One thing to note – the only thing they couldn’t open source was the video codec library, meaning that there are none of the cut-scene videos, which have been replaced with text transcripts instead. But you really don’t miss anything

Go and try it out, and maybe we’ll have a fight on-line sometime

mrBen

Ok – so things might not look any different, but (yet again) we have moved hosting companies. We’ve waved farewell to WebHosting.uk.com and moved over to Dreamhost. The main reason for the move is cost – for only a little more than we were paying for Jedimoose.org on Webhosting, we get a huge amount more space and bandwidth – enough for me to host jedimoose.org, misterben.org.uk, desertofzin.org and (in the future) thefreelyproject.org. It’s not the quickest host in the world – we’ll see how people react to that – but the access is better too. (SSH access, and I can run Django on it too)

We’ve also moved all the subdomains onto a Wordpress Mu install, which has been a journey of discovery, but should hopefully make for a better platform overall. Al can talk more about that at another time, as he did all of the hard work on that end.

mrBen

Well – this is it. Heather and Mira are coming home from hospital today, so here endeth my online participation for much of the next weeks/months. But it’s all worth it

A few more pictures (I promise I won’t go into overload).

mrBen

“Meh”

‘Nuff said…

BigAl 

As I sit here updating my resume again, I’m aware that Ruthy is sitting in the other room downloading the Second Life client.

Now, I could have sworn that our second life is taken up by Guild Wars and will run right through into our third and beyond, but it got me a-thinking on what I do with this fantabulous interweb I have access to.

Other than the cozy corner of Der IntarVeb that mrBen and I have carved out in the form of JediMoose, I don’t really bother with much else.

Alongside my ‘Moose interests I have Desert Of Zin, my writing/creative thoughts blog, apaisleybigfoot, a LiveJournal account I signed up for and never bothered with again, a flickr account and a Last FM account.

And as for games, I’m only interested in Guild Wars because:

1. it’s great,
2. there are no monthly fees
3. and there are no monthly fees.

I’m aware that Second Life is popular and I know MySpace is popular, just like I know Oasis are popular, but for the life of me I don’t know why.

Maybe the problem is that I tend to be suspicious of “popular” things. After all, there’s nothing worse than feeling like you’re caught on the bandwagon like everyone else.

“Do I like it because it’s good or because it’s popular?”

Maybe I’m missing out on something really cool, something really life changing.

Then again, maybe not.

BigAl

Well – it’s a bit earlier than expected, but the offspring has arrived!

Heather started getting contractions at around 1:30am this morning. We went into the hospital around 8.15, and were put into the maternity ward at 9.15am. At around 1.45pm we got moved up to the labour suite. Heather’s waters broke at 5.17pm, and the baby arrived in this world at 7.23pm.

So – meet Mira Hope Thorp, 7lbs 3oz, and totally healthy

mrBen