Asking about the point of the All-Star game in Baseball, he explained about mid-season breaks, and the rest of his answer was worth republishing:

Silly. Thanks Rob

However, on plugging it into my Sky box or PC, what I get is a horrible yellow blob where there should be nice colours (blue maybe?).

Oh dear

I’ll talk to the seller and see what happens.

I’ve been sailing on the Norfolk Broads pretty much every year now for 20-odd years.

We first took the plunge and hired a Percy Hunter boat about 5 years ago, having previously hired numerous different sailing craft, many of which were ruined by the addition of mod-cons like engines, showers, radios and heating.

The Hunters have been beautifully maintained in their original 1930s condition and even the new boat added a couple of years ago was built to exactly the same design without any modern day enhancements. They sail a lot better than anything else on the broads too.

On looking for some good links to explain to prospective crew members what they might be letting themselves in for, the yard sent me these, most of which don’t appear on their website. So I’m putting them here for my reference and yours:

The beer selection really is exceptional and I hope to god they can keep it in the same condition as it was tonight past the first few weeks. We work in the Electric Works opposite and the immediate area is so desperate for a proper beer house / after work stop-off that this is a godsend.

The setting is very traditional and it’s certainly got loads of character - reminded me of some of those impressive Victorian city centre boozers in Liverpool. On the downside I found the seating arrangement pretty uncomfortable and didn’t get the impression I’d want to hang around too long chatting.

The big downer though is that they were playing god awful music and in a big high room with terrible acoustics it’s just a waste of time. Mind you it was a party and maybe they’ll not bother with music normally. I hope not cause it’s got real potential otherwise.

I don’t know if they are planning to do food. They had some on tonight but it was just party food (very good mind you). I really hope they can knock out some good grub as well as the beer. The area is completely crying out for a decent Friday afternoon lunch spot and I’m sick to death of M&S salads.

Banksy classicness

I love how basic tools can be used to such great effect as this.

I’m off to Sudbury in Massachusetts next week. Googling I found their police log. Nothing too unusual, you can read a paper here for a similar thing (a bit more depressing in Sheffield than in New England mind you). But the comments just make this. This is where a web community meets a real one, with great effect.

What is operating to endanger anyway? ;-p

As much for copying later on for my own model, but also because the underlying project is something I think works so well and every company should do, I’m highlighting Uservoice.

Good work chaps. Another thing I don’t have to worry about when the time comes and I need ya.

Ian

Tasty cats can be cheezeburgers?. From http://catrecipes.com/recipes/index.html

I’m going from Heathrow. The flights are the cheapest and direct, but that means I have to get from Sheffield to London to arrive before 9 in the morning. Not a problem you’d think. We have these great things called trains. 

Think again sucker

It’s not that there isn’t a train. There’s enough, even for a peak morning into the capital. But what I wasn’t expecting was the cheapest return fare available, more than a week in advance, of £178. YEP. You read that right. £178. Which by the way is the same price as the direct flight from Heathrow to San Francisco. 

So, here I am, stuffed. Until someone suggested something I wouldn’t even dream of. Fly to London from Sheffield. Excuse me? What? That’s just silly. 

But it’s true. An hour and £116 later I’ve booked a return flight from Manchester to Heathrow and I’ve just brought myself an extra hour in bed into the bargain. I’m pretty appalled by this - I know enough about the reasons why it’s the case, but the fact is it’s plain wrong / bordering on criminal. It should not cost the same for me to go from Sheffield to London and back as from London to California. It should not be cheaper to fly to London than to take the train. Never ever ever. 

And so there it is, I’ve had to compromise myself stupidly and I’m pissed off about it because it’s so totally avoidable. How the Daily Telegraph can spend two weeks exposing MPs with two houses but it doesn’t give a shit about a scandal like this is about everything that’s wrong with this country. 

Only a moron would choose the train.

The process of Subversion replication is remarkably simple, which is really the exciting thing. The WANDisco replicator is implemented as a network proxy - a Java app running in-between the server and the client. The replicator takes over listening to client requests, and when ever it sees a write command, it passes this down to Dcone, which then replicates the same write command on the other sites.

Subversion Multisite is implemented as a proxy in front of the Apache server

The simplicity of this is unbelievable. All of the servers stay exactly the same because they all effectively see the same communication from the client. Logic within the Dcone engine ensures all the Subversion servers recieve the same transactions replayed in exactly the same order they are recieved. As such all the servers are exact copies of each other and stay in synch at all times. If one goes down, it catches up as soon as it’s back automatically and in the right sequence. The behaviour a user sees is no different to what would happen if the client were writing directly to multiple servers at the same time, except the client only has to make its changes against the local server. WANdisco handles the rest. 

This simple two-part model has many possibilities for future products, but for now the most popular WANdisco product is Subversion Multisite. I guess that’s because it has the most impact for developers and because the alternatives in Subversion land really aren’t good enough. These alternatives include svnsynch and the write-through proxy, both of which are variants on a master-slave model of replication that although better than nothing, doesn’t provide the advantages of having every server as a live independent fully functioning copy running at a local site. 

I’m really looking forward to learning more about the products and to being part in the evolution of the business as the Dcone engine is applied to other products. There are many obvious applications for the WANdisco syncronising technology and the challenge seems to be where to start rather than what to do. It’s certainly an interesting place to be.