Author: bakert

Just spent half an hour fixing this one. My laptop was assigned a 169.154.*.* address and I could not ping even my gateway server via IP. I checked the network cable and lights on the hub and the docking station, changed the cable and used the built-in network card on the laptop itself. I tried a whois on the strange IP I was getting assigned:

NetRange:   169.254.0.0 - 169.254.255.255 
CIDR:       169.254.0.0/16 
NetName:    LINKLOCAL
NetHandle:  NET-169-254-0-0-1
Parent:     NET-169-0-0-0-0
NetType:    IANA Special Use
NameServer: BLACKHOLE-1.IANA.ORG
NameServer: BLACKHOLE-2.IANA.ORG
Comment:    Please see RFC 3330 for additional information.
RegDate:    1998-01-27
Updated:    2002-10-14

RFC 3330 has the following to say:

169.254.0.0/16 - This is the "link local" block.  It is allocated for
   communication between hosts on a single link.  Hosts obtain these
   addresses by auto-configuration, such as when a DHCP server may not
   be found.

After trying various registry fixes I realised the awful truth: my DHCP server’s network cabled was unplugged!

I have been disappointed with the capabilities of my Nokia 7250i’s XHTML browser. Although it can theoretically load almost any web page in practice virtually all web pages are too big for its miniscule memory and result in an error.

One site that I wish I had remote access to is streetmap (specifically the London street search). But even trying to load one GIF (no HTML) from the resultant map gives the error, “Not enough memory”.

Rather than be defeated, however, I have written a Java servlet that does searches on streetmap, screen scrapes the central GIF (the one with the road you searched for on), resizes it (actually I make it slightly bigger) and reencodes it as a JPEG. For some reason the phone seems better able to cope with JPEGs than GIFs at the size we are talking about (15-20KB). You can access the service via a browser (phone or computer based but not WAP) at http://bluebones.net:8080/map/. (Sadly I am having to run Tomcat on port 8080 at the moment so this won’t work behind some firewalls – if anyone knows how I can run IIS and Tomcat on port 80 simultaneously please drop me a line (address below).) You need to Zoom the image once you receive for street names to be legible.

I really need to drop the colour depth on the image when resizing to reduce its weight (streetmap images come at 256 colours but look fine at 16) and thus the cost of using this (plus increase the loading speed). I also need to add in links for North, South, East and West because the map is much less useful if your road happens to be near the edge (with the streetmap website you get the eight surrounding squares as well as the one with your road in it). Of course by the time you read this I might have made these changes.

If you use this service and have any comments/requests please send them to bakert+streetmap@gmail.com.

The Mercy Seat with John Hannah and Sinead Cusack is playing at the Almeida Theatre until December 6 2003. Tickets are almost entirely sold out but due to popular demand a new matinee show (3:30pm) Wed 3 December 2003 has been added for which tickets are available at the time of writing (29 November 2003).

This review contains mild spoilers.

Set on the 12th September 2001 in New York, the Mercy Seat is about a couple having an affair. Ben (Hannah) was supposed to be in the World Trade Center on the morning of the 11th but instead visited Abby (Cusack), his mistress (and also his boss). Ben decides this is the ideal opportunity to leave his wife and kids – by pretending he has died along with the others – and run off with Abby. The play then centres around his plan and the fact that Abby wants him instead to ring his wife and tell her he is alive and then leave her.

It is impossible to believe that Ben really would rather his two daughters thought him dead and he was never able to see them again as well as have to construct an illegal false identity. The play goes some way towards making us believe he really thinks this (at least for today) but the premise is sadly slightly absurd. More believable is Abby’s wish that Ben would leave his wife in more conventional fashion. Plausability aside this tension in desires gives the play most of its interesting moments. Something is being said about female desire for honesty whatever the consequences and the male desire to avoid those same consequences even if that means being duplicitous.

The Mercy Seat is not a brilliant play nor a brilliant production. Hannah feels slightly miscast (perhaps someone whose casting is a bit younger, more misanthropic?) Cusack’s performance is strong though. Real truths emerge from the play in bursts. The writer Neil LaBute is right when he says the play is about, “why [we are] willing to run a hundred miles around simply saying to someone, ‘I don’t love you anymore’? Why? Because Nikes are cheap, running is easy, and honesty is the hardest, coldest currency on the planet.” But bursts is all there is. The twist at the end is strong but not enough to elevate the play to the level of a must-see.

Inspired mostly by Microsoft employee’s blogs we’ve started a blog for Cable & Wireless developers.

We talked about how no one would read it and how we might get fired for our posts. And then we did it anyway.

Get more bitching and moaning about internal office politics and poor technical decisions imposed from on-high than you could possibly want at ableandtireless.blogspot.com.

Carl Beeth makes a spirited defence of the money usability of US dollar bills but this seems to me to be a case of “usability is what you know”.

Leaving aside the issue of the blind and partially sighted, the most important difference between US and UK money is that you are much less likely to hand over the wrong note in the UK. I suspect that Americans have a learned behaviour where they always check that they are handing over a note of the right denomination but in the UK because of size and (more importantly) colour differences this can happen in the subconscious. You aren’t going to hand over a big purple note (20) when you need to hand over a small blue one (5), even if you are not concentrating on giving over the correct note. After this, advantages of US bills don’t seem so significant.

Google’s AdSense has got to be the most painless way to put advertising on your website. There are no costs involved and a simple online signup procedure. The ads are text-only and relate to the content of the page. Google Weblog lets you try out AdSense with your site (or anyone else’s) without having to sign up.

Here’s Ads for microsoft.com, Ads for slashdot, Ads for bluebones.net and Ads for aol.com (which at the time of writing are all for pants, for some reason).

Google pays about 50 cent per clickthrough (NOT per view) and this number is falling all the time. Actual stats are hard to get hold of because Google is uncharacteristically reticent in publishing stats or allowing others to publish their stats (probably because Google is paying everyone wildly differing amounts). Personally, I prefer my site to stay free of ads. If I had more than the thousand or so hits a day that I am getting maybe greed would overcome me but as the minimum payout is 100 USD I’d probably be waiting months for that.

From selectsmart.com/PHILOSOPHY:

1. Jean-Paul Sartre (100%)
2. Kant (95%)
3. John Stuart Mill (90%)
4. Ayn Rand (89%)
5. David Hume (77%)
6. Aquinas (63%)
7. Aristotle (63%)
8. Jeremy Bentham (62%)
9. Nietzsche (60%)
10. Prescriptivism (59%)
11. Stoics (59%)
12. Plato (51%)
13. Thomas Hobbes (51%)
14. Epicureans (50%)
15. Ockham (45%)
16. Spinoza (41%)
17. St. Augustine (27%)
18. Cynics (25%)
19. Nel Noddings (25%)

Well the BBC article wasn’t so incorrect after all. England are in the second pot and Sweden are seeded above England, Spain, Germany and Holland.

Get the skinny from Sky Sports.

OK, this really BAD article on bbc.co.uk which CANNOT be true says seedings for Euro 2004 are based on World Cup 2002 performance and the Euro 2004 qualifying round and then goes on about how that’s bad for England. Only we reached the last 8 (5 of that 8 are not at Euro 2004) and we qualified top of our group with the third best record in any group! Given that their application of the premise is so bad I have to wonder about the reliability of their information that it is, “likely to be based on qualifying for Euro 2004 and the 2002 World Cup”.

However, assuming they are right and that is what it is based on then the possibilites are:

MUST be seeded above us:

   France (holders, 24, 1R),
   Portugal (hosts, 1R)

MIGHT be seeded above us (better in 1 of 2 categories):

   Czech Rep. (22, X),
   Germany (18, F)

Our record:

   England (20, QF)

MUST be seeded below us (worse in both categories):

   Sweden (17, 2R),
   Spain (17p, QF),
   Italy (17, 2R),
   Denmark (15, 2R),
   Croatia (16p, 1R),
   Holland (19p, X),
   Russia (14p, 1R),
   Greece (18, X),
   Bulgaria (17, X)
   Switzerland (15, X),
   Latvia (16p, X)

Any fair application of the WC2002 + qual rule puts us in the top seed bracket with France, Portugal and probably Germany or maybe Czech Rep. (depending on which of the two qualifying aspects gets accented). Of course this is the final clinching proof that this isn’t the way it will be done by UEFA.

There are now loads of designs at CSS Zen Garden which are absolutely brilliant, despite the site’s crappy name.

Looking at the pages in Lynx, they do a lot better job at degrading gracefully than this site does. Based on that and the fact that its The Right Thing(tm) I have converted bluebones’ basic design to use CSS not tables.

That gracefully degrading CSS is better than tables for layout I am 90% convinced (the other 10% of me worries about the browsers I haven’t checked on). But there’s still the question of whether the loading times of those graphics are worth it (all the designs use quite a few graphics) and whether the visual quality of the designs isn’t a whole lot more to do with the graphics than the CSS (for an example of this see This is Cereal). There are still plenty of people out there on 56k modems or with mobile internet access of similar speeds and 250KB of graphics (which several of the designs have) adds 30 seconds or more to their page load.

Basically the standard pattern of web use apart from a few favourite sites is to put a query into google and visit the most likely looking from the first page of results. Brilliant graphic design and beautiful pages are irrelevant to that kind of use because the images and design are exactly what google and other search engines strip out.

If you are trying to create some kind of brand or continue and offline identity on the web then strong design and graphics may serve some purpose. But for a community or an altruistic site with no brand to push isn’t the cut-down design and quick load times of a site like apache.org, for example, more appropriate?

I have to say my final conclusion is that I’m torn. Visual impressive sites are exactly that, impressive; and surely its better to be impressive than not to be? But you have to look at the tradeoffs. CSS SAVES bandwidth so its a no-brainer but the graphics that go along with it in demonstrating ‘The Beauty in CSS Design’ can make your page 20 times heavier. 250KB of images just can’t be justified, however good it looks.