At last. The Velvet Hearts debut album, Into the World, has just been released. It’s currently available exclusively from CDBaby. It is the best of times, and the worst of times, to be trying to build a career as a musician. The online revolution is both generous in its audience and stingy in its fiscal [...]

In every Pixar movie, Toy Story, Monsters Inc, Finding Nemo, etc. there is a small yellow ball, with a red star and a blue stripe. You have to look hard to find it, but it’s there. The ball was originally a central prop in the 1986 animated short Luxo Jr. I want one of those [...]

Modern mobile devices (phones, PDAs, laptops, etc) could deter theft by all but the most hardened criminal, and it would only require the simplest of modifications to the firmware in many of the devices already on sale.

Today at lunchtime I was alerted by a colleague, to an uncommon sight: a uniformed officer of the law, smoking. A smoking plod is probably just as likely as a smoking anybody, but I can’t remember ever seeing an officer smoking in uniform. This one wore little blue epaulettes and a bright yellow arm band [...]

The iPhone has a quirk that is starting to become a hindrance. Every time the phone goes through a patch of dead air where there’s no cell signal, it pops up a dialogue box saying “network lost”. This obviously could be useful at times, but it’s bad for two reasons:

My colleague Barrett Abernethy has drunk from the WordPress fountain for the first time and found it to be good. He’s writing at bv2.co.uk on coding for GPUs, games consoles and (I predict) cycling.

I’m buying donuts for software engineers to enjoy. Tests prove that donuts increase productivity in geeks by up to 3.147 percent. If you know a computing professional, buy them donuts today and enjoy better software tomorrow.

One of the coolest future applications that was discussed at WordCamp UK last weekend is the WordPress client for the Apple iPhone. Well, it’s just arrived on the iTunes store (here), and I’m using it to write this short test article.

The very good news on the grapevine is that the first WordCamp UK has, already broken even (through sponsorship and ticket sales) with a full 10 days of ticket sales still to go. This is particularly good news since it pretty much guarantees the success of this years event, and future events. If you’ve been [...]

As the largest food retailer in Britain, what Tesco does has a massive impact on the rest of the British food industry, however, Tesco are not a charity and their primary purpose is to make maximum profit (supposedly within ethical guidelines).  The profit-vs-ethics problem is therefore one of ensuring that the right ethical guidelines are [...]

WordCamp is coming to the UK.  WordCamp is a weekend event where the users and developers of WordPress (i.e. members of the general public) can get together for a series of formal presentations, less formal discussions and informal refreshments. I’ve run this site on WordPress since 2003.  I’ve also written a couple of plugins for [...]

Imagine a scene in the not-too distant future… after a frenzied period of leaks, rumours, claims and counter-claims, interspersed with no-comments, denials, and increasingly reliable and suggestive evidence emerging from component and sub-assembly manufacturers, Apple Inc announce the imminent release of The Perfect Gadget. The mainstream press attend press conferences and briefings where Apple proclaim [...]

Something’s broken on the database that runs this site, specifically there’s b0rkage in the comment table, and the ssh daemon is not reachable. Perhaps it’s to do with the larger than normal amount of spam that’s been arriving today (for “larger than normal” read: one metric truckload). More info later after I’ve had a poke [...]

If you asked a child in the 1960s and 70s to draw a computer, they’d most likely have scribbled out a large box with blink-able lights and tape reels on the front of it. A child of the 80s would most likely have drawn something that looked like a PC, with a CRT, keyboard and [...]

I’m in the process of rewriting the Worst Offenders plugin for the soon-to-be-released WordPress 2.5. Before I make a tested and polished version of the code globally available, I’d be interested to hear from anyone who’d like to alpha test it. As before Worst Offenders works cooperatively with other anti-spam plugins: its primary purpose is [...]

For the last few weeks I’ve been testing out some geo-tagging software on my camera. The concept is fairly simple, whenever I take a photo, the built-in GPS works out where I am and records this metadata within the photo.

I couldn’t help but marvel at the efficiency of our local station café recently, as I watched the staff pipeline their customer orders. The busy morning rush was so great that they’d streamlined the operations; one person greeted customers, took orders from several of us at once, and processed the payments. This freed the second [...]

On a recent train journey I overheard a conversation about someone who’d enjoyed the first class wine so much on a recent intercity journey that they had difficulty staying awake so as not to miss their destination. Staying awake is a problem for many commuters and for those whose destination is not the terminating station, [...]

It’s only 15 months since I mentioned the rocket-like acceleration of Akismet which went from a standing start to the point where it had fended off a million spam messages for its users in just 4 months. If things had continued at that pace it would have squashed a cool 5 million spams by now.

Mr. Deity shows what can be achieved with a static camera, a simple script, minimalist set design and great acting. Episode 5 was released yesterday. By releasing an episode every 2 weeks the producers hope to garner enough interest to turn it into a full TV series.