It’s happened before:

October 11th 2007:

The BBC News web-site has been suffering outages today while its hosting location fluctuated between BBC Internet Services and the Akamai web application acceleration and performance management service.

For many users this afternoon, the front page of the BBC News site has been slow to respond, often displaying error messages such as ‘No suitable nodes are available to serve your request and an error occurred while processing this directive’. Other users found that requests to news.bbc.co.uk caused the server to continually redirect their request back to news.bbc.co.uk, causing an infinite redirection loop which would have added to the load on the servers.

Today’s performance problems coincide with apparent moves to and from the Akamai content distribution network. Prior to today, the news.bbc.co.uk site had been self-hosted by BBC Internet Services in Docklands, London.

For some periods today, the BBC News website had resolved to IP addresses belonging to Akamai, while other times it had either been pointed back to BBC Internet Services at Docklands, or did not resolve at all, thus leaving the site completely inaccessible.

Akamai transparently mirrors content stored on web servers and users then access the content from these instead of the origin server. By automatically picking a mirror server that is near to the user, performance is generally increased while decreasing the load on the origin server.

Steve Herrmann, editor of the BBC News website, has published a blog article about the site problems.

I’m doing some work for Jawbone and they have just released there bluetooth mobile headset in Europe yesterday. But I have so say its quite an amazing bit of kit! The noise suppression on it is something else! They have a demo on their website of what a call is like and it really is like that. I was talking to a mate in my house then walked outside into my car and then down a busy local motorway and I asked him if he could hear my car and he still thought I was in my house! anyway kinda cool, anyway check it out…

More info http://www.artlebedev.com/everything/optimus/

Now a competition has been setup by Weird to find the best snapshots. Highlights include a guy taking a leak, the actual Google Van taking the 360-degree photos but my all time favoruite a photo of 524 Haight St San Francisco, and the google van exceeding the speed limit! Classic!

I haven’t found any UK street photos but guessing this may not happen for a while due to tighter controls on privacy.

http://www.google.com/tisp/

Yup we’ve had a Lahar… (lar-har). Yes everyone one was going on about the Lahar involving one of the New Zealand volcanoes… had no idea what on earth they were going on about. As it was involving a volcano I thought it would be a good idea to find out . Quick search on wikipedia sorted everything out. Its basically a lake a the top of a volcano that has burst its banks and a load of mud and water poring down.

The NZ government have set up quite a neat system for alerting everyone so that s cool… no probs BUT I get a call from my parents. They are travelling down to Wellington on the train and the track had been washed away. Luckily they had stopped for lunch (the train stops for an hour or so, so everyone can get off and have lunch!!! how bizarre!) anyway they had to go the rest of the way by coach.

Should be getting the video of me jumping off the SkyTower next week…

More info: NZ Herald

On wednesday morning an email is sent to everyone in the office… “As you are all free this evening we have booked 10 tickets for the skyJump at 5pm, it will be followed by a meal in devonport”. The office goes quiet… you can hear the jaws dropping from all around… For those that do not know the SkyJump is a virtually freefall jump from a tower no just a smallish tower… its the biggest tower in the Southern hemisphere… nice!… ok, you don’t jump from right at the top but at 640ft tall and going 85kph its still very, very high and fast… and i’ve just received an email saying that i’m going to do it… NO WAY!!! … oh and the added pressure being that they have paid for it so you have to do it.. the panic starts the set in. I’ve seen people doing it, hanging in no mans land waiting to fall… I start to go into a strange laughing hysteria which lasts most of the day… unfortunately my window looks out at the sky tower it dominates the Auckland skyline.

At 4.35pm we get in the taxi and leave the office… 4.50pm we get to the sky tower looking directly up the tower… it looks big… very big.

We get our harnesses and jump suits, I ask for another harness but they says its pointless as your only attached to one cable… nice… I ask how long the person has been working for SkyJump… the reply “one week”, right. Confidence high!… not. Were taken up to the lift and we go up the sky tower. The lift is a glass lift, you can look down and see the bottom of the lift shaft and look directly out of the window to the world. I keep my eyes firmly on the back wall of the lift, not looking out. We get to the top and one by one go onto the little ledge. I have this recollection of the guy saying “Are you ready?” to which I reply “Yes” and wonder why on earth I’ve said yes? because agreeing to a stranger to push you off a building at 192 metres just sounds stupid! and well … unwise! Anyway I didn’t have much time to think about it because he shouts out 3 … 2 … 1 … and i’m gone…

Note the clenched fist! the second photo isn’t great because of the strong lights from the base of the building and night fast approaching. You get a better idea from the video on the website.

http://www.boreme.com/boreme/funny-2006/james-blunt-p1.php

Yes, there was an earthquake on wednesday just north of auckland out to sea… and where was I??? just north of auckland snowboarding at snow planet. Did I feel anything?! .. nothing. I was talking to a local who has lived in auckland for 20 years and has never felt an earthquake, and i’m in snow planet falling over and don’t notice a thing. Then at 11pm there was another but smaller and I didn’t feel that either. Oh well… maybe next time.

Generally Auckland isn’t geared up as much as Wellington for earthquakes. While I was down in Wellington a couple of weeks ago I took some photos of equipment etc in the buildings in Wellington.

On the floor of the building I was working there was a civil defence cabinet:

On top were “Readi-safe survival packs for emergency relief and natural disasters”. The packs can sustain Five adults or Two adults and three children for up to three days. I didn’t check to see what was in the cabinet but the “perishables” replacement list on the front had: Batteries (AA Radio) x3, Batteries Torch (D Cell) x8, Readi-safe survival packs x2, Tampons 1box, Light Sticks 12 hour 15, Water purification tablets 1 box of 50. All interesting stuff

And then downstairs on the ground floor was the “Orange Box”, a safe room incase of disaster… basically an empty room from what I can see

Private Importers Custom Charges

Ok books are free… yupiee! but look at the other stuff! Golf balls are free, golf clubs are free yet golf bags are $7? “Linen – table cloths” are $5 yet “Linen – Kitchen Linen” is free?? and what about the lego?! $7 for lego bricks?!!! Bizarre!

http://www.gtdev.net/crimbo2006.mp4 – Mpeg4

http://www.gtdev.net/crimbo2006.wmv – Windows Media Player

Its only a very rough cut, and it goes on a bit. But you get the general idea. For all those who want to know I ran the footage through a de-interlacer and then colour corrected it to give it a little bit of a filmatic look.

Yes, the phantom of the opera! .. it was either that or a french maid!

Dean went as “Chile” and Joy the new zealander went as scotland:

Yannis won the costume competition, I don’t know what country he came as… I don’t think anyone cared, he came as a maid. The funniest moment was when we all had to walk from the hotel to darling harbour to pick up the boat. The looks from the Japaneese tourists was priceless! also the wolf whisles and the bemused faces of people as he walked by:

Other photos:

Demiti works for GT in Jakarta, Indonesia and it was his first time outside the country… and the first time he has seen how we party… never seen a christmas cracker before… generally in shock most of the night but he did get into the swing of things. He managed to borrow a couple of elements of costumes from different people to make his own costume:

Picture from the boat looking back at Sydney:

My Crimbo Hamper:

Video to come!

BBQ at St Kilda:

It is interesting that this week Google Execs this week told their developers to stop creating so many applications and now look at adding features to the existing applications. Also to concentrate on getting them more integrated. It is definatly needed. Yes the spreadsheets app is good but I wouldn’t use it. I think if Google should go towards the idea of ThinkFreeOfice, offer a large amount of space to save files I think they can really get into the thin client integrated enterprise space. Create and edit any of your files in word, excel, powerpoint, calendar and email and allow them to be shared to whoever you want at any time. Powerful! Oh and if there was a calender integration for Outlook, i’d use it! …

Windows Vista RC2 has been released for anyone to download it! It will be the last release before it goes into production. Here are some screenshots of Vista. Its nice… very Mac like

Firefox 2 RC2 has been released – quite a few new features but its more stable, i’m hoping they have fixed the memory leaks which seem to plage me!

“The Father turns 60. His family, which is a big one of the kind, gathers to celebrate him on a castle. Everybody likes and respects the father deeply…or do they? The Youngest Son is trying to live up to The Father’s expectations. He is running a grill-bar in a dirty part of Copenhagen. The oldest son runs a restaurant in France, while the sister is a lawyer. The older sister has recently committed suicide and the father asks the oldest son to say a few words about her, because he is afraid he will break into tears if he does it himself. The oldest son agrees without arguments. Actually he has already written two speeches. A yellow and a green one. By the table, he asks the father to pick a speech. The father chooses green. The oldest son announces that this is the Speech of Truth. Everybody laughs, except for the father who gets a nervous look on his face. For he knows that the oldest son is about to reveal the secret of why the oldest sister killed herself.”

It was quite a good show, I especially liked how they represented everyone getting ready for bed. They had one bed centre stage which was used by all the characters in the scene at the same time but acting out their own little scenes totally independantly… worked really well

On the way back on the plane the cabin crew announced that the film was about to start and I overheard a passenger saying that it was a really good film, so I thought I should tune in… The film is called Kenny and was about Kenny Smyth who delivers pora-loos. He’s ignored and unapprciated, but its hilarious! … It was really bizare! on a plane at 30,000 feet, trying not to laugh. In the end I just gave up trying to hold it in, the rest of the aircraft was laughing so much! Toilet humour at its best! From what is says on IMDB it doesn’t have any release dates outside Oz at the moment, but I hope it does! Its the second film in as many months that has come out of Australia that has been great.

Homemade flight sim, I want one!

Its amazing what you find on the internet. But on the 11th January 1797 at the Old Bailey. Look who got arrested for stealing 50 pieces of wood pipe and a wooden boat! In the end jury found him guilty and confined to “The House of Correction” and fined a shilling. I wonder if he is any relation?

On the same day in another case, James Waring (Aged 16.), William Green (Aged 13.) and John Milton (Aged 14.) were all found guilty for:

“burglariously breaking and entering the dwelling-house of John Printon , about the hour of six in the night of the 5th of December, and feloniously stealing a black silk cloak, value 26s. six yards of muslin, value 18s. and a muslin cap, value 1s. the property of the said John ;”

They were all sentenced to death… over 200 years ago.

Ok this is cool, its visual look of flight paths going over the US, using US flight data over a 24hr period.. over 19000 planes in the air at a peak time!!

I’ve re-found pimpthatsnack.com a great website with recipes for “pimping up your snack” … I think a mate created a huge cookie using a recipe on the site. I am going to make the kitkat bar! so watch out supermarket, here I come!!

Synthetica is a great easy to use look and feel framework for Java; AT LAST java doesn’t look square, blocky and horrible.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bNF_P281Uu4
Found this cool vid on youtube.com. This guy gets around the world showing off his expert dancing skills!

http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/315702
Online game. Its quite easy until you get to level 16 & 23 which I got stuck on for a bit… think its already done the rounds but its quite fun.

http://poignantguide.net/ruby/
This is a great site if you want to learn Ruby, you can even download a ruby virtual machine from VMTN so your up and developing in… well the amount of time it takes to download! ooh how I love VMs

http://www.google.com/gmm/tour.html
You can now get Google Maps on ya mobile, you can plot a route and even see it via satelite too. I used to use wap to get rail times quite a bit. Every now and again I always wanted to get maps on my phone too, but now you can

Finally I give an award to the most “inventive” post to the iPod Shuffle story:

“Hi. The iPod was shorted out by a cabal of Jewish engineers who perfected the science of invisibility and secretly control the entire universe including Burger King, but not McDonalds. They call to me hypersonically from the little holes in the electrical sockets telling me to produce movies about phony messiahs who didn’t really exist. The dead iPod is NOT an example of the Holocaust although their are millions of dead iPods which have been burried in mass graves in Croatia. Hi, sugartits. ”

Truely bizare!

Saturday night in Ohakune

Well that was a week ago and i’m still in Auckland, really good snow! and its still snowing!! It takes about 3hrs to drive to Ohakune and then about 30mins driving up the mountain… or should I say volcano… BUT it only went active about 10 years ago and wipped the lift system and mountain cafes off the face of the mountain one… but you try not to think about that

I’ve now got a flat on the docks right next to the centre of Auckland. It takes about 10mins to walk into the centre of town. Out here its so cheap, there is no council tax and the top rate of tax is 33% and no national insurance so its basically another 10% cheaper. You do have to pay doctors fees which is about £10 per visit but you can get insurance for around £20 a month which covers everything.

Whakapapa is more or less dead centre of the north island of New Zealand, were going to be driving down from Auckland on Friday evening. Hopefully the mountain will be open. I was closed earlier in the week due to “to much snow” thats what I like to hear! Just a pitty I didn’t have more time to pop down to Wanaka to see the Rookies down there, but treble cone doesn’t open until the end of the month anyway.

Anyway I’ll be back in the UK on tueday. Yupiee can’t wait… (not) but I have to say it is warmer in the UK than it has been in Sydney. It basically rain non-stop for two weeks when I first got here. Also the house i’m in has no heating, well all except a fan heater in my room.

I have to admit it was a bit my fault. He was going to chuck it away so I thought hey why not take a quick look to see if we could fix it, worth a try. It was out of warranty, nothing to loose… well maybe a finger … he wanted to get an iPod Video anyway. I found the site and started the jabbing I just gave up too soon and he carried on. Oh and to the person who asked did we actually fix it … no i’m afraid we didn’t. The memorial service will be on Saturday @700 swatch internet time.

Just to get one thing straight it was nothing to do with “Apple’s shoddy workmanship” that resulted in what happend, it was our fault. I think some people didn’t quite get my English sarcastic in jest tone. I think the iPod design is a work of art, amazing engineering.

I’ve found it quite interesting to see how the story has progressed around the internet. A lot of blogs just seem to copy exactly the same text and put the same info on there blog. Others seem to have multiple blogs but all posting the same stories on different domains, I suppose all trying to get that little bit higher in the google rankings so that they can brag to their friends.

Anyway here are a couple of selected comments from around the web about the story which I thought were quite amusing:

• “ipod shuffle wins battle with knife wielding owner”

• iPod shuffle 1-0 Angry customer

• And this, children, is why Apple tell us not to eat the iPod Shuffle.

• [Using a knife:] That’s what hammers are for.

• fryPod (TM)

• originaly known as “Melting Pod”

• Kentucky fried shuffle

• The “Mission Impossible” iPod

• “Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to listen to audio files… This iPod Shuffle will self destruct in ten seconds after being opened and tampered with.”

• Does it smell like warm, fresh Apple Pie?

• He should’ve taken apples advice for when their products break. “buy a new one”

I actually never knew quite how explosive lithium iron batteries could be. I knew that you are not allowed to bin them or chuck them on a fire, I thought this was more to do with their corrosiveness and reactivity of the chemicals when burnt. Someone posted a video of one going off in an experiment:

Lithium iron battery over-charging experiment

He quickly checks to make sure his iPod is defiantly dead by plugging it into his laptop, looking back probably a bad move, mainly because he got straight into “fixing it” and didn’t let it discharge but we will never fully know .

Using a metal knife he started to ease the bottom of the case off… then with a kind of jabbing notion started to hack at it well then he must have hit a small capacitor and I found him running around the room swearing and screaming like a school girl wondering what to do. The iPod basically exploded in his face and caught fire, sparks flying and thick black smoke, and in the end he placed it on an electric fan, which in turn started to turn black from the smoke and heat coming out of the tiny little ipod…

I feel there are two morals of the story:

1) Apple made the iPod shuffle in a way for it not to be opened… there is a reason for this!
2) Project Managers should never think of themselves as “Hardware Engineers”.

The Dead iPod:

Mikal is coming over from NZ for the weekend as its a bank holiday in NZ this weekend. Need to buy a bed tho! I’ll post some pictures of ma house when I get their!

Anyway just chilling out in Sydney Central. I’m working for a UK client out here for a bit and my plan is to sort out my show reel while i’m here too. Anyway time to hunt out some food… starving, i’ve been living of airplane food for the past 24hrs… not good. I do remember when I first flew and thought that plane food was amazing coming in different little containers etc. Think i’ve changed now

This is a classic! The BBC accidently put on air a cabbie who was waiting to pick someone up from BBC reception. BBC thought he was a technology expert. You have to see the vid for the cabbies reaction! You can see the vid here.

More Snow in NZ! Mount Ruapehu has had quite a big first dump, more info at their website.

Ok this is just bizare… the top 10 strangest robots! I particlarily like the Cockroach Controlled mobile robot, and the chair robet that rebuilds itself … I just have one question.. Why?

Ok I’ve seen this around before, bit hey it really shows that spelling doesn’t really matter If you can read this, you have a strange mind too…

i cdnuolt blveiee taht I cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd waht I was rdanieg. The phaonmneal pweor of the hmuan mnid, aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it dseno’t mtaetr in what oerdr the ltteres in a wrod are, the olny iproamtnt tihng is taht the frsit and lsat ltteer be in the rghit pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can sitll raed it whotuit a pboerlm. This is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. Azanmig huh? yaeh and I awlyas tghuhot slpeling was ipmorantt! if you can raed tihs forwrad it.

Linux Bang Commands:

Some cool little linux shortcuts to help ya out. Most modern shells
support csh's bang commands - bash, tcsh and zsh all do.
While some bang commands don't work in all those shells, all of
the following do. The plus side to using them is that no matter
what shell you're using, these shortcuts will work. For the purposes
of these tips, every tip will assume these are the last three
commands you ran:

% which firefox
% make
% ./foo -f foo.conf
% vi foo.c bar.c

Getting stuff from the last command:

Full line:     % !!            becomes:   % vi foo.c bar.c
Last arg :     % svn ci !$     becomes:   % svn ci bar.c
All args :     % svn ci !*     becomes:   % svn ci foo.c bar.c
First arg:     % svn ci !!:1   becomes:   % svn ci foo.c

Accessing commandlines by pattern:

Full line:     % !./f          becomes:   % ./foo -f foo.conf
Full line:     % vi `!whi`     becomes:   % vi `which firefox`
Last arg :     % vi !./f:$     becomes:   % vi foo.conf
All args :     % ./bar !./f:*  becomes:   % ./bar -f foo.conf
First arg:     % svn ci !vi:1  becomes:   % svn ci foo.c

Various shells have options that can affect this.  Be careful
with shells that let you share history among instances.
Some shells also allow bang commands to be expanded
with tabs or expanded and reloaded on the command
line for further editing when you press return.

Interesting sites found this week:
How to write copy for Websites
Screen shots of Firefox Alpha 2
Signs your a crappy developer
This is a nice little use of AJax and Google maps, visual mapping site… kinda cool.

The robot dance kid is amazing! Julian (ma bro) is going to be working on the ninja acrobatics this year for part of his circus skills course, kinda amazing too.