Simon Rumble’s blog

London can't let New York edge us out for crappiest infrastructure of a so-called modern city. No, we had our own little power outage this evening.

I was in the tube but fortunately the power cut out just as the train hit Waterloo station, my destination. 20 seconds earlier and I would have been stuck in the tunnel. As it was, we all had to file up to the front carriage to get out, but it wasn't so bad.

So I go along to my play at the Young Vic (Le Costume, directed by Peter Brook -- quite good but a bit pricey at £25 for four actors, even if they are amongst the best) which starts a bit late due to the power cut, but the power came back just in time.

After the play, two hours since the power cut ended, and I wander back to Waterloo to find that all the tubes are still down. Four transport changes and two hours later, I'm finally home. Yeesh!

Well I've finally decided to take the plunge. I'm going to convert to Maildir for my mailboxes tonight. The impetus has been Squirrelmail, which Holly uses for her email. It needs an IMAP server and I've now been through UW and Dovecot IMAP servers, and both of them are now silently failing after upgrades. No errors given in logs, no reason given.

So tonight, armed with mb2md I'm gonna make the big switch, then install Courier IMAP. Hopefully it'll work, and hopefully it'll be a bit faster too.

It always amazes me what the average Internet user puts up with when browsing the web. Adverts flashing beside content, the throbbing making the content unreadable. Pop-ups in the hundreds, closing them causing more to open. Yeesh!

I was showing a mate how to use Bit Torrent recently, and pointed him to Suprnova. To my surprise, a whole swag of pop-ups, pop-unders and assorted undesirables over took the screen.

You see, I've had protection from ads for years. It was when they started animating them that I decided to find a solution, because they made the web annoyingly hard to use. More recent ideas like pop-ups have just confirmed in my mind the lack of value added by banner advertising. You see, for much of my career I've worked for companies that, directly or indirectly, are funded by advertising. But where advertising becomes so intrusive that it gets in the way of the content, something's got to give.

You see, I've had protection from ads for years. It was when they started animating them that I decided to find a solution, because they made the web annoyingly hard to use. More recent ideas like pop-ups have just confirmed in my mind the lack of value added by banner advertising. You see, for much of my career I've worked for companies that, directly or indirectly, are funded by advertising. But where advertising becomes so intrusive that it gets in the way of the content, something's got to give.

If you're a Windows user, try the Proxomitron. It's pretty damn effective at dumping all of them. For somewhat adept Linux users, try Craig's squid filter, though there are probably nicer and more cleanly designed ones out there.

Start blocking ads today. You'll be amazed at what a difference it makes to your browsing experience.

I know it's perhaps a little old news now, but I finally got around to playing with Friendster. It's an interesting concept, and the implications are pretty huge.

In case you don't know, Friendster is a site that maps social networks of people. You start by filling in your profile and then attempting to find and link with friends you actually know already. Once your real-world network of mates is hooked up with you, your "Personal Network" includes those friends, and their friends, and their friends etc etc. You can search within this huge friends-of-friends network and find people with similar interests, mabye ask someone in between you on the network to introduce you.

Of course the main application here is dating, and that seems to be the main driver for its popularity. But it's also an interesting social experiment. The six-degrees-of-separation experiment mapped online.

This shit could get really interesting when you start looking at the interests of your "Personal Network" of people. I already get a lot of tips about films, music, gigs and the like from my mates. I know my mates' interests, they know mine, so we tip each other off on things we think they might like all the time.

Now imagine we start listing the kinda music we're liking, or perhaps even have that fed in automagically, and you start getting another interesting axis on which to make recommendations. Friendster, hooked in with the Ringo/HOMR/Firefly concept, could get very interesting!

Anyway, if you have a Friendster account and you're a mate of mine, add me into yer list then eh? I'd go and invite loads of my mates except I don't like that myself. Too much like the spam-producing greeting card scam. Give the gift of spam: the giift that keeps on giving!

I have a simple idea, but I haven't been able to find any software to do it. I have a browser at home and a browser at work. Both are Mozilla Firebird. I want the bookmarks to be the same in both.

The complication is that I want to be able to add, modify, move and delete bookmarks from either of them and have it show up in the remote. That makes it a bit trickier, but not impossible.

Anyone heard of such a beast? Must run on Linux and Windows (in Cygwin if necessary).

Back in 1994 when web browsers were new, we expected a little instability. Hell the operating systems on which they ran were pretty damn flaky too. When Netscape came out, we all justified the flakiness to ourselves by marvelling at the great new features: things like tables and blink tags.

Now explain to me why web browsers are still flaky? I don't use Internet Explorer if I can help it, but the RSS viewer I use at work does have it embedded. At least twice a day, the IE component flakes out, taking all the "seen" data with is.

As my main browser, both at home under Linux and at work under Windows, I use Mozilla Firebird. It's a great browser in most respects fast, standards compliant and massively configurable. The one regard where you see its Netscape lineage is stability. It hangs, eats progressively more memory the longer it's open and the Linux version regularly sits there chewing 100% CPU while seemingly doing nothing.

Now I'm willing to give the developers the benefit of the doubt. They rely on a bunch of plug-in developers' code for stability, and I suspect the Macromedia Flash and Java plugins might well be problematic. But it's nearly ten years since 1994 when the web explosion happened, and you'd kinda expect some progress in that time...

I'm always fascinated with what's underneath modern cities. It's incredible when you look into it how much of the infrastructure is under our fee The third dimension hides sewers, power and water mains, transport systems, old conveyers, bomb shelters and of course historical materials.

My Mum, on her recent visit, discovered and dragged us to the Guildhall in the City of London with its intact section of a Roman amphitheatre. It's amazing what lies beneath!

Anyway, what brought this all to mind is this excellent description of the stuff going on at Kings Cross as they redevelop it for the Channel Tunnel rail link. Really interesting stuff, and very well presented.

Annoyingly, my ADSL router died yesterday. However, my ISP are absolutely brilliant. I phoned them up, described the problem and they've agreed to send out a replacement which should arrive tomorrow. Brilliant! Couldn't recommend this ISP any more highly.

Yahoo's instant messaging system recently blocked third-party clients from connecting to their network. Microsoft are about to try the same thing soon. The hackers have just sorted it out.

All of these vendors want to own the instant messaging marketplace. Yahoo, however, are pretty stupid in doing this. They're probably number three, at best, in this market (and that's counting AOL and ICQ as one company), so they really can't afford to piss too many users off. Piss too many of 'em off and they'll just all decamp to MSN or AIM.

Next month, Microsoft plans to do similar things, changing their protocol in an attempt to knock out all the third-parties. I hear that most of the third-party groups already support the new protocol, so I won't be having any problems.

Thing is, this shit doesn't really bother me. I have accounts on all the major ones: AIM, ICQ, MSN and Yahoo. You can contact me on any of those. I don't do it with some integrated, upgrade-every-time-the-protocol-changes client. Instead I use Jabber, a standardised and free instant messaging system. It has server-side gateways to other networks, which keeps me in touch with people still using neanderthal systems.

So if you use Trillian, GAIM or one of these systems, let me recommend Jabber. Go get yourself one of the clients and stick me on your roster. My Jabber ID is the same as my email address. Enjoy the difference.

This site has been mostly the same since 1998, at least structurally. It's been tweaked here and there, a few kludges hacked upon, a ghastly colour scheme updated to something more sedate, but never really redesigned from the ground up. It's time for that redesign!

Obviously it'll be all the web technologies that have become useful since 1998. It'll be valid XHTML with CSS for presentation, not the horrible tables I've been using since 1995 or so.

For management, I'll be using Blosxom because I love it. It's simple, extensible and doesn't rely on complicated, heavyweight software packages like databases.

So watch this space. It'll start developing as I have time.