Simon Rumble’s blog

At some point over the next year we're planning to renovate our kitchen. We did a very minor renovation soon after we moved in, replacing the lino floor and swapping in an Ikea bench/drawer unit, but we want to do something much more extensive.

One of the things I've been thinking about is getting the best energy efficiency out of our fridge. I've always found it a bit odd the way they're designed. Fridges work by pumping heat from the inside out to the coils normally located on the back. Wouldn't it be much more efficent to arrange the fridge similar to a split air conditioner, with the heat-release coils in a cooler location? My basic understanding of thermodynamics makes me think the higher the difference in temperature between the liquid carrying heat from inside the fridge and the air around the coils, the higher the efficiency.

Along these lines, I was wondering if efficiency would be improved by getting cooler air flowing over the coils. Since our house has a raised, wooden floor, this could be done by putting a grill in the floor, so that the convection draws cooler air from under the house over the coils. Obviously there needs to be a way for the warm air to escape as well. This arrangement should result in something of a chimney effect, with cool air drawn in at the bottom, passing over the coils, then escaping at the top.

So I dropped a note to the Alternative Technology Association who publish the excellent ReNew: Technology for a sustainable future magazine. I expected, possibly, to get a response in the magazine at some point in the future. To my surprise, I received a response the same day from Technical Editor Lance Turner.

A number of people have suggested this mod over the years, however the most important thing is that air can escape from the top of the fridge - ie, the fridge has at least a 50mm gap between it and any of the walls of the alcove, especially the top of the fridge. So long as there is enough space for air to flow freely, you will get convection happening as the condenser heats up.

Lance goes on to suggest a forced-air fan to actually blow over the condensor, particularly if you can get it to work only when the compressor is on. Quite a neat idea, but I'm keen to go with a passive approach.

So it seems that my idea has some merit, but only if there's a good way for the heat to escape. I'll look into having the hot air vent into the roof space, as well as the vent at the bottom. I think that should result in some pretty substantial efficiency gains.

Had an interesting little bug report today. Apparently someone has created an email address with an ampersand in the local-part. While this is perfectly, valid, it means we enter a world of pain when someone decides they want that email address published on a web page.

Anyone who's ever done web or XML stuff will know that & is a special character used to define other characters. For example, if you want to draw a greater-than character (>) in HTML, you have to type > rather than directly typing > as greater-than is one of the HTML (and XML) delimiters.

So noting this bug report, which was that when the user tried to use our drag-and-drool WYSIKCTWYG (What You See Is Kinda Close To What You Get) editor, adding the mailto: link resulted in & being inserted, and there didn't seem to be any way around it, including editing the source.

So I started thinking about the many levels of abstraction and translation in our application. It's quite staggering when you think about it, and any modern, complex application is likely to have similar layers.

Starting at the front-end, you've got the JavaScript editor control, which uses the browser's DOM to translate things into HTML in a GUI. Next the page is stored in XML according to schemas defined in the CMS. These, in turn, are stored in a database -- I've no idea if they're stored natively in XML or translated yet again.

When the content is published, the whole thing happens in reverse except that the HTML is generated by stitching together all the little snippets according to the templates. Finally we see for sure whether anything went wrong.

It's quite amazing how many layers of abstraction and translation there are. This is actually a pretty simple bug, and could probably be resolved in the JavaScript editor. Of course, given there's an easy work-around (change the email address to not have an ampersand) I'm unlikely to get around to having it fixed.

My justification for insisting they change the email address is that this system isn't likely to be the only one that has problems with the ampersand. I know for a fact that there are hundreds of broken email address validation systems out there that don't allow a whole stack of perfectly-valid characters in email addresses.

Maybe I'm expecting too much, but if I were the web developer at Virgin Blue, I'd test that the itinerary lookup page printed alright. It's the kinda page your customers might think would be worth printing.

Instead you get this absolute dogs breakfast. WTF? Before you ask, this is what printing looks like in Internet Exploder 6 and 8, which probably accounts for 80% of your customers. I did try Firefox first, then reverted to IE to see if it fared any better.

I don't need fancy styling, but having the text I'm interested in reading all overlapping isn't what I had in mind.

Russell is discussing the purpose of Planets, the feed aggregators many of us enjoy. I don't think it's ever really been enumerated, and it probably should. But I bet it's different things to different people.

I enjoy the Planets for the rich and varied insights you get into peoples' lives. We're not all one-dimensional geeks, though I imagine those reading Planet Linux Australia might not have worked that out since I've been censored there.

Russell discusses etiquette for the planet operators. I strongly agree. I've found myself added, then censored from some Planets without any interaction from me -- yes Planet Linux Australia's operating cabal, I'm talking to you. Without some sort of policy, it seems these sites are just run at the whim of the person with the password.

The idea of separate Planet installs, one that's filtered to be solely on-topic and one that shows everything, is a good idea. I think that would resolve many of the complaints about off-topic posts for those who aren't interested in everything. Another thing I'd like to see is the banning of Twitter. The inane wibblings of people who are clearly deranged isn't something of any interest. And there's certainly nothing on-topic in there. Less coherence and thought than goes into a text message seems to be applied to average Twitter post. Enough already!

One thing I would recommend is to not run the official Planet software. It's breaks badly on perfectly-valid feeds, and seems to be abandomware. Try Venus instead, which has refactored much of the code.

Pimms-and-lemonade enthusiast David Flint claims the governance panel at the 2020 Summit was stacked to get a pro-republican outcome. That, of course, would be totally different from that other summit where 50% of the delegates were appointed by a monarchist which, despite the clear majority of Australians wanting a Republic, managed to come up with a model nobody wanted.

So this stacked panel has come up with what should have been done in the first place. First, ask the Australian people whether they want to become a republic. Then, and only then, work out what model of republic we should be. After all of that, we put the royal family to the sword, assuming the model chosen is the Romanov option.

While the monarchists will oppose a republic by all sorts of devious means, the ticking time bomb that ensures we'll become a republic is that, eventually, our head of state will be a non-Australian inbred who has sexual fantasies about tampons. Ewwww!

Gah. I spent far too much time today trying to work around a weird JavaScript bug in Firefox. I had a form that needed to have different hidden parameters depending on the search type in a select list (ahh, the joys of integrating disparate systems). The rewriting worked just fine the first time, but when the user switched back it'd break in a strange way.

Just for relief I tried doing it the Prototype way. Not only was it more readable, logical and shorter, it magically didn't encounter the same bug.

I think it's become time for Prototype to be available throughout the site I work on. I've used it for a few small, targetted applications, and it's wonderful. Time for it to be used everywhere.

First, however, I need to see if I can lazy load it.

I recently a rant about not being able to buy an album for a band I'd stumbled upon.. Lucy from the band has evidently been vanity googling, as she found my post and dropped me a note.

Just did a random google and found that you like our tunes. That's nice to know! Understand your frustration at not being able to purchase said tunage... but have patience, our debut album is being released on Stereo Test Kit Records later this year and then you can buy it as many times as you like!

So that's nice to hear, though August seems a long way away. The annoying part, though, is that the album they released last year isn't going to be made more widely available.

We recorded 'six feet above the ground' early last year and it was more of a demo really, we just sold it at a few gigs and stuff. Anyway. A real album is on its way. And we promise there will be a million easy ways to buy it online. All you have to do is wait till August...

This I find annoying. If it's only demo quality, stick it online and label it a demo. Charge money if you like, whatever, but it'll only help. But hey, it's their musical output! I'll just have to wait until August.

Regardless, I'd recommend checking out The Social Services and the tracks they have released. I've really been enjoying it.

BTW, I've recently subscribed to Metacritic's music feed and it's brilliant. The idea is quite simple: they aggregate the best snippets of reviews from all over the place, and score them, so you can see what the rough consensus is. The best part is that they always pull out the snarkiest quotes from the reviews.

The only annoying part about it is their insistence on using American college language when describing album. Nobody puts out a second album, it's always their "sophomore" album. WTF?

Seen on Bridge Road just now on my way to work: a couple rugged up for the most arctic of winter days. Wooly hats, gloves, scarves, thick coats. It's 17 degrees out there.

Hilarious!

It used to be the best guarantee of bestseller status for a publisher was to be listed on the Catholic Church's Index Liborum Prohibitorum. These days, it seems you can engage an assortment of wowsers to get the publicity you want. Scorcese's Last Temptation of Christ was helped enormously due to the protests against its release.

Goat Boy are the latest to mine this rich seam, prompting the usual outcries from the usual suspects. Yes, they're tasteless. But they're pretty bloody funny too.

What I wanna know is this: is there a talent agency for all these self-proclaimed guardians of moral uprightness? Can one hire them to ensure the appropriate publicity? If not, they're missing a trick!

Goat Boy's comment about thinking of a papal t-shirt for the World Youth Day boondoggle gave me some ideas. I'm thinking Palpatine myself, given the uncanny likeness. Then again, I'm also thinking about handing out free condoms at the event.

Back when I used to listen to music on pieces of etched plastic, I had a simple classification system. Music was slotted into one of "Chilled", "Techno", "Hip hop", "Rock/Pop", "Classical", "Jazz", "Other". There could easily be overlap there, but because I was doing the classifying, it made sense to me.

When I started listening to mp3s, I carried over this basic system, with Rock and Pop split to separate categories and a couple of new ones added: "Reggae", "Radio" (for podcasts), "Country" (for Johnny Cash). My musical tastes got broader too, where in the 1990s I listened almost exclusively to electronic music, I started getting back into Rock, and some of the new musical forms like Post Rock (a ghastly term, worse than "Progressive <anything>".

The cracks started to show in my taxonomy. Godspeed! You Black Emperor ended up in "Chilled", yet Tortoise and M83 ended up in "Rock", by virtue of using guitars. Goldfrapp is in "Chilled", despite mostly being stomping electro, but something you could go to sleep to. I dunno, it doesn't make much sense now.

My new toy has prompted me to revisit this issue. I've long avoided music library software, preferring to browse by my own folder structure, and I despise shuffle in most circumstances, either choosing individual tracks or listening to whole albums. The Squeezebox allows me to browse by my directory structure, but it also has a bunch of other useful and cool ways to slice and dice my music, so the time has come to get my music tagged properly.

It's going to be a long process, tagging all my music. I've generally gone for <artist> - <album>/<trackno>.<trackname> but with so many, for example, Bowie albums, that's getting unmanageable too. So I might end up with artist/album/ after all, though I will never do the brain damaged thing iTunes does and move stuff from compilations into individual artist directories -- that's just dumb.

So I'll shortly be starting the Great Retagging. Any suggestions on tools and approaches?