I’m going to skim over the fact that implementing a system like this is completely ridiculous, and focus more on the one phrase that makes my blood boil.

If you’ve got nothing to hide, then what’s the problem?

I have two responses for this. They run something like:

1. The issue of whether I have ’something to hide’ is completely irrelevant. The government has no place in my private business, period. If you cannot comprehend the possible scope for misuse of power of a database such as this, then you need to get yourself down to a hospital, pronto.
2. Shut the fuck up.

Seriously people, contact your local MP right now, before this gets completely out of control. Canada is looking like a fucking good option right now.

Hopefully this will be resolved ASAP!

I’ve been really busy recently preparing for a conference talk in Manchester, so this blog and my photography has had to take a back seat.

For those waiting for Reflection 1.1, I’ll go out on a limb and say that it should be out by the end of the month. That’s not a promise, but it is coming!

At the same time though I don’t want to do anything.

Damn it.

But man, what a hassle. I was one of the lucky ones that managed to get one on launch day. I queued from about 7:45am with about 10 people in front of me and ate my McDonalds breakfast in line. There was the odd comment from miscellaneous chavs passing by, but I was totally happy to stand in line all day if necessary.

Unfortunately, O2’s service was quite disappointing in some respects:

• The server crashes slowed everything down so much it was ridiculous. I think it took about 90-120 minutes for me to get through in the end.
• The store staff wouldn’t tell us how many 16GB phones they had in stock. As it turns out, that number was about 4. Which is small, and irritatingly fewer than the number of people in front.

 
So all this being said, I had to settle for an 8GB, which isn’t really a big issue for me as there’s only about 5GB in use, and there’s plenty of songs to keep me happy on there. However, I think the larger storage would have been nice.

Initial Impressions

• The device is pretty solid. Build quality feels slightly less than the original phone, but that’s to be expected with the plastic backing. Unlike some, I don’t find it ‘cheap’ at all - I think the uniform black casing looks really nice. The curved edges make it quite a bit nicer to hold in the hand, although I didn’t have any problem with the first generation model anyway.
• 3G is pretty much as expected, and the speed is pretty good. It’s much better than EDGE, that’s for sure. Reception is pretty good, and the fallback EDGE/GPRS transition is quick and painless.
• Battery life is low, but acceptable. I have chargers at home and at work which pretty much suits me fine. I also found a complete power cycle (i.e. full charge, drain completely and then re-charge) helped the life out a lot.
• GPS is intermittent for me. Sometimes, I’ll get a good lock very quickly, other times it can take up to a couple minutes. The cellular assistance definitely speeds it up by several orders of magnitude.

My major complaint is actually the 2.0 software. I had multiple problems setting the phone up as a backup of my old phone: random Safari crashes, Mail refusing to open whatsover, major interface slowdowns and, for some peculiar reason, 3G didn’t work. Restoring as a new phone has alleviated this somewhat, but the interface is still real laggy and they do need to release an update as soon as possible.

But for now, I’m just enjoying it. The hacker in me really can’t wait for PwnageTool 2.0 to be released, though.

However, with all the subsidies now available and the much cheaper price of £159 on the £35/month contract, I took the leap of faith a couple days ago and listed my iPhone on eBay. Final price: £220. Not bad, considering it’s 9 months old and the back doesn’t quite fit on snugly due to the hardware unlock I used.

Anyway, this being the first thing of interest in quite some time, on opening day my intention is to liveblog the event as it happens on July 11th. So, depending on precisely where I go to buy the thing, I may see you there!

This post is just to let you know that development is still very much alive and well and I have a bit of free time to do some work on it over the next few days. Here’s a preliminary list of improvements:

• Create a simple admin interface for easier modification of header image and little features that I’ve hard-coded in.
• Add support for tags - really, I don’t see the point in adding category support at this point in time.
• General code improvements to make the animations a bit faster, and port everything over to the latest version of mootools. 
• Clean up CSS - much simpler ways of making the drop-down menus work.
• Fix rendering support in IE6 since it’s currently all broken.

Please let me know if you want anything in particular, either in the comments or drop me an e-mail. 

Anyway. Was back home a couple of weeks ago to do some task that I can’t remember, and went to turn on the PC to the lovely sound of click click click hum *pause* click click…

Now, I’ve worked on enough machines to know that any kind of clicking sound is a very bad thing — usually indicative of imminent, unrecoverable hard-drive failure. At this point, I had a major heart attack since that drive had about 40GB of tagged, organized, irreplaceable and unfortuntely, not-backed-up photos.

At this point you’re probably screaming at the screen asking how I could have been so stupid. In some vein effort to make myself look like less of a dumbass than I actually am, here’s a brief justification for my actions:

1. The drive had been working fine with no errors for almost four years (yes, I know, this isn’t a good reason… in fact it’s probably not even an excuse!)
2. My motherboard’s SATA ports are both full and I don’t want to buy an IDE drive.
3. At the time, I was waiting for Apple to announce a new Mac Pro so that I’d have a PC in Coventry.

So after the heart attack, I ripped the drive out of the PC, mounted it in a caddy and ran GetDataBack, which is an excellent piece of data recovery software. All of the important data (including all of the photos and the Lightroom library) was fine, thankfully.

Now I’m considering backup options. Really I want it to be network-accessible, about 3-4TB and backed up. So far, the most likely candidate is a self-built PC with software RAID-5 with 3×1TB drives. Anyone else out there got any suggestions for a good backup system?

Anyway, we’re going to do the usual tourist crap, but of course I will be taking as many pictures as I’m allowed to by Sarah. Hopefully with a bit of luck I’ll be able to do some diaries or something on here as the hotel has interweb capability.

That’s it for now — back to packing.

I was quite shocked by the amount of people that said they wanted this thing. I thought it was actually okay, but not good enough to publish. However people seem to think otherwise so I decided to put it up.

Design-wise it’s all very simple. There’s a heavy amount of AJAX behind the front page, but it’s handled in a graceful way should JavaScript not be running. Everything on the site uses mootools for any AJAX requests or effects, which is a cracking little library. By far and away the best 3rd party JS library I’ve ever seen.

Anyway. If you want it, go grab it and tell me what you think.