The Life and Times of Neil

So a quick word tonight on a bottle of what proclaims itself “the strongest Belgian beer”, coming in at a fairly hefty 12%abv.

The beer is bronze in colour with a nose that drifts between malty and slightly floral. On the palatte, the beer is quite sharp with hints of citrus; but there is also a noticable sweetness, particularly after it’s been stood in the glass for a while. The high alcohol content also leads to a certain astringency. The finish is somewhere between bitter and sour and tends to catch in the back of the throat. At first the finish is somewhat muted, but once again becomes more pronounced with exposure to air. Overall, I can’t say I was overly impressed. I felt the beer lacked character; although I would not say the beer was unpleasent.

I should probably note that the bottle I sampled did have a slightly cloudy appearance. I’m not sure if this means the beer is bottle conditioned (the bottle makes no indication if this), it had thorn a chill haze, the glass had some residue in it which reacted with the beer, or it was simply a sub-standard batch that slipped through (the beer was still within its best before date). So my review may not be based on the best specimen. Looks like I need to go back to Belgium for some more!

Given this, my scoring may be a little unfair, but I am going for a 6 out of 10. While a very drinkable beer, I just felt it lacked character and is sold mostly under the claim of being “the strongest Belgian beer”. Of course, if I find a better specimen I may yet change my mind and update thus review and score.

(For those who don’t know the Ministry of Crap Design, or MoCD for short, comes from the stand-up comedy of Ben Elton from many years ago. We all experience it many times through life, I have a blog, the rest is history; except Ben is a lot funnier than me!)

OK, so I’m sat in what is starting to feel like my 3rd home: Amsterdam’s Schipol airport. Been here 90 mins so far thanks to a very early arrival and still have 2 hours until my connecting flight. So armed with an iPod with the Wordbook app but no wi-fi (3 Euros for 15 minutes?!? Schipol is a real rip-off these days from food to duty free to Internet prices!) the mind starts to wander. And as usual one of my moments of inspiration(?) came while sat on the bog (please tell me it’s not just who gets that!) and suffering at the hands of the autoflusher!

The idea is simple. No-one likes going into the cubicle to see the remains of what the person to go in there before you has just done. Some places are worse than others (Eaga men… You know who you are you filthy beasts!) so the autoflusher is a panel mounted on the wall behind you which somehow detects when you leave and then flushes away you doings, saving the next person in the horror of seeing what you left before they have chance to flush it away themselves. All sounds very healthy and hygienic!

However… Experience show that they don’t always work as intended. It seems the slightest movement is enough to set them off, even if it’s just slightly to one side to reach to loo roll dispenser. I swear today I only had to breathe at one point and it tried to flush me away! Now I have 2 issues with this. Firstly, we are all being told to conserve water; yet just think how much water is being wasted by all these false flushes. But more important is that the flush is pretty powerful. This means that every time it flushes with you still sat there, you end up with a wet arse. This requires more loo roll to dry yourself off, which means more moving, leading to another flush leading to a wet arse again, and so on.

Of course, in true MoCD fashion, as soon as I stand up today and move away from the toilet what happens… It fails to flush! Thankfully the earlier false flushes had removed most of what was in there so it wasn’t too bad (of course, there is no manual flush backup).

I should point out that this problem is not unique to Schipol. I think the first time I encountered the autoflusher was at another airport – St Louis International in the USA; and theirs were no better!

So it finally happened… I have bought my first Apple product. Given the amount of travel I am likely to be doing over the next few years (clocked up nearly 9000 miles in August alone, 10000 if you add in associated car journeys) I decided to get myself an MP3, and in the end I opted for the iPod Touch (2nd generation, 32GB: Now superceded by the 3rd Gen, 64GB, the gits!)

Now first impressions are good. It’s shiny, for starters. The interface works quite nicely with fingers, which is new to me having come from the touchscreen world of Windows Mobile smart-phones with a stylus. The UI is clean and straightforward, and integration with iTunes works quite nicely. Sound quality is good, and I’m tempted to saying that since switching from Windows Media Player to iTunes when listening to music on the computer the audio quality from iTunes is much better. The iTunes App Store has software for almost every need you might have. So no complaints so far.

However, as you start to use the device, you start to notice more little “issues” with it. One of the common grips with the iTouch is that to do a major version upgrade the OS you have to pay, whereas on the iPhone (they use the same base OS) the upgrades are free. Minor upgrades don’t cost on either device (at the moment).

But if you do decide to upgrade, be warned… When I first got my iTouch it came with version 2.x of the OS. Given some of the new bits they’ve unlocked with version 3 I decided to part with the 5.99GBP to upgrade. Thankfully, this all went smoothly and I got my new OS with a minimum of fuss all ready for my August leave from work. After I got back to <foreign place> I was informed there was an update from 3.0 to 3.1.1 so I decided to go ahead and get the upgrade done. Now the upgrade file is pretty big; nearly 300MB. Where I currently live/work is a Muslim country, and so we’re deep into Ramadan. For some reason, the internet has suddenly started working a lot slower than normal, and I often find my connection drops out – the joys of using a 3G mobile dongle for internet. Normally, these drops would be a minor irritation. Thankfully, 9am in a morning seems to be a fairly reliable time to grab some internet, so did the upgrade first thing. Download didn’t take too long, so all looked good. So plug in the iTouch and the upgrade starts.

The first thing that iTunes does is to verify the upgrade file with Apple. Wise idea on the face of it to ensure the file hasn’t got corrupted in transit. However, as it does this the attached iTouch Windows drivers are updated and the device is put into upgrade mode. You may not think this would be a problem, except my internet chose this moment to drop out for a minute or 2. Sadly, this meant that iTunes was unable to verify the upgrade file. Now you would hope that in this situation you’d either get a chance to retry, or to press on anyway and hope that the download is good. Not Apple! I got an error message which only gave me an acknowledgement button. Pressing this took me back to iTunes with the iTouch still sat in upgrade mode. What do you do now? There’s no obvious menu option to restart the upgrade, the iTouch is unresponsive to any button presses to try and turn it off, the Apple website and iTunes help give no answers on what to do. Oh f**k… I now have a very shiny, but very expensive, paperweight!

Eventually, some other web forums gave the hint of disconnecting the iTouch and holding in the power and home buttons to force the device to power off.  Turning it back on leaves you at the first screen you ever see on the iTouch: the one where it asks you to connect it to a computer with iTunes. Doing this thankfully launches a recovery mode which restores the iTouch to the default settings, thankfully installing the new OS in the process. I was then able to recover the settings from the backups that iTunes does when it Syncs the device, followed by a lengthy process of reinstalling all your apps and then copying all your music, videos, etc from the computer back onto the iTouch.

So thanks to some very poor error handling from Apple, what should have been a 10 minute process probably took closer to 2 hours. Surely it can’t be that hard to add a routine that allows the user to try and re-verify the download, or at least hold off from doing the Windows driver update and putting the iTouch into upgrade mode until the download has been verified??? If you are going to do an upgrade of the OS on one of these devices, it may be worth giving the Download Only option a try and work out how to do the actual upgrade later when your internet is being more reliable!

The other major issue I have with Apple is what seems to be a “we know best”/nanny-state attitude. When shipped, the 2nd generation iTouch came with a bluetooth chip inside, but under version 2 of the OS this chip was unavailable. One of the upgrades in version 3 is the activation of the bluetooth chip.

However, it seems Apple have decided to make this available only for pairing with bluetooth headsets. From what I hear, Apple’s opinion is that bluetooth is insecure and dangerous. To be honest, I don’t really care. I rarely have bluetooth turned on anyway. And if you think it’s that dangerous, surely a better option would be to make the user aware of this when they attempt to enable it so it’s their decision, and their own fault if they do something stupid. (I could rant here about how we’re too nice to idiots these days and how we should be encouraging Darwinism, not holding it back with laws and legal decisions supporting a lack of common sense, but I’ll save that for another day!) But what this means is that I am unable to do things that would be useful like copy my contacts and calendar from my Windows Mobile smart-phone, or pair up my bluetooth GPS receiver for the location service (this would have been really useful when I was trying to find a friend’s house in the UK and managed to get confused by the street doing a loop from the main road!)  I can only hope that Apple see the light, or crumble to user pressure (I’m not the only one harbouring these grudges); but can anyone think of a time that Apple have done either of these things?

Well, we can live in hope. After all, the iTouch itself is a great little device; it would just be nice if Apple would start putting a little usability before “Oooh, pretty!” and the prevention of the natural process of Darwinism.

Well firstly, first blog in a while! About 4 months ago I moved overseas to start a new job and haven’t really had the time to blog so far. Am not going to say exactly where I am, only that it’s in the Middle Eastern region.

Anyway, now I’m getting a little more settled in am starting to look for other activities to get involved in; but it seems one of the most common ones out here is golf. Only problem is, most of this area is desert. Yes, some grass courses do exist, but my experience today was on one of the desert courses.

Now I have played golf on and off when I was younger. I used to play fairly often about 15 years ago. I also managed a round last year also on the desert course on a visit to the region before I ended up working here. It’s an interesting experience with its own unique challenges!

The main thing out here is the heat. On a golf course, you’ve very little opportunity to get into any sort of shade. Temperatures in the shade at the nearest known monitoring station were pushing the low 40s (degC), so I dread to think what it was out in the sun. Thankfully, the desert course is now very quiet since they opened the grass course next to it, so when you do come across shade you are able to have a sit down for a little while without holding people up or getting out of turn. It’s also an advantage given I’m unlikely to give Tiger Woods et al. a run for their money any time soon. The heat also means you need lots of water. Sadly, because the desert course is played by so few people it is becoming neglected and I am told there is rarely any water available. However, we were in luck today as there was a butt of water sat in a shaded position at the 5th tee. It even had water in it!

One thing that probably crosses the mind when talking about desert golf is “Well isn’t it just like playing in one huge bunker?” Thankfully not… The desert around here is more hard baked earth with a fine coating of dust, so you’re playing off a fairly hard surface. Of course, this does pose another problem – how do you play without wrecking your clubs. The fairly simple solution is that you carry a piece of astroturf around with you. You get to your ball, lift it, place the astroturf under it, the put your ball back down to play your shot. (The tee shots are taken off a fixed mat using rubber tees.)

So then we move on to the hazards. Bunkers do exist, usually marked with black/blue posts. The also look like bunkers from a distance, but when you get close up you realise a lot of them no longer contain sand. However, if you land in one, you have to take the shot without the use of your mat and just hope there is sand in there, or try not to ground your club too hard. There are even water hazards on the course! Of course, there is no water in them, but one is an open-topped tank that is sunk into the ground and the others are just ditches across the fairway; all of which are also marked with posts so you know where they are. Despite the fact there’s no water in them, you still have to treat them as if they do and so landing in one incurs the standard penalty and dropped ball.

Finally, you (eventually) get to the green; or rather the brown! Keeping in with the desert theme, instead of a lush carpet of green grass to put on you instead contend with an area of sand, compacted and mixed with oil. This has some interesting side effects. Firstly, the browns tend to be quite slow which means you need a fair bit of power in your putt, especially when putting uphill. Secondly, you end up with a nice trail showing where your ball travelled. This has an added benefit that if your opponent asks you to move your ball you don’t need a marker. All you do is tap your ball a short distance in a different direction and you end up with a nice V, the point of which is where your ball was laid. Finally, because every footstep leaves a mark on the brown once you have finished you are required to “sweep the brown”. This involves taking the 1m wide brush from the side of the brown and dragging it behind you, sweeping a circle centred on the hole and doing enough circuits to brush an area 2-3m from the hole.

Sadly, I can’t give you a final score from today’s round… It was too hot for me to complete the full round. I daresay I’ll acclimatise eventually, or it will start to get cooler as we head towards winter (relative terms out here), and hopefully my game will improve such that my scores will look like I’ve only played 9 holes instead of 18!

Using Drupal – Choosing and Configuring Modules to Build Dynamic Websites
* Author: Jeff Robbins, Angela Byron, Addison Berry, Jeff Eaton, Nate Haug, James Walker
* ISBN: 978-0-596-51580-5
* Publisher: O’Reilly
* Publication Date: December 2008
* Pages: 490
* Price: £34.50

As someone who looks after a few websites in his spare time, Drupal is a project I’ve taken interest in lately as a way of giving the people whose sites I maintain easier ways to update their sites. Given the amount of customization in the core install, and the expandability through the community add-on modules, this new book from O’Reilly seemed a good starting place to learn more about Drupal.

However, I have to start this review with a little rant… O’Reilly is a publisher whose books I have used a lot in the past and so come to trust and respect. Sadly, Understanding Drupal disappointed on the quality front. I am not usually one who picks up on errors in books, however I was quickly spotting issues here: text missing, transposed URLs, incorrect definitions of acronyms and incorrect code examples were the first 4 errors I spotted. And that was just in the first 90 pages. There is an errata on the book’s website, and it is scarily lengthy! This is a first edition, but the list still gives the impression that very little proof-reading and/or editing went into this book. Additionally, there are 6 authors credited on this book… Were they not checking each other’s text?

OK, so rant over; and so let’s get down to the book itself. After a brief overview of Drupal we are straight into the system with a “Jumpstart” chapter. This covers most of the basic core Drupal functionality. Because of this, the chapter is a little lengthy – just over 80 pages in all. Thankfully, there is the usual O’Reilly detailed Table of Contents, and each function is individually headed. Subsequent chapters introduce new modules from the community to show how these can be added to a site to provide additional functionality, such as a photo gallery, job advertising, and online commerce.

In order to help the text appear relevant to the real world, each chapter is written in the form of a “case study” where a hypothetical client is introduced along with a set of requirements. The text then takes the reader through the steps of setting up the new module and fine tuning the configuration. All the examples used in the book are also available from the book’s website.

Overall, despite the concerns over the care taken when proof-reading this book, the overall impression is generally positive. New features are introduced one at a time so as not to overload the reader, but the interactions between core elements and add-ons are clearly explained, particularly useful given Drupal’s in-depth permissions system! The Table of Contents is detailed so it should be easy to find details on a particular module of interest, and the online materials are useful for working through a practice before working on a live site.

Score: 6 out of 10 [Would probably have been an 8 if it weren't for the proof-reading issues!]

Buy this book from Amazon

This review was written as part of the O’Reilly User Group review scheme with the Durham University Computing Society.