ranguard's blog

I'm sitting in the garden on this loverly sunny Sunday morning, the birds are a twittering (that's bird song, not the web site) and it's generally very pleasant. Then the local church bells start ringing and I think... they sound nice. But as someone who's recently decided I should actively discourage religion - of any form - it suddenly hits me that maybe this is a bit heretical!

Taking it further, should I turn off any classical music (or any genre) which has a religious connotations?

I can't help that I like the sound, but I would object to any call prayer where I don't like the sound; this in my mind is a contradiction. From a quick bit of googleing most cases seem to rest on the time, duration and decibel levels in comparison to the ambient background. So I would probably have no grounds on which to complain about the bells or any other call to prayer.

So my conclusion - on this one I don't think there is anything I can do, and as such I'm going to carry on enjoying the sound of the birds and the bells.

I work for an estate agents (I run the web team), which happens to be very successful and a lot of people resent this.

Irrespective of the agent, what always shocks me is people saying their property was "over valued", here is an example I found in a local forum:

"X estate agents really are a joke, they recently valued my 1 bed flat that I just sold at £325k when it is clearly not worth anything near that. A, B and C estate agents all valued it at £250k which is what I sold it for within a few days."

Ok, that's a large difference, but my question is, what would have happened if this person had asked £275k and waited a week rather than a few days? - Or even gone for £325k for a week or two, then come down the £300?

Selling at asking price in a few days to me says the property was under valued, this person might have an extra £25k (or more) with a bit of patience and going with a higher quote to start with. Property is probably the biggest commodity people own - why are they in such a rush to get any old price for it?

As I have a box on the internet I quite often ended up hosting DNS / email / websites for friends and family, this wasn't a problem, just a bit of a pain, especially when some friends started relying on it for business based emails.

Also I don't want to have to worry about my own mail either.

But now I don't need to worry about that any more!

For DNS (Domain Name Service) which you need for your domain so email and web can end up on the right machine I use Gandi (12 Euros a year) or for .co.uk domains (which Gandi does not support) Easily (£10 a year). By registering a domain with them (or transfering it to them) you get free DNS.

Usually I'll get the person to buy the domain and then give me technical contact so I can make adjustments but they still get the bills :)

Next sign up with the domain on Google Apps

Set up google apps to forward <name>@<the_domain>.com to where ever they want their email to end up. Set this up as a LIST, not as a 'user' with forwarding, as otherwise spam is filtered here and not on the redirected to account. Although if whoever you are setting this up for does not already have an email account they want to continue using; you can add them as a user and they can then login to: http://mail.google.com/a/<then_domain>.com/

Change MX records on Gandi/Easily to point to google (the config is in googles help pages) mail (MX) servers

So now both DNS and email are handled but other machines, with backup systems.

This leaves the website. If you need databases / forms etc you are going to have to find a hosting company and point the DNS for 'www' at that. However - for most family needs you can use Google pages - create a 'web' user account in Google Apps, give your family access to this account and they can create a website with no knowledge of HTML / CSS or anything remotly techincal - getitng you off the hook!

I hope that helps.

Leo

Over Christmas I was talking with my younger (19 year old) sister and she said although she didn't really want to be found on the internet (a conversation we'd had the year before) she did now have a MySpace page.

So having only looked at a few user pages in MySpace previously I thought I should give it a fair go (rather than dismissing it as I had previously). So I'm now a member; but I still don't get it. I realize at 31, I am now old and past it, as such I have decided to embrace being grumpy... and MySpace seems to be a good target.

What's the big fuss about MySpace?... there's nothing new there, VOX has most of the same functionality but a much nicer interface. It's all about appealing to the 'Yoof', showing who has more friends and who can set up the most vulgar looking web page (I've been told there is a FireFox plugin one can install to remove all design customizations). I guess as I'm not really into music I'm the total opposite of the target audience.

As one of the largest sites on the net they don't seem bothered with detail...

My_space

I'm not actually a massive film buff, but I loved Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow it is visually stunning, the production and design teams really should get awards for this. The film gets the 40's/50's futuristic comic feel with a touch of the origional lost in space and blends it together wonderfully.

So, if you get a chance.. watch it.

On one of our team walks around the lake at work we were looking at the airplane cloud trails - apparently called contrails (we're near Heathrow airport and there are lots of them) in the setting sun. Steve mentioned that there were actually so many of them they had a positive effect on pollution. Because they covered such a large area they reflect a lot of rays back out into space, this is effect is called global dimming and is actually hiding how bad global warming actually is. This idea was only confirmed during 9/11 when their were NO planes flying.

So it got me thinking - if reflecting rays back out into space helps with global warming shouldn't we be painting every roof white? - ok, I've probably got the science wrong and you can't just reflect it with white paint, or it's too late by the time it's got throught the atmospher and we need to reflect it earlier but I thought it was an interesting idea.

Being winter and with all the bad news about the environment we are also aware of having to use as little energy as possible during the winter to keep our houses warm, in this instance we probably want black roofs to out houses to pull in the heat. So summer we want a white roof and winter a black roof - and there does appear to be paint to do this, I'm sure it would have to be modified to work outside.

I wonder whether the science of this is any good? - does anyone know?

It was one of those rare occasions where we actually remembered to go to something a year on from having just heard about it (after the event). Ok, it's a lie, we happened to take Kerrie's parents to Kew, and then remembered that being Halloween soon they have a pumpkin display... which we had missed the year before.

Pumpkin man

We took the spooky (well, funny) train ghost tour of the gardens, and one of the things we went past was this massive (30 foot+) tall Pumpkin man.

Pumpkin piles

They also converted the waterlilly house for a display of hundreds of different types of pumpkins. I never realised there were quite so many.

On top of that they had some fantastic carvins, this was my favourit:

Puking pumpkin

So, I thought, Google Reader has had a relaunch, and lots of people are raving about it, so I should give it a try to see what all the fuss it about.

I've been using it for about 2 days (Bloglines lets you export stuff so the switch was easy). And my opinion... it sucks.. Don't get me wrong, lots of the features are nice, but it's SLOW. Even after such as short while of using it I've noticed I'm behind on my blogs, I don't check them as often as I would on Bloglines because it takes too long, and when I do I don't get through all of them because i get bored waiting.

So, I've now switched back and all is good with the blog-o-sphere again.

I could go into a list of the differences feature by feature, but who cares, Google Reader is unusable for me because of the lack of speed.

Maybe I'll try Google Reader again in a few months, but likelyhood is I'll forget, Google had their chance, but they lost.

Follow the map for beer

Last week my wife and I were going around South West England (posts to follow shortly) and were driving around small lanes in Devon; we stopped at Branscombe to walk along the beach when we saw this sign... so obviously we had to visit Beer!

And here we not only found beer, but also religion!

Beer religion

At work we offer pod-casts and audio (mp3) files of property descriptions (I work for an Estate Agents - but I am not an estate agent), since launching 50 % of people have hated the audio, and 50 % have loved it (we have a very simple feedback question).

Leon created the system which does text-to-speech and it works wonderfully, except occasionally it is actually quite hard to understand. Looking into it we realised that a lot of the descriptions have very long sentences, with very little punctuation. This means that your ear/brain can not process the information because it become blurred together as there is no pause for you to use as a break point, which would naturally happen when the speaker take a breath.

I started writing a script to report on anything with to many words in a lexical category (the chunk between commas, semicolons and periods). The problem with this approach is that the number of words does not relate to how long it takes to say them; I added a max character count as well, but that didn't help.

So, how does one find out which chunks take too long to say? - well you say them of course. So now my code actually generated the mp3 for each chunk; checks it is under 9 seconds (a value we works out with a stopwatch and a few dozen long sentencies); then reports on any sentence which has a chunk over this length.

I have worked out it will take 52 hours to check every description, but we only have to do it once in a while, and I'll put in some caching so it only has to check each property once when we start running the report more regularly.

I thought it quite interesting that by using this system we improve the final audio, but in the process we are actually checking the grammer of the written description as well.