Today has been a beautiful one, enough to persuade even me to visit the Big Blue Room. Some extensive rearrangement of the local greenery happened after Max lost one of his toys in a tree, and many scratches later I was able to relax in the knowledge of a section somewhat spruced up. That tree that blew down a couple of years ago has been appropriately dealt to, a drain has been uncovered, much moss, ivy and branches removed as well. The weather forecast for tomorrow is for similarly coloured skies, so the industry may even continue for another day!

In other blueness and greenness, when Fraser finally got dressed this morning he loudly proclaimed that he was "all in blue" so I said "Let's have some music to match, then" and we spent the first half of the day playing only tracks with names ending in "Blues", which sourced such a delightfully eclectic set of artists so that this afternoon we moved on and I found that music with the word "Green" in it's name might provided us with even more exotic entertainment to round out a great day of blues and greens. Tomorrow, Max says he wants to hear some Reds and Yellows, so I guess we will carry on there! I might cheat a little and leave the 'w' off yellow :-)

After much wading through possible names, none of which really excited me, I have finally chosen "DAViCal" as the new name for my CalDAV server that was previously called RSCDS, or the "Really Simple CalDAV Store".

In the end, I chose DAViCal because it:

• seems easy to pronounce.
• combines the 'Cal' and 'DAV'.
• returns < 1000 results on google.
• doesn't make me cringe.
• didn't have a domain name registered.

That was about the hardest part of preparing for the 0.8.1 release, and now that I've done that I should manage to make the changes to the packaging, though I have no doubt that the old name will appear in all sorts of places for a while yet.

Choosing names is an important business, and I should know that from the length of time we spent agonising over names for our children, discarding all sorts of things because they had silly abbreviation collisions (like the "Royal Scottish Country Dance Society" :-) Even then, I think we got the kids names wrong, and the big one should be called "Thumper" with the little one called "Sly", but perhaps that's just a temporary annoyance and in time the names that we registered for them will fit them better.

I also recall Grant once saying that you should never use the word "Simple" in the name of your project, and he should know. DAViCal is no longer particularly simple, although I have attempted to hide the complexity from the user as far as that is possible, and will continue to do so.

Once I get out version 0.8.1 of DAViCal I will finally upload it to Debian, proper. This version has some important enhancements to its DAV spec compliance which are going to be needed by some future versions of Mozilla, and probably other things too, so it's important to push it out as soon as possible now.

Is there anything Keith Packard can't do?

Tore, Simon Richter, Keith and others have had great fun restoring the pipe organ that was oh-so-conveniently located in the night venue. I don't think that the landlord would have expected this. Apparently we were instructed not to break or fix anything but this was just too tempting for a bunch of geeks.

I particularly like the fact that there is no sheet music - that's what laptops are for, surely!

More pictures of the night venue.

I followed the advice of the lazywebs a while ago and bought myself a phone (Nokia 6100) on the local auction website then went around to the local Vodafone dealer and bought a SIM card for it.

When I signed up I ticked the box saying "Enable Global Roaming" and now that I'm travelling I realise I should have actually confirmed that happened before I left the country, because it didn't happen. Now I'm sitting in Melbourne with only the (free :-) Wifi to keep me company.

So looking at the Vodafone site, it appears that I could dial "777" to enable global roaming. Apparently I should have done that a few days ago, because it sure won't work now. Perhaps this "Manage Your Account" thingy will work? A period of perusing pages of FAQs follows, and I eventually conclude that it would work.

Except that when I try and register for the service I am told that my phone number is not valid. Yes, I moved my old number across to Vodafone, about the same time Brenda was lamenting the inadequate preparation Vodafone did for Mobile Number Portability, and while the actual phone has been working, Brenda did note back on April 1st that "you can't use the website to manage your account". Two months on and it still isn't possible, which is pretty poor really - you would think Vodafone would be actively encouraging people to move across to their network.

So I'm effectively phoneless until I get to Edinburgh and can buy a SIM card.

At least I can still get on IRC and ask someone to call Heather and tell her why I'm not phoning.

I have just received the most bizarre share purchase offer I've ever seen. It seems some weirdo company called Colonial Capital Corporation wants to pay about 60% of the market rate to buy my shares in Tower Australia Group.

I only have these few shares because of some insurance policy I used to have, and probably I should have sold them years ago, but to be offered 60% market value seems pretty insulting. I wonder how many suckers will be fooled?

A quick search for CCC shows how well-recognised this David Tweed asshole really is.

Good to see that Wikipedia has a pretty thorough write-up on the guy. Maybe someone has some pictures of him that they could upload there as well, so we can recognise him in the street. The Melbourne Age can help out a little on that point, as can the Sydney Morning Herald though he always wears sunglasses, it seems.

The registered office of the Colonial Capital Corporation (NZ Company no. 1891726) is "Andrew James Kennedy, Level 2, 6 Clayton Street, Newmarket, Auckland". I guess if you know that person you should make sure they are aware of the kind of amoral shyster they are fronting. It seems that particular location is a "virtual office" that you can rent for only $120/month from the "Auckland Business Centre Limited", Ph. 09 522 7130. I wonder if Mr. Kennedy takes phone calls, and what company name he gives when he answers?

A previously infamous company also with David Tweed as sole director is National Exchange Ltd (NZ Company no. 1559669). The office for that one was at Suite 102, 63 Remuera Road. No name associated with that, but the constitution is pretty much a license to ensure any funds get offshore as quickly as possible, and a Google search suggests that the address generally has some very dodgy businesses associated with it.

We go to the library every three weeks. Since we don't have a television in our house there is a lot of reading going on. For myself I don't get out many books, spending far too much time in front of the computer to really read stuff. I make an exception for Neal Stephenson though, and I just finished "The System of the World" this morning, so it was time for me to switch to lighter stuff. Terry Pratchett, I think.

My son is demolishing books though! He just finished reading stuff like:

• Winston Churchill and his great wars
• Scottish place names
• The Lonely Planet guide to experimental travel
• A wild ride through the night : suggested by twenty-one illustrations by Gustave Dore
• MacBeth : man and myth
• Fables Aesop never wrote

Time for something lighter? No fear! When we left he could scarcely lift his backpack full of the following:

• Maddigan's fantasia
• Mind-boggling buildings
• The last of the sky pirates
• The curse of the Gloamglozer
• Freeglader
• The stormin' Normans
• Gorgeous Georgians
• Who stole the black diamond?
• Who shot the sheriff?
• Who is the prisoner of Portcullis Castle?
• 501 TV-free party games for kids
• The seeing stone
• The field guide
• Stopping for a spell
• The limerick
• Scotland
• Scotland's Highlands and Islands
• The price of water in Finistere
• EARLY people
• A short history of nearly everything

Well, in fact the last one didn't fit in his backpack, so he had to carry it. At least he had to carry it for a little while until Heather pinched it off him and started reading it herself! That's the way it is in this house though: Max read the Terry Pratchett that I'm on now about a month ago, and I'm sure he'll run through those and start pinching the books Heather or I took out. I don't suppose that reading list would be unusual in a 15 year old (if they liked books :-), but for a 9 year old it constantly continues to amaze me.

Meanwhile Fraser (who's 6 now) isn't so up on the reading thing. He's getting there, and can actually read better than most in his class at school. Never mind: he still listen's avidly as I get through one chapter a night of "Tears of the Giraffe" by Alexander McCall Smith. It's so good that the other folk don't mind listening either, even if they have all read it themselves.

Flying home from Auckland the other day I discovered that women don't have noses. At least that was the case for the little representations on the safety sheet in the seat pocket in front of me. Wherever there was a little picture of a man, it would be a person with a nose. Where it was a picture of a woman there would be no nose.

Odd, and yet somehow it worked.

I shall now have to spend some time staring more closely at people's faces, so if you see me looking at you strangely over the next few days please don't get upset: I'm just trying to work out whether you have a big nose, and why a picture of a person without a nose should look more like a woman.

I need a new phone. My current phone has the battery cover falling off it because I fiddle with things all the time, and since I have my phone with me all the time it seems to get all the punishment from this. And then I drop it, and bits fly off in all directions. It mostly still works, but it's a few years old and the battery doesn't last for more than a couple of days anyway.

So I really need a new phone.

As far as I can see though I'm too unfashionable, or I'm not geeky enough, or I'm too geeky. Well, something is wrong with me anyway, because nobody makes a phone for me.

My Dream Phone

My dream phone is not something that is bleeding edge, but it is seemingly impossible for phone manufacturers to sell such a thing to the phone companies.

What's so hard about that? It seems that all of the features I am after are possible, and have been possible for years. My problem is that the phone manufacturers and marketers have arbitrarily decided that everyone wants to have an (undreadable in sunlight) colour display, except for cheap bastards. And cheap bastards are clearly cheap bastards and so wouldn't dare to want any other features.

Personally I would happily pay $300 for a new phone with no camera, no music player, no video calling, no picture messaging and no "crap of the week" option... Of course it would have to be small, have good battery life, a monochrome display, have an alarm clock, work in other countries and be reasonably stylish. If it had bluetooth, high-speed data capability and a (basic, simple) appointment calendar I'd pay another $300 easy.

Since my phone currently transforms into a 3D jigsaw puzzle at the drop of a hat it rapidly becomes a conversation piece and I have had universal agreement that while functionality like camera, movie and mp3 player might appeal to some people, nobody I know wants to use the phone as much more than a communication device. Invariably the people I'm talking to acknowledge that while the set of such people might exist and might even be large, they are not actually a part of it.

The "I Just Want a Phone" Options

Some of the manufacturers seem to have noticed that people want a simpler, kinder phone. Unfortunately they are targetting their offerings at the octogenarian market, rather than their children. Yes, I do "Just Want a Phone", but I am not yet palsied and could still hit the buttons on something that is 35mm x 90mm x 15mm thank you very much. If I could find one.

My general communication does also involve the use of other devices from time to time, such as a laptop and an internet tablet, so it would be "nice to have" the ability to do bluetooth and high-speed data.

The Best Phone I Ever Had

The best phone I have ever had was a Nokia 8310. It was nearly small enough to be perfect. It had a monochrome, sunlight-readable display. It had an excellent battery life (regularly lasting more than a week on standby). The model was so functional and usable it has, of course, been discontinued.

Since then, it seems, all of the small, stylish phones must have an unreadable-in-sunlight colour display, and most of them have a bunch of other stuff to add weight and size to the device and make it chew through batteries as quickly as possible.

Every few months I take a look through the current offerings, but it seems I'm just too weird.

Perhaps I could steal that Nokia 8310 back off my wife now that she has a new battery for it...

OK. I am now used to being harrassed by my son, Fraser, about how "that man looks like you daddy" when we visit the toilet at the local mall and are "faced" with endless picture of the backs of people's heads.

Fine. I'm used to that now.

Now Heather is accusing me of "male-pattern blindness" as well. On Saturday I spent 10 minutes searching through the back of the fridge for some paté to no avail. I'm sure I looked for it on Sunday as well, but today she pulls it out and waves it at me purporting that it was at the front of the refrigerator all along.

I'm not convinced.

<rant>

I know: I'm a broken record, but there seems to be a depth of stupidity to the Pizza UI which just makes it such an easy target...

Consider this "funny once" joke. When I try and enter my credit card details these guys have programmed their Pizza interface somewhat better than these losers. Some standard UI metaphors work: for example when I go to Hell, I can at least tab correctly from one field to the next. Still though, when I arrive at a field which is a drop-down box, they clearly have so much control over the "user experience" that stuff like hitting the down arrow to select from a drop-down has to be handled personally, and the programmer appears to have forgotten to implement that sort of behaviour.

There are worse sins than the ones visited on people arriving at Hell. In fact the UI from Hell regularly receives awards - presumably from people who find it "novel". The judges probably don't actually buy Pizza over teh intarwebs so they haven't seen it before. Or perhaps they like black, because it's all cool and designery, or they are poorband users who normally have to access their pizza through the 0800 interface. Hopefully those people will eventually be replaced by people who have used the site and got over it. People who actually want to order Pizza, and just want a page where they can quickly and easily do so, and who are sick of chucking devils in the corner just so they can click on a button.

Using this UI to present a plain 'website' is surely just the worst ever though. I regularly find music artists with this kind of site too, which for me means "nothing to see here: move along". And I do, of course, since it is clearly going to be a learning curve understanding their designer's idea of a "user interface" before I can find the information I'm after. After a long succession of bad experiences along these lines, finding out more about the actual music from the Amazon website than from the artist's one, I've pretty much given up on them. In fact nowadays I just go straight to Wikipedia, which has an increasingly comprehensive collection of information about music and musicians.

I haven't seen a really serious website, that wants people to buy stuff, which has been written using the Pizza UI, in fact. I'd wonder why that is, except that it is basically obvious to anyone who regularly buys stuff on the internet (or anywhere, in fact) that increasing the barriers to your customers is not good business sense. Experienced programmers will also understand that the Pizza UI cannot be used unless the server interaction is sufficiently simple, and the presentation is the driving motive.

The fact that Google now use this technology in that one simple way is really interesting. One wonders if it stems from the fact that through an accident of historical bias against Linux by Microsoft and Apple, Google were left with this as their only choice for a platform-independent way of delivering video to the world, and particularly to the sometimes vocal and influential thought leaders in the FOSS community. Or is it a more insidious plot, to ensure that Google, which is primarily in the advertising business of course, wants us all to be able to watch next years advertising, and this is a way of ensuring that we all have an appropriate advertising presentation layer installed!

I don't think that the people over at Google HQ are quite that machiavellian yet, however, and I expect the explanation really is somewhere between "we saw someone else do it and it was clearly a good idea" and "that was all that would work on the three main operating systems".

</rant>

Well hopefully that's got all of the vitriol out of me, and now I can be all relaxed and friendly for the coming week at linux.conf.au 2007. I certainly don't want to offend all the other open source geeks flocking to the best linux conference, as Google puts it.