Back in the UK July 15, 2008
And where’s the flag, where’s our proud, wonderful British flag? Where is the patriotism? I arrive at Gatwick airport, like all airports, it’s not a ‘nice’ place, but unlike the American airports, there’s no flag, there’s no patriotic symbols, there is absolutely nothing telling me I’m actually back in England.
Is Britain not proud of its own heritage? No. That sucks.
Upon completing Crysis July 14, 2008
I’m dissapointed. After you kill the beast thing that sinks your ship, I thought I had completed Act 1 or similar, but no, the whole game? That and the fact that there is no real conclusion, the aliens still remain alive. Perfect sequel line-up ending which ruins the first game for me.
Twitter downtimes… meh June 15, 2008
There have been a lot of complaints recently about downtimes over at Twitter, which I think is a little unfair. There have been accusations that the underlying system and script behind Twitter does not scale, some attacks towards them because they apparently only run three database servers and even the creation of a new web service to use when Twitter is down. Are we really this addicted? Is Twitter really this essential? Is Twitter a component of life as we know it?
Downtimes are bad, and everyone gets them, even the mighty Gooder. Of course, Twitter does seem to be especially skilled at lots of downtime, but their still up 90%+ of the time. Apparently that’s not good enough, because people complain about it. In my eyes, they are doing a great job, I can’t see how they make money out of Twitter (no ads, no premium, no nothing), but even if it doesn’t make money, they do a great job with it. Downtimes are to be expected, because they’re not like Google, Yahoo, Microsoft; they can’t afford a bazillion datacenters with trillions of servers across the world, yet they still run a good, reasonably fast service.
All in all I think the team at Twitter deserve a bit of respect from the public, rather than complaint after complaint. Well done Twitter, I love the service with the (very small) downtimes!
Never take on too much May 27, 2008
In the world of web developing, it’s very easy to have an idea, develop it, start a design then snap! Another idea! Quickly, got to hurry on the new one now. Repeat that over and over. At the end of the day, the result is: a bunch of half finished websites and apps that will take ages to clean up and get launched. This is a serious problem if you’re always thinking of new ideas. On the other hand, if you have the time, perhaps it is worth it to think of all the ideas and develop them, because one day, you might just come accross that killer idea that in 500 years people will be remembering. An idea like Google or Facebook.
Unfortunately though, most people don’t have all the time in the world, so constantly developing new ideas every week simply isn’t feasable. From now on I am refusing to take on any new ideas that come to me (unless they really the idea), and I will concentrate soley on a certain few apps/websites/projects. Once they’re finished I might try actually developing and promoting those sites, rather than hopping straight onto the next project. Do you take on too many projects? Pehaps you should consider a stronger focus on a certain few…
Cannabis is class B - WTF? May 7, 2008
Class B, class A, class C drugs. They’re all drugs though aren’t they? Why categorize drugs like that, an illegal drug is a drug, they should have just one class for them all. Hold on though, who are the government to tell us what we can and can’t injest? Isn’t that just like smoking or alcohol with different effects?
It would be fair to say, there is strong argument on both (possibly three) sides of the drugs issue in the UK. As for the isn’t it the same as alcohol/smoking argument, I can’t quite decide my position. In a sense, yes, it is, what’s the difference? They both can have long term effects, as well as short term effects. In fact, smoking (tabacco) is probably the safest to others, because it doesn’t effect driving, unlike acohol or other drugs. But it does cost the country huge amounts in terms of healthcare, and passive smoking might have a strong effect on people too. Perhaps we should ban the lot? Alcohol, smoking, drugs, etc… But then what happens? People buy it on the black market/similar, and the government simply looses tax revenue.
In reality, people should be able to enjoy themselves/life without the aid of the booz or their fags or dope, yet people still seem attracted to the temptations of these things. I drink, but I hope never to smoke or take any drugs. Ever.
As for classing the drugs, thats absurd. Regardless of whether or not the drugs should be legal/illegal, they should all sit in one class if illegal. If you break the law, you suffer, or should suffer. Plain and simple. The law needs to tighten up in the UK, it’s pathetic.
Expect a post on prisons (a.k.a: free comforting homes for the homeless) soon 
I give up on gmail April 23, 2008
I’ve had enough of gmail. Sure, the interface is nice, and sure, it’s (almost) guaranteed to be online for my email. Although, since I route a lot of mail through the server, that doesn’t really have an effect (although I use pointlessrambler@gmail.com for emergancies). Anyway, why give up gmail!? Well, I’ll explain:
- Slow, gmail got really slow recently; and, although the speed has picked up a bit, it’s still pretty slow at times
- SPAM, the filter used to be my blessing, it always used to catch everything, thousands of messages a day. And it’s still doing it, but not enough. For some reason, google have failed to block out the clever backscatter method of spam. So now, I’m getting about a hundred (give or take) spam emails a day, how annoying
- Reliable (but then again, so is our server)
OK, so what do I plan to move to and how would I go about doing it? Well, hopefully within the next week (probably this weekend), I’m going to set gmail to forward all mail to nick at kerplunc dot com, but also keep its own copy (security & such), then, instead of having the server route mail to my gmail account (in which case it would just sit being emailed all around the accounts), I will store mail on our server. Take control of my own mail and it’s storage. All I need to do is install the wonderful RoundCube on cPanel so it’s our default webmail client. Lastly I will need to go through the latest gmail and finish tasks etc… Advantages?
- Mail is stored in two places, google and this server. What happens if our hard drive fails? Google has millions of drives, what would happen if one of those failed, and it happened to be our emails? But with the mail in two places, it makes a crash so very unlikely
- I take control, the main email control is within our server, I choose everything
- It’s a whole load faster than gmail
So there we have it, why I’ve given up on good ol’ gmail.
CSS galleries don’t = popularity April 20, 2008
Of course, like any deisgner happy with their work, I submitted this new design to a long list of galleries. What happens? Well, the same as always, loads of hits on the first few days, then almost halving daily until a return to the same old low hits this blog recieves (~10-30 unique/day). Still, I don’t care, the aim of this blog isn’t to have a huge visitor base regularly commenting on articles, it’s to express all the pointless rubbish I think off
Why del.icio.us sucks April 16, 2008
Yup, time for a nice little rant on something thats been annoying me a whole lot for a long time. So, del.icio.us, that wonderful service where we can all dump our links in a huge list for us to share and access anywhere on the web. Hold on, did I say access? I think I may have got my words mixed up there. What I really mean is we can look at our links, in a totally non-accessable way.
A huge list of links in no apparent order is not useful or productive. Neither are tags. When I save a link, I want to stick it in a lovely folder or category, only one. Then I want to look at a page where links are separated by category, not in a great big splurge. The option of the splurge would be nice when I’m feeling like just going through random links, but normally I don’t have time for that. I want to look at a list of folders/categories, pick the target one and find my link, simple and effective.
Not only is the organization a mess, the whole social thing too, whats up with that? Stumbleupon and Digg are for that. Linkrolls too. Now, this is where del.icio.us is useful. It’s not so much a bookmarking tool as it is a linkroll tool.
Perhaps I am the problem, and I’m using del.icio.us for the wrong thing? I want a service to store my bookmarks everywhere, and if it lists everything in one long line as an option, thats very nice, but less important. I actually did a quick mockup of a design which might suit the category/folder layout, view it here. Ignore the top bar about a ‘Kerplunc’ service, because it’s not… yet. It’s really a personal project, but I’m going to tie it in with Kerplunc’s new application framework, just in case anyone else wants something similar. If you really like it or want to make a suggestion, go ahead and comment
About
Hey! I'm Nick Barrett and this is Pointless Ramblings. I work as a freelance web design/developer, student and co-founder of Kerplunc. Read more »
Links
I no longer use del.icio.us, because it's unorganized. I use bookmarks, an app by me, for me! Of course, anyone can use it too though. It's unfinished, to work it you'll need a Kerplunc Account, register one here.
When I get around to making such a thing, latest links will magically reappear :)
Gaia Online
Have a guess at my password and hijack the admin capability of this blog: here :)