Stuart Ford

For the first time in a number of years now I have purchased a new computer. The last computer I purchased for myself (i.e. wasn’t a work computer) was my Macbook in 2006, itself now on its last legs and due for a replacement. My new computer is a new (face-lifted) Mac Mini, which replaces my old Mac Mini, which is also of 2006 vintage. The new computer has a dual-core 2.53 Ghz processor, 4Gb of RAM and a 320Gb hard disk. This is in stark contrast to my old one, which has a single core 1.5Ghz processor, 1.25Gb of RAM and a 60Gb hard disk, and as a result had become remarkably difficult to use over the past year ever since it became my main desktop machine. It’s now been turned back into a media centre, which it seems to be much happier doing. The new one is unbelievably fast. Its only bottleneck is the graphics controller which shares the main memory, but it’s not as if I’m going to use it for any hard-core gaming anyway (the most hard-core it’s going to get is Homeworld 2 and Spore).

One of the main advances of the face-lifted Mac Mini over the old design is the fact that it supports dual-monitors. Up until the release of this model last year if you wanted dual-monitors on a desktop machine you either had to get a Mac Pro or connect a second monitor to an iMac, both expensive options if you’ve already got your own monitors from a previous machine, so it was a dream come true when they added two monitor ports to the Mac Mini because it’s such a cost-effective option.

So yes, I’m very happy with it. Next is my Macbook as mentioned before, which gets replaced with a 13″ Macbook Pro later in the year, or whenever my Macbook gives up, whichever comes sooner.

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Google’s new brower, Google Chrome, certainly isn’t a new thing. But it is only recently that Google have finally released a version for Mac OS, so I’m a bit late on this particular bandwagon.

Chrome is based on the WebKit engine, which is the same engine used by Apple’s Safari browser. WebKit used to be a little ropey but ever since the release of Safari 3 it’s actually been very good, certainly comparable to the quality of the Mozilla engine, which is what Firefox is based on.

Its best feature is that it’s very lean and fast. Certainly, it seems to use less CPU than Firefox and Safari. It also uses a different thread for each tab, which means that while it may use a little more memory it also means that should a web page crash or become non-responsive due to a badly coded Javascript procedure or a crashed plugin it won’t cause the entire browser to quit, like it would in other browsers. Chrome simply kills off the non-responsive tab and the others carry on as normal.

Development tools are the same as Safari’s (the WebKit Inspector). These aren’t quite as well developed as the Firebug plugin for Firefox but they do an adequate job. I use Firefox to do most of my development with anyway and then test and modify sites to work in Safari (and other browsers if necessary).

There are of course a few niggles. If a page contains advertisements and an ad-server isn’t responding, this can cause Chrome to believe that the entire page is broken and it will refuse to render the page, eventually killing it off as a non-responsive tab. It would be better to ignore problems generated by loading content from non-responsive servers if they are not the same server from which the main page is being loaded.

The design of the master window means that most of the time you can never read the full title of a web page, since the title of each page is only displayed within the tab, rather than the title bar of the window, which in Chrome does not exist. This can be a little annoying when, for example, you have multiple BBC News pages open, since the title of each one is prefixed with “BBC News | Section name | …”, which usually takes up the whole width of the tab, meaning that all BBC News tabs appear labelled the same in the tab bar.

Other than that there’s not much to moan about and I’m sure it’ll improve with further development anyway. I would recommend it to anyone who’s tired of their existing browser, especially Windows Internet Explorer users. It’s available for Windows, Mac OS and Linux.

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For the third time in as many years I am moving house. I’m not moving far, just to another apartment in the same building, so it’s not a full blown affair with packing boxes and a rented van, just one flight of stairs (or the lift for the heavier items).

I’m moving in with my friend Chris and renting out my apartment to another friend. This move is designed to help me reduce my living costs for the next couple of years as I prepare for university, study at university and then decide what I want to do once I’ve graduated next year. This is all assuming of course that I get accepted on the course, I’ve not yet finalised my application because I’m waiting on an academic reference to come through from my previous university.

There’s going to be a bit of a period of adjustment because I’m used to living on my own and both Chris and I seem to have rather a lot of stuff, which needs to be thinned out if it’s going to fit in the apartment, despite the fact that it’s 50% larger than mine! It’ll be another change for my cat too, but she seems to be quite adept at moving house as this too will be her third time in as many years and she didn’t seem to mind too much last time.

So there you are. I will keep you posted as to how things go with everything.

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Manchester (and the rest of the north of England) received a record breaking snow dump last night, the likes of which I’ve never seen in Manchester and not seen since my childhood. It started around 11.00pm last night and by 1.00am when I went to bed about an inch had fell, which is extraordinary enough for the city centre, but when I woke up this morning it had apparently been snowing all night and there was around 7-8 inches on the ground.

I went into town to go to the post office and the bank and it was a like a ghost town, hardly anybody had bothered to come in to work. There was hardly any traffic and hardly anyone walking around. Snow was piled up on the pavements, it was like Whistler (ski resort). I walked past Albert Square where the council were dismantling the town hall’s Christmas installations, and they had taken the large Santa model down from the building and placed him on the ground, where he looked a bit crestfallen all covered in snow, as if to say “well it’s a bit late now!”.

The midlands and the south are going to to be hit later today and overnight. There’s no more snow forecast for the north west for the time being, but of course it’ll freeze overnight and it’s going to remain cold so the already fallen snow isn’t going to go anywhere in a hurry. Truly extraordinary. Global warming? What global warming. We’re having cold winters and persistently shit summers. Show me the global warming!

I’m just glad that I don’t have to travel anywhere this week!

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On Wednesday of this week I attended a postgraduate open day at the University of Manchester. The world-renowned department of computer science at this institution runs a one year postgraduate MSc course in Advanced Computer Science and I.T. Management, designed for students with existing degrees in computer science. Parts of the course are taught by the Manchester Business School, well known for its MBA programme.

Why am I doing this, 11 years after graduating? There are several reasons:

1. The industry I work in and the technology and knowledge that drives it changes rapidly and all the time. I can at this point only imagine how much the content of the average computer science course has changed in the ten years since I graduated. I expect to have my existing skills refreshed and to learn new skills and methodologies.
2. My managerial skills aren’t particularly strong, which is why the I.T. management parts of the course taught by the Manchester Business School particularly interest me. From what I have researched, the course contains the parts of the MBA that are geared towards I.T. At some point in the future I might consider doing a full MBA, but in the meantime this will serve as an important and appropriate stepping stone.
3. Returning to university after spending over a decade working will be a completely different experience from my first tenure. With such experience I shall be returning to study with “eyes wide open”. Many of my peers have said that they wish they could re-do their university courses armed with their years of subsequent industry experience.
4. Teaching and study methods have completely transformed since I graduated and it will be very interesting to see what difference they will make to my learning abilities.

The entry requirements state that a first or an upper second class degree is required. I only have a 2:2 from Aberystwyth University in Computer Science, however, I do also have eleven years of industry experience and during the open day I discussed this with a member of the department’s admissions staff and she said to my delight that this experience would compensate suitably in my application. I also need to provide academic and professional references to support my application, along with “transcripts” from Aberystwyth University, which I believe are basically individual module results.

I intend to get my application finished and submitted before Christmas. It being a postgraduate course I don’t have to use UCAS; the application is direct. I’ll keep you posted, wish me luck!

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I woke up this morning to the terrible news that Stephen Gately has died in his apartment in Majorca, of causes unknown at this stage, although police say there are no suspicious circumstances. Stephen was 33 years old, exactly the same age as me, so to imagine what might have possibly killed him boggles the mind.

I can’t say that I was ever a fan of Boyzone, I’ve never been into boy bands, but I always did have a huge amount of respect for Stephen Gately himself. He came out in 1999 in the The Sun newspaper stating “I’m gay and I’m in love,”. This was a tremendously brave act and established him as a supremely positive role model for young gay people. Many gay stars remain “in the closet” for fear of their sexuality damaging their careers, but Stephen refused to accept that as a risk. Indeed, Louis Walsh, the manager of Boyzone, was unaware of Gately’s sexuality when he selected him for the band and has said that, had he known, he would have thought twice before picking him, citing that “it wasn’t cool then to have a gay guy in a band”.

The postmortem is expected on Tuesday.

It’s a terrible, terrible shame. Rest in peace, Stephen.

Update 17/10/2009: The postmortem returned a verdict of death by natural causes (fluid on the lungs). However, the vile Jan Moir of the Daily Mail disagrees, which has provoked extraordinary outrage. The funeral took place today.

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Up until recently I used to run a small Internet service provider specialising in domain name registration, e-mail services and web hosting. I’ve now closed this company down for various reasons, but one of the left-over issues I have from it is that I have a random collection of domain names that belonged either to me or the company’s customers that are no longer required, either by me or the customer concerned.

They are all .uk domain names and are listed below. If you are the original registrant of any of them and you would like to retain it, or you are otherwise interested in acquiring one or more of them, please contact me.

The domains are: blimail.co.uk, blogerati.co.uk, bloggerati.co.uk, bluelightening.co.uk, bluelightningmail.co.uk, bogreport.co.uk, burt.me.uk, doofdoof.co.uk, duncaninternational.co.uk, fairlakeholdings.co.uk, gamesanimal.co.uk, gay-lo.co.uk, gaylo.co.uk, innit.co.uk, l1ve.co.uk,  l1-lexington.co.uk, l1-liberty.co.uk, l1-lincoln.co.uk, l1ve-lexington.co.uk, l1ve-liberty.co.uk, l1ve-lincoln.co.uk, lexington-building.co.uk, liberty-building.co.uk, lincoln-building.co.uk, qwertyuiopasdfghjklzxcvbnm.co.uk, sheeponheat.co.uk and stuii.me.uk.

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On Tuesday 6th October Sky 1 starts screening the new Stargate series, Stargate Universe (SGU), the second spin-off from Stargate SG1, itself a TV spinoff from the original 1994 Stargate film and which is the longest running science fiction TV show ever. This follows the recent cancellation of Stargate Atlantis, which lasted five seasons in contrast to Stargate SG1’s ten.

This time the series is based around a Stargate Command (SGC) team that ends up stranded on an ancient starship, the “Destiny”, in a distant galaxy with no way of returning home through the Stargate system. Obvious parallels can be drawn between this and Star Trek Voyager, in which a vessel and its crew becomes stranded in another galaxy. This is no bad thing since the concept worked successfully with Voyager.

I have high hopes for this series. The trailer is very exciting and its clear that it has high production values. Certainly, the producers need to do something to revive the franchise a little, since Stargate Atlantis became really quite ropey during season 4 and season 5 and it came as no surprise to me that it was cancelled. SG1 was cancelled a couple of years previously, but after 10 years of quality sci-fi it was reasonable to do so. I was a little doubtful over some of the ways in which they tied up some of the loose ends but they had to draw the line somewhere.

Robert Carlyle, of Full Monty and Hamish Macbeth fame, plays the lead character, picking up the gauntlet from Joe Flannigan and Richard Dean Anderson from Atlantis and SG1 respectively. It’s a relatively surprising choice since the lead character is traditionally an all-American military man, whilst Carlyle’s character Nicholas Rush is a scientist, but that may indicate that the producers intend to try some new ideas with this series so it’s not necessarily a bad thing. The producers also intend to include occasional appearances from characters from the other Stargate series, which is always nice.

The producers of the show do not see it as a “spin-off” in the traditional sense as it has been designed to be able to be enjoyed by both seasoned Stargate fans (known as “Gaters”) and newcomers to Stargate. This is a very positive step as it’s important to get new people into Stargate, especially considering its overall age (15 years). Original fans are getting older and will eventually become fewer, so it is important that the new series is able to be understood and enjoyed without prior knowledge of previous Stargate stories told in SG1 and Atlantis. However, it is also important that they do not violate precedents already set in these earlier series, because existing fans won’t like that.

So yes, I’m very much looking forward to it. More detailed information on the series can be found over at Wikipedia.

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Another year, another Pride. Four days of hard work, hard play and general excess have once again come to an end. It wasn’t the best Prides I’ve had but all things considered I wasn’t disappointed with it. A combination of recession and bad weather meant that it was never going to be the best Pride ever, but despite that, everyone made the best of it and there was a great turnout and a fantastic atmosphere all throughout the festival. I’ve little to complain about, all told.

I spent Friday night in the Village and saw the opening events on the main stage before spending a couple of hours flyering for Manfest, an event that took place on Sunday run by a friend. I didn’t stay out late on Friday because I needed to be up on time on Saturday to prepare for the parade, with the Manfest float. The weather just about held off for the parade, which is good because the parade is hard work enough without having to deal with rain at the same time.

The parade is a wonderful event. It brings thousands of people from all around in to Manchester to line the streets. It truly is the highlight of the Manchester calendar, nothing else comes close to it. Manchester Pride as a whole is the single most important annual event for Manchester, since it’s not just about promoting and supporting the LGBT community but also Manchester as a whole, which is why it’s so heavily supported by the city council and the Greater Manchester Police.

On Saturday evening I took a break from the festivities and met an old friend from university in Spinningfields for a drink before succumbing to the exhaustion of the day, meaning that I didn’t get to do Federation’s University Challenge this year.

I didn’t do much on Sunday save for a mooch about the Village marketplace and lifestyle exhibition. I bought another leather cuff from Rebel Dogg who have a stall at Pride every year. Their products are beautiful and almost collector’s items; I intend to buy one every year from now on.

On Sunday evening I helped set up Manfest but I was unable to attend the event itself, unfortunately, because I was knackered again, but I understand that it went off very well. It was held at Satan’s Hollow next door to Cruz 101, which is normally a straight rock club and it’s a fabulous venue. The dark and spooky theming inside is outstanding, I’ve only seen better in Disneyland. A lot of money and creativity has clearly been put into it.

I got up at a decent hour on Monday and see some of the fantastic live acts on the main stage. The sun came out and it was actually quite warm for a while before the clouds came back. On Monday evening I attended the Candlelit Vigil in Sackville Park, which I like to do every year because it’s a very touching event and I love the feeling of togetherness that it creates.

I had some nosh and a few drinks in the Village after the vigil and then went over to AXM for Sugarpops (a cabaret show) before turning in at about 3.00am. Walking back home through the village was quite surreal, everything was being packed up, with various lorries and machines scurrying everywhere, yet still there were people out on the streets drinking and enjoying themselves despite the rain.

By Tuesday morning when I went back in to the Village on the way to somewhere, everything was back to normal and it was as if it had never happened. Back to reality for another year. Almost overnight it has become autumn and the world feels like a completely different place. Nevertheless, it’ll all happen all over again next year :)

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During 2007, Facebook released an API (Application Programming Interface) that allows third party developers to create “applications” that run within Facebook, accessible by Facebook users and that have the ability to interact with Facebook accounts. Unfortunately, in contrast to Apple’s iPhone App Store, Facebook place little restriction on what sort of application can be developed and they care even less about the quality of such applications. As a result, these days the average Facebook “news feed” is a cluttered malaise of lame and pointless messages from third party applications that Facebook users have added to their profiles. It was quite simply the worst decision Facebook have ever made and remains so to this day, in my opinion.

I now as a matter of course hide these applications whenever they appear in my news feed, because they are almost 100% of the time always absolute garbage. It’s come to my attention recently that I now have quite an extensive list of applications in my “hide list”, just one short of a hundred in fact:

1. All About Me
2. Are You A Top Or Bottom?
3. Are You Gay?
4. Are you just ONE in a 1 MILLION?
5. Bejeweled Blitz
6. Bouncing Balls
7. Daily Horoscope
8. FarmVille
9. Friends For Sale!
10. Gem Blitz
11. Get To Know Me
12. Hottest Person Contest
13. How average is my life?
14. How Big is your Penis?
15. How Common is your name?
16. How Dateable are you
17. How Dirty is your mind?
18. How girly are you?
19. How Good Are U At Gay Sex
20. How good are YOU in bed?
21. How good is your Grammar?
22. How good is your medical knowledge?
23. How Jewish are You?
24. How long would you survive in the ghetto?
25. How many Sex Partners will you have?
26. How MEAN are you?
27. How Retarded are You?
28. How Sexy are you?
29. How Sexy is your Zodiac Sign?
30. How will you DIE!?
31. If you’re single, take this quiz.
32. iHeart
33. Jewel Puzzle
34. Know-It-All Trivia
35. Likeness
36. LivingSocial
37. Lollipop
38. Meaning Behind Your Name!
39. MindJolt Games
40. My Aquarium
41. My Polls
42. Nicest Person Contest
43. Plastic, Nerd, Jock, Emo, Loner, Popular, or Normal?
44. Polls
45. Reign of Vampires
46. Roller Coaster Kingdom
47. Send Your Friends a HAPPY THOUGHT!
48. Send Your Friends a Slap on the butt!
49. Sorority Sisters
50. Super Slot Machines
51. Superhero City
52. Tango Head Masher 3000
53. Tattoodle
54. Test your english
55. Texas HoldEm Poker
56. THE INNER NATIONALITY QUIZ: WHAT ARE YOU REALLY?
57. The London Underground Test
58. The Official Michael Jackson Quiz
59. What “Periodic Element” are you?
60. What % Gay are you?
61. What animal is your spirit guide?
62. what coulor looks good on u?
63. What do Your Eyes Say About You?
64. What does your Eye Color reveal about you?
65. What Era Should You Time Travel To?
66. What is the name of the man you’ll marry?
67. What is your Dream House?
68. What is your patronus?
69. What Kind of Gay Are you?
70. What kind of heart are you?
71. What Michael Jackson Song are You?
72. what part of manchester are YOU really from?
73. What Psychiatric Disorder do you have?
74. What role will you play in the Apocalypse?
75. What Tattoo Should You Get?
76. What type of Flight Attendant are you?
77. What type of gay are you?
78. What will your Son’s name be?
79. What’s Your Best Quality?
80. What’s your geek level?
81. What’s your Maturity Level?
82. What’s your old lady name?
83. What’s your true choir personality?
84. Where in Stockport are you from?
85. Which ‘Prisoner Cell Block H’ character are you?
86. Which “Spaced” character are you?
87. Which Airline are you?
88. Which color is your aura?
89. Which Friends Character are you?
90. Which Gilligan’s Island Character are you?
91. Which Muppet are you?
92. Which of your Chakras is most open?
93. which part of Salford are you from? INIT
94. Which Tube line are you?
95. Who is your lifetime match?
96. who loves you?
97. Who would be your celebrity boyfriend?
98. You’re sooo Good Looking
99. Your Tarot Card Reading

This list in all likelihood represents only a tiny fraction of all the lame applications available on Facebook. They’re just not necessary, any of them.

For comparison, I only use two applications (in addition to the standard Facebook applications such as Photos, Video, etc):

1. Twitter – allows me to update my Facebook status via Twitter
2. Friendwheel – generates a visual representation of the links between you and your friends, but without posting garbage to your wall (and thus other peoples’ news feeds).

That’s it, and I could easily live without the second one. The first one is however genuinely useful and to not use it would simply create more work for me updating social networking sites.

The madness has to stop some day.

Update 14/09/2009: It would seem that Facebook are finally listening with the launch of Facebook Lite, a version of Facebook designed for slower computers and low bandwidth Internet connections. One of its best features is that it does not include Facebook applications anywhere. You cannot access them and they do not show up in the news feed. Result! Now all that’s needed is to have that as an option on the full version of the site. Also, my list of hidden applications is now over 120 long.

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