Stuart Ford

Front view in the car park at home

I’ve got a new set of wheels after not having my own car for two and a half years ever since I gave my BMW 320d back. It’s a 2001 BMW 735i Sport (E38), one lady owner, and it’s lovely. I’ve always wanted an E38 and what with them getting a bit long in the tooth with the introduction of two new 7 series ranges since they stopped making the in 2001 I thought it important to scratch this particular itch before they became unfeasible to own as daily drives.

It’s nine years old (last of line 2001 model) and has 139,000 miles on the clock. It’s in good working order with nothing fundamentally wrong with it, however, due to its age and mileage there are a few things that it needs doing to it, including (but not limited to):

• It need an inspection service as part of its normal service cycle.
• The steering judders under heavy braking. This apparently means that the bushes need replacing.
• The LCD screen on the dashboard is pixelated (about half the pixels don’t work). This is apparently due to a perished ribbon cable and so I’ve ordered a replacement kit off eBay.
• The boot mat is dirty and horrible and needs replacing.
• A couple of bits of body trim on the passenger side are either missing or damaged and so need to be replaced.
• The satellite navigation system needs a software and maps data update (its map data is from 2001). Again this is apparently easily and cheaply achievable using a CD kit from this guy.

It also requires a few minor personal customisations:

• Debadging.
• Replacement leather gear selector.
• Chrome rings for dashboard.
• Chrome grills replacements.
• It needs an AUX port for iPhone connection, if the stereo will support it.

At some point down the line I also intend to replace the speaker system, but that’s a large project requiring a reasonable amount of money so that will have to wait for a while.

There’s a wealth of E38 geeks on the Internet who have become E38 oracles over the years so I won’t be short of help and information as and when I need it. It’s been some years since I owned a car that I can treat as a “project” car, i.e. not a car that to do anything do would invalidate the warranty. The last car I had like this was my old blue Sierra, ever since then I’ve had new cars or cars that were still within their warranty period.

A few pictures (more to come once it’s had a full spit and polish, it’s a little dirty at the moment as the previous owner was still using it up until the day we bought it):

Side view as shown on Autotrader

Interior as shown on Autotrader

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For the past week or so I’ve been working on an IT and AV installation job at a friend’s house in Salford. It’s a large Victorian house which he bought and is in the process of having it gutted and extended.

As part of this he wanted a fully integrated IT, telecoms, TV and and audio system installation, which he’s asked myself and Chris to do since we’ve some considerable experience with such things. He knows nothing about such things since he’s a GP, and so is trusting our judgement on what to install and buy. I hope he doesn’t regret doing so!

Phase 1 is first fix, so basically the hard work of pulling 80 runs of CAT6 and loudspeaker cable through the house (67 runs of CAT6 and 13 runs of speaker cable, including outdoor cables to the gardens). Once this is complete (on Thursday) we then have to wait for the builders to finish ready for second fix (where the cables are connected to sockets and patch panels). This forms Phase 2.

Phase 3 then becomes the really fun bit where we install all the specified equipment, including a computer network, a 9.1 speaker home cinema system, a distributed satellite TV system, a zoned audio system and other smaller features. After that comes the housewarming party where our friend gets to impress everyone with our work :)

It’s a manual job but it’s a fun job and it’s something I’ve done many times before so I don’t mind doing it. It’s not every day someone asks for a structured cabling system in their house, let alone on the scale of this one. Luckily, since it’s an old house, it has a cellar and lots of voids through which cables can be run. Ironically newer houses are harder to retrofit in this way unless it’s done at initial first fix because they simply don’t have such spaces, usually in the name of cost saving and profit maximisation on the part of the developers.

Here are a few geeky pictures of Phase 1. Apologies for the poor quality, they’re iPhone pictures. I’ll replace them with nicer ones if I remember to take any.

AV cables ready for home cinema installation

Many of the cables run through the cellar

The smallest bedroom is being set up as an office and so has trunking

Plant room in basement, where cables will terminate in a rack (image helpfully rotated by Wordpress)

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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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