I like the internet because you can use it to give local gifts to people far away. For example, I use interflora.co.nz to send flowers to people in NZ. My friend Rory takes it a step further and uses a florist close to the home of the person he’s sending to and bypasses Interflora entirely.

The other day Lucy and I were trying to think of what to get our mother for her birthday and we struck upon the idea of sending photos. Rather than sending them from here in London I used http://www.digitalmax.co.nz/ in NZ and they were able to ship the photos to Mum for $3.50 and do that in 2 days. They even dealt with an American credit card with a UK address. Sweet.

I love spoken word radio programmes. BBC4, World Service, NPR, PRI all deliver excellent content and a lot of it is available as podcasts.

Quick list of my favourites:

• BBC World Service From Our Own Correspondent, the Beeb’s foreign correspondent’s describe what’s going on in their experience covering current stories (half an hour twice a week)
• WNYC’s Radio Lab - sience and ethics, mind blowing (an hour once every two to three weeks)
• WBEZ’s This American Life - amazingly human and touching stories about people (a hour once a week)
• BBC Radio 4’s In Our Time - a long piece on one important idea or period in history

Search them all on iTunes and I’ll try to get this post linked up at some point soon.

Monica and I started today with a list of things we had to do around the house. Cleaning and shit… you know?

By 4pm we’d accomplished none of them and we were feeling midly like our weekend had pretty much disappeared or was accounted for as “chores”.

I made a new rule: no cleaning or doing things we don’t want to do at the weekend. We’ll just get better at getting through the other stuff during the week, bit here, bit there.

Why doesn’t your new host name in /etc/hosts take effect after a restart of Firefox or Safari like it does on Windows or Linux?

Lookupd.

Lookupd is caching your /etc/hosts file entries.

sudo lookupd -flushcache

Sorted.

This baffled me for a little while a couple of months ago.

So, next question: What is NetInfo Manager and why should you use it?

I don’t really know, but you can use it, rather than /etc/hosts, to configure hosts: Mac OS X: How to Add Hosts to Local Hosts File.

Just be aware that the search order for lookupd is DNS and then NI so if you’re configuring a host on a domain with a wildcard DNS match like *.gatezero.org it will appear to never work and drive you mildly crazy. At that point you’ll swear off GUIs for the rest of your life and go back to what you know works: vi and /etc/hosts, just don’t forget that handy flushcache command. You can change the lookupd configuration to alter the search order but that’s going to be your own private battle and I don’t want anything to do with it.

I gave Lucy my old iBook G3 and she has been using with a cheapo TP-Link router we bought her in Macau. Worked great for a while and then it just stopped registering an IP address through DHCP, connected to the router fine but no IP address. Boo.

The other weird thing was that when you disconnected and then reconnected the laptop from the router a second time after startup it would go all Spinning Beachball of Death and Airport networking would be screwed until you restarted.

After much wailing and gnashing of teeth we plugged the laptop into the network and all worked fine. A software update fixed the Airport.

Question 1: Is it plugged in?
Question 2: Is it turned on?
Question 3: Is the software up to date?

*sigh*

I kinda miss that little laptop, it was my first Mac and it was rock solid… basically never crashed, ever. My MacBook is really shit by comparison and I now just want to get rid of it… all the problems it exhibits are intermittent so I know that dealing with Apple Care is going to be a pain in the arse.

The only interest this article will hold for anyone else is the link to the origin of the phrase wailing and gnashing of teeth.

My little sister Lucy is in town. It is great having her here and we’ve been out ’sploring London a bit.

Yesterday we visited the National Gallery. After walking into the first room Lucy and I worked out we didn’t know what the hell we were looking at or why any of it was important. More, there was just so damn much art that it was completely overwhelming.

Museum fatigue was looking likely to set in after a mere 10 minutes. So, we rocked over to the audio guide desk where they hooked us up (for a recommended donation of £3.50) with the audio guides and sent us on our way with a highlight trail I really enjoyed.

The museum had selected about 50 paintings from about the gallery. We visited most of those, having a finite set of things to check off really helps. The audio guide filled in the the background on the artists and what the paintings were about and why these ones were so good.

While I really liked having the, still pretty damn long, shortlist of highlights and the guide everything was still a bit disjoint.

What I’d really love to see at the Gallery, and almost every museum, is a really well edited set of 20-30 minute threads or themes to follow. You could bring artists in to pick their favourites and narrate the audio guide. You could have curators at the British Museum pick their 10 least appreciated but most loved pieces. I’d love to hear people passionate about their subjects talk about the pieces that excite them while being able to walk about and see those piece.

This type of thing would work particularly well in London where there are a lot of phenomenal and free museums that you can visit time and again. You’d see something new each visit and walk away with some good understanding of what you’ve seen.

I don’t want the museums to display fewer pieces, I just want selective, narrative, threads through all of those pieces.

Fuck that. I can’t support that kind of shit. So, we left without buying the water.

It is really cool that the permanent collection is free though.

I really enjoyed Macbeth at the Gieldgud. It was set in 1970s Soviet Europe, I think, and the costumes totalitarian-military style. Think big bubble style TVs meet heavy leather trench coats.

The cast was excellent. I’ll let M discuss the Patrick Stewart bits in more detail as she’s the TNG fan. He is a very good actor though, and he didn’t engage his warp drive or reverse his polarities even once.

I’m pleased that I read the plot synopsis before I went.

http://www.timeout.com/london/theatre/events/470099/macbeth.html

If I may add another voice to the choir: the Wii is absolutely mind-blowing. I played Wii sports for the first time on Monday while at Henry’s house and it had me giggling like a school kid. I’ve never experienced a more natural user interface… there’s basically nothing to learn.

The Wii breaks down cynicism unlike anything else I’ve ever experienced.

Warning, I’m new to this.

Warning, I’m assuming you’re not new to OOP.

I’ve hacked away at some PHP before on a couple of projects and I’m now building a Facebook app for a buddy. That’s all going really well but I didn’t want to spend my time slapping away, procedural-style, at the code, I’ve done that before and generally I prefer OOP, thanks.

Here is the first step, PHP4 style. PHP5 appears to have all sorts of useful access modifiers and the like… PHP4 is more widespread but a little less feature rich. For a variety of reasons, mostly to do with default hosting settings we’re sticking to PHP4.

<?php
class MyClass {
	var $myInstanceVariable;
	function myClassMethod($foo) {
		return "hello world $foo";
	}
	function myInstanceMethod() {
		return "hello caller $this->myInstanceVariable";
	}
}

$myObject = new MyClass();
$myObject->myInstanceVariable = "tim";
echo $myObject->myInstanceMethod(); //=> hello caller tim
echo MyClass::myClassMethod("harding"); //=> hello world harding
?>