I haven’t blogged anything yet this year, mostly because there’s been nothing to say. 2006, frankly, feels so much like 2005 I think it’s the least significant new year I’ve ever had.

I’m not a very good writer. I hope that from time to time I pop out a fairly interesting piece, I can get quite passionate about music and I know a few words. Really, my lack of experience shows. Most noticeably, I overuse certain words and phrases. Especially when proof reading, I swap one phrase for another, inadvertently causing a repetition in the subsequent paragraph.

The Carson Summit draws closer and people are starting to make plans for meet-ups and birthday parties. Mostly meet-ups though.

Riffs launched later on in 2005 and I whilst I didn’t really �get it� at first, I did go back and managed to have some fun. Notably, I realised that really, Riffs has the potential to be “Amazon Customer Reviews” for everything on the net.

Hoorah, a meme.

I honestly hope that this year we see a bank stand up and say “here’s an online service that’s actually integral to the way you work”. At a time when public internet services are sucking up Ajax and open data from party pitchers, I want to know whether online banking is going to make a similar, user-centric leap forward.

They make it difficult, donchaknow.

On trying to join up the internet: Every person’s website includes a file called �profile.xml� that describes public profiles and membership of other standalone webservices. It’s a very vague sketchy idea and I want to know if it’s worth pursuing. Is it really useful? Does it go some way to helping us towards Identity 2.0? Are there glaring architectural flaws that I’ve just missed?

Pfffffffffft.

Or: An accident with type

Google integrates chat logging into Gmail. Produces more shite mark-up.

This is gonna be pretty short but I should say that I had a great time at the Carson Web Apps Summit. It’s always nice to meet up with other geeks and indulge, combining that with my birthday seems to have been a good mix. I should eat at Wagamana more often, too.

I’ve finally got a compelling reason to move my domain over to the Dreamhost package that I’ve been paying for since October. I need to set up some SVN source control for my university project (Oak).

Joshuaburn January 2006 (Print version)

Originally uploaded by Ben Ward

Knocking out cover art is one of my small loves in life.

Not sure if I’ll manage a consistent theme throughout the year, but maybe I’ll try. Currently the theme is ‘photos that I think look really cool’. There’s no relation between the picture and the music or anything so clever as that.

The bottle of Whisky was photographed by me over Christmas, and touched up in Fireworks to account for the terrible focus. It was given to a grandparent as a present, and is comes from the Scotch Malt Whisky Society’s 26 Malts series. This particular label was written by Chris Miller and designed by Susanna Freedman.

I like Microformats. The potential for doing Really Useful Stuff with the internet is immense: Embedding events and contact information into regular (X)HTML pages, representing relationships and now, describing feeds.

Fatty isn’t convinced by my favoured hAtom use-case for providing Comment Feeds, so I’ve got two more reasons why hAtom might yet save the world.

… A small, ugly tablet PC with pitiful 3 hour battery life. Awesome work guys.

After getting over the amusement of Microsoft making it even harder to run a secure Windows system (quite possibly in the name of security, too), I need an alternative standalone file manager. Some of them look rather OTT for my purposes, so I’m after suggestions.

At the beginning of February I wrote about the fact that it seemed impossible to test Microsoft’s IE7 beta legally and without hacks without making a large financial outlay for Virtual PC and a fresh Windows XP license.

I don’t often make posts out of Spam, but this was just a touch too priceless.

I like to think that this blog is, by and large, optimistic. It’s also quite impersonal. Perhaps I keep myself too close to my chest, I’m unsure.

A few weeks ago as I changed my Gmail/Google Talk address over to my preferred ‘talk@ben-ward.co.uk’ Jabber account (which is hosted on Dreamhost). Someone told me at the time that I could change my MSN Messenger address too and that it would magically transfer across all my contacts…

Elly tagged me a few weeks ago with a quite interesting meme. Life has been terribly busy and it’s taken until this attack of insomnia to find time to write it up.

On the imminent closure of my life at university.

So, this is it. My final piece of academic coursework ever has been done. At 11:25 Friday morning I gave a presentation demonstrating my final year project. At midday I exited the Maths & Social Sciences building of the University of Manchester NorthUMIST Campus feeling absolutely bloody great.

On discovering the joy of Tiger’s Automator app, and using it to clean up Windows Thumbnail Caches (download included).

Radiohead rock my world, again.

I shall say this only once, or perhaps thrice:

Regarding the little things the computer does. Volumes controls and Bluetooth transfers.

Little bit of a lazy-web plea this.

1. It’s Saturday night.
2. I’m not drunk.
3. I’m reading the XHTML DTD.

After a solid week of revision (which is a really big achievement for me… just before my penultimate exam ever) I’ve just realised that most of the RDF, RDFS and OWL references I’ve noted lately have been written in pseudo-XPath.

You’re downloading an application from the net, lets say an application that you were curious about but might not turn out to be of much use to you. What’s the biggest download size you’d accept? What size of download would make you think ‘I can’t be bothered’?

Today I finished university. The terror of the rest of my life beckons, but for now I’m just going to play my music really loud.

Oh, interesti…waaaaitaminute…

Originally uploaded by Ben Ward

Saw this advert in on-train magazine while travelling back to Manchester. It’s an ad for a mobile web browser. Nice idea, maybe it’s a bit like the excellent Opera Mini. Then you look a little closer…

My 4th Generation iPod is getting on a bit and as with all rechargeable batteries that get such heavy use, the lifespan between charges was dwindling. You can send iPods back to Apple for replacements, but this costs a not insubstantial amount of money (it’s in the ’why not just save a little more for a new iPod territory).

Somewhat surprisingly I’m attending @media again this year. Whoop whoop. It’s nice to be seeing people again and this time there’re some individuals I must ensure I track down properly. Drew and Colly, this means you.

I’m back from @media. I’m tired, blistered, educated but fulfilled.

There’s a well established saying and it goes something like this: ‘Don’t keep an idea to yourself because you can guarantee that someone else has also thought of it’.

The possibilities are endless, sings Micah P Hinson out of my tinny iBook speakers. His voice echoes off the bare white walls of the room that was my home.

Go go lazyweb!

The Champagne is uncorked because I got a 2:1. Whoop.

The ability to download television programmes from the internet (legally) is hotting up, slowly. Unfortunately we’re heading fast in the direction of DRM, low-resolution and region-enforcement.

The make-up of an Englishman varies dramatically depending on the context of the appending blog post, but right now let’s say it’s 33% fine roast meat, 33% penalty shoot outs and 34% whinging about the weather.

Yes, the official conclusion to my university years is upon us and I’ll be back in Manchester for the day on Monday 10th for my Graduation. It’s strange, for a long time I was a bit indifferent towards graduation, perhaps I’d just not really thought about it very much. Now I’m quite keen to stop into Manchester again, hopefully see a few people.

There are two things I want to write about, both positively.

On a related note to all of this employment talk, I’m currently spending summer at home and trying to pay my way by taking on some small-scale web development jobs.

It seems that the effectiveness of Akismet for comment spam protection is starting to wane. It still catches huge amounts of spam (need to clear another 1600 spam comments from my cache in Wordpress after I write this) but slowly but surely spam comments are sneaking in.

Some time ago I stopped using Gmail. I was criticising it increasingly regularly and it seemed only right that I should explore alternatives. The alternative I’ve been settled on since then has been IMAP, in combination with Thunderbird on PC and Mail.app on the Mac. That’s worthy of a separate post at some point, but one big step backwards I did find was the occasional need for webmail access.

As summer stretches on I’ve increasingly found that there’s just no way I’ll cope with using my PC as a full-time machine again. The Mac experience is just too beautiful and working on my iBook is dancing through poppy fields compared to wading through Windows treacle.

Once regarded as the height of classy UI, it does seem that pinstripes are falling out of fashion and favour faster than a lonely Essex girl.

BarCamp is coming to the UK next month for two days and many are attending.

So, Apple have previewed Mac OSX Leopard. I can’t say I was blown away by the WWDC keynote, but everything there was interesting enough: The implementation of virtual desktop is gorgeous, iChat 4 looks very cool (although I continue to dislike the chat bubbles) and Time Machine might just bring backups to all (if Apple start shipping redundant hard discs as standard… which they might, I suppose). OK, so the new Mail.app templates are shite, looking like a car crash between iWeb and Outlook Express (and not of the chocolate and peanut butter kind). In fact, that seemed remarkably consumer-centric for a developers conference but otherwise all is good.

After a gruelling graduation ceremony, some casual small-job work, casually hunted for full time jobs and spending a lot of time cuddling, I need a holiday.

I’m awful at drawing attention to milestones on my blog. I don’t see an awful lot of importance or relevance in doing so, but would anyway if I were to remember. I missed the first blog anniversary, and the second too (July 21st) but pretty much by accident, I spotted the post count in Wordpress sitting at 199.

Well, this is proving to be a busy busy week.

Well, BarCampLondon has passed in a flurry of excitement, stimulation, free t-shirts and incredible all night games of werewolf.

d.Construct was an absolute blast and I’ll try to write it up properly soon. Meanwhile, I have to move to Birmingham so I’ve been trying to finish the website for Stuart and my little side project.

I’ve been in my new job three days and already I get to advertise for a colleague, things are moving quite fast here.

This is partly in response to Ben O’Neill’s post on the Zune.

Been a week finding time to write this, but as mentioned before, I have a new job. I’m a Web Application Developer for yobject in Birmingham. I’ve just finished my first week in the office and it’s be great fun, definitely feel like I’ve made the right decision.

Like many others, I’ve joined in Pink for October, an effort to help promote Breast Cancer Awareness Month.

You get ‘Cooking with Ben’. No, you don’t ‘get cooking with Ben’, that would be something else entirely (and surely of restricted participation). Instead you get this:

Phishing. What a stupid word. Lord knows how we’ll persuade regular computer consumers to adapt to it. This is quick and techie-friendly anti-phishing technique, and a Mail.app gripe.

I’ve been using my MacBook Pro at home with a Windows keyboard for a while now. It’s been OK, although slightly annoying that the Cmd and Alt keys are reversed (which you can switch over, but that also reverses them on the Apple keyboard I use at work…).

It’s end of October, which means the end of Pink for October, an effort to promote National Breast Cancel Awareness Month.

Well, it’s a special time of year because it’s her birthday on Monday. It’s a special kind of age so I was a bit naughty and approached a lot of people to give me money. A wiser man would’ve stopped there, but with a bit of help from her Dad passing through the states, the money has instead been spent. We’ve bought her a Canon EOS 400D (or ‘Digital Rebel XTi’ as the nutcase American marketeers have badged it).

Came across the best shout-box comment ever on Last.FM.

I believe it’s the done thing in this Web 2.0 world of ours to post indecipherable teasers of our projects. Well, work isn’t quite ready for that yet but at least my evenings have produced something perhaps tempting:

Since Hanni’s blogging is rather low-key since her pinksocks.co.uk domain combusted, I’ll drop a little pointer towards Hanni saying thank you for the camera we got her last week. She’s also said it photographically.

Back in September, Fatty posted a thorough tutorial on using Google Earth to tag Flickr photos. As I pointed out in the comments, there were a few refinements that can be made by delving into the Google Earth preferences.

With all this talk of geotagging, I’ve a lazy web question for you. Take the following case:

Ackey emailed me today complaining that he’d exceeded his iPod capacity. He wants to know how best to keep it sync’d without missing out on the music he wants to listen to.

Hello, welcome to dial-a-view
To locate the area in which you wish to observe
You must program in the longitude and the latitude
For a closer, more detailed picture
Use either the zoom or micro-zoom controls
Good luck

</blockquote>‘Miner at the Dial-a-View’ – Grandaddy

Just the littlest of entries. I’ve just discovered that Elbow’s ‘Leaders of the Free World’ is a free MP3 download on Last.fm. If you’ve not heard the title track from one of last year’s albums of the year, go download now!

In which I complain about the look and feel and Parallels Desktop for Mac OSX.o3

In which I need new earbuds for my iPod.

Right, for about a week now I’ve been having an issue in OSX whereby text is rendering very badly indeed. At random, characters are missing from blocks of text, be that in Web Pages (in Safari and Firefox) in subject lines in Mail.app, on captions on the Dock. All over. If you go back and forward in the web browser the missing characters usually re-appear.

I’ve been working for a week or so now on learning to build Dashboard widgets for Mac OSX. I’ve got one for the rather incredible Last.FM in the works, but since it’s quite complex I took time out for something simpler.

On improving the tag bundles UI in Delicious.

Anti‑Link–Spam plug‑in for Wordpress is a plug‑in to reduce my comment moderation burden.

Regarding the upcoming expiry of my studentssocial.co.uk domain.

On a solution to losing track of half-written email messages.

On the licensing of personal content, asking permission and the reuse of content by new services like NowPublic.