grahambinns.com

Very quick post because I'm supposed to be going out to photograph most of London (this may be an exaggeration; we'll see) before too long. Of course, it would have helped if I'd actually done some organising of said photo walk; that may cause problems.

It's been a good, if very tiring week. We - that is, the Launchpad team - have managed to squeeze a lot of learning into five days, and I think it's fair to say that we've proved our quality as developers and as a development team as a whole. I hope that I'll be able to take at least two things home from this two week epic:

1. You couldn't wish for a better team to develop software with.
2. I really do actually fit into it; they're not going to suddenly suss me out and send me back to doing PHP pages.

In other news, I went to Piracy vs Obscurity - an evening with Neil Gaiman last night with a few colleagues. The talk was held in a (very pretty) church crypt and was everything that I was hoping for. It actually encouraged me to perform the butt-in-chair motion that Mur Lafferty has been talking about for years; maybe I will manage something for Halloween this year after all.

A final note on the Gaiman subject should go to my friend Michelle, who was pretty made up to have come out of the evening with a signed copy of The Graveyard Book and a hug from Neil himself. Not a bad evening, all told.

Right. Off to capture London's soul. I'm sure you'll see the results later, if I can rely on this fairly flaky hotel wi-fi to withstand the upload.

... then the DNS records have propagated correctly and your RSS feed reader is now slurping from the new grahambinns.com server, which is just hunky dory as far as I'm concerned.

I've been working on this version of things for a while. Besides a re-skin - which taught me a lot about how I should be designing my templates and CSS, so it should be a bit easier next time - I've also tidied up the codebase a bit and added some new features. Most of them are under the hood, but here are some of them for those of you that care:

• Each piece of content on the site has its own license. For example, all my photos are CC-BY-NC-SA, as is all the content here so far. But when I start adding stories here (and it will happen within the next few months, I hope) I'll be able to license them as I see fit.
• I can now make posts using markdown syntax. This might not seem like a big deal but over the years I've come to loathe sites that simply turn linebreaks into <br />s (yes, Wordpress, I'm looking at you. You still do it, even with valid HTML posts). On this site I used to use TinyMCE as a WYSWIG HTML editor, which worked fine but was pretty horrendous to load on a slow connection. Now I just use markdown and let Django's markup app do all the work. Fantastic.
• You can now post comments using markdown syntax. No more trying to post a link and having Django eat it!
• I can now post to the blog by email. I thought about using gpg signatures to validate my emails but realised that it was too complicated (we do it in the Launchpad email interface and one look at that code a while back persuaded me to not do it unless I had to). Instead I've gone for generating single-use authentication tokens, which suits me fine and should hopefully - along with an obscure incoming address - stop spammers from doing nasty things.
• The site now supports pingbacks, though at the moment it can only receive them until I iron out some issues with the pingback sending code.

There are a lot more things that I've fixed, added, tweaked and polished, but none that are particularly interesting.

So here, finally, are the vital statistics of the new site:

• Server: Bytemark virtual server running Ubuntu 8.04.
• Django 0.97-pre (to be upgraded to 1.0 stable when it comes out in September).
• PostgreSQL 8.3 (the migration to which fixed so many problems it's unreal).
• Apache with mod_python for serving the Django stuff.
• Lighttpd for serving the static files.

One of my photography idols, Rebekka Gudleifsdottir , has passed 5 million views on her Flickr stream.

That's insane.

Congratulations Rebekka!

Due to enormous demand the Canonical shop is now offering a second printing of the Hardy Heron T-Shirt, this time on sand-coloured cotton.

From the shop:

Due to unprecedented demand, we are producing a second edition Hardy Heron t-shirt. This edition is very similar to the limited edition t-shirt in design, but rather than including the heron image from the wallpaper of the beta release of Ubuntu 8.04 LTS, it includes the heron which is featured on the current Ubuntu desktop wallpaper (a slight difference in the position of the colours used, but different enough to keep the first chocolate coloured 500 as limited edition). Plus this is a sand coloured t-shirt, which is 100% cotton. Can't wait until they arrive? Pre-order yours now.

Since I managed not to order a first edition version I've put in my preorder for the second. Sadly, it won't arrive before I go to UDS in a couple of weeks, but I'll survive. I have another, more sekrit T-shirt that I'll be taking with me, of which more, doubtless, anon...

My colleague and friend Matt Revell has a nice summary of some of the reasons for rising domestic fuel prices in the UK at the moment. A phrase that particularly caught my eye was this one:

Wind power, also, is not reliable nor particularly efficient and requires generation from other sources (coal, gas, nuclear, for example) to back it up when it’s either too windy or not quite windy enough. So, this is the Goldilocks of power generation and just like Goldilocks in the story, it can’t go for that long without needing a lie down; it’s the energy source with ME. So, no, your electricity won’t be free and nor should it be.

I confess that I don't pay a huge amount of attention to the telly these days. It's a means for me to watch DVDs and little else; most of the news content I read on a daily basis is read via the intertubes. But the point that Matt is making in his post, the one about the problem with TV audiences, or rather with TV programs who cater to the lowest common denominator and require no effort from their audience (that's how I see it, it may not be how Matt sees it) is a valid one.

One of the problems with living in an age of high information availability, when all you need to do to be able to know something more about an issue is look it up on Google, is that people accept the information that comes to them almost without question, in the same way that a stereotypical Daily Wail reader will accept the paper's opinion that the country is going to the dogs almost every single day of the week.

Is this just a human problem? Are we just naturally rather too trusting of, well, just about anyone who seems to be better informed than us? One of the most common phrases I've heard - and which has irked me no end - over the years is "It's (in the paper|on the web|on the TV) so it must be true!"

Anyway, I'm not going to go on further in a post that started out with a purpose but has subsequently become somewhat disjointed and is turning into a rant. Go and read Matt's post for a saner and less crabby commentary on matters.

Instead, dear reader, I'll leave you with a summary of my thinking on such matters by that other web luminary, XKCD: