August 2006

Ever since Apple teamed up with Nike, in what can only be described as a huge marketing gimmick, to produce the imaginatively titled “ipod+nike” I’ve been contemplating purchasing the system. I’m not a huge running nut but I do around 20 miles a week (4 sessions of 5 miles) on our treadmill. Now and again I lack the motivation to really enjoy it. When you’re really tired, or the twinge in your knee has returned it’s easy to consider not running. The Nike system appeals because you can upload your data to the nikeplus website to track your progress and compare yourself to other runners.

However, there are two problems:

The first is that you need an iPod nano. There doesn’t appear to be any hardware reason for the sensor only working with iPod nanos but rather it’s a shrewd move on Apple’s behalf to sell more nanos. I guess they figured that exercise can be the nanos niche. I own a 3G iPod that was a gift from Debbie a few birthdays ago so I’m reluctant to retire it just yet. As it’s the 20gig model and contains my entire iTunes library (10gb), I use it on long journeys via my car stereo and when travelling to the US. A nano won’t have the storage I need.

The second is that you have to purchase Nike running shoes at around £70 a pair. I’m extremely reluctant to change my shoes. I currently run in a pair of Asics Gel Kayano XI which suit me well. I don’t want to switch to a pair of trainers that I’ve not tested first. Anyone who runs will stick to a shoe they find comfortable.

Fortunately, I came across a website which has ‘hacked’ the sensor into his own running shoes. It’s an extremely low-fi hack that seems to work based on his tests and the feedback of others. You simply stick a bit of velcro on the sensor and place it between the tongue and laces of your shoes. You can then configure the sensor to adjust for the different placing as the Nike shoes have a cut-out in the sole for the sensor.

Although I don’t want to retire my iPod, 1gb Nanos are fairly inexpensive these days and the storage will suffice for the few playlists I run to and to host the Nike software.

With that in mind, I’ve ordered the sports kit with a 1gb nano and I’ll let you know how it goes…

Once upon a time I thought it would be a great idea to include my email address at the top of each IPB source code file.

Fast forward three years and three million spam emails and I’m glad I removed it a few years ago. Despite having my IPS emails filtered via the corporate spam filter and using gmail for just about everything else I still have an annoying amount of spam to deal with.

Apple Mail’s built in junk filter does an OK job but I found that it was
junking more and more legitimate email while letting Nigerian scam
emails through just fine.

Thanks to a blog entry by Tim Dorr, I downloaded and installed SpamSieve.

SpamSieve gives you back your inbox by bringing powerful Bayesian spam filtering to Mac e-mail clients. It’s quick and easy to control SpamSieve from within your mail client, and you can customize how it interacts with the rest of your message sorting rules. Other spam filters get worse over time as spammers adapt to their rules; SpamSieve actually gets better over time as it adapts to your mail. By learning from the very messages that you receive, SpamSieve is able to block nearly all of your spam, without putting your good messages in the spam mailbox.

It’s an audacious claim - and one that is backed up by the spam sieve statistics. I’ve been using it for a few weeks now and apart from the odd rogue email, it’s done a remarkable job. It works as a plug-in for Apple’s Mail (and can also work as a plug in for Thunderbird and Entourage) and takes over junk mail duty. You can train it with known “good” and “bad” messages and it keeps a log of what it’s up to. You can also add your own entries to its “whitelist” and “blocklist”.

Here’s some statistics collected since the 14th of this month:

Filtered Mail
307 Good Messages
3222 Spam Messages (91%)
201 Spam Messages Per Day

SpamSieve Accuracy
3 False Positives
13 False Negatives (81%)
99.5% Correct

It’s not a free product, but the $25 price tag is more than justified. If you’re using Apple Mail - give SpamSieve a go.

I’m sure you’ve heard of Snakes on a Plane as it’s been something of an internet phenomenon so much so that five days of additional shooting were ordered after the film wrapped to include dialogue proposed by fans.

We (Debbie, Debbie’s sister and I) went to see this over the weekend and we weren’t disappointed. For anyone looking for a high concept film, or a clever twisting plot or even character based acting — forget it. This is definitely a film that you don’t have to think about.

The film takes about twenty minutes to set up the cliched plot involving a throw-away bad guy and That Guy Who Survived From Wolf Creek. The rest of the film involves a plane and snakes. Samuel L Jackson plays the same ‘bad-ass’ character he’s been riffing on successfully since Pulp Fiction and it works well here. Throw in a OCD obsessed rapper who doesn’t like to be touched and you’ve got the dynamics for a good romp.

The body of the film is definitely rooted in “B-Movie” territory with people being bitten in the face, chest and more delicate areas as the snakes weave their way through the plane. It’s all good senseless fun and it doesn’t take itself too seriously as it plays on just about every ‘airplane’ movie cliche you’ve ever seen.

Throughly recommended.

I picked up a Sony Ericsson k800i a week ago and I’m really impressed with it.

The biggest draw is the 3.2 megapixel camera which comes with autofocus, image stabilizer and a built in xenon flash. It’s capable of taking some pretty sharp pictures. It actually gives medium to low end digital cameras a run for their money.
Better yet, you can stick in a memory card micro to extend the phone’s meagre 64mb memory. With a full quality picture weighing in at around 700k it’s not long before you need one. Fortunately they retail for around £20 on eBay which is where I got mine.

Sony Ericsson have teamed up with Blogger.com to enable you to blog right from your phone. Whilst it’s clear that “texting” a long blog is too much hassle, it does allow you to share your pictures immediately and easily. You simply select a picture, choose “Send > Blog” and fill in the title and the body and it resizes the picture and uploads it all via it’s 3G GPRS connection. I’ve got a mobile blog here.

It seems that Sony Ericsson are the new Nokia.

So I had a fun hour this morning.

If you’re unaware, any javascript that’s returned via ajax (XMLHttpRequest) which is embedded in the returned text isn’t executed which is a bit of a problem.

To ‘fix’ this, I wrote a little function in the ajax class that takes the returned text, finds any javascript blocks and eval()s them. The problem is the regex. My first instinct was to write this:

source_code.match( new RegExp( “<script\s+?type=[’”]text/javascript[’”]>(.+?)</script>”, “i” ) )

However that didn’t work. After some tweaking it seemed that ( .+?) wasn’t matching across newlines. A quick search on the internet informed that RegExp’s dot character doesn’t match across newlines and I should use ([^]+?) instead ([^] being match every character except (none)).

I made the changes and everything snapped into place, so I figured I’d quickly blog about it so that I won’t forget in the future.