One of the sidebar links is to the the Mensan Blog and I host this on my (reseller) server. Its handy doing it that way because I can add the type of enhancements like a google map page that just isn’t possible with the likes of Blogger.

The mensan blog uses Pivot, open source blogging software. I just wanted something easy to install and Pivot is excellent. It is very nippy- possibly because it uses flat files rather than a database… though of course how well that scales remains to be seen but I think not a while. Its very easy to customise – I’ve added Google Analystics, a Flickr link and Technorati to it. So if you’re looking for a poweful but easy to use, install and configure multiple blog system, give pivot a try.

The version of Pivot I’m using – the latest is 1.3RC2 (Release Candidate 2) which means well past Beta and almost full release. I’ve found (possibly) one bug with the pinging urls but that easy worked around using the 3rd party Pinging services of Pingoat.com or pingomatic But Pivot itself has proved very stable and robust.

Chocolate is by and large a bad thing for me. I seem to be able to consume it in vast quantities. Last year I stopped eating it for a while and lost 50 lbs-though to be fair weightwatchers helped. Trouble is I love chocolate in all its shapes and forms- from Cadbury’s through to Lindt.

Onm holiday recently in Keswick, I discovered 99% pure Chocolate. The normal Lindt dark chocolate is 70% and 85%. But 99%? Madness! Folly! And yet there it was as you can see. The packet had a warning that only experienced choclate lovers should try it. I laughed with disdain and tried a piece. Yeeeeuch! Well not immediately but within a few seconds. Not a terribly nasty taste, not that bitter either but almost pure cocoa butter. It was a plant type taste.

Ah well, back to 70%/85%.

The 99% didn’t scan in too well compared to the 85%- Shiny lettering but it is real not photoshopped.

I was asked to setup a brand new empty box with Linux, mysql, php, webmin. Luckily I had a copy of Suse 9.2. Now I am not a Linux expert- I can get by, know most of the commands, even how to wget stuff, make and install. But I’d forgotten just how good YAST the Suse installer really is. Getting Suse installed on an empty box took under 20 minutes- it identified everything- not bad for a Pentium 4 box, 1Gb ram.

Network configuration was a doddle and I updated several packages from the internet- well YAST did that automatically and a newer version of the Kernel is well worth a reboot. I’ve used Webmin before- if you are struggling with Admin of a Linux system, Webmin is just superb. Once I browsed to the downloaded rpm file, YAST took over the install and before I knew it, Webmin was up and running- it uses a web interface on localhost:10000. If you’re configuring virtual sites, setting up Mysql users, etc, its very hard to beat.

Then one final test- create an index.html in the htdocs folder – yup that showed up fine and a small php file with the one line inside a php block

 phpinfo();

and that worked fine. Result! In about 2.5 hours.

So how many book titles have an underscore? Rich Bowen’s book (DGAm) has started a new trend. Well none according to Amazon, if you search for _ but they do have it!

Published by Apress, the shortish (120 pages) hardback covers one of the most complicated and arcane subjects. mod_rewrite. This is a module for Apache web-servers that lets you do all sorts of wonderful changes to urls dynamically. Its used for instance to simplify urls, making long complex urls with parameters look like a directory structure.

mod_rewrite is a very complex module- i reckon anyone who is fully at home should be given free entry to Mensa.

Content wise its a combination of cookbook and how-to in 12 chapters from an introduction, look at regular expressions, installation with the bulk of the book explaining the various rewrite modules and how and when to use them and not use them.

This is a book that remains on your shelf until you need it, but when you need it it is invaluable. Rating 8/10. Link to On Amazon.co.uk

Every morning I stop in the newsagents near work and buy a soft drink (sugar free of course). It’s usually the Lemon and/Or Lime diet cokes but this morning I saw a new product. CocaCola Zero. It has just been launched here – according to Wikipedia. Of course not everyone is happy!

I’ve been here before- not New Coke (which I never tasted) but with Tab and Diet Coke. Tab was the first zero (or low) calorie drink they offered back around the late 70s (in N. Ireland). More info as ever on the ubiquitous wikipedia.

In 1981/82 diet coke came on the scene and Tab just disappeared. I think Diet Coke is too ubiquitous now to vanish. So CocaCola Zero is presumably a counter to Pepsi Max. Diet Coke was possibly a bit bitter say compared to Diet Pepsi so this addresses that by sticking with the Coke taste, just removing all the sweeteners.

So what does it taste like? Coke.

Something I’ve wondered about is, what does Coke taste like in other countries? That’s not a silly question. Here in London, over the last few years, there has been a massive grey import market in Diet Coke, or Coke Light as it’s better known.

I’ve drunk cans made in South Africa, Poland, Germany, probably half the countries in Europe. And the taste is definitely different. Also, a funny little quirk. All the cans were the standard 330 ml except the S. Africans which were 340 ml. You can still buy these- many small newsagents, chicken shops stock them. I guess the wholesale price is cheaper than the licensed bottlers.

Tuckerization is the use of a real person’s name as a character name, place name, or equipment name in a story. Its also spellt tuckerisation – I suspect that us Brits anglicising it. Its not unlike a company paying an author to include their name in a piece of fiction or product placement in a film.

If you’re famous like David Beckham then (forgetting about the use of celebrity names- akin to committing suicide legally and financially) then the Tuckerized name would be recognisable, but my name David Bolton- well theres loads of us out there so how do you know which it is? So I guess I won’t be looking for to be tuckerised anytime soon.

Now the point about Tuckerization is that it only includes the name, not appearance or other characteristics of the named individual. Why not go the extra step and put a real person in. Hey we could call that Boltonization ( Boltonisation!) rather than the reference to John Bolton/UN.

The alien female purred as she approached David. “You may think of yourself as fat, bespectacled, asthmatic and ugly, David” she whispered, as her 4 tentacles unbuttoned his shirt. “But that is on your world and in my world you are what every ur-woman desires as their partner (and dinner).” She stepped out of her skin and …

At home due to my son-in-law living with us, we have a very extensive DVD collection. But I never really had the time to sit and watch one more than once a week if that (and that when TV wasn’t being used by anyone else). I love films though and realised that if I could get a PSP, put films on it then I could watch films during my commuting. I’ve been playing catchup!

It works very well. I bought the PSP Gigapack- One GB SD card, usb cable, plus headphones and a game that cost £219- probably cheaper now, plus the £15 case with screen protector from game.co.uk and a set of Creative Noise Reducing headphones from Dabs.

After much searching on the web, I found DVD Decrypter. which takes a DVD and produces a set of vob files. And PSPVideo9 here. Both are free.

So that’s it. To convert a DVD and put it on a PSP, insert the DVD run DVD Decrypter. I’ve found the best way to do this is the re-author option. There is usually a title part which is about 4GB in size. Just copy that and let DVD Decrypter run. It takes sbout 15-20 minutes to rip the DVD and create the VOBs. The longer bit is PSP Video 9 which processes the VOBs and produces the .MP4 files (and then copies them over if you plug in your PSP).

Expect to take roughly an hour from start to finish though it depends on film size. Some DVDs have extra protection and you can use the free utility DVD43 for those. Many of the DVDs given away with the newspapers have no protection on anyway.

As for UMD- Sony’s equivalent of DVD- A bit of a failure I think. Why pay more than a DVD for a poorer quality version? Depending on the film length and quality settings for PSP Video 9, you can get 1 or 2 films on a

The headphones are fantastic- especially as they cost just £25. You can pay up to £300 for really high quality ones like those that Bose sell. Without these the train background rumble frequently masks dialogue. With these its crytstal clear.

Part of my daily commute is by bus. Oh I could walk it- it’s less than a mile but it doesn’t cost anything extra as I have a monthly Oyster card.

Coming back at night there’s sometimes a 5-10 minute wait and a lot of slow moving traffic past the bus stop at Leyton tube. So I play Seatbelt football and count the score. How many drivers wear a seatbelt, how many don’t. Last friday the score reached an amzing 17:17. Yup, 1 in every 2 drivers was without a seatbelt. Yesterday it was 13:5 (thats 5 without). It amazes me that 23 years after this became compulsory (1983) so many still risk it.

I’ve noticed though that the drivers who flash buses out seem to be in the ranks of the unbelted. I wonder if this is because the belt wearers tend to drive faster and so are more likely to overtake than brake and flash – that old chestnut risk compensation theory.

I live in East London, Leyton to be precise, approximately one mile from the 2012 Olympic Village. It is quite a busy area traffic wise, especially when the local football team Leyton Orient are at home. (Well done getting that promotion!) I imagine there is going to be considerable disruption for locals in the next 7 years.

Today I discovered a new phrase “Ambush Marketing”- it originated in the 1996 Olympics where companies who weren’t associated with the Olympics managed to get mileage out of the Olympics to help sell their products and services. This kind of upset the official sponsors and the Olympics organisers. So to head this off, LOCOG (London Organising Committee of the Olympic Games) have got a Royal Bill which basically gives them Carte Blanche to go after anyone using the word “London Games” or various combinations. Fines of up to £20,000. This bill wasn’t without opposition. you can read LOCOG’s interpretation of the law here (Warning PDF).

However things may not be quite that bad. According to Pinsent Mason’s excellent web-site “Factual references to London and the Olympics will be legal and phrases such as ‘Come to London in 2012’ are not subject to a blanket ban, according to the Department of Culture MS.” In general terms, the Act restricts the use of the words “games”, “Two Thousand and Twelve”, “2012”, and “twenty twelve” in combination with each other or in combination with words including “gold,” “silver”, “bronze”, “London” and “summer”. These restrictions will last for six-and-a-half years.

I can understand the logic behind LOCOG but I can’t help feeling a bit uneasy about the approach. It extends into other areas. Coca Cola is an official sponsor so if you try to enter the stadium with a Pepsi Cola bottle they will make you throw it away. This type of thing happens increasingly these days. The organisers can’t have you “Dissing the Sponsors” or “doing a Britney” (having a contract with one sponsor but being seen with a rival’s product)

What LOCOG conveniently omits is that traders and local businesses who aren’t “Supporting the Olympics” but who are affected by it due to proximity, disruption etc are not allowed to gain any recompense from it. Now that seems unfair. Yes some are bound to gain extra trade but they aren’t allowed to advertise it.

I reckon that a large part of the popularity of Blogging is because it addresses a human need. To say something- its the old “Write a letter syndrome” brought into the 21st century. It didn’t matter if you posted the letter or not. Writing the letter was the thing; it concentrated the mind, focussed your thoughts and the act of creating the letter was in a sense therapeutic. You got it off your chest.

So as well as the web developing and my full time job, I’m also doing three reasonably frequently updated blogs ( Mensan.Eu – a blog for mensans- interesting things about Mensa ), this blog and the Squidoo Mensa lens. My old website is at www.dhbolton.com but slowly rising from the ruins is a new look, xhtml validating site at www.davidhbolton.co.uk