Selling the next generation’s seas

So apparently Nobu have been caught selling an endangered species on their menu. Instead of doing the decent thing and pulling it from their menu, they instead gave it more cachet for rich idiots and marked it as Endangered on the menu. How selfish is that? Farewell bluefin tuna it’s been nice knowing you. Shame the next generation will now get a chance to eat you!

Seriously our seas fish stocks are in major decline, and it’s looking pretty unlikely that they will ever recover. Just check out what happened to the Grand banks. Once one of the most fertile fishing grounds in the world. Now most fish stocks have collapsed completely and will never recover. How can a fish that only breeds when it’s over 3 years old, survive when people catch all the 2 year old fish? The human race is pretty short sighted and none of us are innocent! Ah well it’s Friday. Let’s drink and dance to the destruction of ourselves.

3G down with O2

So I come on a long journey stocked up with spare battery n laptop, to find no internet access via my phone. After endless waiting on the O2 helpline I find that the entire UK O2 3G network is down. Wow! I guess I’m not along in being internetless on the train today!

paddling along the Great Ouse in Ely

I’ve just had a very pleasant afternoon on the river Great Ouse. I hired a canoe from Reeds Of Cambridge in the marina at Ely (£30 for the afternoon). Paddled from Ely to the confluence of the Cam and the Ouse (Pope’s Corner), and then a short way up the small river (the one that goes to St Ives). A yummy picnic was then had, although marred slightly by an aggressive ugly swan that wanted our food. Jabs with a paddle seemed to only make it more aggressive, which I understand perfectly, as if somebody jabs me with a paddle I’m not going to feel too happy with them. But letting the swan have the food was not an option. After all ham and brie in a baguette is worth fighting for! This was one swan that had never grown out of the ugly duckling stage. It was grey, with a more than normal spindly neck. I guess this was why it was pretty sore at the world. It really was one mean swan and even narrow boats coming down the river did not make it move until the boat shoved it physically out of the way. Once it realised that it would not get our food then it then moved downstream to harass some poor boaters who’d overestimated the amount of diesel in their tank, and were amusingly trying to pole a 40ft narrowboat along the river, with much less success than when doing the same to a punt. So after helping them get to the bank, the swanless picnic was then finished, and a leisurely tired paddle back to Ely.

The weather was smashing, although of course I forgot sun cream and am now burning a little. A pint at the Cutter pub rounded off the day. I’ve not been back here for quite a while, but when the weather is nice, the corner on the river here is a lovely place. The river was full of people making the most of the last gasps of summer. all in all a very pleasant afternoon.

I can recommend going to Reeds of Cambridge to hire your canoe. Much nicer than fighting amongst the tourists in the Backs in Cambridge!

XL collapses

Whereas you’ve got to feel sorry for people who’ve had their holidays ruined, that pales into insignificance when compared to the many employees who are now without a job. Holiday’s are pretty important, but still a luxury. A job is fairly essential, and I’m sure getting a new job in the travel industry is not going to be easy for the next 12 months.

Issues with configuring Personal Web Sharing on ‘upgraded’ Leopard

I’ve just been tearing my hair out trying to understand why a colleague could configure a personal website and I cannot! WIth OS X you can simply drag some html files into ~//Sites/ and enable Personal Web Sharing and access those files with the following URL

“”http://LOCALHOST/~USERNAME””

So far so good, except I could not for the life of me get this working on Leapard. Every attempt at loading this webpage resulted in a permissions error. What on earth! Whereas my colleague running Tiger set it up very quickly.

The frustration was further deepened by the fact that I was temporarily stranded in the middle of North Carolina without a internet connection! Not even a a single bar of cell signal!

However, once I got my fix back I found this web page detailing the issue, Gigoblog.

It appears that as a consequence of moving from Apache 1 to Apache 2 in the Tiger to Leopard move, Apple forgot a few things. The main one of these was that the default location of the Apache configuration files was changed from “etc/httpd” to “/etc/apache2”. That’s fine, but if you’d upgraded from Tiger to Leopard any users that were created under Tiger have their individual personal web sharing config files stored under the old location, and they’re not migrated to the new location.

Mail.app, IMAP and being mobile

One thing that has always frustrated me is the stubborn nature of keeping Mail.app offline. It always fails to recognise when you are offline and try to send email. Then of course warning you that you are offline and it cannot connect to that server . well no shit Sherlock I did not know that! More importantly when you open Mail.app and you are offline, instead of being able to take all inboxes offline, it instead turns them offline saying you cannot connect. This ‘warning offline status’ is different from when you take it offline yourself (different icons) and the next time you go online it will try to take all these mail boxes back online.

So envisage this scenario. You have to send a single email from a personal account. You do not want to have to even think about work email (being on holiday). More so you want to minimise all network activity as you are connecting with a phone tethered as a 3G/GPRS modem at £3 a Mb (data roaming is a real pain!). So you need to minimise activity due to cost and also the fact that the signal is never more than 1 bar on your phone, and your ZX81 and acoustic coupler used to get a better throughput!

So you fire up Mail,app which automatically takes all inboxes offline since there is no network connection. You go online then immediately you then have to take all these inboxes offline (ACCOUNT > ONLINE STATUS > TAKE OFFLINE). However, doing this leaves whatever connection had started ongoing. (Open Connection Activity to see all the threads that this leaves going). Invariably trying to stop one of these, leaves one or more of your IMAP mailboxes in an ‘unknown’ state and it then tries to resycnhronise the entire inbox and folder structure. However, it cannot do so as there are lots of connection threads in a stopping status and the mail box is offline. Concurrently your single email is timing out as the SMTP server it is trying to be sent by is timing out. SO you kill Mail.app praying that it will remember the proper offline status. However, it then will not close as of course it wants to finish all these open conections. Which it cannot. So you use Force Kill, which is always a bad idea with Mail.app. You fire up Mail.app again, and it tries to again synchronise at least one of your offline mail inboxes. In spite of it’s aparentl proper offline status.

So there I was 2 hours later having had to send a single personal email.

So why does Mail.app not have a proper online/offline status? Does Apple have some deal going with ISP’s mobile operators to inscrease traffic as much as possible?

Edit: my Phone bill for that escapade worked out to be £10. Which was far more than the rest of the data related costs for the entire fortnight!