Whoops. Unexpected hiatus in posting, there; first the long posts slipped, then the link-posts, and by the time I wasn’t even posting stuff into delicious it was getting desperate. I forgot how busy September gets. Far too many people I know are born in said month, and coupled with new terms (school, university, parliamentary) and a return to longer issues, everything ground to a halt round here. IKB – the temporary theme, an attempt at something more generic – has also kind-of ground to a halt. But it’s been a fertile testing ground and something approaching a “proper design” should return soon to these pages. I’ve also been more development work, in both PHP and Rails. The latter’s still proving enjoyable; I’m hitting the tricky problems now, which is good, because I used to be getting stuck on the basic problems.

Keep your eyes peeled; there’s bound to be good stuff coming soon.

…when you start having nightmares in assembly code

Everyone knows about it. The designers are going nuts, the gamers are going nuts. I’ve been having mental explosions since this morning and that’s been most enjoyable.

The Nintendo Revolution controller has been unveiled. It’s very, very, very important.

I don’t quite have time to articulate the mental explosions right now – and indeed, many people are hitting the same nails on the head as me. Gillen is probably the most succinct:

“If you don’t like the Revolution controller, you are fundamentally part of the problem and killing the fucking art form”

He is fundamentally right.

Over at the New Statesman we’ve just launched our Party Conference Blog, which will run for the duration of the political conference season. The TUC conference is currently in progress, and the Conservatives annual conference ends in the beginning of October, so it’s worth keeping an eye on for a few weeks. It should be good – we’ve got a nice selection of writers lined up.

If the design looks familiar, well, it should; it’s my own adaptation of the WordPress theme (which is entitled IKB) that currently – and temporarily – skins infovore . I’m hopefully going to release the theme publically – it’ll be my first “generic” theme, so I’m trying to cover all bases with it. It works pretty well for the NS, I feel.

OK, so Apple have gone completely bonkers with the naming of their new iPod Nano. I’ll let that one go. I can also let go the complete axing of the iPod Mini as a line, as it never really mattered that much to me. What I can’t forgive is whichever lunatic thought that the bottom edge of an audio device was the best place for the headphone socket. That’s before you consider that it comes in black, of all the non-Apple colours in the world. Not that impressed, really – smaller, less space, same money, more whizz-bang. Sticking to my 3G 20gig, then.

(Also, I’m not convinced by this new “streamlined look” for iTunes 5, and will let others download the first stone, as it were – but you heard the prospect of it being “rubbish” here first).

A few days I linked to Dema’s tagging mixin for Rails. In, well, about half an hour over the past two days I implemented it into a project I was working on – first into the models, then into visualisation. The interface will come last (though of course, that doesn’t mean it’s not getting a lot of thought right now).

One problem I ran into was that whilst I could tag away with new tags, adding an already-extant tag to a data object didn’t work – it threw an exception error. In the end, I found this was down to my join table – the tags_things table that assigns tags to thing objects. The thing was, as with most of my tables, I stuck an auto-incrementing id column into it. This was really a stupid idea and not in any way necessary (though in all the other tables, it is fairly appropriate). The moment I just left it with two columns, tag_id and thing_id, it all worked fine.

It’s a nice mixin, by the way – makes searching by tag dead easy and it’s fairly lean. Saved me reinventing the wheel, that’s for sure.

I’m hoping to be at the Django and Rails meetup for a few hours tonight. I’ve begun working in Rails on something, well, moderately big and moderately complicated, but I’ve been greatly enjoying the experience. If you’re there too, do say hi; it’d be good to chat. You might even be able to help me with my login controller…

Let’s take a long shot: is anyone interested in buying an Akai S3000XL sampler in pretty good condition? It’s expanded with a full 32mb of memory, it has the customary 8 outs, and I’ll also throw in a SCSI 100mb Zip Drive and an untested SCSI CD drive. I’ve also got the latest OS disk for it, and a full manual. The screen is in fairly good condition – not like it was when new, but not in need of a new backlight yet.

If you’re interested, email me. Ideally, London area. Will update with pictures soon.

I swear, if one more media organisation refers to Google Talk as a telephony service I will scream. It’s an IM client which happens to have VOIP capabilities. Just like iChat. Just like lots of other things which came before it. Skype is a real internet telephony client, and it appears to have received almost no press as a result of the big-Google-announcement, comparisons instead being drawn to MSN Messenger. Which is a real shame, because not much can touch Skype as a real internet-telephony provider. And it’s also reasonably not-evil. Still, it shows how much power the Google brand now wields.

Height of stupidity: last night’s Evening Standard headline (not online): PHONE CALLS GO FREE ON GOOGLE. I’m surprised the spool hasn’t picked up on this.

So, my 12″ Powerbook, which is now well over two years old, is beginning to be a little unhappy. So far, it was nothing more than being strained a bit by Tiger (despite 640mb ram) and spluttering a bit because of its lowly graphics card.

But the battery is getting to me. Currently, I get a bit under 2 hours out of it. It drains quite consistently, until around 32%, at which point it immediately leaps to 0%. Bah.

Tonight, though, for the second time in a week, a slightly more disturbing problem has arisen. Namely: no matter how much battery is in the laptop, plugging my external Firewire HD in (Lacie 200gb) promptly zaps the battery life to 0%. Instantly. Zero.

This is not very useful, especially given how much I paid for the drive (just so I could back things up), and I’m a little edgy. The rest of the laptop is working perfectly, and I’m loathe to have to replace it just yet – for financial reasons if for nothing else. But it’s all a little too worrying for comfort. Anyone have any ideas about the Firewire problem?

(And no, I do not have Applecare any more).