New Flight of the Conchords! Series 2 - watch now!

Season 2 Online Premiere - Flight of the Conchords (US Only) - watch more funny videos

The first episode of series 2 of FOC is available now! Only to US users though. I absolutely do not suggest or condone using a US open proxy service such as can be found here. http://www.xroxy.com/proxy-country-US.htm

"Internet" - the future

The Multiple Kill Vehicle

Terrifying.

Angry Mob Playset

Angry Mob Playset - the must have toy this christmas.

Oh dear

ok, I really can't draw. to attempt to get better, I'm going to draw myself every day.
I will post occasional attempts to see if I'm getting any better. Here is no. 1 - I don't look like this really!


I've got the look of a Russian from a Big Train staring contest here!

Sebastian Rogers

Check out Sebastian Rogers - met him and saw him perform at a house concert in Brighton last week & he's travelled the length and breadth of the US giving concerts in peoples living rooms. Interesting guy, great music.

I'm sure this is how hitler started

Overcoming adversity

Sand Therapy

http://chir.ag/stuff/sand/

A first for me

I got called a Paki last night outside a bar in Hampshire. To give some context, I'm a middle-class white man from Norfolk.

I didn't really know how to react. Me and my mate George (also white) were just baffled to be honest, as we walked outside the bar for a smoke and the ignorant scum-boy started to quiz us - "not being funny mate, but does your uncle own a corner shop?". No, not being funny, thats the single part of your sentence that made any sense.

Racial inaccuracies aside, I would have genuinely liked to have known what reason he thought he had for instigating confrontation from a distance of 10 yards purely based on someones skin pigmentation. Unfortunately, I judged that this particular chap and his gang of giggling fuckwits weren't really up for some analysis of the issues at hand, or really a friendly chat.

I'm lucky, I don't really witness racism that often, and when I do it's usually in the form of ignorant old men in pubs who have never left Norfolk, and are scared by anything remotely unusual ("sponge pudding, on a Wednesday?! you're starting to make me uncomfortable Mary."). I've certainly never been on the receiving end of it, and I can tell you I didn't much enjoy it.

I really would have loved to be equipped enough physically (or have useful fighting super-powers) to have taken him on and tried to find out exactly how the crazy fuckers mind works. But I'm not, so we took the moral high ground and walked off, a bit confused as to what had just happened.

New UK VAT Calculation - 17.5% to 15%

This is as much for my memory as anything else, but I'm sure there are one or two of you out there having to tweak a load of code for the VAT change (Thanks Darling).

Old Calc = Gross * 7 / 47 = VAT amount
New Clac = Gross * 3 / 23 = VAT amount

Google Chrome is here!

The new browser from google is here...if you have a Windows PC running XP SP2 or higher.
A Mac and Linux version on the way soon. Boo you Google :(

If you have a smelly Windows PC, you can download it here

DIE, DIE...

...IE6! For you have long been the bain of my life.

I wish that I could turn my back on IE6, as most web dev's do. I'm pleased there's lots of chatter at the minute about stopping support for it.

I like this a lot The Ultimate way to stop supporting IE6 and clearly web professionals are pretty much in agreement.

But sadly for me, and a lot of transactional sites, we simply cannot afford to be turning away customers, and yes, I do appreciate some people have computers so old that they can't upgrade. It's easy to say they SHOULD, but people have different priorities and means in life.

I checked our logs today and a massive 46% of our traffic is IE6 - although people do suggest that a lot of bots use the IE6 agent, so I need to have a look at that, because 46% is depressingly high.

I long for the day I can stop hacking my lovely designs about. I'm off to dance around a burning big blue e.

Start and stop mysql on OSX

If you want to start MySql in Leopard, you need to call the startup item directly from the command line:

sudo /Library/StartupItems/MySQLCOM/MySQLCOM start

And to stop it:

sudo /Library/StartupItems/MySQLCOM/MySQLCOM stop

Extract a specific file from tar archive

If gzipped, first run gunzip {filename}.tar.gz Then...

tar --extract --file={filename}.tar {file(s) to extract}

HOW TO: list files within a gzipped tar

tar -tzf file.tar.gz

-t: lists files
-f: instructs tar to deal with the following filename (file.tar.gz)
-z: informs tar that the it's dealing with a gzip file (-j if it's bzip2)

PHP Front Controller Tutorial

The best introduction to using a front controller in PHP I've seen...

http://w3style.co.uk/a-lightweight-and-flexible-front-controller-for-php-5

Getting started with Subversion on Mac OSX

Quick start guide for subversion...
http://www.rubyrobot.org/tutorial/subversion-with-mac-os-x

Regular expression cheat sheet

http://www.ilovejackdaniels.com

Glastonbury Festival 2008 - Line Up

Pyramid Stage

Friday
Kings Of Leon
The Fratellis
Editors
The Gossip
The Feeling
Get Cape. Wear Cape. Fly
The Subways
Kate Nash

Saturday
Jay Z
Amy Winehouse
Manu Chao
The Raccounters
James Blunt
Crowded House
Seasick Steve
The Hold Steady
Shakin’ Stevens

Sunday
The Verve
Leonard Cohen
Neil Diamond
John Meyer
Gilbert O’Sullivan

The Other Stage

Friday
Panic At The Disco
The Enemy
We Are Scientists
Foals
Ben Folds
Vampire Weekend
Joe Lean & Jing Jang Jong
Hilltop Hoods

Saturday
Massive Attack
Hot Chip
Elbow
Duffy
The Wombats
Neon Neon
Black Kids
The Golden Silvers

Sunday
Groove Armada
The Zutons
The Pigeon Detectives
Mark Ronson
Scouting For Girls
Jack Penate
Newton Faulkner
Black Mountain

John Peel Tent

Friday
Jamie T
The Cribs
Reverend & The Makers
MGMT
The Ting Tings
The Young Knives
Lightspeed Champion
Glasvegas
Patrick Watson

Saturday
Biffly Clyro
The Futureheads
Band Of Horses
The Black Lips
Vampire Weekend
The Courteeners
British Sea Power
Holy F*ck (edited for pesky firewalls)
The Teenagers

Sunday
The National
Spiritualized
Crystal Castles
Brian Jonestown Massacre
The Stars
Rocket Summer
Friendly Fires
The Whip
Dogtanion

Dance East/West

Friday
Fatboy Slim
Roisin Murphy
X-Press 2
Hercules & Love Affair
Cicada
Way Out West
Cagedbaby
Stanton Warriors
Utah Saints

Saturday
UNKLE
Eddie Temple Morris
Roni Size
Simian Mobile Disco
Pendulum (DJ)
Kid Sister
A Trak
Metronomy
XX Teens

Sunday
Kosheen
Annie Mac
Sam Sparro
Does It Offend You, Yeah?
Black Ghosts
South Central
Sonny J
Derek May
System 7

The Park

Friday
Pete Doherty
Dizzee Rascal
John Cale
Edwyn Collins
The Duke Spirit
Operator Please
Sons & Daughters
Santogold
Beggars

Saturday
CSS
Battles
MGMT
Kool Keith
Guilty Pleasures (DJ)
Alphabeat
St Vincent
Eugene MacGuniness

Sunday
My Morning Jacket
Tunng
Vetiver
Laura Marling
Mystery Jets
Kathryn Williams
Cave Singers
Alberta Cross

Duran Duran "f*cking up in style"...

...I find that hard to believe. F*cking up in dated suits and crap hair is more likely.



Duran Duran's last studio album, "Red Carpet Massacre" sold almost 300 copies* in the UK and US when released last year.

Duran Duran's World tour got off to a shaky start in Auckland this week as front man Simon Le Bon forgot the words to "Hungry Like the Wolf" causing bassist John Taylor to storm off stage.

"I could not dance to that" fumed Taylor upon appearing back on stage, "These people have come here to dance!".

"Duran Duran f*cking up in style", Le Bon anncounced to the crowd...who hadn't even noticed.


full story here

*factually inaccurate

A and Arse : the nineties music

John Niven talks about the high life of a major record label in the champagne charlie world of the
nineties music industry in this Times article - an interesting read for those of us who were lining the pockets of the record labels during this period.

Thank god for bittorrent, and do they really wonder why they're getting their cumuppence for years and years and years of fleecing us?

Viva la revolution!

Macworld a go-go!

Well, I guess it's a little geeky to get excited about the prospect of finding out what Steve Jobs and Apple have in store for 2008. Sod it, I'm a geek, I don't care.

It does just so happen that my boss is about to buy me a shiny new Mac laptop, so I will be watching/reading tomorrow's Keynote with quite some interest.

The new sub-notebook looks now to be a dead cert, whether or not it'll be called "MacBook Air" - I'm not convinced. Speculation over the name seems to be based on this photo someone managed to snatch of the Keynote backcloth...

...possibly alluding to the name for the much talked about sub-notebook, or perhaps a new wireless offering as the centerpiece of the keynote.

It remains to be seen just how sexy the "Air" is going to be (my guess, really very sexy) but as I'm not on the road that much, I don't think I'll be choosing it over a high end Macbook. But we will see, Apple has a habbit of wowing prospective buyers at these events. If the "Air" has gestural controls, and the MacBook range isn't touched, I might be tempted. After all, we all want to be the cool kid with the latest iToy, don't we?

So we wait to see - I have to wait til the tail end of the day tomorrow as I'm here in the UK, but a fine end to the day I hope it will be, and with a bit of luck on wednesday, I'll have that wonderful feeling of going to the Apple store with my bosses credit card!

MacRumors has all the gossip ahead of the keynote, and www.macrumors.com/mwsf/ has all the latest news from the expo.