Chris Worfolk's Blog

Guess the song. (Seriously, make some really obvious guesses or you’re going to be kicking yourself when you Google the title of this post).

Saturday saw the first Wendy House arrive so we – we referring to the whole Sarann crew (or are we Norman and the Jets; or are we the Chris Worfolk experience featuring Michelle) kicked things off with a warm up at Circle Party Central. The night included some drinking, some spinning of the old records on my shiny decks and even some karaoke (an event we hope to repeat under the new name of “An audience with Bryony Gaskell”).

It was good to see a few people I haven’t seen in a while. Notably, Sophie who has to strain with the problems of post-graduation life and Fonze who has now come crawling back to his real friends (what’s the emoticon code for sunglasses? :p). Plus any excuse to use my sound system is a good one – as Norm correctly points out, the whole point of the night was just to play Cascada really.

Wendy was good as always. I got bought a drink by a girl at the bar which was rather cool. Evanescence – Bring Me to Live was just coming on and being desperate to get back to the dance floor (she explained) she asked if I was being served and if so could she put her drinks through with me). I told her I wasn’t being served and she took this to mean “I am being served I just don’t want to help you” and bribed me with a drink. I then went on to explain it still wasn’t going to save her anytime but that was my limit. At some point, it’s just not worth trying to avoid a free drink ;).

All in all (how often does the last paragraph in my blog post end with those three words?) it was a good night and indeed a very good 3 days. With exams overshadowing the whole of Chrismukkah (not to mention the holidays themselves never really being a nice time) it was good to properly unwind a little. Ah well, back to the grind I guess.

Having had a battle every time I want to stick some food in the freezer because of how full they always are I have finally seized my opportunity and monopolised the freezer with ready meals :D.

Ok so, it’s a bit of a posed picture. Some of them are stacked vertically to hide everyone else’s food behind them. But it still amuses me :D.

Having been backward compatibility testing my Web 2.0 apps without JavaScript I have several times now forgotten to turn JavaScript back on before heading off to browse some other websites. It’s interesting to see which websites work and which don’t.

Facebook is the notable website I have spent the most time on and it’s a fairly mixed bag. Some of it works, some of it doesn’t. For instance you can poke someone back without JavaScript but you cannot accept or reject requests without it. Netvibes (rightfully so probably) didn’t work at all without JavaScript. WordPress seemed to work fine for the most part though I didn’t do anything other than start typing this post.

Which led me on to thinking, will we reach a point where you need JavaScript? Whether or not you agree with the increased use of JavaScript on the web (aka Web 2.0 really, and don’t get me wrong, I do agree with it, that is just my token comment to keep Mr. O’Shea happy :p), it is happening. The question is, how far will it go? How long will people keep writing code backward compatible with non-JavaScript? Indefinitely or have they already stopped doing it? Something to think about.

I’ve added a few Firefox extentions recently and it’s quickly making me wonder how I lived without them.

I’ve had IE View installed for ages which is really simple but really valuable. All it does is add an option when I right click on a page to open it in Internet Explorer. As I said it sounds so simple but I use it so much, especially when I’m testing cross browser compatibility of my sites.

I finally got round to reinstalling Web Developer which adds a toolbar and a load of functionality specifically designed for those developing websites and web apps. I’ve been without it for ages (we’re talking years) but I don’t know why, it add loads of stuff.

For example I can disable JavaScript and CSS with a click to see how the page degrades. This is especially useful in backward compatibility testing my Web 2.0 apps for users without JavaScript. What I also find mega useful is the ability for it to display all forum values including hidden elements and allow you to edit them so you can easily test things like people putting in rogue values (such as trying to edit someone elses profile by changing the user id in the hidden form variable to someone elses user id). I’m just scratching the surface here though, it has a massive toolbar of stuff.

Finally I also installed FireFTP which is an FTP client which sits in a tab of Firefox. I never got round to installing an FTP client on my desktop as I always used my laptop but it was annoying a lot of the time. So it’s convient to have one, especially that just sits in my always open browser. It’s not too shabby either it supports multiple accounts, quick connect, two panes (local and remote) and even lock-stepping.

Remember how we were repeatedly told Google doesn’t translate results for you?

We were told wrong.

Maybe it happens by magic? 😉

It seems the uncultured masses are taking over these days. Even traditional heavens such as university campuses and (if you can consider anything that is less than 4 years old, traditional) Facebook are now awash with quote unquote riff raff communicating with each other in text speak and showing each other pointless videos on their £10,000 phones which have everything but the ability to do voice chat.

Whether I myself fall into the category of Philistinism is a whole different debate. I’m not one for the material you would find in an art gallery though my love for art is passionate when you switch the specific area to for example motion pictures or CSS.

What I want to talk about here is the positive side effects we experience from the prevalence of Philistines in our society. I often comment on how much I like the fact that brainless movies from Hollywood sit on Tesco’s shelf for £10+ a piece while I recently acquired 2001 for the delightful price of £3 while Donnie Darko and American Beauty were also available for £2.

It occurs to me though that this applies to a wider social context. For example, while I was down in London I spent a day looking around the British Museum which was a fascinating experience. How much did I pay for it? Nothing. It’s free. Like almost all museums in the UK (much to Owen Johnson’s annoyance having just successfully integrated the entry payment system into every other system at the Royal Armories in Leeds :D).

The question then is this – would all these museums be free if people were arriving on mass at them all? I somehow doubt it. The cinemas are opening up massive multiplexes to deal with the load of customers waiting to pay £6 a ticket and an extra £10 for a popcorn bigger than their body mass while one of the most famous museums in Britain has no queues to be seen.

As I said, my guess is that if museums were as popular as say cinemas or sports events, there would probably be an entry fee. Maybe I’m wrong and the government would continue to fund it which would be nice but I think the principle is more important. After all, you pay what, £30-40 to go see a sporting event? The same for a music concert with a famous artist. Which such prices, charging the same for entry to the British Museum doesn’t seem unreasonable. But of course, due to the general attitudes we have, if they did, few people would go.

It’s a similar situation with public libraries. They’re completely free to use. Would this be the case if everyone uses them? There is an even stronger case for rebutting my answer of no here as this is case of public education but that’s not to rule it out – DVD rental companies be it instore at Blockbuster or online with Love Film charge what, £5 a movie or £15 a month.

Of course there are exceptions to the rule – for example, the theatre is no cheap excursion but then I’m not sure how popular demand would affect prices there. They generally play to full houses anyway so unless we’re going to get stadium-sized theatres (which I would think would somewhat ruin the experience) the laws of supply and demand may drive up prices.

So there you have it. The case of allowing the uncultured to continue to wallow in their Sky TV and chav’ed up Corsas.

As we all know, Facebook is on the way down. It’s bad enough that they now allow non-university students to use the sites but now with all these pointless applications (as well as now having the types of users that will use and spread them) which people constantly send you requests for and putting a million different boxes on a user’s profile so you have to scroll for 30 minutes to reach their wall, how much better is Facebook than MySpace?

Well, still quite a lot better. But the gap is closing. I was using MySpace today (viral marketing, it’s still the biggest social network in the world) and they have really been working on it. The layout is good, the functionality works. It’s a huge improvement on what it would have been like a year ago.

I was uploading some videos to Revver today to find that they now review every video manually! Every single video is apparently now moderated by a Revver staff member to ensure that it doesn’t violate copyright (among other reasons).

Meanwhile in YouTube‘s fight against copyright they had now banned any videos longer than 10 minutes long, no matter what account you have (previous you could sign up for a director’s account which required a few extra contact details to get the limits increased).

An email recently arrived in the inbox of registered users of Pandora from the UK informing them that Pandora will be switching off to UK users on January 15th.

It’s a real shame as Pandora is a fantastic service. For those who haven’t discovered it yet (and I wouldn’t advice trying it now as you’re only going to get into it as they start blocking us), basically you put in your favourite song or artist and it goes away and finds new music that is similar so you can discover new cool stuff. It also takes your feedback on songs so it can improve what it picks out. It’s a customised radio station for you much like Launch Cast on Yahoo Music.

Unfortunately however, after blocking almost everyone else last year, Pandora have finally given up on trying to secure rights to play music in the UK having been unable to agree on a price with the music industry for licencing broadcast rights and so will only be available in the US after next week.

I’m currently in the process of testing out the new Worfolk Online Backup System which will automatically back up the sites in the network. It’s taken quite a bit of development but hopefully it should all come together now and it’s reasonable swish.

It supports daily, weekly and monthly backups all of which is done automatically. The system goes through the lists of sites and sends a request to cPanel to package everything up nicely so it can be easily restored in case of emergency. It also sends cPanel details of my off-site FTP server (the one I have here at Burchett Place) so cPanel can directly upload the backup via FTP.

Then later on the system logs in to my FTP servers and validates that the backup has been generated and logs the filename that has been generated. It then logs said status. You can then access the web based control panel, check to make sure everything is working via the log and see what backups are available for each site and download them if you wish.