Understanding Nothing

I’m an email packrat. I usually archive every email I receive, and as a mutt user, tend to store them, by default, into whatever folder mutt assigns to them. This is fine for most emails from humans, or to recognised mailing lists, as it’ll generally do the right thing.

But I also get lots of emails from companies I shop from on-line, daily “info” lists that I’m on, ebay and half.com watchlist updates etc. In most of these cases I waste a lot of time having to override mutt’s defaults, as it usually wants to save to =info or =news or =updates or somesuch, rather than =amazon, or =ebay. Of course it never seems like a lot of time – it’s actually quite quick to type ‘s=ebay’. But it’s even quicker to type ‘s<return>’, and with the volume of email I get, that adds up.

I always had a niggling suspicion that there would be a better way, and today I finally got fed up enough to find out. The on-line manual is definitive, but mostly useless for finding answers to things like this. So instead I did what I usually do in cases like this – ask Marty. He introduced me to the wonderful concept of the save-hook.

Now I can create entries like: save-hook '.*.ebay.co.uk' =ebay and have my ‘s<return>’ just Do The Right Thing.

The UK on-line DVD retail market is getting interesting again. Even ignoring imports, the Region 2 market was for a year or two pretty much a 2 horse race between Play.com and CDwow.

Play.com are based in Jersey and can take advantage of the no-VAT loophole. Recently, however, they’ve been gradually raising their prices, foolishly believing that customers won’t notice.

CDwow are in Hong Kong and ship from various locations around Europe (recently Sweden). [They're also under investigation from the BPI for their music imports]. They’re usually cheaper than Play but carry a narrower range.

For a long time Amazon was completely out of it – relying on their name more than their price. But with the introduction of their super saver shipping to the UK they suddenly became competitive – as long as your order was over the £25 threshold. Coupled with their 20% discounts on new releases – particularly box sets – this often made them the cheapest.

Now BlackStar have decided to become competitive again. They’ve finally brought back free postage to the UK and Ireland, and have started shipping low value items from Jersey.

So now it’s worth shopping around again. To take an example, the new Season 1 and Season 2 combined DVD box-set of 24 is now £54.99 at Play.com, £53.99 at BlackStar, £52.99 at CDwow, and £49.99 at Amazon.

Chicago is £13.99 at all of them, except Play.com where it’s £14.99 (but will incur postage at Amazon unless it’s part of a bigger order).

Teachers Season 1 is £17.99 at Play, £15.99 at Amazon and BlackStar and unavailable at CDwow.

And in back catalogue, The Pillow Book is £9.99 at Amazon, £8.99 at BlackStar and £7.99 at Play.

And there’s a few new kids on the block with cheap prices as well: PriceStorm are based out of Guernsey rather than Jersey, and DVDplus has been resurrected as part of the new THE. And ChoicesDirect are always worth checking out; they still have the 20% automatic pre-order discount, and are often the cheapest if you’re looking for something on VHS.

And that’s not counting everyone’s special offers…

Interesting times, indeed.

Many developers treat a delivery as a chance to say, “Here’s the software you asked for,” but they should be saying, “How’s this version?” This is why iterative development is so useful: It gives the business folks and developers numerous opportunities to refine their ideas and discover the system’s hidden potential. If we view deliverables as nouns, we tend to ship them and run. But if we treat a deliverable as a very – as something we do to help improve the way we add value to the business – we encourage communication, cooperation, and feedback between developers and customers.

– Dave Thomas and Andy Hunt, Verbing the Noun, IEEE Software, July/August 2003.

I’ve been hacking on CGI::FormBuilder this week.

It’s very nifty, looks like it could save me a lot of work, and has one of the best websites for a module that I’ve ever seen.

But. It doesn’t quite do some things that I want. So I thought I’d subclass it, override some of the nasty bits, and everything would be rosy. Nice theory – if it wasn’t for the fact that the core method is about 900 lines long.

The author seems happy to accept patches, but I can see this becoming quite a timesink before I can get what I need from it …

This is a public service announcement. If anyone is ever thinking of staying in the Hotel Paix Republique in Paris, don’t. It’s possibly the worst hotel I’ve ever stayed in, and I’ve stayed in some terrible hotels.

I stayed there for YAPC::Europe last week; there was two hotels arranged, and this was the more expensive one – I dread to think what the other one was like. The lack of air conditioning was a major problem, and the room only became tolerable by actually going out and buying a large fan for the room. (The fact that the fan could cool the room down quite quickly was one of the few things in favour of the ludicrously small room.) Actually, there was supposedly air conditioning in the “reading room”, which was basically a 5 seater area with a small TV, where we spent most evenings playing poker. On the one occasion where they turned the air conditioning on, it was unnoticeable and we had to stealthily open the window again anyway.

The lack of shower came as quite a surprise, although if there had have been one, I’m sure that the towel policy would have been even more irritating than it was (they seem to have just enough towels to go around, so when room service cleans the room they take both the towels away, and bring them back in the evening).

I’m also not sure when I last had to sleep in a bed so small that I couldn’t lie on my back without dangling off the sides. Or had a ‘fridge’ in a hotel room that actually seemed to make things warmer rather than cooler. Or had hotel staff tell us we couldn’t play poker any more because the lights had to be turned off – only to discover that it was solely so the door staff could take over the area to watch TV.

And only having one key for each room gets annoying very quickly when you’re sharing. And it’s probably best not to think too much about the issues involved in reception staff happily giving your room key to anyone who happens to know your room number, without any identification…

Hopefully Google will now do its magic, and someone else at some other date will be spared this experience…

The High Court has now “clarified” the lacuna relating to unsigned “driver identification forms” for speeding offences.

The basic thrust of the the ruling [pdf] is that, an unsigned form is not admissible as evidence as a statement. However, it might amount to a confession under PACE (although the judge didn’t rule on whether it actually did or not in the case in question, passing it back to the magistrates to consider).

In Dwight Yorke’s case as his agent had filled in the form on his behalf, there was no possibility of it being a confession.

It seems therefore that the best approach for anyone receiving an s172 form now might be to get someone else to fill it in for them! Of course then we’re faced with the question as to whether or not that’s complying with the obligation for the registered keeper to fill in the form …

I suspect we’ll see more action yet in this regard!