Been to see two films in almost as few days recently. Slumdog Millionaire was entertaining; perhaps not the classic it could have been - I think it lacked a little clarity in storytelling - but still great. Frost/Nixon was more compelling, certainly for me: I was not expecting Frank Langella’s performance as Nixon to be as good as it was - in the end, it perhaps beat Anthony Hopkins’s classic performance from Nixon.

If you’re anything like me, you _hate _the Vodafone Mobile Connect client - it’s buggy, unstable, and requires frequent reboots/restarts/taking-the-card-out-and-putting-it-back-in-again to make it work. What I only discovered today - although I should have known from ancient dial-up modem connections years ago - was that you can just use the regular ‘Network Connections’ facility of Windows. Just locate the ‘Vodafone Mobile Connect’ entry, right-click and select ‘Connect’ (I think this will only appear once you’ve installed the Vodafone software):

(This post is probably of most interest to my IBM colleagues - however, since the AT&T Network Client is also available for other organisations, I’ve posted this here in case it’s of use to other folks.) I recently installed Ubuntu 64bit (amd64) on my Lenovo Thinkpad T61. Unfortunately, the Network Client is not available in a 32bit edition. So I had to perform a few tweaks to get it to work.

After yet another grumble at jt, I’ve finally broken and will give Twitter a try (my ID is andrewferrier). I’m still struggling to see where the benefit will come from, but he made the valid point that I can’t say for sure ’til I try it - so I’ve given in and will give it a go. To be fair, I’ve come across two bits of useful info. already, so early signs are promising.

Early this year I wrote about how the French were standing up to anti-smoking legislation. The Dutch are now doing the same. I wish the British didn’t roll over so easily. Forcing pub owners (or anyone else) to enforce your preferences is wrong and a thoroughly illiberal idea. It makes the world more homogenous and less interesting. Don’t stand for it.

I don’t normally do plugs on here, but my good friend Ella has just recently completed her first novel: Blood, Sex and Coffee. It’s a mammoth achievement, weighing in at a good 700 pages, and is a campy vampire novel bringing in more themes than you’d think could be fit in such as a size - although is fundamentally a huge tract of story crossing space and time. I haven’t yet had a chance to read it - and I’m not normally a big fiction reader - but I have a 12 hour flight to Cape Town at the weekend, so maybe be burning through some of it then.

For some time, I’ve had a Perl script that runs regularly, backing up my Google Reader subscriptions using the standard OPML format: #!/usr/bin/perl # # Usage: # backup-google-reader-opml file-to-write-to.opml google.user.name@domain google-password use strict; use warnings; use WWW::Mechanize; my $mech = WWW::Mechanize->new(); $mech->get("http://reader.google.com") or die "Cannot reach Google Reader Homepage"; $mech->submit_form( form_number => 1, fields => { Email => $ARGV[1], Passwd => $ARGV[2] } ) or die "Cannot submit form"; $mech->get("http://www.google.com/reader/subscriptions/export"); $mech->save_content($ARGV[0]); However, I recently wrote another script (this time Python) that then takes this OPML, parses out all the URLs that are tagged with ‘podcast’, and outputs a serverlist file for podget (an automated console-based podcast downloader).

I’ve had my TripIt Personal Calendar Feed specified as an iCal feed into Dopplr for some time, to keep the two in sync by adding every trip in TripIt into Dopplr automatically (I’d give up on Dopplr entirely, as it seems a bit overdesigned and buggy - but it is a bit shinier than TripIt and produces nicer stats, so I’m hanging on to using it against my better judgement). But unfortunately the folks at TripIt broke this integration recently by adding exact geographic locations to the feed.

Went to see Burn After Reading with plv last night. It’s a bit of a slow starter, but when it gets going, there are some real solid comedic moments. It’s not laugh-a-minute, and is a little disjointed, but it’s sure entertaining as the plot gets more and more mashed up, and could almost be classed as a farce if it were a little clearer. Indeed, as the CIA boss says at one point:

Ordered a t-shirt from Threadless. It never turned up. They offered to refund me in full, no complaints needed. They also gave me a $5 voucher for future orders, bringing the whole deal even further into the red for them. This is pretty excellent customer service. I struggle to see this happening in the UK.