mrblack.co.uk weblog

Dear Electronics firms, Store designers,

Blue LEDs hurt my eyes, stop putting them into everything.

Regards,

MrBlack.

With little time and money spare we need the help of critics or reviewers to help us in our choices. As a single male with a cynical slant and a hatred of being “sold” anything I tend to take comfort with critics who get rather angry in their specialist area. Here are a few I really quite like.

BBC Five Live - Mark Kermode film reviews
Kermode loves film and is the BBC’s film reviewer who appears on Newsnight review and The Culture show from time to time. His reviews are, I have to say, spot on for my liking. Of cause not everybody will agree but I like this chap for his balls in lambasting a film. His famous rants against Pirates of the Carabiean and Little Man have almost become legendary.

Reading
Kermode film page / podcast links
Wikipedia entry

4Later - Vids
Before channel four filled its nights with quiz channels or 24 hour CCTV footage of some wankers in a house 4later aired and was a gem of my pubescent years. It had odd animations and tv shows which ran on a shoe string. One of the best was Vids, a video review show which looked at the latest VHS releases. Starring Stef and Nigel as two Scottish video shop owners their reviews took place during comedy sketches which I have yet to see repeated. A classic which could make a fantastic come back on the net if somebody could track them down.

Reading
Vids fansite, long since dead.
IMDb information
Google cache of old 4later site.
Dog-Sized-Cat. Nigel’s new site with links to Vids episodes.
4later fansite.

Internets - Angry Nintendo Nerd (aka angry video game nerd)
This chap just makes me laugh out loud. His age is about mine, his subject matter old video games and his anger is constantly at about 10.

Reading
Angry Video Game Nerd Home page
Youtube videos

BBC Four - Screenwipe
The artsy BBC 4 hosting a program where the hosts states “an undercover camera show that filmed children in restaurants and calling them c**ts, thats a show I would watch” has to be worth a peek. I missed it up until now and have only caught up thanks to youtube and some chap pirating them. I would basically describe this show as like ITV’s TV burp, but funny. Plus any show that hires fat-pie.com and Adam Buxton has to get my vote. Classic.

Reading
BBC Four Screenwipe page
Loads of “clips” uploaded to youtube

At work I develop Ruby on Rails applications on my wonderful little Ubuntu servers using apache2, fcgid and mysql5. They work a treat, fast responsive and is basically an easy stage to bounce off new apps. So when I was thinking about my own apps I knew I wouldn’t be able to get the same spec machine and redundancy for what I can afford, but I thought I would give dreamhost a try, I should be able to get something near the same speed for test purposes. They were cheap, seemed to offer a massive range of options and copious amounts of bandwidth.

How wrong I was. As I was developing my still unreleased super cool app I noticed that the dreamhost email servers were going up and down faster that a 10 year old with a yo yo. Odd, very odd. Then I uploaded my app tonight and holy shit was it slow to upload. Then I began to use her and yes.. it sucked utter balls, too slow.

There seems to be a few factors responsible for the shit speeds. First of all is FastCGI. FastCGI should make my app wiz around like mad, however compared to CGI its basically the same on dreamhost, which suggests a hardware or priority shitness on the servers.

Then there could be database access speed slowing everything down. The database seems to be located on a different server altogether, again noted by others.

I thought it was just RoR on dreamhost that was slow, but no it wasn’t just that. Even if you access via ssh it all seems very sluggish, even doing a “rm -r” on a directory that contained about 20 files took about 10 seconds. Thats just stupid and should be sorted.

Am I expecting too much? A page that takes less than 10 seconds to load?

Perhaps dreamhost is fine for static pages, images and nothing else. Sigh.

In the morning I like to check the latest technology news. It sort of eases you into the day. To find these swell articles I tend to check all the normal nerdy hang outs, slashdot, digg, del.icio.us/popular and so on. But of late I’m getting really pissed off at the titles of these posts. I’m starting to see more and more of the obvious lets-make-a-list and buzzword loaded titles that shows us the author must have read “Top Tips on how to make your blog more popular”.

And then there are those “digg this” and “add to del.icio.us” links now placed along side articles. Occasionally useful, but when I see them multiple times on the same article or even at the top and bottom of the page it smacks a little of the authors desperation. Who on earth posts to digg as a bookmark and who uses del.icio.us without the bookmarklet anyway?

Bah.. perhaps I’m just getting old and find the cascade of social networks a little annoying at times, especially when they are all so fair and don’t weight the value of “diggs” or “saves” based upon the users actual ranking or education. Its communism gone mad I tell you.

/rants and puts down the daily mail

Normally I don’t mind ticket touts. They hang around outside gigs and make a few pounds but what really pisses me off is ebay and the way they turn a blind eye to selling tickets for silly money. Perhaps its just that I’m pissed off that I can’t get to see the UK premier of Clerks 2 in Edinburgh. The tickets sold out, unsurprisingly. They cost £7 if you beat the rush, however they are going for about £70+ on ebay. Meh.. I wish I had the money or a really big stick to go and get my revenge on the people who only buy these things to make a profit. Swines.

Anyhow, if anybody feels the need to give me tickets and a hotel to stay in I wouldn’t say no. In fact I think I would probably dry hump your leg for a good few hours, or until you managed to shake me off.

I wonder when/if clerks 2 will be showing in my local cinema.. sigh.