Ther’s been some scaremongering going on in the local press triggered by an article in the Sunday Times that “Energy plants may get armed terror guards” - it appears that at least two known Al-Qaeda suspects have been spotted scoping out Bacton Gas Terminal, which is a big complex a few miles up the coast which brings in gas from local gas fields, processes it, then ships it inland and also imports / exports to the continent.

It reportedly supplies 30% of the countries gas, and has been identified as vital to the countries economic wellbeing. Of course it will be a potential target, but what can you do about it?

The site is on a popular section of coastline, has communities living in close proximity on all sides, it has a main road running through the middle of it - there is no way that any security force armed or otherwise are going to be able to prevent suitable ‘motivated’ attackers doing some damage without chucking up a huge exclusion zone relocating scores of homes, closing roads, and having a ‘fire first, ask questions later’ policy for anyone looking suspicious. Perhaps even ground to air missile launchers to stop attack from the air - how many private light aircraft will they threatento shoot down? It’s not doable. I’m not saying we should make it easy, but there’s a ‘proportinate’ level of security / deterence there already in my view.

With the exception of our local MP who I believe is a really nice guy, I’m very suspicious of politicians and their motives, and it scares the sh*t out of me the amount of trust we have to put in them (no I’m not going to start on the whole Iraq war / WMD thing!) or the shadowy world of the ’security services’ - but trust them we have to.

As members of the public, we cannot change the way we live or the terrorists have won. We cannot live in fear. I do trust that the politicians and security services are doing what they say they are and going after terrorism at source using ‘intelligence’ (no sniggering!) rather than ineffective and counterproductive sledgehammer techniques such as putting armed guards at Bacton.

I hope my trust isn’t misplaced.

Well it’s happening… my machine is currently downloading and installing IE7 triggered by Windows Update.

We knew it was coming, at work we’ve been testing using IE7 for ages so there should be no big shocks, but anything as significant as this is bound to have some impact somewhere.

IE6 has had such a market share at a time when business attitudes to the Internet are changing constantly. One of my problems is an apparent lack of appreciation for how transient a thing the Internet can be.

“Why isn’t my email working?” “Why can’t I get on my Intranet from home?” “Why does it look different on my phone to my computer?”

To my mind it’s quite a miracle that the thing does work at all, and I’d like to voice my thnks for all the people who work their hardest to keep it working as well as it does, rather than whingeing about the few bits which don’t live up to unrealistic expectations.

I welcome the coming of IE7 - if it is the promised improvement on the troublesome beast that we know and … tolerate.

Well the installer has completed, and it wants to restart my machine - let’s see if it’s a non-event or if the world is about to end.

BTW, this post is written using Firefox - the best current browser by far!

Postscript - Life goes on - it’s looking good so far. Still not ready to ditch my allegiance to Firefox yet though.

OK, here’s something to go to the top of my TODO list - play with this puppy.

I loved the idea of WURFL, but when I installed Andrea Trasatti’s PHP library I couldn’t immediately get the caching going and it worried me about server load and scalability.

I’ve just discovered Tera-WURFL, which makes much more sense to me - hopefully it’s as good as it looks and it’s something else I don’t have to worry about.

Postscript - Tera-WURFL Rocks! More later.

I know this isn’t the world’s best example of a mobile site, but I feel I’m having a good go at it. I’ve just spent an hour browsing using my PDA looking for mobile friendly blogs and sites for ‘inspiration’.

It’s amazing to me how many people are talking squit about mobile on sites that are themselves almost unusable on mobile devices - but I suppose I’m not really that upset.

It’s reinforcing my gut feeling that I’ve found a topic I can usefully contribute to.

Yesterday I attended one of the Nielsen Norman Group User Experience 2006 tutorials in London titled “Lightweight Content Management: Blogs and Wikis” presented by Dan Brown

It was a highly interactive gathering - it was almost like Dan was chairing a discussion - a great experience, and I’m really glad I went. One of the big problems we had was agreeing what blogs and wikis are - i.e the nature of bloginess or wikiness.

We examined examples of each, their similarities and differences, and discussed various aspects. I thought that I’d like to document the conclusions I came to.

Blog - a series of posts referenced chronologically. Secondary factors could be identifying the author of the post, allowing articles to be tagged or put in categories, or allowing commenting on the article. The blog tends to have a theme or personality, present opinion or news, but the bit that makes it a blog is the reference to the point in time that the article is posted.

Wiki - a series of pages allowing collaborative authoring. It’s harder to come up with a neat definition of ‘wikiness’ but it has to be related to the mechanism that allows the collaboration - a combination of a lightweight editing environment, some form of markup allowing formatting including creating links, following a link to a non-existent page gives the author the option to link to a page, and history of changes to a page is maintained.

The semantics of what makes a blog a blog etc. is a minor amusement to me, but the thing that led me to attend the conference in the first place was an interest in the different ways wikis can be used, success stories and that. It’s unfortunate that we didn’t have a massive opportunity to really explore this, because of time factors but also because many wikis are used in a closed environment for example Intranets.

Of course one classic public example is the wikipedia which in my view is becoming one of the phenomena of recent times - it’s starting to have as much imapct on me as google.

However, I was able to pass on something I was aware of relating to a very interesting experiment launched in August 2006 by DEFRA to use a wiki to develop an Environmental Contract. Credit where credit is due to David Miliband for having the nerve and imagination to try this, but he was the first cabinet minister to start a blog.

I’m sad enough to visit the defra website every now and again and was aware of this wiki before it had a bit of a hiccup. I have to admit I was surprised that editing of the wiki was open and anonymous when I first became aware if it - I can imagine this step was a bit of desperation to try and get things moving, but I did think someone could have some fun if they wanted. Then the wiki received some publicity in the order order blog, and the fun did start!

I see the wiki is back up again, and it seems it’s being used, although you do have to register again. I wish I could get excited enough about the subject to get involved and participate in the experiment, but I’m not that sad.

I’m glad I don’t have to pay for data transfer on my mobile - I might have run up a bit today playing with the new download from Google to access Gmail.

One problem to start off with was that it unfairly discriminates against us Brits (or more fairly should I say non-americans) buy complaining that the network was unavailable - the fix is to use the normal web interface to change the language to English(US).

The verdict - a surprisingly usable interface on a very restrictive device (my phone is a Sony Ericsson K750i) and I’m duly impressed.

One tiny niggle that is the same on the pda version of the website - why can’t we have checkboxes against listings so we can delete or achive a batch of emails? Even with GMail’s spam filtering a fair few still get through and it’s a right pain deleting them one at a time.

I thought I ought to finally write something about Happisburgh - it’s a small village on the north east coast of Norfolk - in fact I think it could be argued that you’d have a hard job getting much further into Norfolk.

There are one or two things the village is known for - it’s been a pouplar holiday destination since .. forever, we have a prominent red and white striped lighthouse that was once painted by Anneka Rice on her TV show ‘Challenge Anneka’, and we’ve got a little problem currently with coastal erosion

We had a bit of a scare on Tuesday night -a combination of gale force winds, a strong swell combined to form a storm surge which added substantially to the natural tides, which were already quite high. The Environment Agency issued a flood warning, saying there was a possibility of sea walls and dunes being topped. A series of phone calls went out telling people to move their furniture upstairs.

It was ‘exciting’ standing on top of Happisburgh cliffs at 9pm on Tuesday night, with one of the biggest seas I’ve seen (not that I can say I’ve seen many) already smashing at the foot of the sandy cliffs with 5 hours to go until high tide.

It turns out we fared relatively well - there was flooding around Great Yarmouth and St Olaves, the railway line at Haddiscoe was damaged, but at Happisburgh we just lost another few bits of cliff.

The other thing that happened was that salt water got into the Broads, killing thousands of freswater fish. BBC News reports the Environment Agency as saying that is was one of the one of the worst incidents of fish deaths from natural causes in the Norfolk Broads in the last 15 years. Yet they are one of the parties who have been trying to push through a new shoreline management plan, which wants to see the majority of Norfolk’s sea defences abandoned to allow natural processes to resume.

I firmly believe that to protect ourselves and our environment from what we are told will be worsening weather conditions, we need to be strengthening our defences not letting them go. We need the reassurance that our homes, communities, services and vital lines of communication are secured against the worst that the weather can throw against us.

This was a small taster of what the sea can throw at us. Have we already forgotten the experiences of the 1953 floods?

I never meant this to be a geeky blog - but I’m obviously so sad that the only things I feel I can contribute to the world are things that I’ve done, and that’s all a bit techy at the moment.

I’ve been meaning to set up some form of backup facility for my main desktop machine - and somehow I don’t think my old ZIP drive is going to make the cut.

But I’ve been playing with various Linux distros, and have a nice clean Fedore Core 5 box with a 60GB hard drive - couldn’t I use that?

So I start thinking - Samba configured so my XP machine can see a chunk of the FC5 machine as a fileshare? A bit clunky perhaps, even with the good old fashioned Backup utility that’s still included with Windows I see.

I remeber rsync which can be so effective in duplicating filesystems, but can I use that from Windows?

I dig about and come across DeltaCopy - looks good. I spend a quite enjoyable couple of hours figuring out how to configure rsyncd and open up the fc5 firewall to let remote connections through - I’ve got a backup process running now, so we’ll see how it goes.

It’s taken several days of recmpiling atc. but I now seem to have a Gentoo installation on my MiniITX system, and I’ve rushed through the Gentoo bluietooth guide to see if I’m back where I was previously, but , alas, there seems to be a problem when I try to start bluetooth:

bluez ~ # /etc/init.d/bluetooth start
* Starting Bluetooth …
* Starting hcid … [ ok ]
* Starting sdpd … [ !! ]
* Starting rfcomm …
Can’t open RFCOMM control socket: Protocol not supported [ ok ]
bluez ~ #