In the early hours of this morning, one of the biggest storm surges since January 1953 came down the east coast caused by low pressure and high winds. Combined with above average high tides warnings were sent out that seas an estimated 3 metres above normal could top defences and potentially cause massive flooding along the Norfolk and Suffolk coasts.

Luckily, the surge missed the high tide by a matter of minutes, the sea level rise was approx 20cm less han forecast, and most experts believe disaster was missed by a hairs breadth.

Still damage was done, and as the Telegraph reports devastation was caused just up the coast from us at Walcott with the sea wall damaged, windows smashed and walls pushed over.

I was at the old ramp at Happisburgh at just after 7 this morning, two hours after high tide but the surge was still being felt. The sea was crashing over the top of the revetments that are around 4 metres about nornal high tide. We were lucky that there wasn’t more north in the wind to put more energy in the swell so instead of lapping at the base of the cliff it would have smashed - but still one of the storage buildings to the south of the old ramp finally went over.

Despite a noisy stormy night, the bulk of Happisburgh survived relatively unscathed, as it is likely to do in the future as our cliffs keep the rough sea away from the village as they have for millenia. But our neighbours of Walcott to the North and Eccles to the south have to rely on partificial protection from concrete sea walls, and as we know locally all too well the plan is to stop repairing them.

What will happen next time we have a surge of this size? It is sure that Happisburgh will survive but I dread to think what will happen to surrounding communities if the sea has a real chance at low lying areas or the broads.

We cannot just abandon our sea defences without helping our coastal communities adapt to the risk of incidents like this and the loss of their security, and until they have adapted we cannot stop maintaining the defences. We cannot afford for what almost happened this morning to become a reality.

It’s not often I feel the red mist come over me, and I like to think I’m a careful considerate driver, but I did get caught out yesterday. (Don’t get me started on queue jumpers when two lanes merge into one though!)

While driving home from work last night, one minute I was on the last roundabout in the slog out of Norwich starting to accelerate for the exit, the next thing I knew I had my foot hard on the brake to the point that the ABS cut in as a stupid tw*t had pulled onto the roundabout infront of me from the park-and-ride. How I missed making a big Discovery sized dent in his drivers door I don’t know.

So there I am, stopped in the middle of the exit of the roundabout with him (or her?) speeding off into the distance and it starts to rise within me. It’s too late to honk or flash, but I can’t let it go! So it’s foot to the floor, hard acceleration until I’m right up behind him a half mile or so up the road and we’re doing well over the 50mph speed limit. Now what do I do?

How tempting was it to gesticulate (pointless in the dark), hoot, flash, or even try and overtake so I could make some signal of my dissapproval as I passed? Or I could just sit on his bumper for a bit and wind him up.

But I took a deep breath, eased my foot off the loud pedal, and allowed a sensible safe gap to open up between ourselves while I calmed down. After all, I’d survived with no harm; it was his fault and I think I’d made my point. I could get no benefit from pushing it further and was likely to have a real shunt. Boringly sensible I know but there we are.

So I settle back into my autopilot groove, but he’s still there in front of me, and as we pull into Wroxham he’s a few feet off my bonnet again. Is he going to pull into the garage - if so should I ‘have words’? He keeps going. Doesn’t turn off to Salhouse, Coltishall, Horning, Neatishead or Smallburgh - another 5 miles on he’s still there in front of me. Does he know I’m still back here, still mildy peeved? Is he panicing?

Then we get to Stepping Stone Lane where I will turn off, and he turns off. At the end where I will turn left he turns left. He’s going to think I’m following him!

In my head I can radio interview (’PM’ is on Radio 4) where the road rage victim says ‘he just kept chasing me until we got to a quiet stretch then drove me off the road - he was a madman - I’m lucky to be alive‘. It’s lucky I’m not a violent person because I can see how it happens, and it was very tempting.

Anyway, it was a hard descision not to follow him as he turned off to Happisburgh but I think I’d had my fun.

A bit of advice to people who do silly things like pull out in front of oncoming vehicles - don’t do it to a Landrover - it’ll hurt you more than it wil hurt them!

I once posted something about ‘why the fuss about the iPhone‘ - I still don’t get it.

We’re a few months away from having the thing released here, but in the mean time there’s the iPod Touch which is most of the iPhone without the phone. Since the bit I’m interested in is the web browser and the Internet features - it’s ideal so I got one for the team for R&D.

I pointed it at one of the sites I’d optimised for mobile devices following recognised best practice (e.g. Luca Passani’s Global Authoring Practices for the Mobile Web) and was not hugely surprised that it rendered the desktop version as my mobile detection didn’t pick up the User Agent.

A quick tweak to get it to spot that ‘iPod’ is a mobile device and … Safari throws an error.

It turns out that Safari Mobile doesn’t support xhtml-mp!

So to get an iPhone friendly version of a site you can’t use your mobile version and keep it xhtml-mp. I see Facebook have a mobile version using xhtml-mp, and a special iphone version without a doctype.

Do I feel a return to the bad old days of browser sniffing and multiple versions of sites? Oh dear!

Why do Apple always have to be different?

OK, I’m so cross I’m inspired to blog!

I’ve had a few phones in the past - each gaining in sophistication on the previous model - an experience I’m sure I share with many people. The phones are now trying so hard to be more than just a phone - email, pda, mp3 player, modem …

I’ve currently got a Sony Ericsson K750i which was quite cool when I got it (aren’t they all?) and it did a job. But I always regretted putting the bloody CD in my computer to install the ‘PC Suite’ - the computer has run like a dog ever since - it never did what it said it would do (sync stuff up etc.) so I basically gave up - and stick to treating the thing as a phone.

But the little joystick nipply thing first stopped going down, then stopped period. Common problem I gather. I ‘acquire’ a spare phone and go to try and copy all my settings, contacts, ringtones, games etc. from one to the other - so I’m back in the world of the PC Suite and now I’m REALLY CROSS!

Whoever came up with the idea of mobile bloody phones and tried to make them clever?

I wish I was one of the few who refuse to use the frigging things!

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.

There are only so many hours in a day, and unfortunately I still need quite a few hours sleep a night. Plus there’s a certain amount of effort I have to put in at work to justify the monthly pay check.

That leaves a limited amount of Jim time, and I’m quite an inquisitive chap; the list of things I’d like to try or investigate are huge.

In case you’re thinking ‘why is he wasting his precious time blogging’ - a/ I’m on a train so making use of lost time b/ the blogging experience is on my list, and c/ so are mobile devices so I’m trying the pda.

I bought a copy of .netmag and was initially thrilled by a relatively high concentration of new ideas and things to look / re-look into, but after 30 minutes the reality hit home - I haven’t got time to look into a fraction of this new stuff without dropping from my current todo list, and things are on that list for a reason - I want to do them.

So the noise filter switched on and I started skimming. What got ignored - ego trips,opinions, css tutorials, design hints, anything with the term ‘API’ init, basically a big chunk of the magazine.

What I realise is lighting my fire at the moment is varying methods of content delivery, and organisation, and management, which is probably why the bulk of Jim time at the moment is spent playing with blogging tools, templates, and xhtmlmp.

So what is it that irritates me most about WM5? It’s got to be the lack of feedback about why things aren’t working.

I’m a bit of a geek, and a fiddler, and have a great talent for pushing boundaries and breaking things. But also for persevering and eventually getting things working as well as possible.

I’ve also recently been breaking the habit of a lifetime, and have started to RTFM - perhaps this is my problem?

OK - specifics - I ‘acquired’ this PDA of mine to experience the Internet on mobile devices (other than my phone) and to do this you normally need Internet connectivity. So I’m trying to get wifi working with some success, and I wad hoping to get my phone to provide access via bluetooth when wifi isn’t available.

Connectivity through the phone has been a total no-go so far - it seems to want modems and phone numbers. Wifi access when it works is great, but it can be a right fiddle connecting sometimes - and here’s where some form of feedback would be great.

There’s no convincing indication that connectivity is in place, other than trying to connect to something like Google. I miss the command line, ipconfig and ping.

My current suspicion is DNS but without some decent utilities I can’t prove that. I have tried installing or using a variety of connection managers including Hitchhiker but none are working.

Another in the ‘Why?’ series - I’m looking at methods for delivering a site based on dynamic content - news, clients that sort of thing - and the primary frontend will be a beautifully constructed Flash movie (trust me, it will be beautiful!) but for SEO, accessibility, and general good practice there will be a beautifully constructed xhtml equivalent too.

So how to store and deliver the content? Flash reads xml very well, so it makes sense to pass the content in that format. So how about representing all the content in xml, and use xslt to transform it for html / wap / any other format? Got to be the way to do it!

So I do some research into the practicalities of the approach, and it’s a right palava! Assuming a standard hosting solution, you need the base xml file, the xslt transform file, then something to do the transform. I’m a big PHP fan, but xslt support is not yet bundled (like MySQL for instance) so you’ve got to reconfigure, and that took some doing. Then for every page you need a php script to use the xslt file to transform the xml file. And XPATH and all that jazz takes a bit of getting your head around.

So why not go ‘old skool’ and store the data in MySQL, read it directly using PHP? much easier - oh yes the Flash. That was going to have a bad time extracting meanigful content from a complex structure, so it makes sense to write a ‘translating’ script to prodcue just the data the movie needs in a nice digestable format - another transformation, or another PHP script reading MySQL data.

I know which way is easier, so it leaves one question … why XSLT?

So while I’m waiting for my Gentoo kernel to compile, rather than drinking bourbon and folding paper (or browsing illicit web pages) let’s have a rant - after all, isn’t that what blogs are about?

I work for a fairly large ‘digital communications agency’ (new media in old-skool lingo) and we’re fortunate to have some fairly substantial budgets to work with, but that doesn’t mean life is easy.

My job, near the top of the food chain but in a technical capacity, is often to decide on a technical approach for particular projects. I hate re-inventing the wheel, and I’m lazy at heart, so if someone’s developed something that will do a job I’m more than happy to use or adapt it. (why do you think one of my categories is ‘tinkering’)

Today however, blessed with the fact that most of the Account Managers were out schmoozing clients and watching cricket test match, I spent most of the day perusing what’s available on the Open Source market for content management / blogs / community sites for a project with a ‘challenging’ budget.

My biggest challenge was figuring out what a particular package did, how it would make life easier, and what I’d have to do to demonstrate it to the decision makers. I had a fresh look at Joomla and Wordpress which I’d played with before, and finally got round to finding out what Drupal and some of the wikis (MediaWiki in particular) offer.

The alternative is either to start from scratch with a bespoke application (possible, but have we the budget) or extend our own set of CMS tools that we’ve been developing in recent times.

Joomla! I know quite well because I use it to drive the Happisburgh Village Website and Wordpress was considered to power this blog (still don’t know if I made the right call, but I do like this one so I’m sure I didn’t make the wrong one)

More later - I think I’m just getting warmed up…