Darlington Arts Academy have a new website; launched in tandem with the distribution of flyers for their summer theatre school.

When it comes to opinions about Apple or their products on Twitter, the general consensus seems to be that only positive opinions are permitted. Negative views are shot down in flames, and owners of those opinions are interrogated in order to quantify their thoughts.

It appears one could easily disagree, unchallenged, about a general political issue, or the war in Iraq; but to speak ill of anything coming out of Cupertino is a sin; with countless figureheads ready to pounce on the first who dare commit such atrocity.

Steve Jobs has his own ideas. I have my own. The two are not compatible. Whereas Jobs values the walled garden-like restrictive technology products he and his company have created; I value openness, standards, innovation and good value for money. I believe my possessions are mine to do with as I like - not what the CEO of a marketing company wants me to do (or not to do, as the case may be).

That’s not to say I don’t find certain aspects of their technology inspiring. I appreciate the magnetic power supply connector of MacBooks, and find the virtual keyboard of the iPhone more responsive and accurate than that on the Google Nexus One. But that’s not enough for me. Where’s the standard USB connectors and the Mass Storage protocol? They don’t exist.

I loathe that the whole proprietary platform is locked down. From the single application store which is a law unto themselves (often ignoring their own “rules”), down to non-user-replaceable batteries in their iPhone. The persistence on using iTunes to accomplish anything between devices. Those restrictions don’t benefit me in the slightest.

I must be strange; but I find it rather difficult to get excited about products which let me do less than the competition. I can’t excited over new products which are just recycled ideas.

Which is precisely why I don’t buy in to the Apple ecosystem. Their products simply don’t do what I want them to do. But I’ll be damned if that stops me having an opinion on them, nor will it stop me voicing it.

People who appreciate modern art are sometimes creative people (photographers, designers) themselves.

A small part of the creative process is re-using things to create new things - this is something that has been done for a long time and there is absolutely nothing wrong with this providing its use is fair. But sadly, this is a trend that seems to be frowned upon by the BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art in Gateshead.

On a recent visit with a group of friends, the hawk-like BALTIC staff descended on individuals in the group, and were more than happy to tell us not to take photos or to touch pieces of the art.

Sometimes, artwork makes an interesting photograph, and photography should be encouraged rather than prohibited. It advertises the BALTIC and it gets the artist increased exposure for their work.

Sometimes, artwork includes pieces of text engraved on metal tags wrapped around objects - unreadable unless moved by hand; lessening our understanding of the work in question.

I recently helped out Darling Arts Academy with some IT issues, and during this time offered to do a bit more in the way of design. Here’s the final poster/flyer for their forthcoming production of The Wiz - a “funky and up-to-date version of the story we all know and love.”

I recently visited a local school website, and discovered (via the rather prominent link in the footer) that it was powered by Frog. Frog is a learning platform for schools - a bit like a web content management system but for learning resources, attendance data, grades and so on; but can also power a front-end website.

Being the curious web person that I am, I investigated the source code of the page. I noticed a reference to jQuery straight away. But getting over the table-based layout and the messy in-line Javascript code, I found the most interesting discoveries in their main.js file. Here are a few notable excerpts.

//folderid “hacked into” fileid

//still bit of a hack :-@
//we just are who we are and we are quite proud of who we are [actually]

//i could have just integrated this into meta_tagging.phtml, but i didnt…

//bit of a hack :-S

// Fix for modal dialogs. Well, maybe. Let’s see if we can break it.

// top document needs it’s own bits and bobs.

There are also some interesting lines in the menu scripts:

/*
Bugs:
parsing the menu details array is still a bit ropey when we are in edit mode
*/

// any changes to this file must be tested on ALL the above since browsers can disagree about little things
// note: so far this file works without any browser detection (but some object detection). its advisable to keep it that way.

the above code is to get a round the dhtml bug where the moseout event fires after a mouseover event so we could mouse over into a ne element and the event will fire. but a few seconds later the previous element will fire its mouseout event (grrr!)

//unless you access this property the script returns a permission denied when in a cross domain frame
insane_magic_variable=prev_window.location.search;

//the code below is for the benefit of the pendantic buggers at opera (we have to retrive the appended iframe or risk all sorts of bother)

// Frog 3 FUXXORS UP the positioning of the menu if the f3 edit button is present (contents are put in an extra div, so use that and take it into account)

// this is a bug fix for netscape 6 and it duplicates the end of teh previous function
// grrrrrrrr

One final gem from their Flash object insertion script.

Purpose: Insert a flash object via external javascript to get around the ‘click to activate’ IE thing.

Potential photo-based project. Not sure how it will go, how long it will last and how much momentum I can sustain (as I am currently incapable of predicting the future), but I’ll give it a go.

Accompanying this short post is a preview of what is to come.

It’s all in the detail. Random message landed in my Facebook Inbox, I couldn’t resist engaging in a bit of dialogue.

Them: Hi Craig, I am fron Honduras, do you study medicine?
Cheers!
J

Me: Hi J
I am from the UK, and yes! I *do* study medicine! How did you know? It really is a fascinating subject.
Thanks!
C

Them: Hi Craig!
I did find you at Mcom fans!.. I do study medicine too, In Honduras, Latin America.
Can be we friends? I Love Uk, I did my english studies there In Southport nearby Liverpool!.
Have fun!
J

Them: Hi J!
I don’t know what Mcom is, and I’m not sure I’m a fan of Mcom due to my not knowing what it is. That might not be such a good idea, I’ve always been advised not to be friends with strangers met on the Internet; I hope you understand.

That’s great news, and a long distance to carry out english studies. In 2008 Liverpool held the title of European Capital of Culture, and quite rightly so. The Superlambanana was of particular interest.

I will!

C

Them: Ok, Ok, Quite British i almost forget it.!
Yeah, Liverpool is awesome, Uk is lovely, specially the old people. I lived In Southport, and there lived a lot of older people. Good Memories.
Ok, …i will send you a link ….hope you can open it, and see it by yourself there!

MCOMS

Me: Yes, the country is full of old people, some of them older than the country itself I am sure.

After some difficulty I managed to open the link, and I now believe there may be some confusion. The link you presented is for MCOMS (with an S, and 6 fans) which is a Technology and telecommunications service. Is this different from your Mcom (without an S)?

Them: Yes, its understood!…and “S” makes a huge diference!

So, theres no more confusion,

See ya never!

J

Me: Yes, S does make a huge difference. Especially with the words Lime and Slime, which I hope you agree have varying meanings! There is no more confusion.

Bye!

Them: You sounds like you know it all! Its a pity if you do, cuz is typical from doctors in medicine. Makes the diference is my lema!

I have no idea what the last message was about, but I left it at that.

Today I travelled to Newcastle (my second home of late, it seems) to meet up with Flickr-found friends Annette (pictured) and Paul. We decided to visit two fantastic photographic exhibitions before they closed at the end of the month.

After minor difficulty finding the venue, first up was City State at the Lit & Phil on Westgate Road.

“City State looks at the achievements of the leftwing group that took control of the city in the late 1950s and the disputed post-war vision of a charismatic regional politician”

It was a great insight into some of Newcastle’s boldest architectural icons portrayed in great photos, both old and new.

We had a brief wander through the library, had something to drink, bit of a walk round, took some photos and eventually had a spot of lunch before heading to the Side Gallery for Byker Revisited - a collection of documenting photos from Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen which must really be seen to be understood.

40 years ago Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen came to Byker as a member of Amber film and photography collective. Her photographs documenting working class Tyneside became an exhibition and book and wove their way through Amber’s film Byker (1983). Feted across the world, the work was a celebration of the community that was demolished to make way for architect Ralph Erskine’s visionary Byker Wall.

We have 8 Dell PowerEdge 2950 servers. Some of them are for our forthcoming RM CC4 network, and some have active roles in the current network. Two of them were purchased before the rest, and use 3.5” hard drives rather than the newer 2.5” disks that the rest have. All servers were bought with 2x 70GB disks and configured for RAID1.

We wish to make the most out of the servers and retire some old hardware, and VMWare ESXi is the way we are going to do it.

The roles for the ones involved in our plan are as follows:

A: BBS-ESX-001 (Currently the only VMWare server; 2.5” 10k SAS)
B: BBS-TSS-001 (Terminal Services server for remote access; 3.5” 15k SAS)
C: BBS-ZCS-001 (Email server running Zimbra; 3.5” 15k SAS)
D: BBS-SVR-001 (RM CC4 Forest Root; 2.5” 10k SAS)

Servers B and C were the original servers; and they have the same disk type. These will become VMWare hosts. In the event of hardware failure, in theory we can just take disks from the failed server, stick them in the working one, and things are back up and running in a relatively short space of time.

(If we had a SAN that could support all our VMs we’d probably use it. Testing our Hitachi SMS100 iSCSI SAN to serve VM images as well as running the main RM CC4 network is something for a later date.)

To maintain the use of everything we currently have and end up with two VMWare hosts with 300GB of capacity on each, we devised a cunning plan. Probably not as cunning as a fox who used to be Professor of Cunning at Oxford university; but a plan none the less.

• Install 2x 300GB drives into (A)
• Virtualise (B) onto (A) using P2V
• Install 2x 300GB 3.5” drives into (B)
• Install and configure VMWare ESXi onto (B) - name it BBS-ESX-002
• Move all VMs from (A) onto (B)
• Migrate ZCS to run physically on (A) on 300GB volume
• Install 2x 300GB 3.5” drives into (C)
• Install and configure VMWare ESXi onto (C) - name it BBS-ESX-001
• Balance load by moving some VMs from (B) onto (C)
• Install 2x 300GB drives into (D)

Some stages in the plan must be done when there is low network utilisation, and others can be done during peak times as it is unlikely to affect anything at all.

I will also take this opportunity to upgrade the server operating system for the Zimbra email server from Ubuntu 6.06 to 8.04.