Searching online for a short iPhone cable, I met this

I purchased this item because I thought, being shorter than the standard 1 metre sync cable, it wouldn’t take as long to charge my devices.

Oh yes, electrons are massively slowed down by travelling through a few extra cm of copper wire. Sometimes I despair of fanbois.

I’m not going back to chemistry, at least not as far as I know, but I’ve recently had cause to wonder what came out of my PhD. My former supervisor has supplied references and PDFs:

• Pyrolysis of Stabilised Phosphorus Ylides as a Route to New Hetero Carbenes, R. A. Aitken, M. J. Drysdale, A. Ford, P. E. Y. Milne, D. W. Russell, B. M. Ryan and M. Whittaker, Phosphorus, Sulfur and Silicon, 1993, 75, 31–34.
• Flash Vacuum Pyrolysis of Sulfinyl Stabilised Phosphorus Ylides: Generation and Reactivity of Sulfinylcarbenes, R. A. Aitken, M. J. Drysdale and B. M. Ryan, J. Chem. Soc., Chem. Commun., 1993, 1699–1700.
• Flash Vacuum Pyrolysis of Alkoxycarbonyl/Sulfinyl Stabilised Phosphorus Ylides: Generation and Intramolecular Insertion of Alkoxycarbonyl(sulfenyl)carbenes, R. A. Aitken, M. J. Drysdale and B. M. Ryan, J. Chem. Soc., Chem. Commun., 1994, 805–806.
• Effect of Added Benzoic Acid on the Phase-transfer Catalysed Permanganate Oxidation of Organosulfur Compounds, R. A. Aitken, S. T. E. Mesher, F. C. Ross and B. M. Ryan, Synthesis, 1997, 787–791.
• Flash vacuum pyrolysis of stabilised phosphorus ylides. Part 13. Extrusion of Ph3P from sulfinyl ylides and reactivity of the resulting sulfinyl carbenes, R. A. Aitken, M. J. Drysdale and B. M. Ryan, J. Chem. Soc., Perkin Trans. 1, 1998, 3345–3348.
• Flash vacuum pyrolysis of stabilised phosphorus ylides. Part 15. Generation of alkoxycarbonyl(sulfenyl)carbenes and their intramolecular insertion to give alkenyl sulfides, R. A. Aitken, J. M. Armstrong, M. J. Drysdale, F. C. Ross and B. M. Ryan, J. Chem. Soc., Perkin Trans. 1, 1999, 593–604.
• The X-ray structures of sulfoxides, A. L. Fuller, R. A. Aitken, B. M. Ryan, A. M. Z. Slawin and J. D. Woollins, J. Chem. Crystallogr., 2009, 39, 407–415.

I have to admit I didn’t have any part in writing these papers.

Following on from last week’s wee surprise, Martino’s music selection last night included a mashup of Kylie’s Can’t get you out of my head and New Order’s Blue monday. There’s a brilliant brass cover of that here.

As an update to this request for opinions, I’ve now received the USB enclosure for the for the spare 60GB SATA HD and put the two together. I’ve populated this device with what was on my spare 64GB PATA SSD, namely installers for different flavours of MacOSX (from 10·4 to 10·8), then copied the contents of Pismo’s 32GB PATA SSD to the 64GB PATA SSD. (This took all night because Pismo only has USB 1·1 – slow!)

Just now I’ve put the 64GB SSD into Pismo – she seems to be working fine. In fact she seems a little snappier than before. And so I now have a ‘spare’ 32GB PATA SSD in a USB enclosure. (I’ll leave it alone for now – it has a known-good copy of Pismo’s OS and apps, just in case the 64GB SSD gets flaky.)

Pismo now has 33GB free (3GB on the OS9 partition, 30GB on the OSX partition). I seem to use about 2·5GB per year, so this space may well do for another 10 years.

The final steps would be to put WinXP back on the netbook and find a suitable home for it. Oh, and stop myself wasting money reviving the macbook pro. (It’s been prevented this month by £100 drop in my income and buying running shoes.)

It’s been a hectic few days.

On Friday, my team-mates and I were working until midnight on our management of software projects coursework: the initiation step of a PRINCE2 project. When it’s been marked, I’ll post our submission and my mark.

Over the weekend, I wrote my web design and development coursework almost from scratch, as well as doing more on the MSP coursework.  I tried to go to spinning on Sunday evening but just before I got there, the new iPhone holder broke, spilling my iPhone onto Ferry Road. I did an emergency stop and retrieved the phone but this manoeuvre did something nasty to Lev’s rear wheel such that he couldn’t move. So instead of spinning, I cooled my heels waiting for a taxi that could take Lev and me home. In the morning, I found that Lev’s rear axle had shifted in the drop-outs. That was easy to reverse but I wonder why the axle was loose enough to move.

On Monday my team-mates and I wrote a presentation to go with our coursework and finished more of the coursework. In the evening, Elly and I went spinning as usual but Elly’s cold and tiredness from far too much work didn’t let her finish the session. On Tuesday we finished the last bits of the submission and re-rehearsed our presentation. Then I jumped into a taxi to get to Elly’s hairdresser, got my hair and beard cut and then taxied back to Napier to help out at the OpenKnowledge meetup. More info (possibly including my live tweeting) at #opendataedb and #okfn. Then a rapid run to Kalpna to meet Elly to celebrate my birthday with curry.

On Wednesday, I had the web design and development lecture and practical which gave rise to this friends-locked post. Then my team-mates and I gave our presentation, after which we listened to the other groups’ presentations. No failures but plenty of useful feedback from the stand-by lecturer. (The real lecturer is on paternity leave this week.) Then off to spinning again.

On Thursday morning I prepared for an interview for this post and on Thursday afternoon I sat the actual interview. I’ll blog about how I got on next post.

You may recall me moaning about the state and design of the cycle-path from Leuchars to St Andrews. I emailed Dr Bob McLellan at Fife Council about it. His folk replied

• to say that redesigning the cycle-path to avoid cyclists being dazzled would be too expensive, as would buying a second strip of land for a lane on the other carriage-way. One Fife Council officer made the valid point that buying strips of land on both sides increases complexity, thus leading to even more cost. He’s not yet replied to my question about buying one wider strip on one side, and using this increased width to create cycle-lanes on both carriageways. (I do see that some re-engineering would be needed, which of course has costs. But perhaps increased cycling-derived fitness might reduce government costs overall.)
• to apologise that the snow wasn’t cleared properly:
  

  This section of cycleway was only promoted to a P1 priority footway/cycleway in the last few weeks as a result of communications we received from the public as to just how busy this can be. Unfortunately the mini tractor driver had missed this part of his new route and steps have been taken to ensure this does not happen again.

Democracy at work!

I’m getting increasingly annoyed by our web design and development lecturer’s apparent inability to parse and/or reply meaningfully to questions. Here’s the latest:

Hi redacted lecturer-name

Won’t world+dog know that the default MAMP server username and password are root and root? (Even worse, WAMP’s default password is null!) How can we reset these defaults so the websites we create in real-life aren’t so easily hacked?

For the coursework, I’d want to put my effort online so I can ask friends to test it.

1. is this allowed?
2. if so, macs have a built-in apache webserver. You can see my use of this at http://www.bruceryandontexist.net. Can I enable PHP on this? If not, how would I direct users to the version within MAMP?

Thanks
Bruce

The lecturer’s answer, in full, was

The wamp server on our computers isn’t connected to the world wide web so no-one can navigate to it from outside. The default password is only there as root during the development phase. One a project is competed it is moved to a production server which is connected to the www – security issues and concerns are dealt with at this stage.

Does this answer my questions in any way? The lecturer knows I don’t use the uni PCs. (For a start, you have to reload all files into MAMP each session, and that these files go into C:/Program Files where no luser should ever go.) He knows, because I’ve told him and he’s seen me doing it, that I develop on my MacBookAir and home mac. And I was clearly asking ‘how can we go live and user-test from our own computers?’, not ‘is it possible to go live from a uni PC?’

I’ve tried again and will let you know if I get any meaning response to

Hi redacted lecturer-name
To be clear, I mean to use one of my macs as a production server as well as a development server, so I could invite others to test it. (In the spirit of agile, I would ask friends to represent clients testing features as I develop them.)
I have no hardware PCs – the nearest I get is running Windows via BootCamp* on my mac laptop or Windows virtual machines (under VirtualBox) on my desktop mac at home. All my development for this course will be done on these machines. So

1. is asking friends to test what I do, as I do it, allowed – or would this be considered cheating by Napier?
2. If it is allowed, how do I get PHP working on a mac that’s a production server? Or can I use MAMP, and allow world+dog to see the site?
3. To prevent anyone hacking my website, how do I change the default passwords on the production server’s incarnation of PHP/MAMP?

I know that the coursework doesn’t require the website to go live, but if I do any real-life web development, the go-live step will be quite important, so I want to take the opportunity to practice this too.
Thanks
Bruce

Too much already today

• feedback from many sources about this. Some positive, some helpful, some asking how we dare attack CCs. For the record, we don’t – we think they are at base good things. But they need to get where people are, and our research shows that many don’t. Phase 2 is to find good practices, and the pitfalls along the way, so that other CCs can learn and travel more smoothly. Ideally CCs would mentor each other – and my role might be to catalyse this.
• explaining to parents why SocMed can be a good thing, despite the caveats – and a necessary thing if you are trying to reach people.
• Issues with stuff we’ve ordered
• Correspondence about St Andrews-Leuchars bike path
• Stuff I’m involved with being ripped off – see final comment here
• contributing to class discussion of software project management
• check with two blogs whether they’ll host an article I’m writing

Other stuff to do, ideally today, includes:

• return calls
• contact a friend
• sort my lecture notes
• arrange to be able to use Edinburgh uni library
• data analysis, then redraft a paper
• get a friend’s HD sorted. Why the hell don’t people learn to back up properly?

Things that can wait include

• buying running shoes
• job application
• order some cycling gloves
• contact council about council tax
• blog about other things

And I need to eat and sleep. Bah!

I’m on teh internets! Interview with @myceliumme_CC on what our findings re CCs use of internet mean nationalnetworkcc.com/2013/02/toe-in… #eparticipation

We did see the copy (and were encouraged to make necessary amends), which is great journalistic ethics IMHO. I didn’t get to vet the photo – do I really look like that?

Top spinning session tonight:

• Martin (Facebook link) leading, explaining and encouraging at the front and Josh (Facebook link) right next to me so there’s no way I could have skived. (Not that I would!)
• Ace music too, especially the mash-ups. The one that most bent my head was The Doors’ Riders on the storm to the music of Blondie’s Rapture. And I loved the final working track. 5 minutes of ramping it up and living it large!

And I’ve just found this!