Michael Henley

Upgraded to Lion this morning and it has resulted in something weird. My computer can not make outgoing connections on port 80 unless I connect to a VPN. Other connections (ICMP, SSH, etc.) work normally but browsers, DropBox, apps in general can not connect and simply times out. Thoughts on what might cause this? Googling has turned up nothing and conveniently my Apple support has expired. I would rather not pay £35 for something that might not result in a solution…

UPDATE: Some further searching yielded this Apple Support discussion which gave me something to go on. Basically Avast breaks the internet under Lion. Should probably have run that compatibility check… Uninstalling Avast fixes the problem. Curious that a VPN connection allowed it to work. Guess it circumvents whatever magic Avast put in place for the web shield to work.

Dear customer, we are making an already useless service more useless. Yours, @O2:

FT launches web app for iPad. Further tablet support in pipeline. Free this week

A very necessary new filter

Sometimes sleep is the best option

I don’t know how I feel about the whole super injunction thing. I have no interest in a sports player’s personal life, but I also hear and understand the arguments about it being the top of a slippery slope. I would like to trust the judgement of the the judiciary; on the whole I do although cases like Trafigura make me question. I have a feeling that a lot of the bile that has been spouted about the celebrities that are allegedly covered by these injunctions has relatively little to do with moral values or setting an example. It comes from jealousy and anger. Anger at ridiculous levels of pay; anger at things like corruption.

I don’t see these as valid reasons to drag the names, lives and loves of those involved through the mud. Anyone knows that no man is an island and the naming of these people will have consequences. Be they for their kids in the playground, their wives in the workplace, there will be consequences. Do these innocent parties deserve that, on top of the personal and emotional pain that they are exposed to by learning that their husband or father has been unfaithful? In my opinion, no.

Should companies that hawk their product on the back of a celebrity’s name demand to be informed contractually if one of these has been issued? I think that would be a good start in taking some of the legitimacy out of these revelations. If someone uses their name to profit and then does something that will damage that name then they should suffer for it. Legal protections such as these exist to protect people; Not to protect their incomes. A system allowing a distinction to be made would be a vast improvement.

In recent days there has been a new round of injunction breaking. Even if it were legal to I wouldn’t link to it given what has been revealed. I think David Aaronovitch summed it up perfectly on twitter:

I hope some people, having seen the details of injunctions posted on Twitter, now understand why they were granted. I am ashamed of us.

If you do decide to go hunting for what has been published you will easily find it. I hope it makes you as uneasy as it makes me.

In the mean time, those publishing on twitter or any other medium are breaking English and Welsh law and should be treated accordingly. If you decide to take it as far as it has gone without taking some basic precautions like using a VPN then I have little sympathy for you.

I can’t help but empathise with those involved; Those that are innocent but for their association and relation to someone with a talent that has granted them a god-like status amongst the tabloids. Anyone demanding that this kind of thing be published ‘in the public interest’ needs to start considering the people involved. I would hope that starts to add some shades of grey to your opinion.

At the beginning of this post I said that I didn’t know how I felt about injunctions, but I think in the course of writing it I have gained a better idea. I want to be sure that it can’t be abused, but I fully believe that their purpose is an important one.

Today Apple announced what would happen at the WWDC keynote. The unusual nature of this announcement aside, I wonder whether we are thinking a little too small with this. At the moment everyone is thinking that it will basically be a music locker, perhaps stretching to a DropBox killer. My question is whether there is a greater significance to the announcement coming with iOS 5 and OS X Lion: Is this more of a push to take the whole home folder/user profile into the iCloud ie providing you have connection, you can ‘log in’ and access some extent of your own profile like preferences or favourites. Likewise with the iDevices. That kind of freedom from the physical device is something that I might consider paying for.

Zif268 consensus. Revision gets silly.

Two weeks to part I finals; It’s the (almost) final countdown. Despite this looming deadline I’m still finding time to do a bit of blogging. Actually, looking back at my archives it seems that there is a noticeable upturn in my output during times like this. Rather than being a student, scraping by on doing things last minute and waking late, frequently with a hangover I am working solidly most days in an effort to make this degree decent. I haven’t so much as sipped wine in weeks. Madness.

Since I received an iPad at Christmas I have used it almost exclusively as my portable computer. I can write at a decent speed on it now (~70wpm according to some sources) and the weight is a huge positive over my obese 15″ MBP. This has come with some downsides and I think in a few weeks when I have a bit more time I will properly consider the trade-offs that I’ve made to make this work.

Blogging is something that I have always struggled with on mobile devices. In no small part this is because of the WordPress iOS app, which is frankly shocking. Now I know it is completely done by contributors and all that, but needing to write links in HTML is bad enough on a normal keyboard. On the iPad virtual one it’s just painful. Until recently I hadn’t really explored a way around this. Then a little while ago David pointed out Writing Kit as a general purpose Markdown editor for the iPad.

I have been playing with Writing Kit for a few days and I really like it. The extra toolbar makes writing the syntax easy, which given the way the iOS keyboard is arranged would otherwise be a little stilted. I can write and preview a post in the app and then export the HTML straight to the clipboard for import into the WordPress app. Finally I drop in images using the WordPress app and I’m ready to post. Simples.

There’s a lot more to Writing Kit than just this, but it’s the main purpose I have given to it. Absolutely check it out. It’s worth the £2.99

I often wonder if the person that drew this had ever actually seen a keyboard