RSTY

In OS X, Apple has thoughtfully given us network location profiles. You know when you go round to your mates and want to plug into their LAN, but they don’t use DHCP? Annoying isn’t it. With network locations, you can setup multiple profiles and switch easily, rather than having to reconfigure your TCP/IP settings each and every time. I’m surprised that even in Vista, as far as I know, this still isn’t possible (I assume it is in Linux, or even possibly originated there…)

With this in mind, it’d be useful if we could also have Dock profiles. The apps I use at home are, for the most part, completely different to those I use at work. At home my notebook functions almost exclusively as a net-top - instant messaging and browsing - that’s it. Work is a different story - multiple browsers, enough terminals to get me in a mess, multiple file transfer clients, text editors, IDEs… the list is endless.

I suppose I could create a seperate user for home and use fast user switching, but I’d rather keep everything simple and in one place. Hmm.

I just “launched” a newsletter service for a site on which I work, which relies on some SSL enabled pages for registration, logging in, and that kind of thing. Corporate policy is that any sensitive personal data must be encrypted. Once the new functionality had been rolled out, I was greeted with a “the page you are about to view contains secure and non secure items, do you want to continue?”.

Now, obviously, Joe User is used to clicking “no” to anything he doesn’t understand, so we can’t leave these warnings to appear even if the non secure items are harmless - we can’t expect users to know that or decide for themselves.

The non secure item on our page was a Google Analytics tag which looked like this:

<script src=“http://www.google-analytics.com/urchin.js” type=“text/javascript”>

Which, as you can see, is not transferred over a secure connection. Instead, you have to use:

<script src=“https://ssl.google-analytics.com/urchin.js” type=“text/javascript”>

As you might expect, my first try was to just change http:// to https://, but actually you need to change it to ssl. from www.

My family has a history of high blood pressure, which on my paternal side develops into Polycystic Kidney Disease. My Father, Grandmother and her three sisters all have the disease, which sets in later on in life.

I’ve always been a caffeine drinker - since maybe the age of 10 or 11, I was regularly drinking tea and coffee which developed into a habbit of almost exclusively drinking hot, caffeinated drinks and never drinking sodas, juices or water. I would say that since the age of 14 I was consuming 6 to 8 cups of tea per day, with maybe a couple of coffees thrown in too. Essentially, my caffeine intake was very high.

I had my blood pressure taken recently and it was far too high for comfort - probably caused by too much caffeine, and maybe a little stress from time to time. Given my paternal health issues, I figured I should cut down or stop my intake of caffeine.

I made the decision to quit the caffeine cold turkey. This was a few months ago now, but I’ll document each day as I remember it all very clearly still.

Monday

The first day, Monday, was absolutely fine. I kept getting up to make a cup of tea or coffee, and even filled the kettle a few times before realising “wait, can’t do that any more!”.

Tuesday

Nothing to report really, I felt normal pretty much. Until the evening, where I could feel a very slight, dull headache making its presence felt. I went to bed as normal.

Wednesday

I woke with a headache. Nothing too bad. It certainly didn’t stop me from getting up and going to work. But work was very difficult. Throughout the day the headache worsened and being a programmer I was not productive at all. I wouldn’t say I couldn’t think straight, but I spent the day doing menial tasks that didn’t require much concentration. I found it hard to focus (visually) on things.

Thursday

The headache continued throughout all of Thursday, and my work was still affected. I went to bed with headache. I really felt like getting a fix at this point, but decided I’d stick through it unless it lasted until Monday, where by I could not afford to take any more downtime at work.

Friday

Headache gone! Great news. Friday was my first day of feeling absolutely normal again. My work was back up to speed, and I felt “free” of any symptoms.

Saturday

Body ache. This came as a surprise to me, especially given that on Friday, the before, I felt absolutely normal. I felt like I had done a lot of exercise perhaps, it was that kind of ache. My limbs were a bit stiff, and I pretty much spent the day lounging around. I felt miserable and irritable too.

Sunday

Body ache continued, but much less so than on Saturday. I had a normal day otherwise, and didn’t feel so miserable or irritable.

Monday (exactly a week after going cold-turkey)

All body ache gone. No symptoms.

Since the one week barrier elapsed, I have had no other symptoms and have been caffeine free since then. I feel absolutely great for it, and quitting allowed me to realise a number of effects that caffeine had on me during my time as a caffeine drinker.

Firstly, I was actually quite an anxious person before quitting, and I really believe that some issues I was having were solely being caused by excess caffeine intake. Such issues, and the anxeity, are now far less of a problem.

Secondly, I feel that now I am a lot less irritable than I was before. A number of people have commented on this, both work colleagues and friends.

Thirdly, and most importantly, my sleep has improved vastly. I had always marked myself as being a light sleeper and never attributed it to caffeine - I thought it was just the way I was, presumably because I can’t remember life before caffeine. I used to wake up at the slightest thing - a car in the distance, the house creaking, even people walking past on the pavement outside. Not any more! I sleep a lot deeper, feel better rested, and need less sleep to feel rested. My usual 8.5 hours is now 7 hours, which is fantastic.

A friend of mine has also just recently (in the last fortnight) given up caffeine, and has had exactly the same symptoms as I have had, although his took a full fortnight to disappear, where as I only took a week. He had the same headaches and the same body ache, which is interesting.

I must admit, I did have a cup of tea about 6 weeks after quitting. It was terrible. The caffeine sent me on a massive head-rush, I went dizzy and very sweaty. Not an enjoyable experience, and I don’t plan on doing it again.

I’d say quitting has changed my life for the better.

I notice a lot of people are finding this website when searching for things like “when to apply for a 2008-2009 ISA”.

You can apply for a 2008-2009 tax year ISA from Saturday 5th April 2008 onwards.

Just to recap, you should use a handy price comparison site to find the best deal for you, but just in case you didn’t read my other post, I will summarise the best offers in the following table -

All offers have a minimum opening balance of £1.

What does ‘Bonus’ mean?

This means that after a year (or sometimes on the start of the next calendar year - see the institution’s respective website) the rate will drop by the bonus percentage amount. I.e., the Alliance and Leicester rate will drop to 5.25% AER from 6.25%.

What about Yield Frequency?

This is how often interest is paid on your balance.

Withdrawal Penalty?

None of these offers have withdrawal penalties. A withdrawal penalty often comes in the form of no interest paid for any month that you make a withdrawal during.

Just another thing - if you’ve got savings available that are not currently in an ISA, you have just a week or so left before the deadline. We are still currently in the 2007-2008 tax year, so don’t forget if you haven’t used up your ISA allowance this year, there is still time! Remember - savings that are not in an ISA have interest taxed at 20%, so why would you leave them outside of an ISA?!

As a Mac user, Firefox has never been great on Mac OS X. It is well known that native apps to the host OS always win based on speed and looks alone, and this, so far, has been true. I’ve used Safari since I first started out on Mac in 2003. Firefox, by contrast, has always looked out of place and old compared to Safari with its brushed aluminium and aqua elements.

Firefox 2 - an old, out of place look

Firefox 3, however, has fixed this issue for Mac users. It now sports a great looking skin and has aqua-like elements too. I note that it is still not a native cocoa implementation, but it’s close enough. It’s also much, much faster - one of my gripes with Firefox 2 was that not only did it have Windows-like form elements, but it was very sluggish - and my Macbook is by no means lacking in grunt. Mozilla have clearly put a lot of work into memory management, and the developers are claming that it is twice as fast as Firefox 2. I can believe them on that.

Check out how Firefox 3 looks -

 On the left you can see the default Firefox 3 Mac theme, and on the right is a gorgeous Safari-like theme called Grapple. You can clearly see the Aqua-like elements on the Google home page.

But it doesn’t end with how the app itself looks - we have some really nice features under the hood too. The bookmarking and history engine has been rewritten to use the SQLite3 engine which makes for some interesting development possibilities. You could quite easily interface other installed apps to use data from the database - I’m looking forward to some nifty gadgets and mashups based on this change.

The Mozilla team have also completed updated the add-ons control, centralising it into a single “add ons” form which deals with extensions, themes and plugins. The downloads window is now searchable, and makes it a tonne easier to find files you’ve downloaded compared to Firefox 2.

I’m actually going to move away from Safari to Firefox - and I couldn’t be happier. Roll on release candidates and a final 3.0!

The weekend has arrived, and so it is time to upload the pictures I promised earlier in Part 1 of Starting Out In Trials Riding.

Firstly, just some nice overall shots and then we’ll get into the detail of things.

Quite a nice looking bike, eh?

Let’s run through the parts we replaced/fixed in Part 1.

Tugs, chain-ring and chain.

When I first had the bike, the drive side Revell tug was broken. We replaced the tugs with a set from TartyBikes. There are different types of tugs available - we went for the stronger, generic set rather than some branded, less strong branded versions. These actually have better tugs too - they latch over the rear of the frame rather than press up against it. £6 well spent.

Rear Brake

Moving onto the Hope M4 brake I have on the rear. Although this isn’t strictly a Trials brake, it’s still a complete beauty. Eventually it’ll be making its way onto my XC bike to be replaced with a Hope Trials Mono.

The Bars and Stem

The bars and stem that came on the bike wern’t really suited to it. The stem was too short which made the front wheel very flicky, and being riser bars they just felt… wrong. Here’s what we fitted - Zoo bars, a try-all stem and Specialized lock-on grips (which are awesome, by the way. I’m going to put some on my XC bike when I have time).

Rear Hub and Chain Tensioner

There’s a little more play in the hub than I’d hoped, but it’s fine in the medium term. You can see the 74Kings lightweight tensioner too.

Front Brake

Here’s the front Hope Mono Trials caliper that we fitted to replace the original Hayes HFX-9. The original was fitted with a strange bracket and the pads were probably contaminated going by the horrendous noise the whole assembly was making. We de-contaminated the rotor with some alcohol pads and fitted this lovely new caliper.

And there you have it! One fixed, lovely looking, awesomely performing trials bike.

One last overall shot:

Stay tuned for Part 2, where I’ll begin to document my progress into Trials riding.

It’s that time of year again. The UK financial year is nearly over and Alistair Darling, the Chancellor, has unveiled his budget for the next tax year. For those of us who consider ourselves financially savvy, the run up to the new financial year is the time to be hunting around for a good deal on an ISA - an Individual Savings Account. The difference between an ISA and a normal run-of-the-mill savings account is that ISAs are tax free.

Huh? Tax on savings?

That’s right. When you place money in a savings account, the bank pays you interest on that money. However, 20% of that interest paid to you by the bank is taken by the Government.

Oh, so, ISAs are tax free? What’s the catch?

Until now, you could deposit only £3,000 per tax year into an ISA. That means that if you deposit an initial £2,000 and withdraw £1,000, you can only deposit another £1,000 - bringing the balance back up to £2,000 - until the start of a new financial year.

If you have savings (and I hope you do!) that are not currently in an ISA, you are giving money away to the Government for absolutely no reason. It is silly not to have an ISA.

The Good News

The good news is that for the 2008-2009 financial year, that £3,000 limit has been increased to £3,600, which means that all of the banks are competing for customers who are hearing about the increase in the allowance and thinking about opening accounts.

The Best Offers

Currently, the best offers on the market are from Barclays (”Tax Haven ISA”) and Alliance and Leicester (”Direct ISA Issue 4″), offering 6.5% and 6.25% AER respectively.

Barclays are able to offer the 6.5% by throwing in a 1% bonus for 12 months. If, like me, you decide to go with Barclays you will want to move your money away in 12 months time as the rate will become 5.5% which is not going to be the best available. This particular offer pays interest monthly, and has no penalty for withdrawals. There’s the usual opening balance of £1 required. The one slight downside to this offer is that you must go to a local branch to open an account.

Alliance and Leicester’s offer also has a bonus of 1% until 31/5/09, and pays interest annually on January 1st, and like Barclays has no withdrawal penalties. This account can be opened online. You will also want to move money away in 12 months time with this offer.

If moving your money away in 12 months time sounds like a lot of hassle then your next best bet is with Egg, who offer a flat 6% which includes no bonus and will likely not change into the next financial year.

Happy saving!

Each and every time I’ve attempted to start a blog I’ve used WordPress. The ease of installation and usability of the CMS really sets it apart from most other software out there. It has come a long way since I last used it - there are now more features, themes and plugins than ever before, which is always a good thing.

I like minimalism, so as you can see I’ve opted for a very clean theme. I’ve modified the width slightly and changed the font faces from the “out of the box” defaults.

I took an hour or so to browse through the WordPress plugins directory and honestly not a lot took my fancy for my goals here on this blog. The plugins I’m running are purely functional in purpose:

1. All In One SEO Pack
2. WP Lightbox 2

The SEO Pack has some nifty features. WordPress by default does not include any keyword or description meta tags (which I find quite puzzling), so this is the first thing SEO Pack sets about fixing. It also offers you the complete ability to play with the format of various areas of the site such as post titles, page titles and description formats, as well as the ability to inject custom meta tags and play around with noindex/nofollow settings too. My favorite feature is being able to add keywords and descriptions per post too. I definitely recommend this plugin.

WP Lightbox automatically adds a very nifty preview-like functionality to images added to posts. If you scroll down a little and look for some bike pictures and give them a click, you’ll get a demo. I think it makes a big difference.

I bought my first trials bike about a week ago. I’ve been into cross country (XC) riding for a good while, but after having a short blast on a trials bike recently, I decided that I should spend some time on another discipline to vary my riding a little.

A good friend of mine, Spode, found a bike for sale on a trials forum. It was listed as being a custom build based on a Revell frame and in good working order with the exception of a contaminated front brake. I bought it, although upon closer inspection it needed a little more work than was advertised.

Here are a few pics as taken by the previous owner in his back garden…

The frame has horizontal drop-outs and the drive side tug was broken. The previous owner attempted to fix this, but the result was that under stress from the cranks the hub would slip forwards. When this happened, the chain tensioner would move causing the chain to lose all tension and slip very, very badly. It was basically not fit to be ridden hard. The chain ring was also fairly worn and the crank set had a locked out freewheel which was causing a horrendous amount of lag when combined with the freewheel on the hub at the back.

I took the bike down to Spode’s over the weekend where we:

• Replaced the crank set with a set of really nice Middleburn RS7 Pros.
• Fitted a new chain ring with a better ratio - it’s now at 18:20 (front teeth : rear teeth) rather than 14:20.
• Replaced the bottom bracket with a Shimano Un72.
• Fitted new bars (Zoo), grips (Specialized) and a lovely new stem (Try all).
• Replaced the chain with a KMC K710 and fitted a 74Kingz lightweight tensioner.
• Fitted a Hope Mono Trial front brake caliper and threw away the old Hayes HFX-9.
• Cleaned up the contaminated rotor with some boiling water and a scouring pad (more on that later).
• Pimped it with tartybikes and thinkbikes stickers.

The bottom bracket had been installed with no grease so the insides of the frame were filled with rust and other gunk. We sorted that out running a tap through the threads and giving it a good clean with a rag and some magic spray.

It also turns out that my forks have a strangely dimensioned disc mount, we’re still not exactly sure what they are. When we fitted the new Hope caliper and rotor, we noticed that the rotor (180mm) was only just being bitten by the pads. My forks actually require what appears to be a 193mm rotor, so for now my 190mm Hayes rotor will have to do. It too doesn’t quite get bitten properly by the pads, but it’s very close. I’ll fit a correct rotor when I have time, for now it’s not a problem.

The rear brake that came on the bike is absolutely stunning. It’s a Hope M4… which is an XC brake. This means that it’s really progressive, which isn’t great for trials riding. I’m not the heaviest rider though, so I should be fine on it for the time being. It does lock and it locks hard, but you really have to grab a handful of lever to get there.

Eventually I will fit a matching Hope Mono onto the rear and move the M4 to my XC frame.

Well well, here we are again. This must be my fourth attempt in as many years to start a blog.

I plan to write mainly about biking, as I’ve recently bought a trials bike, but I’ll also be writing about XC a lot too. I’ll be journaling my trials riding progress mainly so I can look back and review my progress to date, but also to help other new riders as they get started too.

I’ll also be writing about the (world) economy and software development, as these are both passions and interests of mine.