In the cyrillic alphabet, it's Шапка...

photo credit: dr-nick

Eleven weeks on, and she's thriving. Healthy, nice smiles & coos, and mostly sleeping through the night, which is pretty much all you want from a baby. Jess loves her lots, although she can be a bit heavy handed at times.

photo credit: dr-nick

photo credit: dr-nick

photo credit: dr-nick

photo credit: dr-nick

photo credit: dr-nick

It permits the use of works, including photos, where the author cannot be identified by a "reasonable search", simply by registering the work as an "orphan" and paying a fee to a quango. Since metadata about things like authorship is so easy to strip from a digital image, this has the potential to become a publishers' charter for online image theft. If you find someone has stolen your image by claiming it's orphaned, you can claim a fee, and apply to have the orphaned state revoked.

You can read more from Copyright Action. I've written to my MP; my own letter is on the next page. You should write too. It doesn't have to be as long - but they need to know that clause 17 takes away too many rights from the individual photographer.

Personal Information Online Code of Practice

The same article refers to a code of practice for collecting personal information, drafted by the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO). The code doesn't actually mention photography. However, the contention of Copyright Action (actually in the clarification on p2 of the comments) is that the ICO would now view it as a breach of the Data Protection Act if you took a photo, even in a public place, with someone who did not want to be photographed. This follows the High Court ruling under the ECHR that a photo of JK Rowling's son in a public street was an invasion of privacy.

In my view, this is less of a real threat at the moment, but is certainly one to watch.

1. Motorola mr30
   Back in the day this boasted "an astounding 40 hour battery life", support for fax and data (up to 9600bps). "Also, for the first time with an Orange Motorola, the phone supports a proper battery life indicator." It could store up to 190 names and numbers. This would have been in around 1995, when I signed my first 12 month contract with Orange.
2. Motorola cd920
3. Ericsson T28s
4. Nokia 8210
   Ah, properly dinky. Nice Nokia menus. Must have been around 2001?
5. Ericsson T610
   Wow! Colour! 128x160 pixels! 2MB memory! This was the state of the art in 2003 (or at least heading in that direction). I left Orange after all these years, taking my number to Vodafone. At the end of that contract, I got it unlocked at Banbury market and switched to a better contract with T-Mobile.
6. Motorola RAZR V3
   Sticking with T-Mobile, I got an upgrade to this handsome little flip phone. Excellent design that (visually) stands the test of time in 2010.
7. Nokia N73
   Big upgrade here, to something which probably just about counts as a smartphone. I got it on the 3 network, who were excellent, until I tried to leave them, when they tried to invent all sorts of exit fees and notice periods which were never part of my contract. Grr.

8. iPhone 3GS
   So, here I am now, with a phone that is a very welcome companion. I'll freely admit that I didn't buy into the iPhone hype for a couple of years - when I used the iPhone 2 I wasn't that blown away by it, and couldn't see much gain over the N73. But when the 3GS came out with the new OS, I compared it (specs, size, design and usability) to the N95, Blackberry and first gen Android phones, and the advantage was clear. So I bit the bullet, handed over the cash, and signed the contract with O2.

   I use it more as a pocket computer, calendar, map, and web tool than I do as a phone, but it's probably the mobile I've valued the most. It's got 16GB, 95 apps across eight screens, and the same phone number I started with 14 odd years before.

(Edit 8 Feb - managed to forget the RAZR!)

Ros has a proud bump, and is looking very cute and motherly.

Aside from work, I've made much progress in my long-term project to rip all the old vinyl that's been hanging-around-the-house-not-getting-played-for-years into MP3s. Once I wrap that up, I'll probably share a few 'fair use' snippets for fun. My other autumn project has been a photography course at Warwickshire College, the fruits of which I'm going to have to dedicate some time to organising - quite a bit of technical stuff rather than focusing on the 'pretty', but so many photos produced...

Jess is getting bigger, brighter and bossier. She's lots of fun but relentlessly hard work. I suppose it's better that than supine! She has learnt the concept of the joke, and now has a surefire one which she proffers remarkably frequently. We've given up trying to come up with a new reaction... Want to hear it? Tough, nor do I but I have to several times a week:

What's grey and wibbly?
A jellyphant.

Finally, I've stopped resisting and bought an iMac, which is a thing of much beauty and omigod power. All I need is to make time to use it. It arrived on Tuesday, but I've not really had chance to do a huge amount with it yet, as I've had to spend best part of two days recovering the linux box that acts as mailserver and fileserver for the family. It chose Monday night to keel over and die. Not helpful, but I suppose at least we don't use it for TV or webserver any longer.

Right, having been up until 1am fixing that yesterday, I want an earlier night, so I'm off to bed! If you want to keep up-to-dater than my rare forays into the blogosphere, you'll find me most days on twitter.

Due on 19 March 2010.

• We have a new car, a Volkswagen Golf Plus, having traded in our 11 year old Mazda. It was shortly before the scrappage scheme was introduced, but we got a cracking deal!
• We've remortgaged, with an offset tracker from First Direct. They've lived up to their reputation for excellent customer service. Can't rate them highly enough so far.
• I've bought an iPhone 3G S which is just lovely. I'm turning into a real Apple fanboy.
• Is this is a convenient point to mention my 'hackintosh'?
  
  A netbook running Mac OS X. Cute; see the video.
• I've had another set of phototherapy treatment at Warwick Hospital to keep the sunshine at bay. So far so good.
• Jess is happily three, fully toilet-trained, and looking forward to pre-school in September.
• We've had our summer holiday, once again in Germany. We drove the new car across to the Mosel, where the weather was nothing special, but it was nonetheless a good change.

So, some pictures. Jess having some summer splashing fun:

And a few holiday pics. Enjoy!

We've got a development environment based around virtual ColdFusion 8 development servers which run a codebase from across a couple of subversion working copies (WC). The webroot maps to one WC, there's a common folder (with common code/resources for several applications) which is aliased below the webroot in apache, and another WC for custom tags. When we commit working, tested code to trunk, post-commit hooks on the repos update the relevant working copies on the public web servers.

So, the problem yesterday was that code which worked fine on the test environment was failing on the live server. The code was using ExpandPath() to (try to) return the absolute filesystem path for a web-relative path supplied. It worked on the test server (let's say it returned /etc/webroot/ for /), but on the live site, it returned something like http://www.example.com/siteCheck/http:/www.example.com/ instead. Obviously this isn't a valid filesystem path

Googling pulled up a link to a page by Mark Drew which didn't reference my particular bug, but there was a comment by Mark Mandel which suggested that in the absence of a CF mapping for the webroot, it looks to the apache mappings (and possibly mod_rewrite rules) for its path resolution. As our live server sits behind a load balancer, this fits with the very broken ExpandPath() result we saw.

In the end, there's a very simple solution. Set a mapping in the CF Administrator for / to the actual filesystem path for the webroot. It shouldn't have any other side effects, but it completely fixes ExpandPath(). Methinks that CF8 is trying to be too clever...

Anyway, that's that for today. At some point I'll get back to normal service and post some cute photos of Jess.