With a new fringe rapidly approaching I finally decided to put all the photos (well not all, but a massive 879!) from last year at Rocket Venues on line. I apologise to those of you (especially if you worked with us) that expected them before now but it’s become a lot easier now that I have a higher upstream at home to upload them. It also took a fair amount of time to actually go through the initial 1,800 photos and whittle it down.

They’re over at http://www.iross.net/photos/v/Theatre/Fringe2004/. Enjoy and do feel free to post (appropriate) comments.

7 days ago I decided to eMail the edfringe people about my little observations (see below). This is the reply I got…

“Hi Ross, Thanks for your email - all of the errors you mention are related to a database problem whereby the website is taking in venue entries from both last year and this year, but rest assured our IT people are aware of it and working on it!”

… It does worry me how long it takes them to implement either; a GROUP BY clause, a WHERE DATE clause or… remove the old entries?

Ok, I did something exceptionally stupid and deleted all the photos on here. They’re mostly back.

Notice i’ve adopted a new format with VERY small thumbnails which open in a new window at a nicer size when you click on them. This is to try and reduce the time the pages take to load a bit for those friends of mine who are still on narrowband connections… Poor things.

PokerStars101.com - the name says it all - it’s a website - but you need software to play (windows only but I’ll make that rant later)

Anyway I got handed this CD at the Student Union and having no interest whatsoever in poker I thought i’d poke at the CD just enough to see if they had thought of people who dont use windows and I found the stupidest thing ever - the CD is basically a hyperlink. Yep, that’s right instead of putting the 20Mb application on the CD they make a CD rom with an autoloader that contains nothing more than a pretty graphic and a link to their website to DOWNLOAD THE (Windows Only) SOFTWARE!!!

How utterly pointless.

Not really code as such but a detailed description of how the internet radio station DRL Radio operated and hopefully snippets of the code behind it. Someone eMailed me recently asking about DRL … figured my answer was far too long for an eMail and there’s a chance somebody else might want to read it http://www.iross.net/blog/drlradio

Yet another case of a domain not being registered by someone who should know better - this time Edinburgh City Council - or more accurately “Interbrand” who were responsible for rebranding the city (exactly how or why you would rebrand a city I have no idea :P)

Long story short Edinburgh City Council spent around £880,000 paying Interbrand to develop a new image for the city. They came up with “Inspiring Capital” but failed to register any domain name based on it! So an individual registered the domains (rather a lot of them). Instead of admitting their mistake and asking for the names back they instead made the person responsible out to be some form of criminal accusing him of “domain-hijacking” - not true, he simply registered names that didnt exist - he didn’t steal them from anyone.

So, the person responsible (owner of EdinburghSucks.com) offered the council the names for free in exchange for an apology from the council. Needless to say he has not recieved such an apology. Now he has prompted Interbrand to improve their own image with the people of Edinburgh by agreeing to transfer the names free of charge to the City Council on the condition that they make a donation of at least 1% of what they charged the city in the first place to the Patients Fund at the Fillieside Section of Findlay House, formerly Findlay Ward, Eastern General Hospital, Edinburgh.

There is a petition at http://www.petitionthem.com/default.asp?sect=detail&pet=1844 which is well worth signing

As all friends of mine will know the Fringe is a very important event in the calendar of my life, being about the only chance I get to be a techie each year

The programme (and also venue list) was published today so naturally curious I decided to look through some of it on the website…

There are, to say the least, a few problems with the fringe site at the moment. Namely that someone somewhere didn’t check ANY of the database or any of the queries - one or the other - every venue shows up (at least) twice, it lists some shows as venues, and there’s venues listed that don’t exist any more. Come on guys, you’ve had days to get this right before making it live on the site - 10 mins of testing would have shown all these problems - the Fringe is the biggest festival of it’s kind and the website is usually pretty good… Coming from me that’s a compliment - anyoen who knows me will know how critical I can be of web sites!

I think I’ll wait for my copy in the post and see what that says …

Fringe 2005 starts in August (much like every other fringe in that respect) and the programme is due in less than 7 days from now still havent decided what i’m doing this year with regards to fringe, but no doubt it will be something and there will be more on that here of course (probably in a nice shiny new fringe category when i get around to it :P)

Ironically I found one of the venues I have worked for before is looking for staff… but I wouldnt dream of working for them again (largely because they fired all their staff … long story) but rather amusingly they arent in their old venue… looks like our good friends at the radisson got rather pissed off with them last year and didn’t want them back hehe…