|Absolute Value|

Grant, Sarah and I have decided to move from our flat in Stepney to somewhere in the West of London. We really like our current place but our neighbours and the travel time are a bit much. So we (in that I mean Sarah) have been looking for somewhere in the Ealing or Chiswick area. Very beautiful area, lots of green stuff around and a nicer area to live.

So we found this great little place in Chiswick. Two bedrooms, a small open-plan lounge and kitchen and a garden all to ourselves. £230 a week for the entire house. We put in an offer for that price as long as the landlord puts a new kitchen in (he had agreed to this already) and he comes back saying he doesn’t want 3 people living in it. What a load of crap! Now we have to start again from square one. This was such a nice little place and the landlord is worried about having both bedrooms filled. Wanker!

We went looking again today and only managed to see one place. Working full time means that the only time we can look is after 6pm and Saturdays. Our lease runs out at the end of February so we need somewhere soon. I don’t want to be rushed and have to chose out of necessity instead of what the place looks like. Plus work has been hell for Grant and I this week (I worked a full day over-time in 2 days) and it doesn’t look like it will get any better. So life is a little stressful but still the best experience I have ever had. Cmon London!

PS - Go over to Lee and Jenny’s podcast site and leave a message for them. Jenny is in hospital recovering from an operation and a little message will do wonders.

Dave Winer has a great post on the “RSS Subscription Problem”. I won’t discuss it here as Dave is the master of this subject so follow the link and have a look. The proposal sounds great and is a really exciting idea.

Today I received news from Lee that Jenny is not well with something up with her appendix. My thoughts and prayers go out to her to get well as soon as possible.

I found out today that she is in the Royal London Hospital. This is literally about 3 minutes walk from my house. I will be visiting Jenny and Lee tomorrow evening. Get well soon!

I am putting it in writing now, so I can prove that I knew the outcome beforehand. Blu-Ray DVDs will be the DVD of choice over HD-DVDs. HD-DVD cost less but the Blu-Ray holds more data. It will overcome! Watch this space.

So its official. My iPod is sold. Ebay is now my best friend. My reserve price on the auction was £150 and thats what I got. I sold my iPod, remote control, 2 pairs of Apple earphones and a protective case.

Now once the payment comes through PayPal, I will be purchasing one of these babies. A Creative Zen Micro (black one of course). I bought one for Sarah for Christmas and I love them. Build in FM tuner, microphone, 5 gig of space and a 12 hour battery life, it kicks the iPod into touch. The menu interface is nice and intuitive and the touch sensitive buttons are great and USB2 in the mix.

I will be a bit sad to see the iPod go because it is a beautiful piece of hardware. No mp3 player can beat it for looks but its battery life and the fact that you can only use iTunes to put music on it pull it down completely. The one other extremely annoying glitch is that if your ID3 tags are missing from the music, the iPod doesn’t categorize them, not even under “UNKNOWN” or anything like that.

With hindsight, I should have but the auction on this site when I first submitted as I could have leveraged my huge readership to publicize my iPod and get the bidding up! Yeah, right.

Finally, a quick and easy way to see what is better - Managed or Unmanaged Code. Countless hours have been lost to arguing which is better and now the answer is clear: Clicky

Wordpress is a great blogging tool. Since moving from Movable Type I have never looked back. For one thing comment spam has dropped from about 50 a day to about 1 per week.

However there is (now was :P) a niggly little problem with wordpress. Because the RSS feeds for each blog are generated on the fly, there are no physical RSS feed files (e.g. atom.xml, index.rdf). Therefore when GoogleBot or Yahoo! Slurp came along requesting these files, the server responded with a 404 error saying that the files didn’t exist.

The way Wordpress handles RSS is via a PHP file called wp-feed.php. If you need a feed to be generated you pass this script a variable such as “atom” or “rdf” and it generates the appropriate XML file and returns it to the computer requesting it. This is perfectly acceptable except in the case of search engines (i.e. I need to be indexed more!).

I decided to search Google a bit to see if anyone else had realised the problem and found a great solution which strangely enough follows on from my previous post about mod_rewrite.

The link for the post that I found is here. With two URL rewrite rules, Apache automatically causes the wp-feed.php script to be run and pass back the correct XML feed. Instant gratification. Thanks CrazeeGeek!