Brett Hutley's Blog

I have just been importing some music into iTunes from an external drive. Sometimes iTunes doesn't recognise songs as belonging to the same album, even if they have the same Album name. (Bad iTunes!)

Continue reading “Getting iTunes to recognise tracks as belonging to one Album”

I just picked up my Jawbone UP from the Post Office last night, so thought I'd post my first impressions.

Continue reading “Bio-Monitoring and the Jawbone UP”

There is an absolutely awesome bit of Neal Stephenson's book Reamde, that goes like this: The brain "was sort of like the electrical system of Mogadishu. A whole lot was going on in Mogadishu that required copper wire for conveyance of power and information, but there was only so much copper to go around, and so what wasn't being actively used tended to get pulled down by militias and taken crosstown to beef up some power-hungry warlord's private, improvised power network. As with copper in Mogadishu, so with neurons in the brain. The brains of people who did unbelievably boring shit for a living showed dark patches in the zones responsible for job-related processes, since all those almost-never-exercised neurons got pulled down and trucked somewhere else and used to beef up the circuits used to keep track of NCAA tournament brackets and celebrity makeovers."

Continue reading “Rewiring the Brain”

The Luddites were a 19th century anti-industrialisation movement (and militia), who believed that their jobs were at risk because of the industrialisation of manufacturing. They proceeded to try and destroy mechanical looms in a vain attempt to turn back the rising tide of industrialisation. These days anyone seen as a "Luddite" is perceived to be backward and anti-technology.

Continue reading “Were the Luddites Right?”

I just finished reading the Kindle book Race Against The Machine, a book I thoroughly recommend. This was the driver of the NPR article I blogged about recently. The book is mostly oriented towards the US, although the issues they discuss seem to be prevalent across all major economies. The authors make the case that technological improvements are severely impacting every job market except those for highly-skilled individuals.

Continue reading “Race Against The Machine”

I've just read two blog posts on creating written content programatically. The first was the article How I automated my writing career by Robbie Allen. This article gives a brief description of how the author's company generates web-site content automatically using the quantitative analysis of data.

Continue reading “Written by Robot”

Here is a great presentation given by Jason Yan and David Cramer of Disqus fame about how their site was architected in order to scale to handle 75 million comments.

So I ended up getting iRex Technologies iLiad e-book reader. I have been using it for about a month now, and I absolutely love it! I usually switch it on so I can read it on the way to Canary Wharf (currently doing a contract out there), and leave it on the whole day. It's like having an iPod - but for books. I've installed an 8GB SD card, and I've got lots of books and maths and computing papers loaded.

I was working on my website ValidateModel.com, and I wanted a way to protect files that are uploaded by the users. My solution is to encrypt the files with gpg when they are uploaded. Only the public key is stored on the server and the files are encrypted with this. The only way for the files to be decrypted is for them to be downloaded and then decrypted with my private key. The steps needed in order to achieve this are:

1. Obtain gpg and generate a public/private key if you don't already have one (gpg --gen-key)
2. Export your public key to a file (gpg -a --export > pubkey.txt)
3. Upload the pubkey.txt file to your server
4. Create a directory accessible to the webserver (apache) process
5. Create a public keyring in this directory (gpg --no-default-keyring --keyring /path/to/pubring.gpg --import pubkey.txt)
6. Make sure that this file is readable by your webserver process
7. You may now encrypt files using the command line "gpg -q --batch --no-options --no-default-keyring --keyring /path/to/pubring.gpg -r brett --always-trust --output encrypted.enc --encrypt unencrypted.txt".

Make sure you back up your private keyring - if you lose it, your files will NEVER be decrypted!

I've been interested in electronic book readers with e-Ink technology ever since I read about the Sony Reader. I waited and waited for them to bring the reader out in the UK, but it's been over a year and still no release. A friend sent me a link the other day about the Iliad. This seems like a fantastic device, but it's quite expensive! I then discovered a review on e-book readers on Wired magazine. This led me to discover Bookeen's CyBook Gen3. The CyBook is lighter and cheaper than the Iliad and the battery lasts a lot longer. According to two reviews I read; the screen quality isn't quite as good on the CyBook as compared to the Iliad, and both reviews mentioned that the button for turning the pages was awkwardly placed. There seems to be a very active developer community for the Iliad which is a big plus. The price, weight and power consumption difference between the Iliad and the CyBook are probably because the Iliad has a Wacom digitizer in it, so you can draw and take notes on the screen. Also the Iliad screen is bigger and supports 16 shades of gray as opposed to 4.