I did a double-take when xearth popped up this morning, but today’s news is simply quite awful. Hearing that possibly as many as 11,500, more than 15,000 25,000 people have been killed really isn’t comprehensible. As trite as it may sound, our thoughts go out to those affected by this terrible tragedy :-(

28-12-04: OK, so i’m not going to keep updating this entry as the death toll rises, that would just be mawkish. Suffice to say it’s much, much worse than the initial, terrible reports portraid.

Sanjiva, who everyone involved with Web services knows, lives in Sri Lanka and has brought the tragedy even closer to home through his blog. Good to read that at least his folks appear to have been saved. As Glen says, “thank goodness the LSF guys all seem to be all right”.

This week seems to be a good time to buy Fog Creek Software, if you were already inclined to do such a thing. I’m not exactly sure how i feel about that announcement - generous or just cashing in? It’s a really fine line to tread, and i’m aware how pompus even my jottings probably sound to someone right there in the thick of it .

So here’s how to exercise your guilt! UK citizens can easily send money using their credit card with the additional Gift Aid bounty of 28p for every £1 donated via the Red Cross

Jed’s Christmas card to our pet hamster:
“To cyber Hamish,
have a hammy christmas!
from Jed”.

Choose a greeting
Happy Christmas
Canny Crimbo
Merry Crippins
Wassail
Wassup
Happy Hanukkah
Happy Holidays
Season’s Greetings
Gézuar Krishlindjet
Idah Saidan Wasanah Jadidah
Gleðileg Jól
Whatever
Everyone!

Today was the winter solstice. It was also DiloDec04 on Fickr. My contribution documents a dull winter’s day at the office. Enjoy!

Two photo sets from a trip to Seattle the other week: Arctic Wing and WS-Addr, Redmond.

Everything in the US is bigger, heavier and more powerful than in the UK with one obvious exception: electrical power. I imagine it’s having 220v in the UK as opposed to 110 volts in the US that has led to our plugs being much larger and power supplies three times heavier, as with these two Gameboy adaptors.

Tuesday night, and off to the newly refurbished Rex in trendy Berkhamsted.
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Google Suggest is very cool! A useful replacement for the vanilla search page. Via Joel.

Update: Adam Stiles reveals how it works. The onkeydown event invokes a HTTP GET which returns the suggestions as a Javascript function, e.g http://www.google.com/complete/search?hl=en&js=true&qu=paul+downe. An interesting combination of a Web service and self modifying code. What’s amazing is how smoothly this fine grained chatty interaction works.

Drat! For some reason the MT script that forwards comments from this blog to my email address has stoped working. Unfortunately my ISP doesn’t seem to provide an error_log, only statistics, so it’s a case of head scratching over what may have changed along with littering the code with “exec 2> my_log” statements. I’ve so many better things planned for today :-(

18-12-2004: The MT rebuild triggered by adding a comment was thrashing and i guess exceeding a server process limit. Reducing the number of templates with the ‘rebuild’ flag on seems to have resolved this (for the moment). Of course within three minutes of reenabling comments, i was hit by 10 comment spams. Gah!

Preparing for another trip next week i was struck by how much copper and plastic gubbins i stick in my backpack. That’s without my laptop which Bijan nicely described as “a boat” (i really should have bought a Mac :) Take a look at the Flickr image for details.