Just got home. Tomorrow, I am going to Edinburgh, but I've left my laptop power supply at work. I'm not going to pick it up and get the train at 7:30.

Pretty pathetic really. Why do laptops all have different power requirements? I can see varying voltage requirements, but all the different shapes and sizes? At the end, this variety is not for any good reason, but for an economic imperative. Vendor lock-in, to the direct deteriment of the user.

Going to be interesting doing a workshop laptop-free for the first time in ages. I'm falling back to old technology — pen and paper.

Was particularly pleased to get the following error today:

I would have been somewhat less pleased if it had happened the next time I rebooted but, fortunately, it all sorted itself out.

A first for me today. I have had an ongoing Silly Ideas wiki running for sometime, but someone finally tried one of them today, namely by Portable Music idea.

Perhaps this will spur me on, as I haven't written up a silly idea for ages.

Took rather a lot of messing around, but I should have an "Everything" page now. The problem was that people kept saying I never posted anything. In reality, it's because the posts were split among four feeds. So, now, there are five!

As it happens, this is was a good thing. I use muse to generate these pages, but I've had to hack it a bit to split the files up — I want to maintain a single source file but then generate out a one per month chunk of HTML.

Muse is quite clever; it works out whether output files are out of date, but assumes that there is only a single file. I'd hacked the code so that it checked all the output files. This never worked well, so I've removed it. Things seem to work better now and there are less changes between the publish function supplied by muse, and the one I overload it with.

Perhaps, I should just take Dan's advice and use a content management system. But, this way I don't need databases and all that malarky.

Part of the infrastructure at Newcastle moved over to the Shibboleth provided by SDSS, at least as far I can tell from the login screen.

It's fabulous. The idea is to provide a federated login so that, at least as far as I can tell, login information is managed at a single point, and allows authorisation at multiple institutions. All of this sounds like a good thing, but they've actually managed to achieve the notable success of making logins harder than it was before.

In the past, I would go to a URL like http://ness.cs.ncl.ac.uk, which is our coursework system, be presented with a login screen, which would login me into the system. Nowadays, I get take to a screen like this:

The purpose of this form is to let me tell the browser to go back to the system that I asked it to go in the first place. There I get another login screen which, to make our life easier, has been nobbled so that the browsers won't remember the logins. It also seems to be crashing a lot now, so that you have to refresh your browser to get it to work.

The help link, incidentally, at the bottom takes you to a page which tells you:

SDSS Development Federation

The SDSS Federation no longer accepts new applications to join the federation. Applications should instead be made to the UK Federation.

Help is not forthcoming.