While I was on holiday recently I went on a bit of a reading marathon, which included The Ancestor's Tale, by Richard Dawkins. I just can't recommend this book enough - unless you are a wizened old Biology professor you aren't going to know all of the cool and fascinating things in this book, but you should! Especially in these times of madness where Intelligent Design creeps insidiously through the minds of many. It is literally dripping with footnotes and references to Dawkins's other works and those of other authors (including, obviously, The Origin of Species). The book starts out in the present day and traces back through time, examining each of the points where major groups of species join into our ancestry. This is an entirely arbitrary way to look at it, but avoiding going forward in time removes any problems with language suggesting that there is intent or purpose in Evolution; And it is more convenient to consider us as the main line because we are humans, but the early chapters make it abundantly clear that the structure is humanocentric because it has a human author and that there can be no suggestion that Evolution was leading towards us. One of the most fabulous concepts in the book is actually quite generalised and applies to many areas outside Evolution; It relates to how we view things as discrete objects/groups and dislike gradiated scales (e.g. we like to label people black or white when in reality there is a full range of skin tones and a "black" person can have lighter skin than a "white" person). Dawkins refers to this as The Tyrrany of The Discontinuous Mind and I think it's a very interesting way of looking at things. Sadly this book is not for the faint-hearted, it's a pretty weighty tome and isn't shy about using Biological terminology (almost always with an excellent explanation though). Trust me that it's worth wading through and buy a copy!

Joining the gallery (see links section) now are pictures from Shoreham Air Show (camera battery died, so I didn't get to take pics of most of it) and a holiday with my family to Salou, in Spain.

Mr Madonna, sorry, Guy Ritchie, is back with another film. This time it stars Jason Stratham and is generally about unpleasant londoner types; So no change there for Ritchie. He has an impressive pedigree - Lock Stock is a very very good gangster film and Snatch was a worthy followup, but Revolver is largely nonsense unfortunately. It has a pretty clever idea and some snappy dialogue, but it also has a lot of meaningless rambling and a very strange central message - other reviewers have suggested this is the influence of Madonna's crazy Kabbalah beliefs, which sounds entirely plausible to me. So basically don't bother wasting your money, watch Lock Stock or Snatch again :)

I've been up to things again and finally got around to putting the pictures up. To kick things off we have a gallery of photos from the Jazz Cafe Picnic at Marble Hill in Twickenham (London). It can be found here. On Tuesday I went to London to meet up with adie and we wandered around the Science Museum, saw a 3D IMAX movie and looked round an exhibition of costumes/props from the Hitchhiker's Guide movie. The gallery is here. Finally, as a bit of fun, I found myself in some TV footage from Glastonbury (click on the images for larger and fullsize versions): On the left is the original TV image with us circled, on the right is the same shot, but with us magnified (or rather, the back of our heads magnified)

I spent the weekend just gone in some fields in Herefordshire, at the Eastnor Castle Big Chill festival and it completely rocked :) My photos are in the gallery and tom's are here

I saw Mark Thomas doing a stand-up gig at Concorde 2 in Brighton this evening with Alex, Simon, and Simon and jolly good it was too. The man can certainly express some righteous anger! It wasn't all political ranting (which was still very funny), there was a good mix of humour, some of which went beyond the pale for some of the audience; Along with some excellent anecdotes from various anarchic protests he has taken part in. Two thumbs up :)

I just upgraded to a k750i from a t610 and my initial impression after a few days is that it's a very good phone overall. It's not perfect, but it many of the weaknessesof the t610 are gone or minimised, and new features have been added and integrated extremely well. Visually the phone is quite simple, I have a mostly black one and half of the front is flat clear plastic for the screen, the rest is buttons, which are bigger than those on the t610, but seem like they are quite flimsy and may be easily encouraged to fall off. Time will have to tell on that. The phone has plenty of hardware, too much really. There's a much more detailed display than on the t610, mp3 playback, fm radio, movie playback, movie recording, flash, autofocus... it's all a bit much really. I already have two digital cameras for different occasions, I don't really need a 2 MegaPixel camera in my phone; I do realise that these are "useful" to a lot of people though ;) The shortcut button between the two soft buttons is very nice, being able to quickly pull up the functions you most use can save a lot of menu diving. The thing has a MemoryStick Duo slot too, which is a genius plan really. If you don't already have a little digital camera to keep in your pocket and a little mp3 player to keep in your other pocket, this phone can realistically do the job of both, and save you having a third pocket used by your phone. The Duo cards are pretty cheap and I have seen suggestion that it can support up to 2GB (mine shipped with a 64MB card pre-installed, in addition to the 30-somethingMB onboard). It also seems to have some kind of 3D graphics ability - my Orange branded unit shipped with a Sega tennis game that is in 3D and Alex's one on O2 came with a 3D flight sim of some kind (I don't mean crazy red and green specs, it is rendering a 3D engine ;) The biggest improvement over the t610 and probably the best thing about this phone is the software. It's clearly based at least in concept on that of the t610 (which in turn in herits from the t68 and earlier), but it's much, much faster. Speed has often been a problem for SonyEricsson, text message inputs regularly lag a long way behind even a moderate typer. I was often several menus ahead of mine in general use, which is a serious pain. No more, menus appear much quicker and are able to use the higher screen resolution to display more information, reducing the number of questions you have to answer to perform even the simple task of calling someone. The phonebook is wonderful now; if you start typing it jumps to the letters you press instead of waiting a second; instead of selecting a person and then getting a request to select the number, it now displays the default number and offers a direct call option, then offers horizontal scrolling to select alternate numbers/addresses. Very handy. Also nice is the text message recipient chooser keeping a list of recent contacts. The browser seems to work well, the menus/notices are often animated and pretty, you can have an animated background if you really want. The media player is quite an interesting idea, I am investigating transcoding movies and putting them on memory stick - it'll be interesting to see how the battery stands up to such tests. The supplied USB cable charges the phone; very handy and it also presents the MemoryStick to the host computer as a USB storage device, so it will work with pretty much anything that works with USB memory sticks. It's bloody fantastic to see mobile phone and camera companies adopting this more and more instead of proprietary communication protocols. It makes integration far easier for Operating Systems, as shown by the fact that I connect the phone to my PC running Ubuntu Hoary and it is able to mount the storage drive and notice there is digital camera data there, and offering to import the photos into my albums. Simple things like that make these devices much more rewarding in my opinion (and I'm pretty sure I'm right ;)

Woo! Ok, so the torrential rain and inches of mud were a bit of a pain, but didn't dampen many spirits and the festival was still a lot of fun :) I saw some groovy acts play (Jools Holland, Van Morisson, Royksopp, etc.) and saw some funny sights (the guy in the tent near us who made a habit of walking around naked, for example) and generally communed with hippies for a few days. I hope the 2007 festival is as good, if not better! My pics are here, mooks's are here and Tam's are here

I forgot to mention that I saw The Chemical Brothers live recently. They're touring at the moment, so a few of us caught them at the Brighton Centre (not the best gig venue in the world ever, it has to be said). They rock a bunch :) Up and coming musical happenings are my trips to Glastonbury and Big Chill festivals - expect lots of photos unless some pikey half-inches my camera ;)

I'm quite a big fan of the Zend Studio development environment for PHP - I use it quite extensively at work and generally speaking it's a very capable tool and makes developing PHP a lot easier/quicker. However, it's closed source and quite expensive, which is a bit of a downside, but at the same time it should give me some leverage to get the features I want into future versions, right? Probably not. I've been bugging the Zend support guys about AMD64 support for near enough 10 months now, with little success. Now, this might not seem too surprising, what with it being closed source, but the important difference here is that Zend's Studio is written in Java. Given that Java is supposed to be a platform agnostic virtual machine, precisely why is it that Zend only ship binaries for a few platforms? The answer appears to be that the installer they use to install said binaries on customer machines is a complete nightmare. Specifically they appear to be using InstallAnywhere, which is becoming quite common for installing java programs, especially on Linux. Sadly it has some pretty serious flaws. Firstly it's one of those godawful self-extracting/installing shell scripts, so modifying the installer is exceptionally hard. It also knows almost nothing about AMD64, despite the fact that it ought to be really quite compatible with 32bit code (especially for something as library-free as java) and triggers a lovely glibc bug (set "LD_ASSUME_KERNEL=2.2.5" on an AMD64 machine and then try to run anything ;) So basically that all sucks and anyone using InstallAnywhere is cutting themselves off from potential customers for no particularly good reasons. Obviously I can't accept that, so knowing that Zend Studio is really just a Java program I went at it with a copy of vim and a lot of scribbling notes until I figured out how InstallAnywhere's crazy LAX configuration system worked. With that out of the way I was able to determine that all you need to do to make this thing run *perfectly* on AMD64 is make two tiny changes to two not-so-tiny text files. Simple! Here's how:

1. Install Zend Studio somewhere (a 32bit machine or a 32bit chroot), copy the folder to your 64bit install
2. Look in the directory Studio is installed in (e.g. "/usr/local/Zend/ZendStudioClient-4.0.2/") and edit "bin/ZDE.lax", you need to have "lax.nl.current.vm" point to your 64bit Java VM binary (e.g. "/usr/bin/java").
3. Now edit "bin/ZDE" and comment out the line "export LD_ASSUME_KERNEL=2.2.5"

That should be it, fire up bin/ZDE and you should be hacking PHP in 64bits of goodness (be aware you may need to reconfigure where Zend Studio finds external binaries like cvs - see the ZDE configuration window). Update I've spoken with Zend since writing this and although they are still not committing to supporting AMD64, they did provide me with a handy link to download the Zend Studio installer without the 32bit JVM in it, which (with some work) makes a native 64bit install possible. Hurrah! So, what to do, well firstly you will need the tarball (I'm not going to link to it, ask Zend) and to extract it. This should leave you with a single file called ZendStudio-4_0_2.bin (in the case of 4.0.2, current release at the time of writing). Run the command: cat ZendStudio-4_0_2.bin | sed -e 's/=2.2.5/=a.a.a/g' >ZendStudio-4_0_2.bin.1 Then run "sh ./ZendStudio-4_0_2.bin.1" and the installer should start. Once it has completed you still won't actually be able to start ZDE because the same LD_ASSUME nonsense is going on there, so edit "bin/ZDE". Above I showed the quick and hacky way to make this work - comment out the "LD_ASSUME_KERNEL=2.2.5" - however there is a way that is probably better, so I will encourage you to do this instead... Edit line 1326 so instead of reading simply: if [ `uname` = "Linux" ]; then it now reads: if [ `uname` = "Linux" -a `uname -m` != "x86_64" ]; then and all will be well :o) Update 2 One thing I hadn't noticed because it was working transparently is that not all of ZDE is Java, for example the code analyzer binary in Zend's bin/ folder appears to be a native 32bit binary. These should still work fine if you have some 32bit compatibility libraries installed (Fedora should install these by default on AMD64, Debian based systems may need to install the ia32-libs package).