Hello from a campsite in Sidmouth! I’m clinging to the side of a reasonably steep hill in the Devon countryside. If it tips down with rain here I don’t know how anybody is going to get out

Unfortunately, things aren’t going well. Firstly I went to the Bulverton Marquee on Friday night, which is just a climb from the campsite. I was there to watch/photograph the excellent Mawkin, a band I met back at the Cuckoo pub back near Chelmsford. The programme was supposed to start at 8pm, but didnt kick off till 8.30. Which was lucky as I took ages to climb that hill

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Onspeed is a tool for speeding up web access. This is useful if you are on GPRS (i.e. pay on bandwidth services) as it uses compression to reduce the size of web and email transfers.

I tried it out last year as I do a lot of GPRS access, but found that web pages are still too expensive to really use, and email can be screened using download headers. It was also incompatible with the anti-virus I was using at the time.

Around Xmas it started popping up an alert window telling me to pay to upgrade to get a better version. Every time I connected. So I removed it, and found the web browsers seemed to start up quicker.

But the most annoying part is the email I just recieved saying that the year of service is up. They were going to bill automatically. If my card details had changed I could click a link and change them. To cancel though you have to phone up to their national rate number. In fact:

Please note: to cancel your automatic renewal, you must call ONSPEED. Requests via e-mail, fax or post will not be actioned.

Well thats lovely isn’t it. I sign up online but can’t cancel on line. I spent 5 minutes waiting in a queue to cancel this. I could write them a letter but they will IGNORE it.

Think carefully. Do you want to want to get involved with a company that doesn’t respond to written requests to stop charging you?

Last year, the UK Film Council announced that it was spending £11.7m of lottery money installing digital film projectors in 209 cinemas.

In return for the new equipment, the cinemas have committed to providing more screening time to showing a greater selection of more specialised (ie non-Hollywood), classic, and foreign language movies.

That was over a year ago. So what has happened? My local cinema hasn’t expanded it’s range of films yet.

*update*
I emailed the UK Film Council and recieved this response:

Odeon Southend falls into the South East section of the DSN rollout, which means we anticipate the installation should take place towards the end of this year.

Pictures from the launch gig from the 17th March 06 with Kids Choir 2000 featuring Hayley Okines have been uploaded, there are more to come. The colours and general image quality for these are pretty bad, this is due to the stage lighting being almost totally red. To the human eye this can look fine as the brain adjusts (google chromatic adaption or von Kries adaption) but there is a limit to what electronics can do to recover. This goes way beyond what camera White Balance controls can compensate for.
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I was working through some errors with my AJAX application running on Opera and found a problem parsing the JSON response from the server. Testing things out I found that this script won’t work in Opera 8.53, but does in IE & FF.

var f = eval( “( { 1337: ‘Hello World’ } )” );
alert( f[1337] );

The problem is that Opera doesn’t seem to like the fact that the PropertyName ( 1337 ) is not an Identifier. This is a spec violation as having NumericLiteral as PropertyName inside ObjectLiteral is valid, see ECMA-262 3rd Edition Page 158.

Note this is unrelated to the bug below about Opera and evalScripts().
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Prototype is a great JS library for building your AJAX enabled web pages and I am using it in a project I am working on. However when I was testing my application inside Opera 8.53 one of my little interactive widgets stopped working. The problem was due to the widget downloaded a little piece of extra scripting capability which needed to be added to the page, so evalScripts was being called from the AJAX responder. But this was doing nothing inside Opera.

Don’t ask me what the problem is, but I have got round it, here is the quick fix in case anybody else needs it.
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Photos from the recording session with Hayley and Kids Choir 2000 have been uploaded. I had wanted to upload the full size images but it came to over 700mb!

Hayley is a lovely little girl that unfortunately has an extremely rare genetic condition called progeria. Jane Winiberg & Mark Street wrote a song in aid of progeria research called “Voices of Tomorow” and I was there to capture some photos of Hayley recording with the choir and on her own in a studio setup. For more information on Hayley see http://hayleyspage.com

The bad news I talked about in the last post is finally over. My mum died of cancer yesterday. She had lung cancer that had spread to the spine and head. The spinal cancer had caused spinal cord compression, leaving her unable to walk and with very little feeling from the waist down. We got her home from the hospital for about three weeks where her condition seemed to make no progress, but went downhill rapidly from about last friday. Her last good day was Monday where she seemed quite with it, then spent most of the time sleeping.

I’d like to thank all the friends who have supported me through this and continue to offer their friendship and kindness.

Ok so I’ve been a little lax in going away, but just as I’ve been getting ready a couple of *very* bad situations have popped up, so it looks like I will be here for a while at least.