Arrrghh!!! Why is my BT broadband connection so slow today? Will it ever be fast all the time so I can watch YouTube and BBC iPlayer videos without pauses? For as long as the internet has existed it seems that people have been complaining about how slow it is. When I had a dial-up connection I was complaining about how long it took pictures and pages to load, and now I’m complaining about video streams. I can see myself one day complaining about not being able to get HD video fast enough. Next time I move house I’ll make sure I’m living next door to a main telephone exchange, and then maybe I wont be at the end of an over-stretched data pipe. If I’m spending more and more of my free time watching video on the internet then I guess there must be lots of others doing the same. The BBC iPlayer is a great for watching TV programs you’ve missed. There must be so many people using it, I’m surprised it works at all.

I have a book on success with a quote in it from Jonas Salk: ‘The reward for work well done is the opportunity to do more.’ Sometimes we think the only reward for doing work is financial remuneration, which can be wrong. There are occasions when I don’t always agree with this quote. There are circumstances when work well done does not necessarily lead to more work. For example, at one time I was making scanners for FUJIFILM. They were the very best scanners, but then along came digital cameras and the market for scanners dried up. In another job I was porting computer games to the Apple Mac, but before long, everybody had a Playstation or X-Box and didn’t want to use their Apple Mac to play games. I think, what I’m saying here is, however well you do your job, if you’re not keeping an eye on the competition and market trends it can all be to no avail. If you work hard to produce a wonderful product, but it doesn’t sell very well, then is it work well done? Perhaps the quote, ‘The reward for work well done is the opportunity to do more’, fits more comfortably with the service industries, rather technology companies trying to produce the best product.

I think any sensible investor will have the majority of their assets in boring cash at the moment. Lots of volatility makes investing more like gambling. What can we be certain of? Whenever there is a bust it will be followed by a boom. A bull market with increasing investor confidence will replace a bear market. Over the long term the value of shares tends to increase. What we don’t know is when it’s safe to dip our toes back in the water. The brave investor may try to predict when things have bottomed out. This is like trying to catch a falling knife. The wise investor will be patient like a gardener waiting for spring to arrive. Only when you can see the new green shoots emerging can you be sure that spring has arrived. There might be a few cold snaps on the way, but spring will eventually emerge for the patient investor.

Here is the result of finding a MIDI file on the web of, “Men In Black”, dropping it into GarageBand, and messing around with it until it sounds OK. The free Flash MP3 player can be found at flash-mp3-player.net. The ‘Men In Black’ version was actually a resampled version of a song called ‘Forget Me Nots’, so here is my resampled version of a resampled version. The GarageBand saxaphones sound great and it makes me wish I could play a saxaphone.

A while ago a friend lent me a book on Adobe Flex. The tools used to create advanced web applications that are based on Adobe’s Flash Player. Although I was impressed with a lot of the design concepts using in Flex, I couldn’t find any web application made with Flex that really impressed me. This has now changed. I’m really impressed with Adobe’s Buzzword - a word processor application that works from a web browser. It doesn’t work as smoothly as an application on your own machine, such as Apple’s Pages application, but it does have some advantages. With Buzzword, all of your documents are online, so you can access them from anywhere, and you don’t have to worry about making backups of your documents. Another advantage is that you can easily share and co-author documents. These advantage, could one day mean that advanced web apps become the apps of choice, compared to the apps that live on your computer which always need upgrading.

I’ve been having fun with Inkscape, creating seamless repeatable patterns that people can use for their background on billion7. This one is based on Escher’s lizzards. Each lizzard is on a hexagon, which forms a grid of hexagons. This becomes more apparent when try to see the outline of all of these lizzards together.

I’ve switched off comments on this blog. It just got too annoying having to to delete spam comments every morning, and there weren’t many legitimate comments.

I’d really like to thank Wiserhosting, my hosting company for this site. When the number of people downloading the Red Baron screensaver went through the roof, they increased my bandwidth to 40GB for the month, and they did this for FREE.

I wish all companies were this good. I’ve just been sent a bill for a repair that was partially completed on my boiler about 6 months ago. Pegasus Rural Services in Sherborne really need to get their act together. I told them I wasn’t paying the bill until the work was completed. Sending someone a bill after 6 months is a joke, and they are lucky I’m still living in the same place, otherwise they wouldn’t be getting any money at all.

Due to the popularity of the Red Baron screensaver, my bandwidth quota didn’t last very long.

It is now possible to download the screensaver from www.billion7.com:

www.billion7.com/downloads/RedBaron.zip

There is also an article at www.tuaw.com, where Mike Rose kindly added an alternative download link.

I’ve just submitted details of my Red Baron Screensaver at the Apple Downloads site. I spent a few months working on this screensaver last year, and it’s very exciting to be announcing it now. It was the first time I had done any 3D modeling work. I used Cheetah3D which is a great product. Modelling was only part of the work, and there was a lot of coding, and complicated maths to get the plane and camera modes to work.

The development work was payed for by Niama Media, so if you like the screensaver please check out the official movie website: www.redbaron-themovie.com, and go and see the film, which I believe will be released next month.

I’ve added another tin whistle video to YouTube.