The lightweight Mozilla browser has been renamed to Firefox and a new version has been released. Looks good too!

The big plan for the weekend was a suprise trip to London to celebrate Georgina’s birthday. I had planned a meal and then a show followed by meeting friends. I booked with lastminute.com and when we got to the restaurant, the restaurant had no record of our booking and checked with the Theatre who also had no record. :(

The manager of the Rock Garden restaurant was wonderful and gave us a very large discount on our meal there to make our day special. We were very very impressed and will definitely be goin back there! The meal was really good too with great service and finely cooked food, so the day wasn’t a disaster fortunately.

I am very unhappy with lastminute.com though and now need to get a refund out of them!

It’s Friday! I ended the week on a high with us meeting a deadline and getting a prototype to the customer. The main focus of this week’s work was a search system and I have to say that it works remarkably well. What I’m most pleased about is that I didn’t do it! All I did was spec up the workings and ship it out to our developers in India who then returned code that I integrated. Very nice, on time and gave me time to ensure that the site that went live yesterday worked as the customer intended.

Today is Georgina’s birthday! Jon thought it was his though and wanted to open Georgina’s cards for her.

Cutest moment of the day was Jon singing Happy Birthday!

Got my new Linux desktop actually doing stuff today and have been almost productive. I’ve installed Mozilla Firebird so have a decent web browser :) I looked at Konqueror, the default browser that comes with KDE and was quite impressed, but it has no password manager…

I’ve looked at Quanta for my development needs; it looks quite good, but I’m not sure if it’s not just easier to use Emacs ;)

I’ve installed Linux on my work PC. It’s been a while since I’ve used Linux on the desktop and it’s certainly come a long way since fvwm!

Obviously, having had time to think about it, Chris Lightfoot has put together a very well thought out piece on our old friend Hutton. I think I’ll read this blog more often – nice to see some balance out there in blogland.

It’s been a “bitty” day where stuff has got done, but I don’t feel like I’ve been very productive :(

One highlight was that Jon got a new ball today that needed inflating. However we don’t have a pump to do that, so I went down to Halfords to buy one. The nice man if Halfords offered to just inflate the ball though, so that was nice and easy and didn’t require any expenditure :)

I put up a border around the top of Jon’s new room today and steamed-cleaned the carpet. It’s all done bar moving his furniture in :)

Harry’s Place has a great article called “Time to save the BBC”.

A couple of choice quotes:

The BBC is necessary because, unlike all other media outlets, it is accountable to us, the viewing public, rather than billionaire owners or corporate advertisers.

and

Look at some of the appalling acts committed by malign news owners in the past decade. Rupert Murdoch has censored even his most respectable news outlet – The Times – from reporting Chinese human rights abuses, because it was inconvenient to his plan to extend his interests into the heart of the Chinese Empire. Or look at the late, unlamented Conrad Black, who promoted a fierce right-wing agenda amenable to the uber-rich when he owned The Daily Telegraph. As one of his former editors, Max Hastings, put it, Black is “seldom unconscious of his responsibilities as a member of the rich man’s trade union”. Do we want the editors of our news accountable to them, or to licence payers?

The comments are worth a read too!