Alex Muller

On the train back to York from Last.fm’s Hack Day last year, Alice introduced me to pixel art (her post on Guess Who is a great example of this style). At the time, I remember making some comment about how she’d effectively ruined my degree because making pictures of people from dots of colour would be my life from then on. To be honest, it never really caught on with me – I think I’m just naturally crap at drawing people.

However, that’s all just changed. I found a thread on a music site entitled "MS Paint Your Favorite Album", encouraging users to recreate the front covers of iconic or important albums (to them) using the standard Paint included with Windows.

If you’ve got thirty minutes or an hour spare, it’s a really great way to spend some time. I wanted something simple to start with, and I think this turned out pretty well.

So, give it a go: Microsoft Paint if you’re on Windows, the open source Paintbrush if you’re on a Mac. No layers, no fancy text tools, no nothing. Brush, line tool, eraser… and get to it, without forgetting to post the results somewhere.

It’s the day before exams start here at university, so needless to say I’ve got my priorities straight and am messing around with things on my blog.

There’s been big discussion on the Internet for a few weeks now, I think, on rev=canonical. If you need to get up to speed, take a quick look at Jeremy Keith’s post titled Revving up. I’ll wait, it’s ok. You can even skim or speed read if you’re desperate to get back here.

So, the benefits should be obvious. Providing short URLs from a domain that you have control of, so as not to rely on a third party service. That’s how I interpret it, anyway. It’s important to note that big sites like Flickr are already implementing this, taking links like http://www.flickr.com/photos/alexmuller/3473217214/ and turning them into http://flic.kr/p/6hV9tq. Cool stuff, definitely.

I have an incredibly short attention span. There, I said it. If you’re like me, with the concentration of a tired racoon, here’s what you need to do. Readers, consumers, everybody: grab the rev=canonical bookmarklet created by Simon Willison and use that to find short URLs before other services. Creators, bloggers, people with a website: if you’re using WordPress, install the WordPress rev=canonical plugin which will provide shortened URLs for your blog or site. Everybody’s trying to reduce the impact that linkrot could have, one step at a time.

And there you have it. Every article on this blog now has a short(er) URL, which you can find using the bookmarklet I linked above. Those links will be good for as long as this blog is around, which is potentially longer than URL shortening services. The link for this post is http://mullr.net/blog/pap.

Small update

The plugin broke fairly soon after I implemented it this morning, possibly because of a 301 redirect I have going on from mullr.net to alex.mullr.net. Duncan Robertson, the plugin’s author, replied to my plea for help within half a day with a fix for the issue, so massive thanks to him. I’m sure an updated version will be released on his site that sorts this problem.

I took the photo below as a bit of a joke (hey, Vaio stickers are a joke… right?) but it’s interesting to have a record of the "old" Google Reader which was on my screen at the time. When it recently changed, I remember quite a few people complaining at how the layout seemed less intuitive; now, of course, I’d easily vote for the new, cleaner look.

Sometimes, I guess you just have to get through a few days or weeks of your users complaining at change – especially in this fairly new space of constantly evolving online software. And other times, the change isn’t so great and your users might actually have valid concerns (hey, Facebook, look over here).

Here’s hoping Tweetie for Mac fills the void.

I’ve had a few issues with my Virgin Media cable connection over the last few days, and wanted to write about it here. We’re in a pretty difficult position at home: as Virgin have a monopoly on the UK cable market, and we can’t have ADSL over our phone line, we have to stick with them no matter what. I’d never tell them that to their face, of course…

So, our connection died at about 4pm on Monday afternoon. I called up their support number at 9pm and got put through to India. I was asked to reboot the modem, and when it didn’t work again I was told we could wait for it to be sorted, or book an engineer.

I decided to sleep on it, and called them back on Tuesday daytime (again, Indian call centre). Again, I had to reboot the modem, and was told to disconnect my Apple router because they couldn’t support that. She didn’t sort the problem – when I tried to get her to report an issue (open a ticket, have an engineer look at it on their end), all she’d say was the stock line: "I’ve checked the system, there are no issues in your area."

I was out all day Wednesday, but called them back that night. I was put through to John in Swansea; whatever Virgin are paying John, it isn’t enough; VM should be proud to be employing somebody so competent. He did some tests straight away on my modem, saw some strange power fluctuations, and said immediately that it needed an engineer to look at it. He booked one for Monday, commented on how their internal support systems are so slow, and let me off the phone.

At 1pm today (Thursday), I got a text saying they’d fix the problem within eight hours and that they’d cancelled my engineer. At 4pm, I received a voicemail saying the problem was sorted. I don’t know whether John was correct that my modem needs looking at, but if so… it can happen some other time. The connection’s working fine now, and I’m happy.

Here’s the interesting thing (to me): I was really pissed off on Tuesday afternoon. Truthfully, I was incredibly pissed off until I spoke to a UK call centre. Quality of phone support is so important, and I hope Virgin aren’t moving more of their operations out of the UK. That’s the kind of thing that, in the long run, would lose us as customers. And finally, to the people behind @virginmedia on Twitter: what you’re doing (openness & pretty immediate availability) is really cool… please keep it up.