This is a still from an old film called The Sandwich Man, in which Michael Bentine plays a character called Horace Quilby, who spends his days walking around the streets of London wearing a sandwich board.  It's absolutely jampacked with nostalgic '60s views of the West End: Piccadilly, Upper Regent Street, Pall Mall, Trafalgar Square, St James' Park.  Everytime I watch it, (obsessively frequently frankly), I wish I could somehow jump into my TV and wander around to see how the London of 1966 compares to the London I began to know and love myself ten years ago.  So much of the West End as shown in the film looks so familiar, particularly in the more historic parts, yet so much must have been dramatically different then too - no Virgin megastores, no Starbucks, no Burger King.

One scene troubles me, though.  I can genuinely claim to know London's West End like the proverbial back-of-hand, but I just can't work out where this scene was filmed:



From the geographical flow of the film, it should be somewhere between Piccadilly and The Mall, but I can't work out where.  I've even tried analysing the orientation from the direction of the shadows and probable time of day, but no luck!  I can only imagine that it looks very different today; perhaps the public toilet shown in the foreground has been demolished, and the road system reshaped and rebuilt.

Anyone out there recognise this London location?

Anything can happen in the next half hour

[edit: well, I did redesign the site a bit]

I record quite a lot of stuff to minidisk from my DAB radio, and often archive it to CD after editing on my PC.

So, I've just written a shell script to parse sets of audio files, to work out a 'best fit' to put them onto a CDR with the minimum wasted space (I have an anally retentive dislike of leaving more than 2 minutes free space before finalising).

I devised a recursive algorithm which works surprisingly well.  I'd initially intended the shell script to be a prototype for a final version coded in (much faster) C, but in fact it only takes a minute or so to run for a medium-sized list (depending on how soon it finds a fit).  Here's the function that does the hard work:

function fillspace {
# james gibbon 7/2004
typeset -i space=$1
shift
for item in $* ; do
  typeset -i isize=$(echo $item |awk -Fc '{print $1}')
  if (($isize < $space)) ; then
     typeset -i acc=$((space - 1000))
     if (($isize > $acc)); then
       printf "$item / $((space - isize )) \n "
       exit 0
     else
       if (($# > 1)) ; then
         x=$(fillspace $((space - isize)) $(echo $* |tr ' ' '\012' |grep -v $item))
         if (($? == 0)); then
            printf "$item\n$x"
            exit 0
         fi
       fi
     fi
  fi
done
exit 1 }

In the CD player:  The YeahYeahYeahs, PJ Harvey, Amy Winehouse
In the PS2: The Getaway
In the whisky tumbler: the Talisker
In the DVD player: Solaris (the 2002 remake), M*A*S*H (series 2)

Particularly keen readers may have noticed one or two changes to the front page here in recent days - most notably, I've ditched the CSS-based navigation menu.  In well-behaved, modern browsers (Firebird, Mozilla, Epiphany, Konqueror) it appeared as a neat, horizontal bar with menus activated on mouseover, but in IE - which is still, sadly, the most popular web browser - it was all over the place, like a vertical list.  So I've replaced it with a javascript-powered menu, using code written by TwinHelix Designs.  I particularly like this one because it allows you to use your own CSS, so I've been able to style it to my own taste.

I'm not finished yet.  I'm a bit sick of the general design of this page now, so I'm going to make it look a bit more dramatic, somehow.  At the moment, it has the general look and feel of a dull provincial newspaper.

Sad to hear that Sacha Distel has died - many think of him only as an ageing crooner of saccharine Burt Bacharach songs, but in his day he was an accomplished songwriter himself, and composed the old classic The Good Life, recorded by Sinatra and Tony Bennett in the '60s.  He was a jazz guitar player of some note in his time, too.

I bought an X-Micro USB 802.11b stick on Tuesday, to attach my 2nd desktop PC, an old Compaq Deskpro, to my wireless network.  I'd originally wanted to use the PCI card which I pulled out of my main desktop PC after installing my wireless router (to which the main box is now hard-wired) - but the Compaq is too old to support it.



I was slightly apprehensive about getting the USB stick to work under Linux, which (as usual) is not officially supported - but the driver (which I had to download from the net - it wasn't supplied with the product) compiled cleanly with one tiny modification to the source, and after half an hour of tinkering with config files and startup scripts, it's now running happily under Slackware 9.1, so big smiles all round.  It only connects at 11Mbps (my other wireless-attached PCs have 54Mbps interfaces) but it was cheap and it seems to work very well.  A very neat solution.

With the help of one of my fellow students (thanks Ben) I managed to rescue some photos taken on my last trip to London from a corrupted smartcard before reformatting it.  I was particularly pleased with this one, taken not in London but on returning to Derby at sunset, as I leaned out of the window of the train a few hundred metres from Derby railway station:

I've also added a review of Feedback to the Rush reviews.  Have a good weekend! :D

In my late teens, I discovered religion - in the form of devotion to a Canadian three-piece rock band called Rush.  Inevitably - after all they have been recording for thirty years now, and every band has its time - the quality of their material has been going downhill for many years, and they ceased to be relevant a long, long time ago.  But they've released a mini-album of cover versions this week, entitled Feedback - and I'm sad to say they've finally hit rock bottom.  The wheels have finally fallen off the old wagon.

For Feedback truly is awful.  They steam through these old songs like a tasteless, lacklustre covers band, adding nothing to them.  In particular they absolutely crucify Buffalo Springfield's For What It's Worth.  Yet once upon a time they were the most stylish, imaginative, subtle, brilliantly creative, intelligent rock band on the planet.

Anyway, I've collected some of the Rush album reviews I've written and posted on Rush fan sites over the last couple of years, here.

I'm off to listen to Radiohead or the Yeah Yeah Yeahs.