Enjoyed this BBC4 program on the history of Factory with lots of interviews with Tony Wilson, Peter Saville, Vini Reilly, Shaun and Paul Ryder, Stephen Morris, Peter Hook and Bernard Sumner. So many amusing anecdotes and quotes: New Order insisted on playing live on TOTP and, unusually, ‘Blue Monday’ promptly fell down the charts thanks to their abysmal performance (Sumner’s appalling vocals). Martin Hannett’s unconventional approach to production: ‘He used to piss the drummer off so he would hit the drums harder.’ ...

The problem with installing typo is that, during the research for hints and tips to get the software installed, configured and running on a shared server environment at Bluehost, you Google across like-minded obsessives individuals who have also successfully installed typo in 30 seconds flat. These people are technical types who sneer at PHP and lie awake at night, worrying about Ruby’s scalability. These geeks tend to be obsessive characters who have now tired of typo and have subsequently migrated to a brand new exciting platform called django. ...

I have upgraded this blog to the recently released WordPress 2.3. However, I have deep rooted concerns that the new tagging functionality will simply overload my tiny brain. The WordPress upgrade went smoothly enough although the editor now reports a missing table (wp_post2cat) which is slightly irritating. Also, I sense increasing disquiet amongst some long standing, intelligent and loyal WordPress users so I took the precaution of installing YABP (Yet Another Blog Platform). Please put your hands together and welcome Typo (powered by a delightful lady called ‘Ruby on Rails’). ...

I’m not normally a sucker for these free, pyramid style, link exchange schemes to drive more traffic to your blog but as simply everyone is not just talking about it but actually doing it, I thought I’d better add BlogRush to this blog. Now, I must hurry into town and join the lengthy queues at Northern Rock to withdraw my 1 million pounds life savings. To be honest, I think this media fuelled panic is a little overblown and as I have a contrarian investing style, I have just purchased £5,000 worth of NRK shares at £3.10 waiting for the ‘dead cat bounce’. ...

I like Robert Scoble. While I don’t always agree with him and I have a love-hate relationship with his laugh, his blog is worth reading and he posts some varied and interesting videos but one thing is obvious. The guy has a real passion for technology and writing. On occasions, he is subjected to vitriolic comments, hurtful criticism and abuse that is completely unjustified but he calmly takes it all in his stride and rarely retaliates. ...