Live8 : G8 : Particip8

Just finished watching the Live8 concert here in the UK. Whilst events of this kind in themselves don’t change anything they can however help to raise awareness. As far as we know humans evolved in Africa so it’s about time we recognised the the importance of the birthplace of humanity and did everything in our power to halt the grotesque suffering that goes on their daily. We’ve all read the statistics and seen the reports 30, 40, 50% of some countries populations with HIV-AIDS whilst we in the west have the drugs and the technology to help, the 21st century, and people still dying of starvation. We all know this should not be, but what can we do? we may be on the brink of something quite momentus, that is politicians actually doing what we elect them for…..listening to the people and acting on our behalf. It remains to be seen if Tony Blair and Gordon Brown can deliver and persuade the others to do the right thing, but I think, if people keep up the pressure on our politicians we may actually start to see a difference in our world.

march past Gleneagles hotel
makepovertyhistory
Live8Live
Live8 from BBC news
march in Edinburgh
g8alternatives
G8blog

Google & Gmail

Found this cheat sheet on Google to help with searches, always useful as I can never remember these operators.

If you have a GMail account here’s an excellent tool that allws you to uses your 1Gb allocated storage as a virtual drive. Files are stored in your Gmail account as email attachments.

If you don’t have a Gmail account why not get invited to open one. Many people with Gmail accounts are allocated invitations to hand out to others so they can open an account. If you are lucky enough to know someone who has some invitations, great, if not then go to isnoop.net where you can pick up an invitation which has been donated.

The Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

Douglas Adams was in in advanced talks about bringing the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy to the big screen when he died suddenly in 2001. However the film has finally made it and will be released in the UK on 29th April. There is an excellent trailer on the official site, but there’s an even better bonus trailer narrated by Stephen Fry. The Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy started life as a radio programme, which was excellent. Douglas also wrote a series of brilliant books. There was a BBC TV series in 1981 based on the first 6 radio shows, but this was rather low budget (ala Dr. Who), however, the books were fantastic. From what I’ve seen of the film it looks really good although there does seem to be a certain amount of Americanisation, which is to be expected since the backers are probably American. I really hope they have managed to retain the unique Douglad Adams humor in the film.

MySQL and PHP

I recently managed to get the server for my work web site upgraded to handle PHP and MySQL. I am used to MS Access databases and so MySQL was quite new to me and I found the administration of the database through MyPhpAdmin quite foreign. I searched for some free MySQL admin tools and found a great one in MySQL-Front This gives a much more familiar front to the database. I also had the problem of having a number of MS Access databases which I needed to convert to MySQL, I did this by using the MyODBC driver for Access, but on a few occasions this process caused MS Access to crash. So I searched again for an easier way to do this and came across another MySQL administrator called Navicat although this is not free ($95) it does look great. As well as being a front end to MySQL database it can also import MS Access databases, so all the functions I need in one tool.