I just got a new 22″ Samsung monitor for the Vista PC and it looks terrific. Previously I had 19″ Phillips and the extra 3″ looks like an extra 6″. I can run World of Warcraft at 1680 x 1050 and it’s pin sharp.

I finally got iTunes working OK on Vista and 40,000 tracks, podcasts and movies are loaded OK and the iPod is also recognised. Heaven knows why that took so long. I also bought a Logitech Quickcam Sphere (webcam) which has motorised tracking. What that means is that the camera follows your face around, which sounds a bit spooky. I tried testing it but the sunlight was blasting through the windows so fiercly that the auto lighting was getting confused. I think it needs setting up without sunlight.

I mentioned to someone at work the idea of creating a wiki to be used for some basic documentation, initially. They sounded a little interested so on Sunday I thought I’d see of I could download the software and knock up a demo. I hoped that I could download just a client piece of software and then get on with it but it needed a few more steps than that. I did download Mediawiki, which is the software that Wikipedia uses (No trouble with scaling then. Ed) and did some reading and realised I needed my XP PC to act as a server. I downloaded Apache and got that running as a server. Then downloaded PHP and installed that and finally MySQL which I installed. I was a bit worried about the MySQL as that was most likely to go wrong. Anyway I installed it, created a root user and password, a username and password, created a database. Then I installed Mediawiki and pointed that at the MySQL database.

I don’t think there was any security on much of that setup but having wired it all up I started Mediawiki and the darned thing only worked. (Really? Ed). I entered a test entry into my created wiki and it was saved and redisplayed. Now all I have to do is reverse engineer all of that to try and understand why it worked.

The demonstrations in London yesterday were quite close to where I work but didn’t affect us at all. There were no cars, trucks, buses or cabs around as they’d scarpered in case they got stuck somewhere. The absense of them makes the City look so good somehow. I did check on the demo’s later but all I could see was a sea of florescent yellow jacketed cops rounding up a bunch of ‘we have the streets’ yelling protesters. Hmm…

A friend of mine told me that he’d just been made, the previous evening at an awards ceremony, the sports writer of the year. I was impressed.