After Open Science last night, we sat around discussing just what had been said earlier. Tim Hubbard, of the Human Genome Project (who spoke very well) namechecked SimCity, in reference to his desire to get people playing with simulations of the economy. After all, they might turn something up.

I realised that whilst lots of people have played SimCity, myself included, no-one is any good at it. Not one person I can think of had any degree of success with it. We all start idealistically, spending not beyond our means, paying off debts as fast as possible, piling money into public services and education, and then the big space alien comes and zaps us because we have no defence budget. Either that or rioters start fires. It’s a nightmare. Chatting with Alexandra this morning, she suggested the way to succeed was starting huge, massive zoning, huge debts, and thinking in the long-term.

She also pointed out that she did know someone who was good at SimCity: her brother. Alexandra’s brother is autistic. With all this in mind, I’d love to see him set loose on the Budget.

(I also had another idea for making world-economy-sims popular: encode the world economy into the world’s most popular spreadsheet, namely Championship Manager: Man U are China, Leyton Orient are Luxembourg. Its players love the stats, the layers; the model underneath gets changed subtly, the top end doesn’t, and you’ve got the biggest ever machine-farm for experimenting with the economy – with the single exception that Everton are far better than they have any right to be).

To cut a long story short: I’m stuck.

I’ve got PHP installed on my 10.2.8 Powerbook; it’s installed to /usr/local/php, as per the default pkg install from Marc Liyanage. I’ve been trying to get PEAR working with it.

The pear executable is in /usr/local/php/bin. I’ve set this up as a path so I can get at it anywhere. The problem is, when I run, say, pear upgrade-all it downloads all the tar.gz files entirely fine, and then terminates with the following error message:

failed to write /usr/local/php/lib/php/Net/.tmpSocket.php

Thing is, Net as a directory has permissions of 755. I’ve also tried doing this with sudo and get a different, but similar, error. What the hell’s going on? I’m completely lost. And that’s why I ask the Lazyweb for help; I don’t know where to turn.

…and not a word from me. Busy busy. Working on several things, not least of all: having fun and enjoying myself away from this computer. Things being worked on include the new, stunningly improved, version of Infovore, and something currently known as Brahe, a PHP/Magpie based Halo 2 stat parser.

Things currently being enjoyed as influences on Infovore 3.0: dsandler.org, Khoi Vinh’s Subtraction, nixlog, Memo, flickr, del.icio.us, and a few of the usual suspects as points of reference. It’s fun, it’s clean, it’s wide, it has more colour than this one. I’m happy with it and can’t wait to start sorting out individual post pages (the real bummer) and plugging it into Movable Type.

I’m also still technically working on some writing, listening to music (currently loving The Killers’ album Hot Fuss and Out of Season by Beth Gibbons and Rustin’ Man) and meaning to get around to more of my own music. Programming currently on a break but going well; have spent a good while looking at Amazon Web Services today and boggling at potential. REST is wonderful.

Plus I’m going to this talk on Open Science at the ICA tomorrow.

Life is nothing if not action-packed.

Sometimes, the thing that stops me functioning is the wrong space. I need the right space to work.

I haven’t really had that since I moved into this flat; there was this computer table in the corner of the lounge I’ve never really got on with; the wrong height, the wrong corner. But I stuck it out. And it made me hunched and grumpy.

I’ve got a little study now. Well, little is a huge exaggeration; it’s tiny. It’s the corner of a chest of drawers, where if I put a stool up to it, I can work quite happily, and with very good posture, too. It makes me feel a lot happier – the light in this room is better for a start, and the benefits to my posture are huge.

New place to work; new start. I’m reworking infovore for that reason, too. It’s a bit more different than all the other reworks since, you know, last summer. Marginally different structure; more colour, more light. I like the cleanliness, but I’m thinking wider now. Khoi Vin’s subtraction has been a huge influence in this regard.

But it’s not going on show til it’s ready. In some ways, it’s strange; I know that the Photoshop mockup is quite a way along, but I’m just not ready to start hacking that into XHTML and CSS just yet; it’s going to take some time and probably make me tear my hair out a little. I don’t want that just yet. Also, I’m still working on the individual entry pages; trying to do my best with every template, not just the front one. This could be some time in the making, but I’m very pleased with it.

And, I hope, a new design to work in, will make me work better: writing more, uploading more, getting off my backside to post the things I really want to. Once upon a time, I blogged loads, and it wasn’t terrible.

I hope I can get some of that spark back, soon.

Happy 2005. I’ve been quite quiet here because of a few things; a personal project keeping me busy, a hectic couple of weeks at work, and a holiday, away from the Smoke, with friends and family.

And now I’m back, ready to start again, only this time there’s a new number on the calendar. No doubt I will fluff a few cheques in the next week or two.

Anyhow, stuff that’s been keeping me busy and is moderately exciting (and which I should have plugged earlier): firstly, “How to spread the net“, an article I wrote for the New Statesman on web accessibility (mainly looking at the blind), which coincidentally accompanies the launch of the NS New Media Awards 2005 (which this year include an award for accessibility, in all its many forms).

My personal stuff isn’t quite finished yet – but it’s nearly at a stage I can show people – so that will continue to tick over.

Lots of other stuff on the go; all will be revealed in due course. Hope it all turns out OK…

The best quote in this long-ish Livejournal post and threads (in which a programmer asks” please explain PHP to me) is this: “PHP sucks as a programming language as much as HTML sucks as a display description language. Somehow, they are both absolutely suited for the task at hand. ”

It’s all about keeping it sloppy, and it’s exactly why I love them both at the moment. Sure, there are other more appropriate tools at times, and I am as convinced as the next man of the sea of average-at-best PHP hackers out there… but when it shines, it can really be quite something. Anyhow, that quotation spoke to me a lot (and it’s a good-ish, if a bit snobby, discussion), so I thought I’d share.