Offmessage

Sorry - couldn’t resist it… Seriously though. The ICC has published the full text of Hair’s “resignation” email and it doesn’t make for a pretty read. This is not an email of a man under stress in difficult times, this is the email of an arrogant customer who honestly believes that he *is* the law, let alone above it.

At least this gives everyone a way out of this mess. Previously, wherever public opinion stood, it was going to be very hard for the ICC to hang him out to dry and let Pakistan off the hook; despite that being the only real course of action. Now, suddenly, Hair has thrown himself on his sword (albeit apparently unwittingly) and the world’s cricket authorities can breathe a collective sigh of relief and start the process of vilifying Hair and forgiving Pakistan (whether either deserve it or not).

Not offers to resign, mind, but offers to resign for $500,000. Fire him.

While I sold mine for entirely family reasons (you try getting a pram in the boot or a child seat in the back of one of those things… you can, but it gets seriously annoying in no time) I wasn’t entirely sad to see it go for other reasons either. The petrol consumption was ludicrous (some tanks I got 9 miles to the gallon, the best I ever got was a trip to the lake district in heavy traffic where i was forced to average about 50 miles an hour and I got 17 mpg) and I’ve never had to put so much oil into a vehicle since my two stroke moped. Still, hearing that nearly all RX8s need to be recalled to possibly have their engine replaced makes you wonder about that engine all the more. That fuel and oil consumption just wasn’t up to it in a car of that type. Doesn’t make me love my Focus any more though

So. More random sleevenotez related posting, but this time rather different. We’re also using the Flickr API to identify photos of the band that you’re currently using. It’s rather cool, but also rather hit and miss… I’m currently listening to Contact by Contact right now, and these two photos came back…. 1 and 2. Nice, but not really photos of the band…

Sometimes things just happen in the right order…

As mentioned previously we are working on a new service called Sleevenotez. One of our main concerns is that, like all prospective web applications, we don’t have an awful lot of budget for hardware. People will only invest in the hardware once they know the service is going to be worthwhile, yet we may never achieve critical mass if the system is underpowered (and thereby slow) from the start.

Doug and I have been muttering for a while about the fact that one of Google or Amazon should provide application hosting. With Amazon S3, Google Code and the like it seemed to us natural that one of them should make a grab for the app hosting market - it’s the obvious next step.

Anyway - our work on Sleevenotez makes heavy use of the Amazon API. Yesterday Amazon announced E2 (Elastic Compute Cloud Service) - their application hosting environment. They only invited a relatively small number of developers to trial it and because this last week we’ve been hammering their API we were one of those lucky few. Suddenly our server infrastructure/public alpha problem may well go away. Read about how Doug’s getting on with putting an Ubuntu image running Twisted up on E2 over at the Sleevenotez blog…

Dear God. Does using a ‘z’ count?

First Vaughan’s career appears to be over, and now we’re being none too subtly prepared for Freddie’s departure…

…but I thought you should share my frustration.

Lawrence Booth is generally a man I agree with. His weekly ‘The Spin’ column for the Guardian is vital reading. He’s paid full time to commentate on the state of cricket, so I shall leave it to him to sum up ‘Ovalgate’ rather than keep posting little snippets myself…

[…] Instead, Hair insisted on the application of the letter of the law, the ICC predictably stood by their man, and a chain of events was set in motion that could yet rock cricket to its foundations. Whether or not Pakistan tampered with the ball, this will be remembered as the Test that was ruined by the intransigence of one man.

Tube Journey Planner vs. Google Maps mash up.