Made Media Ltd. 105 Carver Street, Birmingham B1 3AP
mail@mademedia.co.uk +44 (0)121 200 2627
We hope you all have a wonderful festive break and look forward to seeing (and working with:) you in the forthcoming year!
We will be closed from 1pm on the 22nd Dec but will be open again for business and hangover-nursing from 9am on Wednesday the 27th Dec.
We'll also be briefly closing from 5pm on the 29th and back open on Tuesday the 2nd Jan 2007! So if we don't have opportunity to say it in person in the meantime, we wish you all a fantastic new year.
Having played with most of the Cocoa Dual applications (fun little Christmas apps for charity), here at Made we have a clear winner.
We love the Christmas Lights and Snowflakes but SantaSnaps, a clone of Apple's PhotoBooth with Christmas adornments is just fantastic. A suitable donation will be made shortly.
More pictures of the staff on Flickr.
UPDATE: I'm thrilled to say that service was restored at 8.33pm. Others are not yet so lucky but things are looking good. The Digital Spy Discussion forums have the latest info.
At around 2pm today my TV Drive suddenly took away Soccer Saturday and replaced it with a screen saying "Important: Do not switch off your set top box as it is being updated".
Two hours laters when nothing had changed, it was clear something had gone horribly wrong. After a 40 minute phone queue wait, I was told that this affects EVERY TV Drive user in the country and there is no estimated time to fix. They hope that they can put things right within 24 hours but no promises.
Of course, if they've borked the firmware with a bug-ridden update - and pushed that to every TV Drive in the country then the fix might take a lot longer and be much more expensive...
For updates check out Telewest/Blueyonder status (next update 9pm is the message at the time of writing) and the Digital Spy Discussion forum.
Wonder how long I'll have to wait until I can watch TV again?
You can’t have failed to notice the meteoric rise in spam in recent months. Many commentators characterise the fluctuations in spam rates as an arms race. Spammers come up with new techniques, the anti-spam houses respond with new rules. Just recently the spammers have started winning the race again. The worst of the new breed of spam are image-based, stock scams because they are not susceptible to most common spam-catching techniques. There has also been a rise in advertising for – ahem – ‘upsizing’ products as well as the usual pharmaceuticals.
We know that some of our customers have been struggling under the load recently, and we have been working to improve the situation. We’ve finally brought it under control, to the point where we are now seeing just one or two unwanted emails slipping through the net per day.
If you’re still receiving unmarked spam, just forward it on to: spamcop@mmnet.co.uk. We’ll take a look and see if we can tweak the rules to prevent mail like that from slipping through in the future. At the very least it will be added to our Bayes database.
Forward it on to spamcop@mmnet.co.uk. We’ll recognise that the email has been marked incorrectly, and add it to the ‘good’ Bayes database . This will help to prevent similar mis-identification in the future.
Happily the SpamHaus SBL/XBL list is catching most viruses and phishing schemes before they get near your email account. If one does slip through, the Dr Web service kicks in and isolates the email.
In the spam arms race we’ve just taken the advantage back. Hopefully our clients can breathe a sigh of relief until the spammers come up with something new. We’re also working on some black secret technology to provide the same relief to people who don’t even host their email with us. Watch this space.
We submitted our new Jobs Board Digest widget to Apple just yesterday. We assumed it would take a while to process but no. Browsing our referrers this morning I spotted this.
That's impressively efficient on Apple's part.
Jobs Board Digest continues to grow. We’ve just added a few extra job boards and given the design a much-needed refresh. We’re now providing a combined listing and rss feed for the job boards from:
And, for those of you who appreciate such things there is now a Dashboard Widget too.
It's a small world, cliche, but true. Peripherally scanning newstoday I happened to notice a post to this motion piece, which set a bell going with an odd ring of familiarity. Chritsmas? Japan? Animation? Lee_b? It finally dawned on me that this is the movie we set up space for on our server last week, so our friends at Fluid, Lee and Jonnie could transfer this personal project over to Japan in time! Nice work guys 
If – like me – you don’t know much about wine but you know what you like, and you have a prediliction for full, red fruit with a bit of mellow oak, you might have latched on to Rioja. There’s a lot of it about.
And if you’ve drunk so much Rioja you thought you’d better expand your range you might have caught onto the whispers about Malbec. It’s a traditional Bordeaux variety somewhere between carbernet sauvignon and merlot, known for complex, plummy tones.
Common consensus is that the Argentinians have made Malbec their own. I was lectured at length on the quality of Argentinian Malbec by a financial services backpacker on the Isle of White this summer, so I’ve tried a few over the past few months and it hasn’t really worked out. Over-powering tannins and a leathery oakiness with little fruit-depth has been my general experience.
So I was pretty blown away this evening, when I tried a bottle of Chilean Malbec from Drinksville in Moseley. (You know – next to Sabai Sabai – staffed by the friendly, mysterious lady who once featured in the Eye on Moseley ‘Most powerful people in Moseley’ list.)
The bottle in question is Casillero del Diablo Malbec 2004. It hasn’t won any medals. It’s not on special offer. But I urge you to buy a bottle. An initial inky blackberry and plum hit gives way to a subtle oak with vanilla, and a smoky, peaty edge, remeniscent of an islay single malt. It’s complex.
Give it a go. All Jilly Gooldon pretensions are hereby cancelled. Normal service will be resumed on Monday.
UPDATE: For those of you arriving here via searches, the new NAB07 website has now launched. More here.
We are delighted to be involved once again with the regions premier contemporary art sale.
We designed and produced the branding, site, press campaign and print materials for the event back in 2005. Expect a to see a whole new site early in the new year but you should go there right now to register for info or sign yourself up to be an exhibitor.
If you were unfortunate enough to miss last years show you can find out about the whole thing here.
If you need to manage more than a handful of domains on your own box, and you’re not man enough to do everything the raw way (I’m not), you probably use some kind of virtual host control panel software. At Made Media, we use Plesk. It has its quirks, but it’s one of the best. It’s not cheap though, and you could argue it’s a little over-complex.
But we didn’t get into Open Source to pay for stuff did we?
A bit of aimless web surfing led me to a post on Scripting News, where Dave Weiner reveals that he picked up a Cobalt Cube from eBay for $125. This got me googling for Cobalt stuff.
For the uninitiated, Cobalt were the first company to really push the idea of Linux-based Internet Appliances. While the Cube was a kind of all-in-one Linux-based Exchange equivalent for the tech savvy office, the RaQ was a Web Hosting service appliance. It was pretty-much the fore-bearer of the explosion of data-centre ‘blade’ servers, and also the grand-daddy of hosting control panels like Plesk, Ensim, Cpanel et al. With it you could manage up to 100 websites on a tiny purple box, with a web-based control panel that made it easy to configure domains, and even pass a level of control out to your clients.
Sun snapped up Cobalt in 2000 but didn’t develop the products a whole lot further before discontinuing the line in 2003. By that time the rest of the web-hosting scene had caught onto the idea and were developing similar systems on top of white-box hardware.
And there the story ended. Or so I thought, until I did a bit of googling last night.
It turns out that in a typical exmple of doing the right thing, Sun open-sourced the Cobalt software. A crack team of Japanese hackers have been working on the code ever since, resulting in an Open Source version, Blue Quartz.
Even better, some bright people have got it working on top of CentOS, which is a hardened, community-supported clone of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (which we use on our main webservers at Made). The great advantage of this is that you can use the latest apache, mysql and PHP, and security fixes are a simple ‘yum update’ away.
But ultimately, the thing that really tweaked my interest is that one enterprising Linux Hacker has produced an all-in-one, free combined ISO installer that will install the whole lot on pretty-much any old PC in around 20 minutes.
So from reading Dave Wiener’s post, to having a fully-running, control panelled, reseller web-host box in my spare room took about two-hours all-in. The computer was an ancient 500mhz celeron machine that really needs freecycling. As it happens the fan-noise is irritating so this little project will probably go no further. But for charities, companies on a budget, or just garage enthusiasts this offers a great opportunity to run their own budget web-server in the spirit of open source.