people sometimes ask me why I won't shop at Tesco

from today’s Guardian

Tesco is quietly building a profile of you, along with every individual in the country – a map of personality, travel habits, shopping preferences and even how charitable and eco-friendly you are. A subsidiary of the supermarket chain has set up a database, called Crucible, that is collating detailed information on every household in the UK, whether they choose to shop at the retailer or not.

read the full article here.

I always wonder why people are so happy to have store cards …

this weekend …

I have been mostly writing code. Not for clients, but for myself.

for a long time, I’ve wanted a way to track the recipes I use – I have a lot of cookbooks, loads of URLs file away, and can never find what I want. I also wanted a way to look through my recipe resources for given ingredients.

I know there are software products about that do this, but none of them did what I want, so I’ve been meaning to write one for *ages*.

and yesterday I made a start on it – I have ColdFusion talking to Amazon’s web services, and pulling data straight onto web pages, I’ve adapted some code we had to do the tagging thing, and I’m extremely pleased with myself (preens).

it’ll be a long time before it sees the light of day – there’s a lot more to do, lots of data to enter, and £920* odd to find to upgrade our ColdFusion to the latest version . But it must be done, and so I’m writing this stuff as a sort of test case; parsing the Amazon API stuff would be a hideous nightmare in our version of CF.

* or about £740 if you bought it direct from Macromedia US. But they won’t allow you to if you’re in the UK. Bastards.

what I haven’t done this weekend is what I should have been doing, i.e. doing some Extreme Housework before kalunina comes to stay – briefly – on Thursday, before we all trundle up to geoffcampbell‘s for the bank holiday weekend. And I have a load of stuff to do work-wise this week.

it’s probably extremely sad that I’d rather code than go out and enjoy the sunshine …