http://www.catmosearts.co.uk was launched today, it’s the web site I’ve been working on for a long while at work (alongside my other work) and promotes the Theatre and Gallery.

Events
This is the clever bit which I’ve described here before I think. A calendar application which uses the iCalendar specification and supports WebDAV is used to add an event. The calendar is published to the web server where it is stored as a .ics file. On the web site the .ics file is then parsed by a hacked version of the phpicalendar parser and a section of it is turned into an RSS feed of sorts, which is then used by some functions I’ve written in conjunction with magpierss to generate the final web pages based on templates. It all amounts to a web site whose content is managed using a simple calendar application on someone’s (hopefully not my) desktop.

Directory
This is a simple MySQL database of local arists and arts groups.

Standards
The site is XHTML and CSS validated. The only minor thing I haven’t done yet is write a text only version of the front page, because (usefully) that’s really the only bit which doesn’t transform gracefully into text only.

In other news…
I got 10 Ubuntu CDs through the post yesterday (mixture of x86, AMD64 and PowerPC), and I’m very impressed with Hoary. I did try and do a day’s work using the Live CD on the eMac I use at work, but I soon ran out of RAM 😛 I especially like the simple view of the Synaptic Package Manager and the “Search for files” functionality but there’s a lot more going for it than that.

I’ve ordered a Dual 2.8 Xeon (yes, 64 bit) Dell rack mounted server at work to be my new testing web server with 1Gb of RAM. Mmmmm. As sarge is now finally frozen I think I’ll stick that on it, but I’m still very tempted to try out Ubuntu on a server platform. We’re rackmounting *everything* in the server room this summer (so there’ll be Windows, Mac and GNU/Linux servers all in the same rack), hope they get along OK, especially as they will all be sharing a 12-way KVM switch for when VNC breaks 😀

The Film (there are no real spoilers here but you might want to reserve judgement until you’ve seen the film for yourself)

lauperr and I went to see H2G2 (the film) last night.

If you’re one of those people who get’s annoyed when you go to see a film which is based on a book and it turns out to be very different to the book, then you’re probably not going to like it. However, I don’t think you can really apply that logic to Hitchhikers because it isn’t just a book, it’s a radio show, a book, a TV show, a video game and now a film.

Each version tells the story differently and the film is no different in that respect. It doesn’t ruin the experience for me at all, it’s almost like you’re just watching a parallel dimension which callously disregards all other dimensions and does its own thing. It’s great 😀

I wasn’t particularly impressed by the liberal sprinkling of American accents, but the British humour was left well and truly intact. I can’t help but think that the film would have been better had Douglas Adams still been around, but it was still good enough to be a fitting tribute to him and his work.

If you’ve read the books you’ll probably think that the involvement between Arthur and Trillian is too much and the Vogons pop up in places they shouldn’t, but the storyline generally worked well.

Some of the settings were exactly how I imagined them, Arthur lying in front of the bulldozer and the air lock on the Vogon ship were spot on. The big planet-making factory floor was quite good, Marvin didn’t look how I expected but the voice and personality were perfect! Zaphod and Ford were nothing like I imagined, Trillian was OK, Slartibartfast was played well (though he didn’t look how I imagined) and Arthur was very good.

I’ll be buying it on DVD. Just don’t go into the film wanting it to follow the books religiously and wanting to hear all of your favorite quotes because you’ll be disappointed. The only thing that caused me great disappointment is that I want to see more! I do hope they do the rest of the books, but I suppose that will be determined by ticket sales this time around. So go buy some tickets.

The Audience

When the credits started rolling and the lights came up I noticed all the smiling people who had just watched the film and I thought that would make DA happy. I also noticed that the audience seemed to comprise of two main groups – mothers and children, and geeks. In fact, we managed to follow a huddle of 7 geeks (what’s the correct collective noun for geeks?) to Franky and Benny’s where we’d planned to have a meal.

Hello all
Firstly, hello to my new readers. It’s a weird feeling when I keep hearing that people who I know but would never expect to look at my web site have been reading my blog.  This includes elderly relatives, people I’ve not seen for years and people from work who I don’t know that well.

It’s silly that I’m publishing my thoughts to the entire world yet I’m suprised when I hear that someone I know is reading them! I’d say that I’ll have to be careful what I write from now on, but that would also be silly.

“New ALUG member”
Congratulations to quinophex and wildduck on their new baby girl. They’ll make great parents 😀

Google Goes Local
Lastly, Google Maps, Google Local and related SMS services have gone live in the UK and I’m extremely impressed. They found the closest place I can order a pizza from and my nearest computer shops as first hits, I’m almost sure there was a half-built bypass down the road from me on Google Maps and the SMS stuff is really very useful. Oh and I think it’s tracking where taxis are in real time.

IEE Magazine
It must make me a real geek but I’ve just been reading the Electronics, Systems and Software magazine the IEE sent me and I found it really really interesting.

If this counts as a meme, it’s the first one I’ve ever done. I was curious…

Who should I vote for?

Your expected outcome:

Green

Your actual outcome:

Labour -22
Conservative -38
	Liberal Democrat 62
UK Independence Party -1
	Green 39

You should vote: Liberal Democrat

The LibDems take a strong stand against tax cuts and a strong one in favour of public services: they would make long-term residential care for the elderly free across the UK, and scrap university tuition fees. They are in favour of a ban on smoking in public places, but would relax laws on cannabis. They propose to change vehicle taxation to be based on usage rather than ownership.

Take the test at Who Should You Vote For

Web Development Woes

At work the plan was to launch the new site after Easter. Following a hardware failure over Easter, last week we ordered a new motherboard for the web server only to find out it was the CPU that was faulty.

On Monday I learnt lots of things about why design-by-committee doesn’t work, which lead to my first real conflicts with anyone in my job so far. It was comforting to find that some developers I met in Birmingham last night had just had a very similar problem, wasting 4 months work.

Last night the hard disk in the web server died and I spent a large portion of the day today transferring the entire Debian installation and data to another hard disk. Now I find out that an entire extra database and front end needs writing before the launch, which is supposed to be this week.

This project is cursed.

OpenAdvantage Seminar

Last night I took a train to Birmingham for a free seminar on Open Source Content Management Systems which was really very good. The work OpenAdvantage are doing in the West Midlands is brilliant and there was lots of interesting discussion going on.

I find the intricate process of geek mingling at these types of events very amusing.

Private wiki as a brain extension

After installing a wiki for LLUG, In a kind of paradoxal move I’ve installed a private wiki on my home web server which I’ve been using as a kind of open canvas project management tool. It’s been especially useful for putting some structure into my personal research which has otherwise been rapidly filling a dead tree notebook in a very messy fashion. Wikis seem to be good for situations where a more formal structure for data is too restrictive and prohibits the flow of ideas.

I’ve got to have one of these to ride to work on.

During mine and laura’s trip to Woburn Safari Park over easter, a lemur decided to sleep in my arms. It curled up and sucked its thumb for a very long time and I had real trouble pursuading it that I had to go. Photography by lauperr. It has been suggested that the Lemur sensed that I am a hairier, less evolved version of a human being and I would therefore make a good friend. Or at least a warm place to sleep.

lemur3.mov (6.1Mb)	lemur4.mov (2.5Mb)

lifehacker reports Google for H4x0r5 and other novel languages including Klingon.

Yahoo! releases Creative Commons Search beta

I was going to write about a lemur here but I haven’t managed to get hold of the pictures yet.

This post originated as an email to the LLUG (http://lincs.lug.org.uk) mailing list but I thought I’d stick it here too.)

I use Ubuntu on my desktop and powerpc laptop and I used Debian on web servers. As well as The Linux Documentation Project (http://tldp.org/) I’ve found a couple of web sites with a wealth of information specific to these distributions that you may or may not have heard of.

The Unofficial Ubuntu 4.10 Starter Guide
http://www.ubuntuguide.org/

This web site details how to achieve many of the most common tasks required of a Desktop PC in Ubuntu Linux and also covers topics relevant to running a server. I’ve constantly referred to this site since I’ve started using Ubuntu.

A Debian Grimoire
http://deb.riseup.net/

I’ve only come across this one very recently but it looks great. It covers setting up a lot of the main services a Debian GNU/Linux server commonly offers including a Web Server, Mail Server, List Server Databases and Backup. I’m not sure how up to date it is and it doesn’t seem to indicate which release of Debian it most applies to. I’m assuming Woody, can anyone tell me otherwise?

New Releases
The next couple of months are going to be a very interesting time. The next six monthly release of Ubuntu codenamed Hoary Hedghog is due very soon, as is the transition of Debian Sarge to stable (finally). I believe the next version of Open Office is not too far away and slightly off topic, Apple will be releasing OS X Tiger.

Here’s a list of things in Free Software I’m currently very interested in.

Horde (http://horde.org)
Application framework written in PHP which runs webmail and a million other things on a web server. I’m also interested in running a mail server and OpenLDAP.

Moodle (http://moodle.org/)
This one’s for work, “a course management system (CMS) – a software package designed to help educators create quality online courses.”

Easy Moblog (http://easymoblog.org/)
I’m looking to run my own weblog software for various reasons including LiveJournal (http://livejournal.com) being bought out by Six Apart. Easy Moblog looks very interesting but I’m currently looking into authentication methods when updating a web log via email.

PHPiCalendar (http://sourceforge.net/projects/phpicalendar/)
I’ve been doing a lot of PHP coding around this application for a while. It’s basically an online iCalendar (rfc2445) parser which parses a calendar file published from a compatible calendar application (like Apple iCal and Mozilla Sunbird (http://www.mozilla.org/projects/calendar/sunbird.html)) and displays it on a web page. I’ve been hacking it (in conjunction with magpierss http://magpierss.sourceforge.net/) into an events based content management system updateable by a non-technical user via WebDAV (http://www.webdav.org/). The web site is due to launch after Easter so I’ll post the link then. I’ve also recently been interested in converting XML to SQL to create a table in a database from an XML file.

Ever since we got back from Morocco I’ve been dying to blog about my experiences there, I’ve just not got round to it. So this is the first of (hopefully) a series of posts about my first time abroad, spending a week in Northern Africa and my experiences during my stay. Hopefully this one will cheer up poor Kazzy.

Accidental Tortoise Purchase

Quite early in the week we went round the mini zoo in Agadir and were being followed around by a zookeeper who kept letting us into enclosures with the animals so we could get a better picture, in return for a small tip (tipping is a way of life in Morocco). We got to a cage full of tortoises and there was one particularly cute baby tortoise. I pointed at it and the man went into the cage and passed it through the bars to me. I held it in the palm of my hand (did I mention it was very small) and we took photos.

I gave the tortoise back to the zookeeper, very aware that he would be expecting a tip. Usually I’d give perhaps 2-4dh but as small change seems hard to get hold of in Morocco the only coin I had was a 10dh piece. I gave it to him discretely, but perhaps a little too discretely and I think he got the wrong idea. He suddenly gestured for us to wait and then disappeared.

After standing there wondering what was going on for a few minutes the zookeeper returned with paper and a pen. This is where it started getting tricky. He appeared to speak only Arabic, I speak only English and we were trying to communicate in a hybrid language of gestures and very broken French! He started making gestures which could only be interpreted as symbolising a plane, pointing at me a lot, pointing at himself a lot and pointing at the tortoise. Then he kept saying “address, address”.

After going through all the possibilities, perhaps he wanted to visit us in England or perhaps send us news on how the tortoise was getting on, we came to the conclusion that he had in fact accepted the 10 dirham as *payment* for the tortoise and wanted my address so he could send it to me. Through the post.

Now being very aware that it is now illegal to import tortoises into the UK and bearing in mind Laura’s mum was already worried about getting through customs with some rather dodgy looking mint tea, I was quite keen not to complete the transaction. It took quite a while for us to escape!

Of course there’s every possibility that I still interpreted the situation wrongly and that he was suggesting something entirely different. I guess I’ll never know.

Edit: Here’s a photo of my very cute accidental purchase…