Just A Summary : Category administrative, everything about administrative

New Layout

pdcawley@bofh.org.uk (Piers Cawley) — Thu, 12 Apr 2007 00:51:00 -0500

You may have noticed I’ve been tweaking. The new layout is based on Scribbish with a few CSS tweaks and some low cunning to get the three column layout working.

The basic font set is drawn from the new fonts that come with Vista: Body text is in Calibri, headings are mostly in Candara. I can’t say I’m a fan of Vista – I type this in a Windows free house – but the new font set is gorgeous. (I’ve put information on getting them installed without Vista below the fold.)

What do you think?

Update

Thanks to Simon Pride for pointing out how ugly things looked in safari – I’ve hopefully sorted out the leading issues now.

Getting the fonts

If you’re not on Vista (pretty likely I’m guessing), you can download the PowerPoint Viewer 2007 and either install it if you’re on Windows. If you’re on a Mac or Linux, you need to jump through a few more hoops. Here’s what to do on a mac with Macports installed:

Download PowerPointViewer.exe
From the terminal, install cabextract by doing:
```
$ sudo port install cabextract
```

Run

$ cabextract PowerPointViewer.exe
Extracting cabinet: PowerPointViewer.exe
  ...
All done, no errors.
$ cabextract ppviewer.cab
Extracting cabinet: ppviewer.cab
  ...
All done, no errors.
$ open *.TTF

This should open Font Book windows for the new fonts. All you have to do now is hit ‘Install Font’ for each of them and you’re home and dry. You can delete all the ppviewer detritus.

On linux, the basic cabextract steps are the same, but your Font installation steps are probably different; check your distribution’s documentation.

What I've been up to recently

pdcawley@bofh.org.uk (Piers Cawley) — Tue, 05 Dec 2006 18:09:00 -0600

Cast an eye over my new venture. It’s pretty much a place holder site at the time being, but I’m beavering away at the bits that need beavering away at.

Everyone is human...

pdcawley@bofh.org.uk (Piers Cawley) — Sat, 25 Nov 2006 01:59:00 -0600

Why do people have to be human with my new computer?

You would think that arriving home and opening up a brown cardboard box and pulling out a shiny new 15” MacBook Pro 2.16GHz would be a fine thing wouldn’t you?

It’s rather less than fine when what you’d paid for was a 17” MacBook Pro 2.33GHz.

Annoyingly, it turns out that this wasn’t a case of someone in the local store pulling the wrong box from the stockroom. That would be easy to fix. Instead, it turns out that someone in Northampton had a moment of humanity and mislabeled the box – the stockroom monkeys in my local branch have apparently checked the apple labels of all the MacBooks in the shop to no avail.

Apparently the nearest real one in the store network is in Sheffield. Assuming that’s not also subject to humanity in Northampton.

Bugger. No new toy until at least Tuesday.

But why the new computer now?

I’m in the process of setting up a new, photography related, business and, good as my G4 Powerbook is, it can’t run Aperture, which is a key part of the game plan, hence the new kit.

Watch this space for details; I shall of course post more once I’ve got the new website up.

Second thoughts...

pdcawley@bofh.org.uk (Piers Cawley) — Thu, 19 Oct 2006 06:23:00 -0500

I just pulled the the entry entitled It’s not just open source that has a problem with sexism. Here’s why:

My intention was to point up the kind of unthinking, ingrained sexism that is all too common in our field. My friends’ email exchanges with a conference organizer were textbook examples of the sort of thing I mean, so I used them and posted them pretty much verbatim without a thought. I was aware that it might cause offence, but my aim was to make the organizer stop and think about the message his conference website was sending out. So, basking in the knowledge that I Was Right, I pressed publish and was damned.

Then I watched as the organizer’s reaction grew increasingly more aggressive, opening with a demand to remove the material, followed up by a ranting phone call and a couple of “I know where you live!” messages. His weblog entry on the affair mutated over time too. He ended up accusing me and my ‘cohorts’ of an orchestrated campaign of hacking, abuse and fraudulent spam signups.

Since I had orchestrated no such campaign, I took the view that I would not dignify such ludicrous allegations with a denial.

This morning, I learned from someone I trust that the organizer has indeed been subject to sustained attacks on his webserver. That both he and his 8 months pregnant wife have been signed up to porn mailing lists and have seen massively increased levels of spam.

What?

What kind of infantile idiots do stuff like that? Seriously? How on earth is this kind of victimization of one side of a debate supposed to help anyone? For heaven’s sake, I don’t think the organizer set out to offend, that much is apparent from his reaction to my post.

If you, reading this, are responsible for the attacks and you believe yourself to be doing it at my behest, then please stop it and, if you have it in you, apologise. Your actions are despicable and I hope that, should you persist, you are caught and punished to the full extent of the law.

Why pull the entry?

I still stand by what I intended to say in my earlier message, but after more reflection and a bad night’s sleep, I also realise that what I wrote was hurtful. It’s all too easy to forget that the people we debate with are flesh and blood too. Frankly, being right isn’t a good enough reason to cause as much pain as I appear to have done, and for that I apologise.

It's not just open source that has a problem with sexism

pdcawley@bofh.org.uk (Piers Cawley) — Tue, 17 Oct 2006 22:12:00 -0500

This message has been removed.

Please see Second thoughts… for the reasons.

Um...

pdcawley@bofh.org.uk (Piers Cawley) — Tue, 12 Sep 2006 08:14:00 -0500

Has anyone seen my passport?

Update

Found it! I shall go to EuroOSCON 2006. See you all there, or at RailsConf Europe.

Mmm... I got my theme back

pdcawley@bofh.org.uk (Piers Cawley) — Mon, 21 Aug 2006 09:52:00 -0500

It may not be a nice theme, but it’s my theme. Look! There are adverts again!

Why not click on some of them?

Ahem. Sorry about that. I shall shortly return you to more usual fare.

Dogfood time

pdcawley@bofh.org.uk (Piers Cawley) — Sun, 20 Aug 2006 05:13:00 -0500

I’ll let you into a secret. You can tell when I’ve done a big svn up on this blog simply by looking at the theme. If it’s all black and white and sans serif, then it’s a racing certainty that I’ve just done an upgrade which has broken my usual custom theme.

So, later today I shall be sitting down with my local theme repository and bringing things up to speed with all of Scott’s changes. Who knows, I might cheat and put back a few helper methods.

Update

Oops, it seems that there was a bug in the Scribbish theme which meant you couldn’t read articles at their permalink…

Recent instability

pdcawley@bofh.org.uk (Piers Cawley) — Sat, 12 Aug 2006 02:59:48 -0500

Just in case you’ve been caught by it, the recent instability of this site doesn’t appear to be because of typo and rails bugs, but because the hard disk at my hosting services appears to be in the process of going bad. Hopefully it’ll be resolved soon.

How do you find me?

pdcawley@bofh.org.uk (Piers Cawley) — Wed, 02 Aug 2006 19:01:00 -0500

Are you reading Mark Dominus’s Universe of Discourse? and if not, why not?

Mark’s one of the cleverest and most entertaining guys I’ve ever met; if you get a chance to attend one of his courses, you really should do it. Your mind will be expanded. Which is by the by, but hey.

The reason I bring this up is that Mark started an occasional series of articles discussing some of the ‘interesting’ queries that show up in his server logs, and he gets some pretty spiffy queries – if I ever get a query as interesting as “if n + 1 are put inside n boxes, then at least one box will contain more than one ball. prove this principle by induction” I think I’ll print out the log report and frame it. And how can you not love a blog that somebody found by searching for “consciousness torus photon core”?

Which is a roundabout way of saying I’m about to pinch Mark’s idea and attempt a pale imitation of it here.

I’ve got to say, I find myself wondering what the searchers thought they were looking for with queries like:

fluent coupling faces
very short pixie styles
management ho topics

There’s a smattering of porn related stuff, which I’m not about to quote here because, frankly, I could do without the resulting adsense hits, and a few that lead me to worry about the searcher:

the best thing about being white

That probably led the searcher to The best thing for being sad, which must have been a sad disappointment to him or her. (I found myself thinking of the joke: “How do you dress for success?” “Wear a white penis.” Maybe I’m just weird like that¹)

Then there’s the java ones:

What’s java for

Fucking up the brains of programmers who’d be better off with a dynamic language like Perl, Ruby, Smalltalk or, ghod help us, lisp. I particularly liked that that got asked more than once.

java programming language for laymen

That one’s almost too easy. I’ll let you fill in the blanks

The sheep joke attracted a few hits too. I particularly admire the chap who searched for

how to shag a sheep

Um… according to legend you need to be wearing wellington boots

can i shag a sheep

Yes, but it probably won’t respect you in the morning.

How about

study women in open source slides

That probably led to the Women in Open Source post, which might well be my greatest hit. Danese Cooper obviously has good Googlejuice, and a link from a comment in a Slashdot thread didn’t exactly hurt.

Am I alone in wanting to read that query as a command?

I’m still at a loss as to why

are there women paedophiles in britain?

points here. I’m even more befuddled to discover that there were two separate hits from that query.

Dominus does it better

He just does. Dominus gets meaty questions in his query logs. And, on occasion he answers them seriously. I get multiple hits from someone searching for my brother and the ‘lumps women get when they get when puberty hits’.

Still, it could be worse, at least I don’t have to live in Philadelphia².

¹ Did I say I was worried about adsense ads? Bah!

² Which is an absolutely gorgeous city really. I’ve only been the once, in sweltering August heat, and I liked it then. I’m sure it’s even nicer when the weather’s a little more moderate.

Moving day

pdcawley@bofh.org.uk (Piers Cawley) — Mon, 12 Dec 2005 02:18:00 -0600

Today is the first day of our move. We’re only going down the road, but we’ve got a flatload of stuff and a self-store unitload of stuff to amalgamate into one house load of stuff, which means it’s going to be a two day process.

With any luck I’ll be back online and reading mail on Wednesday morning, but that’s subject to BT doing what they’re supposed to do. So who knows when I’ll be back on the air.

At least the blog’s hosted offsite now—something I’ve been meaning to do for ages and just never quite got round to before now.

See you all on Wednesday.

Welcome to the new server

pdcawley@bofh.org.uk (Piers Cawley) — Thu, 08 Dec 2005 11:29:00 -0600

Welcome one and all.

Things are getting switched over. There’s been a few teething troubles with getting fcgi working (it was fine when I tested it, of course) so we’ve fallen back to the old, slow CGI version so everthing will be a little slow until the caches fill.

[later: Hands up if you hate timezones?

For a short while there this article showed up as the second most recent on the homepage. The most recent was posted some time in the future because of some foolish assumptions on someone’s part about timezones. It’s fixed now.

Everyone should just use GMT dammit!]

On the road again

pdcawley@bofh.org.uk (Piers Cawley) — Thu, 08 Dec 2005 07:16:00 -0600

I’m just about to freeze the database here and turn off comments until DNS changes propagate and Just A Summary returns shiny and new on its new host at site5. Hopefully the changes will have propagated before I have to turn the ADSL off here and move everything a quarter of a mile down the road to our new home, but one never knows ones bad luck.

Here’s hoping it won’t take too long.

You shag one lousy sheep!

pdcawley@bofh.org.uk (Piers Cawley) — Thu, 01 Dec 2005 17:45:00 -0600

I find myself thinking of the old joke about Sheepshagger John:

A man goes into a pub in a small town and, for whatever reason, gets introduced to the clientele. There’s Farmer Jack, Barman Jim, Maurice “Dancer” and Sheepshagger John. After a few pints, the visitor’s curiosity gets the better of him and he asks John what’s with the nickname.

“See this pub?” asks John, “I built it, but they don’t call me Pubbuilder John? I’m the local doctor, I saved Barman Jim’s life once when he choked on a peanut, but they don’t call me Lifesaver John. Every year, I supply a huge Christmas tree for the village green, but the don’t call me Christmas Tree John.

“But you shag one lousy sheep…”

Why am I reminded of this?

Well, it’s like this.

I’ve written Perl 6 Summaries, a long article about women in Open Source and a rave review of Spiers and Boden’s Songs CD.

But I write one article about the dreadfulness of Digital Rights Management and every single Adsense ad on the front page is DRM related. Worse, they’re ads from people who think DRM is spiffy. I’ve made what seem like endless visits to my adsense settings page adding more and more advertisers to my ‘No! Don’t show that ad!’ filter, or whatever it is Google call it.

I’ve probably just made it worse.

At least with the DRM ads I can see the relationship though. The ads for the Perl Six summaries seem to be about C++ and Java, which seems odd. However, there is (possibly) light at the end of the tunnel. Google are about to introduce ‘advertise on this site’ links to their Adsense adverts. Hopefully, once they start appearing there will be a flood of advertisers who want to reach the kind of people who read my summaries. Or maybe they won’t, but I live in hope.

Version Control

pdcawley@bofh.org.uk (Piers Cawley) — Sun, 04 Sep 2005 17:52:00 -0500

The trouble with version control systems is that, if you’re not careful, it’s almost as bad as having no version control at all. I’m currently juggling about 4 active branches of typo: the local development branch, the production branch and a couple of branches that isolate some of the local changes so I can make clean patches for the typo developers.

So far, I’ve managed to upload about 5 patches, and I’m still not sure if the patches that are up on the Typo tracker are sane. And back porting the clean new system’s been a complete nightmare.

Still, it could be worse. I could be still trying to understand the inner workings of Moveable Type.

The Trouble With Tags

pdcawley@bofh.org.uk (Piers Cawley) — Fri, 02 Sep 2005 15:55:00 -0500

Tags’re great aren’t they? Yet another way of slicing through the thicket of information. The only problem with adding tagging support to your blog is deciding if you can be bothered to go back through the archives adding tags to everything.

I’m leaning towards the ‘not adding tags’ option.

The moneygrubbing continues

pdcawley@bofh.org.uk (Piers Cawley) — Sat, 30 Jul 2005 08:02:00 -0500

Ooh look. Google ads. The mercenary git. Next thing you know he’ll be doctoring the RSS feeds so they don’t carry whole articles.

We're getting there

pdcawley@bofh.org.uk (Piers Cawley) — Thu, 28 Jul 2005 06:50:00 -0500

After much poring over The Truck Wheels pdf¹ and the Pickaxe book, accompanied by a certain amount of waving of dead chickens², I’m pleased to direct your attention to the sidebar where you will find a selection of relevant links to Amazon. If your interest is piqued, maybe you’d like to toddle over there and spend your hard earned cash on these and other fine books, enabling me to live in the lap of luxury on kickbacks from everyone’s favourite book pimp.

In the future I hope to have slightly prettier links, but I’m still finding my way around the code, and Amazon Web Services, and…

Still, I’m pleased with it so far.

¹ The Pragmatic Programmers are fine people. Rails is a well thought out and documented framework. However, I’m really struggling to come up with a pithy description of the picture on the cover of Agile Web Development with Rails. So, do I lack the word power or have Dave and David dropped the ball on cover design?

² No goats or virgins were harmed in the making of the sidebar. I think it’s important that you know that. Besides, this is Gateshead, where am I going to find a Virgin?

Excuse my dust

pdcawley@bofh.org.uk (Piers Cawley) — Wed, 27 Jul 2005 09:26:20 -0500

So, typo, the tool this runs on is undergoing some major (and good) changes. The only catch is, my deployment script consists of ‘doing it by hand and forgetting stuff’, which isn’t ideal.

Hopefully, next time there’s a change I’ll have a sensible deployment scheme in place (it won’t have to be very sensible to be more sensible than the one I have at the moment).

Comments working again

pdcawley@bofh.org.uk (Piers Cawley) — Thu, 26 Aug 2004 04:46:06 -0500

Oopsie! I managed to misconfigure the name of the comment script.

Which is one way of stopping comment spam I suppose, but not my preferred method. Comments should be working now.

Downtime

pdcawley@bofh.org.uk (Piers Cawley) — Sun, 20 Jul 2003 12:35:50 -0500

Bah! The only trouble with being in full control of a website is that you’ve got nobody to blame when you screw up.

So this site fell off the net when I decided to rearrange my config files to conform to something a little more sane than their previous hodgepodge. Oh, and upgrade the server at the same time.

Obviously (with hindsight) I was doomed. Hopefully things are fixed now…