Today has been humbling. I had made some changes to the Typo database schema with the goal of making the code easier to follow and because, dammit, it’s the Right Thing to do.

Sometimes you have to laugh. Or cry, I suppose.

Martin Fowler has somehow sparked off a wide ranging argument that appears to be heading rapidly Hitlerwards. And all he did was write about the tension between Humane and Minimal interfaces and then confess that he tended to the humane side.

Have you ever bought hardware from Apple?

Lovely wasn’t it?

I don’t mean the kit was necessarily lovely – Apple have build their fair share of clunkers in the past. I’m talking about the experience of getting your iPod, PowerBook, PowerMac or whatever out of its box for the first time. It’s obvious that Apple have spent a good deal of time on making that out of box experience as satisfying as possible. A box that you will probably only use once seems to have had as much care lavished on it as the thing it contains.

I heard a rumour on the London.pm mailing list week. Apparently the Perl 6 Summaries are no longer being ublished. As I’m sure you can imagine, it came as something of a surprise to me.

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.

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.

As I write, Typo Themes Contest is in that nervous interlude that comes between the last day for entries and the judges’ announcement of fabulous prizes (I haven’t totted up the value of the prize fund, but there’s a Powerbook and an iBook for first and second place) for the winners.

I wonder if the ground state of the photographer is ‘dissatisfied’. When I bought a D100 two years ago I loved it. But it didn’t take long for disenchantment to set in; the frame buffer was too small, I couldn’t use old (and wonderful) manual focus lenses on it, digital noise was horrid at high speeds, white balance was dodgy and it didn’t feel as good in the hand as my F100.

This evening, I acquired a commit bit for the Typo project. I’ve been chucking the occasional big patch and ideas at Scott Laird, the most active of the current maintainers, but he’s been busy doing all sorts of stuff, and he just started working at Google (go Scott!) so he doesn’t have quite as much copious free time as before.

One of the joys of writing applications using Ruby on Rails is the way the framework is constantly evolving better ways of doing stuff. It’s one of the dangers too.

My brother’s company, Longstone Tyres, sells classic and vintage tyres for old cars. Or, as Dougal describes it “Specialist rubber equipment for the discerning gentleman”.

This month they’ve finally started to use something like that slogan in their press advertising. Below the fold is a picture of their latest advert:

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.

Photos by Piers Cawley. CC Licenced, though I bet he didn’t think I was going to do this with them.

– Photo Credit at Love Perl

Another week passes. Another summary is written. Another sentence is written in the passive voice.

Welcome to another fortnight’s worth of summary. We’ll get back to a weekly schedule one of these fine days, you see if we don’t.