Friday, July 16, 2004

Catching Up

Well, that was a hectic couple of weeks. Claire and I are now officially on holiday, but our active approach to holidays means that I still can't find much time for posting here. Sorry.

Since the last proper entry, I've been busy, both with work and socialising. Marillion were brilliant - first half was almost the retail version of Marbles in order (only Drilling Holes replaced with the Damage) and second half a selection of older stuff, mainly bouncy crowd pleasers. Londoners can catch them in September, Europeans and North Americans soon after. Well worth it. There's also (just) still time to buy the new single (Don't Hurt Yourself - country-tinged acoustic pop, very catchy) and piss off Radio 1 by making them play Los Marillos in the top ten again. Hehe.

The rest of last week got lost in a morass of server moving. Open Source can be stunning - Apache springs to mind - but it can also be an awful way to create software. One of the worst examples is SLASH (the code that runs Slashdot, and unhappily Lokarnos). Given I was moving Lokarnos to a new server, I foolishly agreed to upgrade as well. The old Lokarnos was running on the latest official release, which is some years old now. The current release candidate (2.3.151!) is only available from CVS. Tarballs? Must be some other project. The documentation is almost non-existent. Most of what is there is out of date. The default site install crashed half way through, with no error message. Upgrading Lokarnos failed miserably - again not a useful error message in site. The code itself is poorly commented, and a wonderful example of Perl obfuscation. (One comment actually says "Do we need this bit?") Oh dear.

I took a break from the server for the weekend. Claire's father's birthday celebration on Saturday - long walks and a nice meal. Sunday a group of us went to the zoo (including two of the cutest little kids I've seen in a long time - probably since Wilfie mooned Eltham) then back to Ben's for a curry. The kids seemed to enjoy the animals (hunting dogs, tigers, monkeys, etc.) while the adults mainly found the otters cutest. Monday a similar group met up at Kai's, and Tuesday at ours. At ours we feed people Lasagne, burned garden rubbish (much to the children's delight) and watched Doctor Who. Wednesday we recovered... Finally, today is the cats' birthday. We haven't really worked out how to mark that, but the cats probably won't notice.

As I said, we're now officially on holiday. Tomorrow we head south, visiting a few friends and (hopefully) family before ending up at Continuum next weekend. We're not abandoning the cats totally though - a succession of friends are staying here to look after them. Although on holiday, I'm taking the lap top, and will have a small amount of time on the internet most days. I probably won't post here, but e-mails may well get a response. As part of the preparations for this, I've picked up a new mobile phone - a nice Nokia with a built in modem. Claire, not to be outdone, has picked up the cutest little Siemens, which sort of slides open, reminding me of the Original Star Trek.

So, I'll see some of you at Continuum, some tomorrow, and some when I get back. Take care!

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2 comments so far.

Nick B wrote :

Graham, your efforts with Lokarnos are *hugely* appreciated. I'll have a sniff around the fringes and see if anyone has useful tips on how to make the Great Leap Forward... but it honestly doesn't matter all that much. The system works well enough as-is.

I always wanted my old Palm's hard case to beep when I flipped it open. Original Star Trek casts a long shadow...

See you both in a few days' time.

06:26 am, 17/07/2004

Kai [e] [w] wrote :

The kids are asking for you still. Thank you to both you and Claire for everything, it means a lot to me and I hope you enjoy your holiday.

12:10 pm, 17/07/2004