nick.recoil.org

I’ve just got hold of my first edition print of Computer Lib/Dream Machines by Ted Nelson. It’s an amazingly inspirational read, and covers a bewildering number of topics. It’s a shame that it’s a little too large to take on holiday with me to Italy.

For some reason, I was reading the Slate article on the mysterious Short Capuccino from Starbucks, and I thought I’d try it out in my local. The guy serving me, as described in the Slate article, didn’t bat an eyelid when I asked. 1.95 UKP for a regular Tall cappuccino, and 1.75 UKP for a Short cappuccino, and it’s definitely a better amount of milk in my opinion.

This has been brought to you by the trashy coffee department

Today was an example of the perfect English summer’s day, with a clear sky, temperatures around 26^oC, and a cool breeze, all enjoyed with a glass of Pimms in hand. As part of the Open Garden Squares Weekend, ours (Nevern Square) was open to the general public, and while Jasper and I were lazing around the flat, we heard a lovely bit of light jazz drifting up from outside our window. We decided to investigate!

It turns out that the Garden Square Committee had organised a Saxophone quartet to come and play in the square between 2pm and 4pm. The Glyn Williams Quartet were four very nice gentlemen who kept everyone entertained whilst many of us were eating our picnics (including Jasper and I), or having a browse around the Herbaceous borders.

The source of the movie above was taken with my JVC Everio GZ-MG36EK, which I lovingly refer to as the iPod of the camcorder world. No more fussing with DV tapes, this is captured straight to an internal hard disk drive. The only slight issue I have is with the range of editing tools that support GOP-style editing on MPEG2 streams. They are few and far between, especially if you’re using a Mac.

I’ve moved this blog installation from my locally hosted MythTV server over to the recoil.org box we’ve designated for hosting dynamic content. In doing so, I’ve re-hosted all of the content from MySQL to SQLite, as this is going to be easier to maintain in the future in a secure and simple way.

In doing this, I’ve discovered that there’s apparently no neat way of doing this through the current Rails rake tasks. Eventually I’ve settled on preparing a blank SQLite database via:

rake db:schema:load

And then running the following script, which was modified from something found on the SQLite trac installation:

cp db/typo_blank.db /tmp/temp.db ; /usr/local/mysql/bin/mysqldump --no-create-info --compact --extended-insert=FALSE --quote-names=FALSE --complete-insert -u root -pYOURROOTPASSWORD typo | perl -pe '
        if (/^(INSERT.+?)\(/) {
                $a=$1;
                s/\\'\''/'\'\''/g;
                s/\\\"/"/g;
                s/\\n/\n/g;
                s/\\r/\r/g;
                s/\),\(/\);\n$a\(/g;
        }
' | sqlite /tmp/temp.db;  mv /tmp/temp.db db/typo_dev.db

And the last thing I found I needed to do, which may or may not have something to do with being on the SVN trunk:

UPDATE contents SET published='t';

After the migration, the contents.published column seemed to contain a 1 instead of a ‘t’, which is related, I assume, to the way the differing systems choose to store boolean values

I’ve installed the breveCreatures screensaver at work, which has been entertaining my co-workers whenever I’m not at my desk.

It sets up a simulation that evolves a walking creature based on a simple genetic algorithm. The state of the simulation is saved each time the screensaver is interrupted, the state is saved, and will pick up again the next time it starts. Very entertaining eye-candy.

I’ve also got so used to certain aspects of Firefox extension functionality, I’ve installed SafariStand to enable my typical browser session state to be saved and loaded with ease. Not quite as nice as having it saved when you quit, but it’ll do.