Wednesday September 13, 2006 ..has finally arrived!
He was born at 10.33am on 27th August, weighing in at 8lbs exactly. Mother and baby doing just brilliantly, thank you very much!
Sunday April 09, 2006 Barcelona
What a funny place! Everyone I know that's been has raved about it, but I just didn't get it. Yeah, there was some really weird stuff by Gaudi there, but that was it.
What have I missed? We visited the Casa Mila, which is an apartment block designed by someone who's clearly had one too many mushrooms - take a look at these chimney stacks:
We also saw the Park Guel and the Sagrada Familia, both designed by the same wacky, mushroom munching genius, and they were cool.
But, the place had no soul. You go to Florence, or Rome, or Lisbon, and these places have an identity, some atmosphere or culture that makes them unique and alive. Barcelona just didn't have that. Hell, it didn't even have any culinary identity - even the guide book said "there's no such thing as local cuisine"!
And don't get me started on vegetarian food ...
Posted by ajt [General] ( April 09, 2006 02:14 AM ) Permalink |
Thursday March 23, 2006 
Friday April 08, 2005 I'm sure this site isn't news to many people - I'd seen it cropping up more and more in various blogs and discussions that I've been reading, so I decided to give it a go.
What an ace idea - keep track of your bookmarks online, but also tell you how many other people link to it, and allow you to view their bookmarks : a very quick way to get totally absorbed in the web for a few hours!
Give it a go!
My measly collection of bookmarks (I've been using it 10 minutes) is here.
Posted by ajt [General] ( April 08, 2005 09:03 PM ) Permalink |
Friday March 25, 2005 I've recently been reading 43Folders, initially as a great resource for Mac "productivity" software (aka stuff on which to waste my time), but after reading more and more about Getting Things Done, I decided to get the book and see if I could sort my chaotic life out.
Well, I haven't got there yet, but I reckon it's improving.
Being a geek, though, I wasn't prepared to implement it with having some automated way of producing the various lists that it requires. I'm not going to go into loads of detail here about what the method entails, only to say that the basics consist of:
- capture all the stuff you have in your life in an Inbox (or inboxes, e.g. e-mail and paper)
- regularly process that stuff
- decide whether to the item you're processing now, defer it, or delegate it
- if you defer it, where does it live? Assign it a context in which it can be done, e.g. @Home, @Work, etc.
Various geek solutions have been proposed, using things like OmniOutliner, VimOutliner, etc, but something was lacking for me - it's probably the way I'm "interpreting" the GTD system (I haven't finished the book yet!), but I couldn't cope with having Next Actions in both Contexts and Projects lists - I couldn't persuade a tool to produce a Contexts list from the Projects lists. Obviously a bit of sed/awk/perl/grep trickery was in order.
Except... a bit of browsing brought me to this page. Which almost gave me the answer - automatic generating of action lists...
A little bit of tweaking later, and I have a script and some snippets which let me enter all my next actions in a single file : projects.txt, in the following format
Project Title
-------------
[ ] @context: Task [Project Title]
for agenda items, then I have date and time fields too. Now, there is a bit of duplication (entering the project title twice), but a little bit of tweaking should sort that out too.
The TextMate snippets to create that are:
[ ] @agenda: ${1:date} ${2:time} ${3:action} [${4:project}]
[ ] @calls: ${1:action} [${2:project}]
And I assign a tab trigger of @c or @a, etc.
The ruby code to extract the data from the above into a context list is exactly the same as that on the web page I mentioned earlier. So, basically, none of this work is mine!
All plugged into GeekTool, and my next actions list appears on my desktop...
The best bit? It's all text-based, so it'll work anywhere, ready for the next time my Mac blows up...
Posted by ajt [General] ( March 25, 2005 12:27 AM ) Permalink
Wednesday March 23, 2005 A while ago I posted that I'd had a good experience using a digital SLR, which made me, at the time, feel I needed to take a shower.
Well, since then, I've gone out and point a digital SLR (Nikon), and haven't looked back. I've picked up my Mamiya twice, I think. Once to put it in its bag, the other to bring it in to the office to lend it to someone. Shame, because it's a beautiful camera.
I've shot around three thousand frames since I got the Nikon late last year, and here are some observations about shooting digital:
- You shoot more crap
- Digital sensor dynamic range is roughly equivalent to shooting slide film (i.e. the range in stops between black and white is roughly 5)
- Viewfinders this size are nigh on impossible to manual focus with
- All your mates get bored of the RAW vs JPG argument very quickly :-)
Friday February 25, 2005 Well, Rosie & I have just come back from a couple of days in Florence. A surprise trip that ended up not being a surprise because her passport had expired... However, I did manage to keep the purpose for the trip secret : to buy our wedding rings on the Ponte Vecchio.
All was going to plan until we went into the first goldsmiths, and the woman behind the counter extinguished her cigarette (!) and spoke in a broad Brummie* accent! There was just no way I was going to go all the way to Italy only to buy our wedding rings from a bloody brummie. No matter how nice the rings were.
So we went to the next shop, to be greeted by someone who was probably South African or something. But much better looking than the woman in the first shop. And not a Brummie. So that was OK. :-)
On the upside, though, Florence was, as ever, beautiful. Even in the cold. Especially in the cold, actually. You could actually walk around the streets without being forced to get overly friendly and sweaty with throngs of tourists (isn't it odd how no-one seems to categorise themselves as being the same as all the other tourists? Or am I wrong?). I've never been there in the winter before - whenever I've been before it's been just the wrong time to be there.
Pics can be found here
For those of you lucky people who don't know what a Brummie is, it's one who originates from Birmingham, or the West Midlands, and has what has to be the worst accent on earth. Imagine the most whiny voice you can think of. And multiply it by a hangover, and you get the idea.
Posted by ajt [General] ( February 25, 2005 10:36 PM ) Permalink |
Thursday October 21, 2004 Setting up virus/spam free e-mail at home
By the fact that you're reading blogs.sun.com (note the arrogant assumption that someone might actually be reading this blog), you're probably an enlightened person who run an OS that's less vulnerable (or, at least, less targetted) to viruses. But, how do you handle spam? What do you do, if, like me, your other half runs Windows and uses Outlook - and their company policy (ok, it's a school, she's a teacher) is only to upgrade virus defs every now and then?Well, obviously you could go down the line of setting up SunONE Mail Server, but that's overkill for home, surely? (Especially on my poor little Ultra 5 with only 64Mb RAM) Well, how about just using a standard sendmail installation?
I've got an Ultra 5 sat in the loft (but this could apply equally to Linux), which sucks down mail from all her accounts, and all my accounts (not Sun, obviously!) via fetchmail, runs it through 2 virus checkers, and spamassassin, then delivers to our relevant mailboxes - in her case, local to the Ultra 5 (served via IMAP), for me, to gmail.com. All this is done by using a little bit of perl, called MailScanner, developed originally by Julian Field of Southampton University.
MailScanner works very simply - it's a perl binary that sits and scans your mail queue dir (you set sendmail to queue only), picks up each mail and scans it through whatever progs you configure, then delivers the mail. I've chosen to use clamav and f-prot virus scanners - each of them updating thrice daily out of cron - and spamassassin.
Since I installed this about 12 months ago, we've not had (touch wood) a single virus - the system is rejecting about 10 a day, largely because Rosie gives out her e-mail address to some students, who, presumably, have virus infected machines. The amount of spam that I get has gone down from around 50 per day to 2-3 a day.
Well worth trying.
Posted by ajt [General] ( October 21, 2004 11:08 AM ) Permalink
I've been hunting round on the net for quick and easy ways to knock up a prototype DB and data entry system.
I've stumbled across DBDesigner4 for Windows/Linux, from FabForce, which is excellent for doing the relational database bit, and JaneBuilder for the Mac, which features something that is randomly called AutoJane - for some reason I think of Austin Powers style FemmeBots at this point, but that's a whole other story that I probably shouldn't tell anyone.
The Auto-Janes (femmebots, go away!) basically go like this:1. Select : New Record Auto-Jane
2. Connect to DB
3. Select table you want to populate.
4. Select fields you want to populate and setup what sort of HTML inputs you want for them.
5. Click generate
And out pops a bunch of HTML and PHP for you, all very nice and quick. And nice clean HTML/PHP too - I just tacked on a one line include to pull in my site template/css, and in the space of about 30 seconds, I'd got most of my prototype written.
I heartily recommend JaneBuilder - I hope it stays free! DBDesigner 4 gets an 8/10 : great tool, doesn't run on the Mac :-(
Posted by ajt [General] ( October 21, 2004 12:46 AM ) Permalink
