Archive for 2007

Breaking the habit of a lifetime

Thursday, December 20th, 2007, 6:39 pm

I actually sold some bike bits today. My "beefy" wheels[1] went to a friend as I hadn’t used them for a couple of years. In fact the rear had only done a handful of rides since I built it.

Now I just need to decide what to spend the cash on, I’m 1/3 of the way to a Canon 24-105IS lens which is tempting.

[1] Middleburn on D321 and Hope Bulb on X729.

What a load of bollocks

Wednesday, December 19th, 2007, 3:27 pm

Or not as the case may be.

Public asked to decide whether interactive NHS body map images should have genitals.

First Christmas present of the year

Wednesday, December 19th, 2007, 1:54 pm

4 cans of Guinness and a box of mince pies from the IT Help Support Service Desk.

Common sense prevails

Tuesday, December 18th, 2007, 5:42 pm

"Slut" and "faggot" are back again.

Radio 1 backs down in Pogues row

It’s political correctness gone mad

Tuesday, December 18th, 2007, 11:10 am

"You scumbag, you maggot, you cheap lousy beep".

Beeb censors Fairytale of New York.
Radio 1 censors Pogues’ Fairytale

Wordpress vs Movable Type

Tuesday, December 18th, 2007, 9:46 am

Many years ago when I first decided to set up a proper blog type site, I looked at a few options and ended up running Movable Type because IIRC it worked quite happily with text files and didn’t need a full-blown database.
Over the years MT improved and got more complicated, but I sort of knew what I was doing so stayed with it. In September 2007 MT4 came out which was a fairly radical change so I rashly upgraded. I basically ended up having to redesign the site from scratch and certain functionality was broken, but I stuck with it out of a sense of loyalty.
However come mid December, for no reason that I can determine, MT stopped working completely. Every time I tried to post an entry or comment it failed with an error message. I tried to find a solution to the problem with no success, and eventually came to the conclusion that MT needed to go. It’s overly complicated and the peer-support seems somewhat lacking.

Fortunately a domain I’d been after for a while had become available, so I registered that, configured Apache to serve up the new site, downloaded Wordpress and had it running within 20 minutes. It was actually easier to import the old content into Wordpress than it was to get a complete export out of MT in the first place.

Having now played around with Wordpress for a few days it’s definitely easier to use and configure for what I want. The themes are far easier to install and modify, and plugins drop-in seamlessly. MT by comparison is overly complicated, but possibly more powerful if you can get your head round it and spend the time learning it’s idiosyncrasies. However the unexplained breakage is worrying and enough for me to avoid it in the future.

Wordpress also seems a lot faster as well which is handy.

Just in case I hadn’t got enough to watch…

Monday, December 17th, 2007, 4:36 pm

…this

Buffy The Vampire Slayer - The Complete DVD Collection

is on it’s way.

Cold

Monday, December 17th, 2007, 10:25 am

For the first time in many years, it’s actually cold in the office today. Usually we are bemoaning the over-enthusiastic heating and trying to cool the room down.

(Threescore years and ten)/2

Saturday, December 15th, 2007, 12:00 am

It must be all downhill from here.

Hello

Thursday, December 13th, 2007, 9:43 pm

Welcome to a new URL.