Goals for 2011

New goals for this year:

• Buy house—assuming I’m still gainfully employed and the banks start to lend to people without £30k+ deposits.
• Continue to sign up new clients to web/email hosting package, with the goal of having 5-10 clients by the end of the year.

Goals carried over from last year:

• Redesign and rewrite my portfolio site (updating the text is an ongoing process, but I may have to pay someone to do the design as it’s not my strong point).
• Launch pubs website—I’ve been so busy this year that I’ve had to keep pushing this back, although it’s almost complete now.
• Launch at least one of the three business ideas I have.
• Take driving lessons and pass test.

Completed goals from last year:

• Contribute to open source projects—I’ve filed a reasonable number of documentation bugs and open-sourced some of my own software on GitHub.
• Sign up two more clients to hosting package.

posted by Paul at 7:00pm on Sunday 2nd January 2011 | Comments Off

Refusing censorship

A Merry Christmas to all Bankers demonstrates that universities still have the ability and courage to stand up to powerful vested interests, who should have been reading the publication rather than trying to ban it.

posted by Paul at 1:42pm on Sunday 26th December 2010 | Comments Off

Merry Christmas

Highlights from today:

1. The slightly worrying suggestion that when Chris sees The Prince (Niccolò Machiavelli), he thinks of me.
2. A black metal teapot with built-in infuser and a tin full of loose leaf darjeeling.
3. A desk diary which contains a different paper plane design for each day of 2011.
4. Confirmation of my earlier suspicion that the level of excitement experienced at Christmas is inversely proportional to age.

Haven’t watched Doctor Who yet, will do so and comment tomorrow morning.

posted by Paul at 11:05pm on Saturday 25th December 2010 | 1 Comment »

Custom WordPress theme designer needed

One of my hosting clients is looking to launch a new website for their company, which provides ecology consulting and training services newt and bat surveys, reports for planning permission committees etc.) to other businesses.

They’re looking for a unique custom theme to use with their existing WordPress install, which needs to look professional but not too flashy. They can supply photos, text, PDFs etc. but they don’t have the ability to design a site. They also need a logo to use in print and on the web, though this doesn’t have to be done by the same person.

They don’t need any other services – no hosting, theme installation, social network integration etc. Ideally the theme needs to be ready by the New Year, but the sooner the better. The client is looking to launch more sites later in 2011, so there is potential for future work (again custom WordPress themes).

Designers based in Manchester, and Bury/Bolton in particular, would be preferred, though further afield is not a problem. You must have a portfolio site with examples of work you’ve done for other clients – no “under construction” or “coming soon” sites.

If this is a service which you could provide, please drop me an email for more details – paul at xk7 dot net.

posted by Paul at 8:18am on Wednesday 15th December 2010 | Comments Off

Alderney photos

I have now finished uploading most of my Alderney photos onto flickr. I don’t own a fancy camera—and I don’t know enough about photography to make use of one anyway—so the photos are unlikely to win any awards, but they should give you an idea of what it’s like on one of the few remaining unspoilt areas of the British Isles.*

*Traditionally the Channel Islands are counted as part of the British Isles, but they’re not part of the UK, being Crown Dependencies (as is the Isle of Man). A full in-depth discussion of the constitutional and legal differences can be obtained in exchange for a pint of beer.

posted by Paul at 1:00pm on Sunday 31st October 2010 | 2 Comments »

Alternative DNS book

Jan-Piet Mens, who I’ve met at various UKUUG events, has just released his Alternative DNS servers book as a PDF, available for free from his website. It’s well worth a read if you want to do something with DNS other than running a BIND server with zones stored in plain text files—e.g. storing DNS data in an SQL database or LDAP directory instead.

Of course, a hard copy version is still available for those of you who, like me, still prefer to read things printed on dead trees.

posted by Paul at 7:12pm on Saturday 30th October 2010 | 1 Comment »

Back from Alderney

Last night I got back from my trip to Alderney, a constituent of the Channel Islands (the only one actually in the Channel as it happens) which I first visited last year for Nick and Jane’s wedding – though this trip involved slightly less running around and pushing people about on scaffolding.

Some thoughts from my time spent there:

• The curry house on the island, Nellie Gray’s, is a fantastic restaurant which rivals the best in Rusholme. The food is great, the prices similar to the mainland (i.e. you’re not being ripped off just because you’re on some remote island) and the waiters have perfect etiquette. Probably a bit far for Currybeer though.
• Most people are friendly and will smile and say ‘hello’ when they pass you in the street, with the exception of some grumpy locals who seem to dislike anyone from ‘the mainland’, and the annoying teenage girls who followed me down the street one day.
• It’s possible to go for a walk and not see anyone else, bar a few locals whizzing past in cars and completely ignoring the 35mph speed limit. Apart from a few private roads, most of the island is open and you can go pretty much anywhere you want, although some of the forts are probably a bit dangerous to explore alone.
• The economy looks a bit shaky at the moment—a number of shops have closed since I was last on the island, there are quite a few empty buildings on the main shopping street, and I estimate around 10% of the residential properties are up for sale.
• Although most civilian aircraft fly on autopilot nowadays, it is still slightly unnerving when you see the pilot take his hands off the controls, lean back and enjoy a cup of coffee mid-flight!

If I was going back again, I think I’d go during the week rather than across a weekend. Most of the tourist activities, such as the tours of the island, take place mid-week, and many things shut down completely on Sundays. I suspect I’d also go for a shorter period of time – perhaps three days plus one for travel – as I was starting to run out of things to do by Monday afternoon.

As for living on the island full time (permanently or for a fixed period), which I’ve been asked about a few times, I think it would be a bit too quiet for me. I wouldn’t object to purchasing a holiday home though, which could be rented for self-catered trips to cover the mortgage and used one or two weeks every year when I wanted to visit.

Photos will follow in a separate post, as flickr doesn’t seem to want to accept any files at the moment and I want non-Facebook people (yes, they do exist) to be able to see them. Photos and geodata for all the pubs will be uploaded to Pub Gateway once I have finished the comments system.

posted by Paul at 9:13pm on Wednesday 27th October 2010 | Comments Off

Writing and releasing open source software

One of my goals for this year was to contribute to an open source project, in the form of filing/fixing bugs, as a way of giving something back because open source software makes my life a lot easier. I’ve partly managed this through filing numerous documentation bug reports—some of which have been fixed already—and in particular on the Lithium and Symfony frameworks.

However, I’ve also decided to be a bit more pro-active in making pieces of software I’ve written available under an open source (and free software) licence. I’ve signed up for an account at GitHub, partly because it is free and also because I want to get to grips with git, now that I’m comfortable with Subversion. Currently only my Sitemap Generator is available, but I’m planning to upload my Wikipedia railway station parser in the next few days, along with an extension to MaPit which I’m hoping to finish by the end of the month.

posted by Paul at 9:53pm on Saturday 9th October 2010 | Comments Off

Pub Gateway progress

After a few weeks of being too busy to code, I have finally settled back into a routine of working on my pub site. I have given up on frameworks, as all the ones I tried fell into one or more of the following boxes:

1. Poor documentation.
2. Difficult requirements (e.g. Lithium, which looks great but requires a version of PHP which is not yet in Debian stable).
3. Missing components, such as an OpenID class.

Instead, I’ve linked lots of existing classes (MDB2 for database access, Smarty for templates, Zend_OpenId_Consumer for OpenID etc.) and created some extremely simple models for accessing database rows as objects.

The following tasks are now complete:

1. All the basic backend code for connecting to the database, fetching and displaying data, checking whether a user is logged in etc.
2. Logging in and creating a user account using OpenID – and the session handling code works for non-OpenID accounts too.
3. Viewing individual pubs, and a list of the latest pubs added to the site.

Still to finish before launch:

1. Creating a user account if you don’t have OpenID.
2. Pub searching.
3. Adding comments to pubs.

Ideally I’d like to have the ability to submit pubs ready before launch, but I don’t think that’s essential as I can do the initial database population myself. I want to have the basic version ready for when I go to Alderney towards the end of the month, which leaves just over two weeks to finish the bulk of the work.

posted by Paul at 9:06pm on Monday 4th October 2010 | Comments Off

Disabling bluetooth on startup in Ubuntu

I recently bought a new netbook (Samsung NC10) for taking on the train when I go to London, Birmingham etc. for meetings. So far it’s been an excellent buy, except that the battery life has been nowhere near the five hours quoted in the literature and I’ve only managed to get less than two hours constant running.

At first I couldn’t understand why this was happening, until I realised that Ubuntu automatically starts bluetooth when I boot the machine, and this drains the battery. I never use bluetooth, so I tried to disable it permanently. However, whilst the preferences panel allows you to disable bluetooth for the current session, it will still start automatically when you reboot. There’s an option to disable bluetooth on startup, but this only applies to the panel applet and doesn’t actually stop the bluetooth service from running.

After a bit of searching I discovered a program called Boot-up Manager, which can be installed through the standard repositories—it is the ‘bum’ package (stop sniggering at the back!). Start this up after installation and uncheck the ‘activate’ checkbox next to bluetooth, and the next time you start your machine it will be disabled. You can still start the service manually through the panel applet, should you need bluetooth for a single session.

posted by Paul at 3:03pm on Saturday 25th September 2010 | 2 Comments »