Highlights from today: The slightly worrying suggestion that when Chris sees The Prince (Niccolò Machiavelli), he thinks of me. A black metal teapot with built-in infuser and a tin full of loose leaf darjeeling. A desk diary which contains a different paper plane design for each day of 2011. Confirmation of my earlier suspicion that […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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: Poor documentation. Difficult requirements (e.g. Lithium, which looks great but […]
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 […]
Holiday to Alderney
After failing to book a proper holiday since I started my job (most of my weeks off work have been consumed by UKUUG events and other voluntary groups), I have decided to go back to Alderney for five days in October. Apart from being beautiful and quiet, it also has military history (the Germans occupied […]
BarCamp Manchester 3
This Saturday I attended my first unconference, in the form of BarCamp Manchester 3. Part of the reason for attending was to see how the unconference model works in preparation for UKUUG’s FLOSS UK Unconference in October this year, and also to do a bit of networking within the web development community. Things stuttered slightly […]