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well, it’s been a while since my last post, but on a mailing list recently, a subject close to my heart liver came up: gins (’amyl.org.uk machines are named after spirits, after all)

So, erm, here are some thoughts:

Whilst I still mainly buy tanq (it’s just so easy to drink, and v. nice), I prefer drinking Miller’s neat, or Old Raj for hair-of-the-dog/breakfast
(seriously: in a high balloon’d wine glass, a couple of inches, swirl, knock back before brushing teeth/going to the khazi).

I’m also rather partial to Blackwood’s — particularly to add a little more to Pimm’s, and other drinks.

If i’m poaching fish, i’ll use blackwoods’ too: it’s not too over-powerful in the taste department.

Afternoon gin: Hendrick’s is quite nice — if you like cucumbery tastes.

Drinking nice gins, however, does encourage me to buy nice tonic-water (fentimans’ or fever tree – stupid fucking javascript URIs.). I’m not really a fan of Schweppes’ tonic: too much sugar for me. I quite like Sainsburys’ & Waitroses’ own brands of tonic; the Sainsbury’s with lime’s quite nice on its own, too.

As for Pimm’s, well, I have been known to make it without a ‘conventional’ mixer: my approach falls along these lines (but is always a case of each top-up will be different):

• ⅓ ‘garden’
• various fruits
• various legume
• sprigs of mint
• a couple of handfulls of ice-cubes
• ⅓ Pimm’s Number 1 cup
• a very generous slug of either
• gin,
• cider,
• beer (ale),
• good quality white wine

– gin & cider sometimes work well together;

If there’s space, fill the rest up with lemonade, and stir well. Allow to fester for a couple of minutes, and serve.

Hum, so there’s another UKGovWeb Barcamp in the pipe-line. Good-oh, says I.

To work around my hatred of PBWiki’s “notification” system, I’ve just re-appropriated (and made ‘ukgovweb-check‘) my dell-order-checking script to work for the wiki-page; changelog is that the script now uses lynx instead of wget, and that we send the difflog, rather than the whole-bloody-changed file.

If you’re still in the dark-ages like me, and haven’t written one yourself, here you go. If there’s a demand and people are feeling lazy, I suppose I could whip up a list.

Let me know if you do.

There’s some discussion going on on email, I do believe.

Yes, yes, I know Twitter wants us to call them “tweets”, but I think “twits” is far more appropriate.

Anyhow, I’ve just made my thousandth post (shamelessly plugging this article), and thought: “given its gravitas (the number, not any of my drivel), let’s make it a bit more than the usual moans”. So, to Wikiquote I wandered (or should that read “wander’d I”) to get inspiration from others. After all, to use another quote:

Derek says it’s always good to end a paper with a quote. He says someone else has already said it best. So if you can’t top it, steal from them and go out strong.

more of that

So, here are some random quotes on “1000″, with the odd multiple thereof for when there’s a good ‘un:

• “May our children and our children’s children to a thousand generations, continue to enjoy the benefits conferred upon us by a united country, and have cause yet to rejoice under those glorious institutions bequeathed us by Washington and his compeers.” — Abraham Lincoln (Second Speech at Frederick, Maryland (4 October 1862))
• “A single Voltaire will do more hono[u]r to France than a thousand pedants, a thousand false wits, a thousand great men of inferior order.” — Friedrich der Große
• “If I have a thousand ideas and only one turns out to be good, I am satisfied.” — Alfred Nobel
• “It is better and more satisfactory to acquit a thousand guilty persons than to put a single innocent one to death.” — Maimonides (The Commandments, Neg. Comm. 290, at 269-271)
• “I don’t think the human race will survive the next thousand years, unless we spread into space. There are too many accidents that can befall life on a single planet. But I’m an optimist. We will reach out to the stars.” — Stephen Hawking
• “Take the best orgasm you ever had, multiply it by a thousand and you’re still nowhere near it. When you’re on junk you have only one worry: scoring. When you’re off it you are suddenly obliged to worry about all sorts of other shite.” — Renton explains smack, in Trainspotting
• “One thousand years from now there’ll be no guys and no girls, just wankers. Sounds great to me.” — More wisdom from Trainspotting
• “The imagination of a boy is healthy, and the mature imagination of a man is healthy; but there is a space of life between, in which the soul is in a ferment, the character undecided, the way of life uncertain, the ambition thicksighted: thence proceeds mawkishness, and the thousand bitters which those men I speak of must necessarily taste in going over the following pages.” — Anne Rice
• “Was this the face that launch’d a thousand ships,
  And burnt the topless towers of Ilium?
  Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss!
  Her lips suck forth my soul: see, where it flies!” — Christopher Marlow’s Faustus
• “Pain… pain of the flesh. Like no Dalek has felt for thousands of years.” — Hybrid Sec, Evolution of the Daleks, Doctor Who
• “The battle is between big money combines who spend a thousand pounds or more on every constituency they fight. Or when they speak democracy, they don’t mean government by the people…they mean financial democracy, in which money counts and nothing but money.” — electioneering in 1939, as viewed by Tom Mosley
• “I became the murderer of many thousands of that fine race.” — William I, R
• “The germs of existence contained in this spot of earth, with ample food, and ample room to expand in, would fill millions of worlds in the course of a few thousand years.” — Malthus
• “When the first baby laughed for the first time, the laugh broke into a thousand pieces and they all went skipping about, and that was the beginning of fairies.” — J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan
• “Anyone can stop a man’s life, but no one his death; a thousand doors open on to it.” — Seneca (the Elder)
• “Hitler was undoubtedly a genius but he lacked self-control. He recognized no limits. Otherwise the thousand-year Reich would have lasted more than twelve years.” — Wilhelm Frich
• “For thousands of years, human beings had screwed up and trashed and crapped on this planet, and now history expected me to clean up after everyone” — Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club

“Well, my conclusion is: Hate is baggage. Life’s too short to be pissed off all the time. It’s just not worth it. Derek says it’s always good to end a paper with a quote. He says someone else has already said it best. So if you can’t top it, steal from them and go out strong. So I picked a guy I thought you’d like. ‘We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory will swell when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.’” (via Wikiquote)

I guess there’s a wee bit of an irony here: in musing over a 1000th post of <160 characters, I've rather gone on a bit... rather than ending with a quote, would any of my half-dozen victimsreaders care to throw some quotes to the comments box? Preferably on the “1000″ theme….?

If, like the guys in the ORG HQ, you find yourself unable to upload images in a Wordpress Blog, and are befuddled by the reams of posts &c on the web, well, here’s another idea that might sort you out:

Remove the crap from old installs, in your ~/.mozilla directory. And by crap, well, I mean:

• appreg
• mozver.dat
• pluginreg.dat
• plugins/

cd .mozilla
rm -rf plugins/
rm appreg
rm mozver.dat

cd firefox/
rm -rf pluginreg.dat

Astonishingly, by removing a couple of bits of pelt, the uploads worked for the guys.

Seeing as this is my blog, and people expect me to be miserable, here’s my whine: why the fuck don’t people SEARCH THE FUCKING ARCHIVES on forums before posting a new question? I gave up, and went back to old-fashioned testing.

Oh, and I should probably plug a fairly new site I recently discovered: stackoverflow — about all I can whine about with that is that is uses OpenID…

Well, in an half-arsed manner, I’m finally catching up with this century’s gizmo, that most people didn’t believe I didn’t use.

RSS.

I say kinda, ‘cos, despite having finally found something non-intrusive, and with a UI that doesn’t suck, I still don’t check the webpage it makes. Despite it updating.

Of course, I should have thought “I know who would have written something useful” donkey’s years ago. But I never did. Only recently, when hunting for Matilda did I think about it. *sigh*

So, there we have it. Next up is working a fix for it, to handle rss feeds which require basic-auth (trac-tastic!), and getting xkcd to display inline…

Next up: populating it a bit more, and then unsubscribing from some lists… well, maybe filter ‘em out…

Gah. It’s been quite a while since I’ve needed to install Windows on a stand-alone set-up. I’d forgotten how much stuff I find is needed to actually make the thing frikkin useful.

As this blog doubles up for my memory pad, here’s the list of stuff that I’ve just installed:

• Firefox
• Thunderbird
• WinSCP
• PuTTY
• Spybot
• Avast
• OpenOffice
• Pidgin
• XChat (silverx’s)
• The MS PowerToys
• Flash Player
• AIR
• Acrobat Reader
• GVim
• GIMP
• iTunes
• VLC

SP3 (given that my Windows disk is Slipstreamed with SP2)

I guess there will be more stuff to install — the MS Viewers seem likely, as will another 400Megs of patches and things…

Ok. So let’s start off with a fairly obvious statement. I’m indolent. And I can write scripts. This is a dangerous, nay, perilous pairing…

So, with this existing laptop really getting on my nerves, and the lack of email coming from Dell regarding the new ‘un I ordered, I thought I’d tidy up some diff-scripts used $ELSEWHERE, and re-appropriate for quick-and-dirty order-tracking.

Fairly simple: fetch a web-page, in this case the order page (which is accesssible with the order number & email address used for the order), compare it with an existing copy (should it exist), and mail specified addresses when/if there are changes. Do this whenever (@hourly works fine for me), and forget about website visiting.

Bingo.

So, erm, just in case anyone else wants it (yes, the licensing blurb is probably about the same length as the code itself, i dunno why I bother, but maybe someone’s got some hints/tips/comments…), ‘dell-order-status‘ (it’s a tidied up version of the one I’m actually using, so i may need a nudge to update the web-version if I change the one in use)

Dontcha just hate doing them?

Particularly when there’s the whole big fun of package updates, and it taking about six iterations of the various tools to get things up and running properly again?

Ach well. Mainly done now. Urfgh.

Shame about freebsd-update(8) not wanting to play ball: my guess is that the SINGLE SERVER was over-loaded.

Ah, right, well, yesterday, I made it along to a new meet-up/group, Drupal for NGOs

bloody good turnout, and quite a few people with experience in the field, along with those of us who’ve been playing around, and those thinking about Making The Switch. (like what no2id are to be doing soonish)

I saw on the upcoming comments that someone was after a few notes, so, erm, here are mine…

casestudy 1: greenpeace uk

Greenpeace UK (gpuk) used to use a legacy system of coldfusion, dating from the late 90s, and strove to gain better communications with their supporters, to recruit/engage others (vide: user module, forum). One of the cool things that’s on their site are the context sensitive blocks — targeted ads and stuff. Rock on!

Navigation’s made possible via both menus and tags, making use of the Tagadelic module.

Their local groups functionality draws in data from elsewhere, and as the sign-up process mail goes to the punter and the co-ordinator for that group: useful. Local groups are a specific Content Type.

To tweak some of the text, the locale module’s used

An extensive list of modules were used, the ones in my notes include:

• Deliver
• Diff
• Forward
• HTML corrector
• Newsletter
• Service Links
• User
• User Categories

For their data stuff (the idea to link in the Drupal with their supporters database/CRM) is to use SOPERA, something that uses SOAP, and can act (as I understood it) as an intermediary.

For importing stuff, they used a couple of scripts, and then manual tidy-up.

casestudy 2: oxfam international

Migrated from Plone → Drupal (site not yet live)

They use 14 core modules, and 29 custom modules, a few the same as gpuk, but also Custom Breadcrumbs and Lightbox 2

From start to finish, it’s taken them about 6 or 7 months.

In terms of clean-up, i can’t read my notes…

Their press releases, though were structured data, and imported in.

Nightly builds take place from their subversion repo.

For content specific stuff, they’re making use of the Cue node.

Apart from those, there were a couple of other Q&As, some of which focused on large-scale sites/optimization/techy concerns — the idea of PHP optimizers (there’s a blog somewhere comparing versions of PHP & Apache), and running a lightweight httpd were suggested, such as lighthttpd / ergdex. along with something like squid/varnish. Some modules it seems involve onehelluvalot of database queries (250) per load, so for large-scale stuff, re-writing may prove useful.

There are some load sims out there, too.

For proxying, appliancesys.com (hum, maybe I mis-heard) was mentioned as having proven useful

Looks like the start of a London Drupal community, which could be useful…