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I’ve just upgraded to WordPress 1.2 beta—-a wonderfully easy and trouble-free process. I think it speaks volumes for the quality of the coding in WordPress that I’ve been using an alpha version since I switched, without any significant problems. The beta has been tidied up a great deal, and if you currently have 1.0.x installed, you’ll find a lot of nice new features. For me, the big improvements are the customisable meta-data you can attach to each post (this is how the EXIF data is stored in Pictorialis, which I use for my photoblog), and the Plugin architecture. You used to have to manually paste the code for hacks into a my-hacks.php file. It wasn’t particularly difficult, but perhaps a bit off-putting for beginners. Now the same functionality can be provided by plugins which are just dropped into a directory. They then appear on the Plugins page of the admin interface, where you can enable and disable them with a single click.

I promised—-when I wrote about my reasons for switching—-that I would list the hacks I had used on my site. Now seems as good a time as any to do that.

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I must be cursed. The other day—-after having randomly heard the theme tune on some TV programme and remembered how much he liked it—-Mr. Bsag found the theme to Banana Splits on the web. As a ‘surprise’ for me, he played it to me very loudly at 6:30 am when I was barely functioning¹. There can be few more tenacious soundworms than this song. Somebody make it stop! Then today, one of the builders at work was merrily whistling the tune just outside my office door (as a thoughtful counterpoint to the sound of drilling and hammering). Will I never be free of it?

All together now, “Tra la la, la la la la, Tra la la, la la la la.” Now I’ve infected all of you too. If I’m suffering, everyone should be.

¹ I’m sure that there must be legal precedent for this being legitimate grounds for divorce.

There seems to be a rash of social bookmark/link aggregator services being developed lately. I use del.icio.us, as you can see in the Quick links section on the right, but I also recently discovered Spurl.net. Then there’s Furl.net.

All offer slightly different features, differing interfaces and philosophies. Spurl’s philosophy is outlined here, for example.

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I like giving revision tutorials. Of all the different kinds of interactions with students, revision tutorials have the highest job satisfaction index (subjective benefit to student divided by amount of work required on my part). They come in clutching terrifying lever arch files, bulging with lecture notes, revision notes and ten other kinds of notes, and a look of panic etched on their features. Then they fire a load of random questions at you, which you try to answer in a clear way without recourse to books. It’s almost fun, and you get to feel like some kind of biology guru.

The key is not to introduce any idea that they haven’t heard of (or should have heard of, but haven’t revised), as it makes them go into a blind panic, and flick through a couple of reams of notes looking for the concept you just mentioned. The best part is when you are hopping between ideas and you suddenly see a light bulb come on over their heads as they make a connection that they just hadn’t considered before. Sparks jump between the nodes and they see the beauty of the way things link together.

Now that I’m doing more PHP-based web development, I decided that it might be time to install PHP properly on my laptop and run Apache locally to test my sites. PHP is great, but there’s great potential for messing things up royally, and in full and embarrassing view of your users.

There’s a series of great tutorials on MacDevCenter starting here, which gives you a good overview of using Apache as a development server. Sitepoint.com has some useful pointers if you want to set up VirtualHosts, so that you can have:

http://test.blog.com/

point to the directory /Users/me/Sites/blog. You can set up as many of these as you like, so that links rooted in your online site still work in the test server.

I got all of that working fine, with a lot of help from the incredibly easy packages available at Server Logistics. They have Apache 2, PHP with all the bells and whistles on and MySQL, all of which can be installed with an easy *.dmg package. There are also useful preference panes for Apache and MySQL, which let you quickly turn the server on and off and edit the config files, which is very convenient. It all went amazingly smoothly. Now I should be able to tinker away to my heart’s content in the privacy of my own machine.

I’ve finally finished messing about with my photoblog, and I’ve set up redirects from the old entries to the corresponding entries in the new blog. I say ‘finally finished’, but of course a true geek never finishes tinkering .

I’m quite pleased with the way it turned out. I’ve mentioned before that I used an adaptation of the WordPress publishing platform called Pictorialis, which has been developed by Mark. It has loads of great features, like automatic uploading, re-sizing and thumbnailing of images, and it also sucks down the EXIF data provided by the camera, so that you can show the shutter speed, aperture and so on, which can be very useful.

However, the default thumbnails were rectangular, and used the full frame, whereas I had always used square thumbnails which only show a portion of the full image. After asking Mark’s permission, I hacked the source and added the ability to automatically copy a randomly selected square region of the image to use as a thumbnail. It wasn’t a complicated hack, but to my utter amazement (considering I have only been writing PHP for a few weeks), it actually worked. Better still, Mark is going to incorporate it into the next release of Pictorialis—yay!

Mr. Bsag’s next art exhibition starts tomorrow. He was frantically blasting spray-mount on price labels, while I was trying to produce a new architecture and design for his website, and cursing the day I ever decided to use a footer. We had both been slaving away indoors while the sun shone and the breeze blew balmily outside. We had had enough.

“Oh, let’s go to the pub”. Our local—the Mason’s Arms—is a lovely, friendly Victorian pub, nestled in the hollow made by a former quarry. It has great real ale, and—more importantly for our purposes—a sunny beer garden. Half an hour with a pint or two of beer, a newspaper, listening to birds singing, and basking in the sun was just sufficient to restore a genial outlook on life.

What would we do without pubs?

There’s a great article in Thursday’s Guardian G2 by Clare Pollard, launching a scathing attack on the idea that ‘retail therapy’ is the answer to every woman’s problems. She reserves particular scorn for shopping for clothes or shoes.

Never mind that most of the world lives in poverty, and probably really “deserves” a bowl of grain, this month’s Cosmopolitan gives a 10-step happiness plan that includes such “happy steps” as “Buy those shoes” and “Give yourself treats.” No mention of giving other people treats. Or buying other people shoes. You wonder how people in the middle ages didn’t just die of misery, with no frappuccinos with which to reward themselves, and nothing to browse through on the high-street but cider and cheese.

How true. I feel like an alien sometimes. I’m not keen on any kind of shopping (except for CDs, HiFi or computers—but I don’t get to do them very often), but I particularly detest shopping for clothes.

I would rather be gnawed to death by weasels than go clothes shopping. It wouldn’t be so bad if I was the kind of standard-size woman that the high street caters for (if there is such a person). Then I could plan a commando-style operation, diving into the first shop with vaguely reasonable clothes, grabbing a selection of stuff, paying and getting the hell out of there. It would still be painful, but brief—like ripping off a plaster really quickly. Alas, there’s no possibility of this kind of thing; I’m short and I have big hips, and most clothes don’t fit, or don’t fit in the right places.

A couple of years ago I had to buy an outfit for a wedding. Mr. Bsag (who quite likes buying clothes for me, but not himself) managed to cajole me into going shopping, but after a scant 15 minutes, I was completely fed up. We were in Monsoon, and he was trying to coax me into trying something on; “Why don’t you just try this on? It will look great on you.” I was whining like a little kid, “Oh, can’t we just go, I don’t want to try anything on.” A couple of shop assistants were within earshot, and looked at us as if we had just defied the laws of gravity and floated up to the ceiling.

One thing¹ that visitors to this country probably find odd is the British obsession with queueing (or standing in line for any North American readers). Of course, people in other countries form queues or lines for things, but I don’t think I’ve ever visited anywhere else where it has become such a pervasive part of social behaviour.

I was thinking about this this morning, while waiting for the bus. The obvious, orderly queues are fairly easy to get to grips with: join the end, and don’t under any circumstances attempt to push in ahead of anyone else—doing so will only result in holes being burned in the back of your skull by the people behind you, and a chorus of ‘tutting’ and sub-vocal muttering about your lack of manners. No, the tricky blighters for the novice queuer are the crypto-queues. Crypto-queues can form anywhere that the queue is not physically constrained into a straight line, but seem to be particularly common at certain bus stops in Oxford where people approach the stop from either side. The vital thing to remember is that just because there doesn’t appear to be a line, it doesn’t mean that there isn’t a queue. Everyone in the loose cloud of people waiting knows exactly the order of arrival of all of the other members of the cloud.

When the bus arrives, this order is adhered to by subtle use of body language. If you happen to be nearer to the bus, but someone further away arrived at the stop before you, you signal permission for that person to board ahead of you by stepping back slightly and inclining your head towards them. Each person performs this ritual towards the person before them in the crypto-queue, and the cloud unreels itself rather gracefully into an ordered embarkation. You occasionally get people who don’t spot the signals, and they get holes burned into the back of their skulls in the time-honoured tradition. Elderly ladies are particularly proficient at this form of social enforcement.

¹ Perhaps that should be “one of the many things”…

I watched a bit of the BBC 2 40th birthday celebrations last night, which reminded me what a lot of excellent and innovative programmes they’ve produced over the years. The snippets they showed were tantalizingly short, but some made me wish I’d been old enough at the time to watch the documentaries they made in the 60s and 70s, like the Ascent of Man by Jacob Bronowski. The clip showed Bronowski standing in a pond made of human ashes from the gas ovens at Auschwitz and talking about how we have to “cure ourselves of the itch for absolute knowledge and power”, and to touch real people. He then bent down and picked up a handful of the wet ashes from the pond. It was an extraordinarily powerful moment.

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Having updated this blog to WordPress, I’m now turning my attention to my photoblog—wings open wide. I found a fantastic customisation of the standard WordPress install produced by Mark, called Pictorialis. It has all the great features of WordPress, plus easy image uploads, and automatic resizing and thumbnailing of images. I’ve tinkered with the stylesheet a bit, and imported my posts from Movabletype.

One slight pain is that I have to wrap the main images in some

and

tags to get them to work properly with the template, so some of the older images currently look a bit weird. I’m gradually fixing them, along with making a few more minor changes to the CSS and to the format of the archives, so that you can browse by category. I’m quite pleased with the way it’s shaping up so far—have a sneaky peek if you want.

Once I’m happy with how it’s working, I’ll redirect the old URIs to the new entries, as I did with this site.

Sometimes it isn’t clear why you choose a new piece of music. When you go into a record shop and pick up a CD by an artist you’ve never heard of before, what makes you give it a listen? I had never heard of Sufjan Stevens before, but something about the album cover intrigued me, and I listened to it in the shop. Even through the one working working channel on the headphones (what do people do to headphones in Virgin?) I could tell that I would love it.

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I had been thinking for a while that I’d like to incorporate some quick links in the sidebar to things that I’ve read and enjoyed, but I was still deciding on the best way to do it. There are some nice WordPress solutions, like markku’s excellent wp-recent-links, but I was feeling exceptionally lazy and thought that there must be another way to do it.

Then I remembered the service which allows you to quickly mark and categorise links, and display them publicly: del.icio.us. It’s really easy to set up an account, and you can see my page here. There’s also an easy method (using a query string) to get a raw HTML fragment containing the last x links in your feed, which you can then include in your blog page.

So, I put a bit of PHP in my sidebar to pull in the last 10 links. You should be able to include HTML files from remote sites using:

include 'http://somesite.com/file.inc';

but it seems that my hosts don’t have the allowurlfopen option enabled, so I had to think of another way to do it.

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The probably-final-ever series of Black Books has just ended, and I am in mourning. Along with Spaced, it’s one of the best and most imaginative UK sitcoms in many long, dreary and ‘Keeping up Appearances’-filled years.

For those of you who haven’t had the pleasure, Bernard Black owns a bookshop, but barely tolerates the customers. He’s more of a misomni-ist than a misanthropist; apart from red wine and cigarettes, he loathes and detests everyone and everything. Manny is a sweet, cheerful, good-natured beardy hippie, who Bernard uses as a general dogsbody. Fran is an alcoholic who has nothing better to do, and so spends her time in the shop.

Last night, Manny and Fran tried to persuade Bernard to go to a party, only succeeding when they deceived him into thinking that the booze had run out:

[Manny, excited to be going to the party]: Let’s paaaar….

[Bernard, furiously pointing at Manny]: Don’t you dare use ‘party’ as a verb in this shop!

Later, after the party, Bernard muses on the evening’s entertainment:

The drinks were few. The people were many. It was all I expected and less.

I’m really going to miss it, but I’m going to fill the void by reading these hilarious book reviews—’Mastering Regular Expressions in Perl’ is priceless.

Living in a city that is popular with tourists can be an odd experience. It often doesn’t really occur to you to visit some of the more popular ‘attractions’ if you live there all the time, but as a result you can miss out on some great experiences. My mum visited today, and insisted that we should look around Magdalen College. I’m very glad that she did, because it was really beautiful. The buildings themselves are very pretty, of course, but I’m afraid that living in such an old city has spoiled me for ancient buildings—“Pfft, that bit only dates from 1723”.

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