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In the course of keeping up with Ruby-related things, I came across a weblogging engine written in Ruby and called hobix. The hobix homepage could well be the maddest I’ve ever come across; the tagline “hobix: the white pantsuit of weblahhing (sic)” gives you fair warning. Hobix is written by _why the lucky stiff (his friends call him _why), who is also the evil genius behind Why’s (Poignant) Guide to Ruby (of which more later), and the excellent RedCloth (combined Textile and Markdown format markup in a Ruby library).

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120-year-old tortoise adopts baby hippo:

‘When we released Owen into the enclosure, he lumbered to the tortoise which has a dark gray color similar to grown up hippos,’ Sabine Baer, rehabilitation and ecosystems manager at the park, told Reuters.

I’m ashamed to say that when I first saw the photo, I thought it was a Photoshop job because I hadn’t noted the fact that it’s a baby hippo and a very old (and therefore very large) tortoise. Poor tortoise—at his age he was probably enjoying just pottering around slowing and eating lettuce, and now he’s being pestered by a hippo.

[via Boing Boing]

Yesterday was Epiphany (or so the hubby tells me, and he knows about these things), which meant that the Christmas decorations were supposed to come down. I always find it a rather sad a dreary time. Taking decorations down is much less fun than putting them up, and everything looks so drab in contrast.

The worst job was getting the fairy lights off our rite of passage tree. I thought when I got them out of the box in their super-compressed state that the chances of getting them back into the same box were vanishingly small. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but fairy lights behave like DNA. In the box, they are in their supercoiled, chromosomal form. As soon as you unwind them, they explode into a tangle of wires; unlike DNA, this is a strictly one-way process.

I made a half-hearted attempt to form loose coils, but realised this was a losing battle and resorted to cramming the whole lot in a huge plastic bag. That’s going to be fun next year.

I’m under a bit of a torrent of Trackback spam at the moment. It’s particularly nasty content, and—as yet—very difficult to block without blocking Trackbacks totally. So that’s what I’ve done; until someone comes up with a counter-attack, I’ve turned Trackbacks off. In fact, I’ve also changed the permissions on wp-trackback.php to 700 so that it can’t be executed.

It still doesn’t stop me being notified of the trackbacks, and I still have to delete them manually from the moderation queue. Unfortunately, they seem to be emanating from a huge number of possibly zombied computers, so you can’t even block the IP addresses in an .htaccess file. Sigh.

I’ve been meaning to post about a great programme that was on Radio 4 on New Year’s Day: Thinking Earth - an ABC of the Night. It was a collage of people’s stories and sounds of the night, from all around the world. They went through the alphabet, with one little segment representing each letter. It was the kind of thing that radio does superbly. Listening—at night—with the lights dimmed, it was wonderful to immerse yourself in this lush soundscape, and to enjoy people talking about their experiences. One of my favourites was of a Norwegian man talking about going skinny dipping one night as a teenager with some friends. He described their surprise at finding their naked bodies illuminated by bioluminescent plankton. They were simultaneously delighted and embarrassed. They were rather expecting that their bodies wouldn’t be visible in the dark water, but found that they were lit up like Christmas trees!

I really recommend it; listen to it in the dark.

Now that I’ve released the next version of what is now called Tracks, the awful realisation has hit me that my icon designing skills leave everything to be desired. The icons I made for Tracks are grey blobs. All of them. So I’m on the hunt for some replacements. I’d like some 16x16 pixel icons for edit, delete, show note and perhaps also a ‘done’ bullet point (a tick or checkmark in a circle).

IconExperience and IconBuffet both have beautiful royalty-free icons which would be ideal, but as I’m not making any money out of Tracks, I can’t really afford their packages. Also, I only need a few of the icons, so a full package wouldn’t be very good value for me. Does anyone know of any free (as in beer and speech) sources of suitable icons? Or does anybody feel like contributing something of their own? Tracks is GNU GPL licensed now, so I can offer you only the undying gratitude and rapt admiration of everyone who has to peer at my blobs and wonder, “Is that an edit symbol, or a delete symbol? Uh-oh.”

This purchase was inspired by seeing Gillian Welch and her partner David Rawlings play an acoustic set on BBC4, although I was slightly familiar with Gillian’s work from the soundtrack of ‘O Brother, Where Art Thou?’. Their virtuoso acoustic guitar playing and gorgeous hamonies blew me away, and—thankfully—the album didn’t disappoint.

Some of the tracks (for example, ‘Red Clay Halo’ and ‘I Want To Sing That Rock and Roll’) have a strong bluegrass sound, which might be off-putting if you don’t like that style of music, but there’s quite a variety of sounds on the album. I love ‘Revelator’, which is sweetly mournful, and ‘Elvis Presley Blues’, which glues itself in your mind for days afterwards. Given that Gillian and David are life partners as well as singing ones, I was quite amused to see what facial expression David would adopt when Gillian sang ‘My First Lover’. I have to say that he was annoyingly deadpan, but he might have been seething inside.

Gillian and David’s voices and playing dovetail beautifully together, without them even looking at one another. I wonder what it would be like to have a lover you could harmonise with so sweetly? I’m a bit jealous.

…Happy New Year!

I’ve fallen in love with Subversion. Some time ago, I had a go at using another version control system (CVS), but I never managed to get the hang of it; it seemed more trouble than it was worth. But when I moved to TextDrive, I found that I had access to Subversion repositories, so I decided to see if I could get to grips with it.

The Subversion book proved invaluable, but it all seemed much simpler than CVS once I’d got the basic idea. I’m currently working on the next version of my GTD app, and it’s been wonderful to be able to hack away at it without worrying that I’m not going to be able to put things right again if my new feature turns out to be a gigantic mistake. As long as I make sure that the app is working properly (or at least that I know exactly what is working and what isn’t) each time I submit a commit, I have a reassuring safety net, and can experiment to my heart’s content.

It’s fantastic! I almost wish that I could have my whole life administered by Subversion so that—in the likely event of a major mistake on my part—I could just svn revert to a previous, non-messed up version.