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It’s funny how inspiration has a tendency to wax and wane. A week ago, I was really struggling with development of Tracks. I was tired, and even when I had time in the evenings to try and code something, nothing worked out. Then Rails 0.10.0 came out, and I’m flying along again. Things I tried and made an utter hash of before worked first time, and Tracks has come on in leaps and bounds. Either I’m less tired and more inspired, or this release of Rails came with an undisclosed feature of Magic Pixie Dust that wasn’t listed in the changelog.

I had to go into the city to do a bit of shopping yesterday, but my mind was whirring with ideas, and I was eager to get back to my laptop. This was when I discovered that my multi-tasking skills are seriously lacking. I was waiting at the bus stop to come back, and designing a new bit of code in my head when I realised that the bus that had been right in front of me for some time—-the one which was closing its doors and moving off, and driven by a man with an ‘I can’t see you pounding desperately on the closed doors’ expression on his face—-was in fact my bus. In my irritation (and still thinking about securing the signup page), I read the number on the next bus as 104 rather than 114. That one digit makes quite a bit of difference in time to get home, as it turns out. Still, I got to see some new bits of the environs of Birmingham.

I had to get up in the very early hours of this morning to use the bathroom, and was amazed by finding the bathroom full of moonlight. The full moon was a couple of days ago, and the room was dappled by shards of silver light, broken up by the patterned, etched glass in the window. I went into Mr. Bsag’s studio and watched the blue shadows of the trees outside dance on the walls.

Sometimes it’s easy to forget about the moon, but that just means that it’s a delightful surprise when you come upon it unexpectedly.

As some of you may know, I’ve been using Textpattern to run my project site, Tracks (more on why I made the decision to use Textpattern rather than WordPress later). Textpattern 1.0 RC3 came out last week, and when I eventually got around to thinking about installing it, and I couldn’t believe how straightforward it was. I followed the instructions for upgrading via svn which are detailed on the Textpattern forum, and it was simplicity itself. I have shell access at TextDrive, so I just needed to log in via ssh, follow the instructions, and bingo—-everything worked perfectly. Checking out a copy of Textpattern via svn is a great idea, because the next time it gets upgraded, I can just issue a svn update command in the directory, and it will automatically fetch the new versions of files for me, with the added benefit of being able to svn revert back to what I had before if something goes wrong.

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I’m a bit late with this, but the PowerBook 100 made it to number one of Mobile PC magazine’s Top 100 Gadgets of all time. Obviously, I have good taste. I’ve got a PowerBook 100 sitting in a cupboard, and it was the machine —- bought second-hand —- that I wrote my thesis on. I was very fond of it, despite the persistently squeaky trackball that I never managed to silence. I slaved over it, played an inordinate amount of Tetris on it, and it even survived having a terracotta plant pot fall on it —- a tough little machine.

I always seem to do this, but I’m going to rave about a TV series that’s about to finish. I’ve been really enjoying [In Search of Myths and Heroes][1] with Michael Wood, but somehow I kept forgetting to write about it. As the title suggests, Michael Wood undertakes various journeys to try to trace the truth behind some of the famous myths and stories from the ancient world. He’s uncovered the story of the Queen of Sheba, and the historical links between Africa and the Middle East, he’s tramped over treacherous mountain passes drinking yak butter tea in search of Shangi-La, and in the latest programme, he followed the route of the Argo to tell the story of Jason and the Golden Fleece.

Behind most myths there’s a grain of truth, but even the embellishments say interesting things about human nature. The series is an ideal mix of interesting bits of history, stunning locations and the enthusiasm of Wood himself. I have to admit that when I was much younger, I had a slight crush on him. In fact, just about the only thing that would get me to watch history programmes in those days was the sight of his be-jeaned snake hips and stubbled face striding over a ruined wall somewhere. I’ve got over that now, but I still find him one of the most engaging presenters. He’s not pompous or patronising, and his rampant enthusiasm for the subject is very infectious. In the latest programme, he was geeking out over an ancient ruined Greek palace (and actually speaking Greek to the archaeologist, mind you), and I found myself getting vicariously excited about it too, even though it really isn’t my thing.

[1]: http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/programmes/myths_heroes/index.shtml “BBC site”

When it isn’t being remorselessly dull, British weather is just plain weird. When I left work on the train this evening, it was beautifully bright. The low sun and clear air made even the dowdiest buildings shine like jewels. Gradually, as I got closer to my station, the colour drained away and big, fat flakes of snow started to fall. By the time I got off the train, the sky was low and a soft dove grey and I walked into a swirl of dim whiteness. It was like stepping out of the wardrobe into Narnia.

The need to write a will has been bobbing about in the back of my mind for a while now, so when I read [this article][1] by Reid, it struck a chord. I had also been idly wondering what would happen to my online existence if my organic existence ended suddenly. I know that it sounds like a bit of a morbid topic (and don’t worry—-I have no particular reason to believe that I’m about to check out), but it is worth giving some thought to.

The hubby and I don’t have a huge amount of material stuff to distribute, nor do we have children to worry about. We don’t own a house and have few savings, so there’s just the car, some IKEA furniture, hi-fi, computer, and a music collection. But the things we’ve created seem much more valuable and worth conserving. Mr. Bsag’s paintings are fairly easy to deal with; I know where they are, and would have no difficulty in physically accessing them and making sure that they were safe. But what about my writing here? I’ve written 770 posts here to date, and while they are by no means all worth saving for posterity, taken together they do reflect me in some meaningful way. In fact, this collection of writing probably represents the essence of me and my interests and opinions better than anything else tangible. And then there’s all the comments, forming a little community that I would hate to see disappear.

The problem is that with all the passwords, obscure URLs and technical challenges of accessing this material, the chances are that it would all just go quiet here, and when the hosting fees weren’t paid, it would disappear. I think I might have to sort out a kind of ‘load in case of emergencies’ CD with instructions on accessing my WordPress installation, passwords and so on, and make sure that those close to me know where it is.

[1]: http://photodude.com/article/2548/lifetime-web “The Daily Whim: Lifetime Web”

Do you ever have one of those days when you do a load of work and then find that you have to undo all of it? I do. This afternoon, I was trying to add some kind of authentication to Tracks. I knew what I wanted to do, had a vague idea how to accomplish it, and off I went.

Two hours later, and all I succeeded in doing was making a total pig’s ear of the thing. All I can say is thank goodness for svn revert. Time for a beer and a film.

[Posted to both here and on Tracks]

Jason, of TextDrive fame, has been singing the praises of lighttpd recently. In my experience, when Jason sings about something techie, it’s worth listening.

A week or so ago, the Apache installation I use to test Tracks locally abruptly stopped working. I’m pretty sure that I just messed something up in my httpd.conf, but my motivation to go through it, find the problem and fix it was seriously lacking. So given all the great press that lighttpd has been getting, I thought I’d have a go at installing it on my machine last night.

It wasn’t a very difficult process, but I ended up having to try to compile it a couple of times. The first time, I neglected to notice the part of the instructions here that said you needed pcre installed. Then I came up against a maddening error during make that I couldn’t fix until I came upon this excellent tutorial by Johan on installing on OS X. He found the same error as me, but had made a patch to fix the problem. Bingo—everything ran smoothly from then on.

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OK, I think I’m finally there; WordPress 1.5 is properly installed. It was a bit more tricky and nerve-wracking than I’d hoped, but I think that’s probably because I’d done quite a bit of hacking of my index.php and comments.php, so I had to merge the old files with the new changes. However, the new structure for templates should make it much easier to upgrade in future.

It didn’t help that I had a corrupted download of the files, permissions problems when I uploaded and conflicts in my .htaccess file. Oh, and a conflict with one of the plugins (HashCash), which is why I made all those cryptic and pointless comments on the previous entry. Anyway, WP 1.5 is a really nice upgrade (and fully justifies the 1.2 -> 1.5 leap). The changes to the admin interface are really smart and make it much easier to manage posts, comments and plugins. As usual, if you do find any lurking problems that I haven’t spotted, let me know.

I’m just in the process of upgrading to Wordpress 1.5, and some things are temporarily broken. Bear with me while I fix stuff up. If you saw brief flashes of either nothing at all, 500 errors, or completely different stylesheets, that was me frantically trying to sort things out.

I don’t know what it is about the weather today, but I’ve been generating massive amounts of static electricity in the office. The combination of dry, cold air, an acrylic fleece and a synthetic carpet must be nearly optimal conditions for generating static, because every time I touch anything in the office (light switch, sockets, poor shocked PowerBook), sparks crackle from my fingers like I’m some kind of human Van der Graaff generator.

It’s got to the point where I’m aversively conditioned towards metal objects. Every time I look at the light switch I feel a little knot of fear. I actually contemplated not switching the lights off when I left the office this evening, because it hurts. I can see that I’m going to have to wear a very long version of one of those grounding straps around my wrist, with the other end attached to the radiator.

Remember last year, around Valentine’s Day, when I mentioned a rather wonderful geeky Valentine’s poem? Probably not, but as you see from the magnificent image here, you can now get it on a T-shirt at ThinkGeek. I like the fact that the hex codes are visually colour coded. I like the fact that they make it in a women’s fitted-T style. And I really, really want one.

“What’s that you said? Yes, grandaughter, I remember the Ikea riots of ‘05. Oh, terrible it was. There were flaming bags of GLIMMA being hurled over the BILLY barricades, then exploding in a waxy splash on the AMORF. KLACKBOs were being fashioned into makeshift trebuchet to chuck RESPEKT at those packed into the warehouse. I even saw one woman use a KLIPPAN on a trolley as a battering ram. Shocking. Of course, back in those days, Ikea just sold reasonably priced furniture, not like today.”

Watching a recording of the BAFTA tribute to Victoria Wood last night, I suddenly realised that I have never written about her here, despite the fact that she is one of my favourite comedians/comedy writers. People often compare her material to that of Alan Bennett, which seems apt to me. They both have an acute ear for the subtleties of everyday conversation, an affectionate warmth for their subjects (while still being biting at times), and genuine pathos and sadness in with the laughs.

She has turns of phrases that wedge themselves in your mind, only to pop up again unexpectedly and make you laugh. I love the title of one of her mini plays: ‘Mens Sana in Thingummy Doodah’, set in a health farm. From ‘Pat and Margaret’, I still cherish Thora Hird’s line (trying to warn her beloved son off his girlfriend), “She’s taken you for a giddy kipper, my lad.” Thora always got the best lines. And who can forget the immortal phrase “Beat me on the bottom with a Woman’s Weekly” from the song The Ballad of Freda and Barry (Let’s Fall in Love).

I think the show which displayed her talents to the fullest was Dinnerladies. For some inexplicable reason, it was never wildly popular, despite having brilliant characters, fantastic one-liners and more acting talent in one show than most serious dramas (Julie Walters, Duncan Preston, Celia Imrie etc.). It was set in the works canteen of a Manchester factory, and perhaps one of the reasons I liked it so much was that it reminded me of an old people’s day centre kitchen I worked in when I was at school. The banter between Dolly and Jean (they are very fond of one another, but can’t help making really catty remarks about each other within earshot) was spot on. There was a Dolly and Jean in the kitchen I worked in too, and I loved listening to them having a gentle go at one another. Dolly’s prim catchphrase (“It was in the Daily Mail”)—which precedes every wildly inaccurate fact she’s got hold of—has become a kind of code in our house for badly-researched, right-wing rubbish.

She caught the kind of mental gymnastics that you have to go through when talking to people who are slightly absent-minded. There’s a fantastic scene when Dolly is saying that she hates people crying on films. She’s trying to give a particularly obnoxious example, but can’t remember the title of the film. I don’t have the script (unfortunately) so I’m paraphrasing, but she said something like “It had that man in it… who was in that film with the chap in the dirty vest, you know!” Frowning with concentration and working on this extremely scanty set of clues, Bren goes from Bruce Willis in Die Hard to Alan Rickman to Truly Madly Deeply. I’ve had those kinds of conversations a lot.