Just A Summary

Today is the first day of our move. We’re only going down the road, but we’ve got a flatload of stuff and a self-store unitload of stuff to amalgamate into one house load of stuff, which means it’s going to be a two day process.

With any luck I’ll be back online and reading mail on Wednesday morning, but that’s subject to BT doing what they’re supposed to do. So who knows when I’ll be back on the air.

At least the blog’s hosted offsite now — something I’ve been meaning to do for ages and just never quite got round to before now.

See you all on Wednesday.

Welcome one and all.

Things are getting switched over. There’s been a few teething troubles with getting fcgi working (it was fine when I tested it, of course) so we’ve fallen back to the old, slow CGI version so everthing will be a little slow until the caches fill.

[later: Hands up if you hate timezones?

For a short while there this article showed up as the second most recent on the homepage. The most recent was posted some time in the future because of some foolish assumptions on someone’s part about timezones. It’s fixed now.

Everyone should just use GMT dammit!]

I’m just about to freeze the database here and turn off comments until DNS changes propagate and Just A Summary returns shiny and new on its new host at site5. Hopefully the changes will have propagated before I have to turn the ADSL off here and move everything a quarter of a mile down the road to our new home, but one never knows ones bad luck.

Here’s hoping it won’t take too long.

I find myself thinking of the old joke about Sheepshagger John:

A man goes into a pub in a small town and, for whatever reason, gets introduced to the clientele. There’s Farmer Jack, Barman Jim, Maurice “Dancer” and Sheepshagger John. After a few pints, the visitor’s curiosity gets the better of him and he asks John what’s with the nickname.

“See this pub?” asks John, "I built it, but they don’t call me Pubbuilder John? I’m the local doctor, I saved Barman Jim’s life once when he choked on a peanut, but they don’t call me Lifesaver John. Every year, I supply a huge Christmas tree for the village green, but the don’t call me Christmas Tree John.

“But you shag one lousy sheep…”

Why am I reminded of this?

The trouble with version control systems is that, if you’re not careful, it’s almost as bad as having no version control at all. I’m currently juggling about 4 active branches of typo: the local development branch, the production branch and a couple of branches that isolate some of the local changes so I can make clean patches for the typo developers.

So far, I’ve managed to upload about 5 patches, and I’m still not sure if the patches that are up on the Typo tracker are sane. And back porting the clean new system’s been a complete nightmare.

Still, it could be worse. I could be still trying to understand the inner workings of Moveable Type.

Tags’re great aren’t they? Yet another way of slicing through the thicket of information. The only problem with adding tagging support to your blog is deciding if you can be bothered to go back through the archives adding tags to everything.

I’m leaning towards the ‘not adding tags’ option.

Ooh look. Google ads. The mercenary git. Next thing you know he’ll be doctoring the RSS feeds so they don’t carry whole articles.

After much poring over The Truck Wheels pdf¹ and the Pickaxe book, accompanied by a certain amount of waving of dead chickens², I’m pleased to direct your attention to the sidebar where you will find a selection of relevant links to Amazon. If your interest is piqued, maybe you’d like to toddle over there and spend your hard earned cash on these and other fine books, enabling me to live in the lap of luxury on kickbacks from everyone’s favourite book pimp.

In the future I hope to have slightly prettier links, but I’m still finding my way around the code, and Amazon Web Services, and…

Still, I’m pleased with it so far.

¹ The Pragmatic Programmers are fine people. Rails is a well thought out and documented framework. However, I’m really struggling to come up with a pithy description of the picture on the cover of Agile Web Development with Rails. So, do I lack the word power or have Dave and David dropped the ball on cover design?

² No goats or virgins were harmed in the making of the sidebar. I think it’s important that you know that. Besides, this is Gateshead, where am I going to find a Virgin?

So, typo, the tool this runs on is undergoing some major (and good) changes. The only catch is, my deployment script consists of ‘doing it by hand and forgetting stuff’, which isn’t ideal.

Hopefully, next time there’s a change I’ll have a sensible deployment scheme in place (it won’t have to be very sensible to be more sensible than the one I have at the moment).

Oopsie! I managed to misconfigure the name of the comment script.

Which is one way of stopping comment spam I suppose, but not my preferred method. Comments should be working now.