In the dying moments of this day, just before I nip off to Pro Corda early tomorrow morning, I've looked at a few things:
- ikiwiki: A wiki compiler that also allows updates through Subversion! A neat little quirk but whether I'd use that I'm not sure. What I simply can't explain though is how fast this is- wow! Another thing holding it back for me is the different syntax used. I am used to the Mediawiki or Trac wiki syntax and this is a little different. However this is actually very small, and if it bothered me too much, I could just write a plugin to accept the different syntax...
- Xgl: Using the instructions I found here I managed to get Xgl installed. This is rather an eye-candy thing, but it looks nice, so I installed it.
- Beagle: I had Beagle installed a while ago but I can't remember why I deleted it. I thought it would be a nice thing to have installed along with the deskbar applet.
Anyway, I'm going now. I hope Pro Corda goes alright...
Happy birthday Debian
I was waiting for my parents to come back from Devon on Friday night, and it got later and later, until I heard the crunching of gravel outside. Instead of just the car coming in, a recovery lorry was carrying it! That was rather amusing, and more surprisingly, they were in good moods about it- odd.
I had an interesting weekend. I went to the sunny area of London known as Herne Hill to visit my sister. The visit was extremely nice and we got up to lots of cool things. First of all there was a little problem meeting up with her. I got an earlier train to Herne Hill on the Thameslink and so I set off to her flat on instructions from a reliable source that told me that she would be coming from the flat anyway- foolishly, I believed her. However, things corrected them after a short time, and I was engulfed in the book I had downloaded and copied to my phone (I am determined to find out what the fuss about Python is, and now I've read ahead in the book it seems that the examples at the beginning are awful! Anyway, after arriving at the mansions we chatted about things. After a bit, we decided to go to the South Bank. We had to take the bus as the Thameslink wasn't functioning past Blackfriars. Once there I saw, for the first time, a mass second-hand booksale that's apparently there all the time, under a bridge. It was interesting, but being not much of a book person, I bought nothing. Next we wandered onto the Watch This Space outdoor entertainment space outside the Royal National Theatre. At first, all was quiet and we were drawn to inspect the treasures of The Caravan Gallery. This was amusing and we, or at least I, had fun filling in the questionnaire at the end. After we had finished these though, the floor came alive as an event was starting. Cliffhanger! by the Bash Street Theatre was this event and it was hugely entertaining. It was a silent movie with real-live piano player (who was extremely good and must have been extremely knackered at the end)! After all this, we went back to her flat, had dinner and watched Vanilla Sky. This was a good film, and messed with my head a little, but Memento still holds the title in my books for the Head-screwer and I recommended it to my sister as a must watch before falling asleep. On the second day, we went to the Imperial War Museum and went to The Animals' War exhibition with the family whose kids my sister used to babysit for. This was good, but personally this wouldn't have been my number one choice of exhibition to visit. After this we went to my sister's local pub which she speaks highly of. We narrowly beat the hail that came tumbling down onto the roof, and rain down through the roof! After a quick slurp, we went back to her flat, picked up my stuff and went back into town armed with an umbrella. We went to another pub in town and met her friend. We sipped on drinks and ate some food and afterwards I went to King's Cross and got a train back to dear old Huntingdon. The journey was made short as I spoke to my dear friend for the first time in a long while. I got home and went to bed. For another entry on the weekend, one can visit my sister's blog entry and read the fourth and fifth paragraphs.
I've just been forced into visiting my grandparents in Devon straight after Pro Corda. Although this shouldn't be too bad, I'm going straight after I get back from Pro Corda and leave a day before school starts starts. How unnecessary...
Today has been boring. I got up, wrote a letter and that's just about it.
On a silly note, isn't this image outside the old Addenbrookes?
As I write this, I am listening to: Paganini: Violin Concerto No. 4 in D minor (Accardo, London Philharmonic Orchestra, Dutoit), however as I was typing it ended, so I started playing: Paganini: 24 Caprices for solo Violin, Op. 1 (Perlman)
Just made three changes:
- From using joe to vim,
- from the WYSIWYG editor in WordPress to the plaintext HTML one (I hope my HTML is up to scratch),
- and moved my Trac and
Subversion installations to
server2as well as opened ports 80 and 443 to the outside world so the links in my previous post work
As I write this, I am listening to: Dream Theater, Blind Faith, from Six Degrees Of Inner Turbulence
The title: lol
I have heard reports that my blog is rather one sided and some can't actually understand what is going on. It is correct though: unless you have a Windows Mobile phone and want to use it on GNU/Linux, then you will not know, or will not want to know, about SynCE and my woes about it! Same goes about using the bcm43xx driver on my wireless card. Although I'll keep writing blogs like that, I will try to also write more about what's going on in the old life I'm having at the moment.
PHP-Site has really been taking off in development. I have been using Trac on my home server and can be accessed at:
https://jonnylamb.no-ip.org/phpsite
This site contains a wiki, roadmap, subversion source and ticket system. Please visit this if you're remotely interested and check it out. I want to move this site to it's normal home: phpsite.org, or more precisely: trac.phpsite.org. There is also a mailing list for PHP-Site. It will start to be used more as the script really takes off. This can be found on SourceForge at http://lists.sourceforge.net/mailman/listinfo/phpsite-news. I would also love more interest and more people involved in development, documentation or the general running of the project. It would be a great help as well as a good way to promote the project.
Results day is in one week today (it is now past twelve so technically 6 days) and I'm not looking forward to it.
However, Pro Corda starts soon and I am looking forward to it! I'm playing first violin in Dvorak's American quartet, Op. 96, movements II and IV; and first viola in Bargiel's octet, Op. 15a, movement I. The former is a really great piece and I still have much work to do on it before I leave, but I'm sure I'll enjoy playing it with my regular quartet- Anna, Immy and Conrad. The latter is a new one to me- I hadn't heard of Bargiel before receiving the music but I am liking the piece. It isn't quite like the octet but it is a very nice piece! The theme of the party is the letter G, which I think, and I'm sure you'll agree, is rubbish. In fact, there's no doubt about it!
Last week while my parents were in France, I was (dumped) onto my god-father who runs the Cambridge Pianola Company. While he is a very interesting guy, we didn't get up to much as he spends a lot of the time on the phone and, because he's blind, can't get out and about too easily. However, there were some interesting moments to the week. He let me drive his Porsche. This was a more than entertaining experience as my previous driving experience is null. I had great difficulty putting it into gear and had to call on both my brother and my darling Fiona as they both had actually driven a car before! I was also quite lucky, as I managed to just miss hitting his Mercedes, which is fortunate, as I doubt he'd enjoy hearing the crunching of metal! Interestingly, he is also a member of the Institute of Advanced Motorists, which I don't quite understand, but I wouldn't, would I? However, thanks to this membership he was invited, with guests, to a barbeque in Fulbourn. Although the weather wasn't the nicest, I had a nice time and spent most of the time discussing cellular networks in the UK with his daughter, and the bids for the 3G licenses some years ago that went astonishingly high.
In July, I had a mixture of interesting excursions. I went to York to check out the university, as well as play in a concert with the York Young Soloists. The concert was good: we played Strauss Romance for Cello, James Freeman (a horn player in the orchestra as well as a music undergraduate at Cambridge) Fantasie, Richard Sheppard (an authority in the minster) Six Shakespeare Songs and Mozart Symphony No. 40. I enjoyed the Mozart the most, but it was a nice concert. The university was also good. I didn't spend much time there, but I did get a good tour of the Computer Science department which was informative and helpful.
This new graphics card that I ordered came to the door this morning, but 9am is a time that sounds like a boggy marshland when you've gone to sleep at 6am. It should be coming again tomorrow morning (again technically later today) and so I'm determined to be up to receive it. I'm bored of using the integrated graphics on this VIA motherboard using the native Linux driver in Debian. Go hardware graphics!
I have noticed (I'm not sure whether it's a recent thing) that Google now links you to a referrer page, so when you click on a search result, it takes you through Google and then to your site, which is rather annoying when you try and copy the link's URL. Is there any way to get rid of this?
As I write this, I am listening to: Corelli: Sonata for Violin and Continuo in D minor «La Folia», Op. 5 No. 12 (Manze, Egarr)
A few tremendously interesting things have been happening here:
- Development on SmartLife has slowly began with me trying to understand more about how one should parse the feedlist.opml
- I have moved from Sylpheed-claws to evolution. This is for when I can get SynCE working on this computer, and synchronization is available through OpenSync.
- I've purchased a new graphics card after frying my other two. I could no longer stand using on-board graphics with the less-than-terrific via display driver for Linux.
- Instead of learning C++ as I said I would early in the holidays, I have decided to further my knowledge in C#.
- I got my phone application unlocked by Orange, so now I can run my own code, as well as some other unsigned apps.
Other than that, everything is awesomely boring!