As I can’t comment on her post (nudge nudge, Laurie) I’ll say welcome back to Carly via Planet Afterlife instead!
Now I’ve spent half an hour looking through your archives of old posts instead of going to bed like a good boy, I’m going to be that little bit more tired at work tomorrow. But as I had 15 hours’ sleep the night before, perhaps I won’t be after all.
Must remember to blog the pictures I’ve been taking on my phone over the last few days. Camera phone photos rock.
I fixed Planet Afterlife again. This time its cache had got corrupted somehow, which I think was what was causing the old entries to pop up a few days ago. In the end it started crashing while halfway through the update job, swallowing huge amounts of memory and CPU time until the computer seized up completely.
I cleared the cache and it all seems fine now. Although perhaps I should have copied it off somewhere else so I could use it to file a bug report against Planet instead. A rm cache/* command isn’t particularly helpful in allowing me to do that but never mind, eh?
Nice to have Matt back up there, even if most of the entries up there are now his! I wonder if it’s possible for one to spam one’s own blog? 🙂
Labour
Labour -16  |
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| Conservative -33 |
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 Liberal Democrat 52 |
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| UK Independence Party 2 |
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| Green 35 |
You should vote: Liberal Democrat
The LibDems take a strong stand against tax cuts and a strong one in favour of public services: they would make long-term residential care for the elderly free across the UK, and scrap university tuition fees. They are in favour of a ban on smoking in public places, but would relax laws on cannabis. They propose to change vehicle taxation to be based on usage rather than ownership.
Take the test at Who Should You Vote For
Long time no blog. Meh.
I did ten kilometres in the gym in total yesterday. Five kilometres of cycling, three of rowing and another two on the treadmill. I’d have done more on the treadmill if there’d been some free earlier on, before I tired myself out doing other things. I don’t hurt too much today though, which has got to be good. Maybe I’ll have a delayed reaction tomorrow or something.
Also, Planet Afterlife has been changed around so that it only requires a single cron job running on my work PC. The new cron job runs a script to build the HTML and RSS files and FTP them up to my UNIX web space on mimosa. This means that Planet Afterlife will still work if my PC’s IP address changes, as the process is no longer dependent on mimosa being able to wget the files off it.
Warwick people may be interested in a story about blog censorship, via Blogging Pro. But as it’s related to work it’s probably best that I don’t say why…
I finally remembered to sponsor Clare and Ali for the Great Manchester Run next month.
Anyone reading this who hasn’t already sponsored them should feel thoroughly ashamed and should proceed directly to the web site without passing Go or collecting 200 pounds. Unless you’re going to give the 200 pounds to them, of course 🙂
The courier with my replacement phone was supposed to turn up sometime between one o’clock and five o’ clock today. Naturally, he turned up at one minute past one and went away again when I wasn’t here.
So I phoned up Orange when I got in fifteen minutes later, only to be told that they can’t contact the courier and neither can they arrange for a new delivery date until the courier notifies them that the delivery failed at the end of his shift at around five o’ clock. Bastards.
To help calm myself down slightly, I went over to the Union to have a game of pool with Pat. Only to discover that (a) most of the tables weren’t working, (b) the few that were have been modified so as to require 70p (up by a whole ten pence!) and (c) the one we used in the end wouldn’t give us the last red ball, so we had to play without it.
/me wonders what else can go wrong today…
My phone’s broken. I’ve only had it a couple of months but it no longer rings, which is rather a problem. I think the loudspeaker is broken.
This means that the speakerphone also doesn’t work, so I can’t make any hilarious hungover speakerphone calls. Quite clearly this is unacceptable and so today I took the phone into the Orange shop in Leam to see what can be done about it.
Fortunately because have Orange Care, they’re sending a courier with a replacement phone tomorrow. Unfortunately this means I need to back up all the files and settings off the old phone sharpish, so I purchased an overpriced bluetooth USB dongle from the Orange shop in order to facilitate this.
So now all the photos that I’ve taken with my phone over the last few months are on my computer. Which means they must be blogged.
Having a camera on your phone is quite cool, because it lets you take small grainy pictures of things on those occasions when you forget to take a half decent camera out with you. Much like the other week when Dave, Kevin and I went shopping in Brum.
So here are two photos of the escalators in Selfidges and Dave being rude while wearing a wig.
I stopped off on campus on the way back from Wales last night, just in time for the sunset. It had just rained, and there were still lots of clouds in the sky, which turned bright red as the sun hit them.
I wandered up towards the Arts Centre armed with my camera, but I couldn’t get a decent shot there. I went over to the top of the Piazza – no joy there either. I was on the way back to the gym when I looked back at Union North.
I got Planet Afterlife working again, woot! Perhaps I need to simplify the current updating process somewhat from it’s current form:
All this happens once a minute, every day. Except when it doesn’t, either because of a problem with mimosa, my work computer or the VMware installation running on it, or because of something getting turned off or unplugged, or (in this case) the IP address of Ubuntu changing after I rebooted it.
I freely admit that this method sucks and I’m actually quite surprised (though glad) that it doesn’t break more often.
Perhaps one day I’ll find a reliable*, UK-based** web host who have Python 2.2 or greater installed on their servers and will let me run a cron job to update Planet Aftelife every minute or so. But that day hasn’t come yet and until it does I have to make do with the current system.
Which sucks. A lot.
* If you remember the frequent downtime I was getting on wabson.org until I changed back to Easily last summer then you’ll understand why reliability is my top requirement.
** As I said to Laurie yesterday, I want someone in the same country as me who I can phone up when problems crop up. Admittedly the need to do this is much reduced if you have a reliable hosting company, but call me paranoid.
The Sun came out in Wales!
