David Angier Blog

We went to the London Eye the other week, and I managed to get a few nice sunny photos during a break in the rain, you can see them on my SmugMug gallery

I was browsing the MacRumors forum and saw a thread for Junes photos, and there was a lovely picture of Westminster. I realised I had a similar picture from my London Eye trip, which I had felt was too poor to publish. But, I applied a similar post-processing treatment that the other guy had done, and voilà...

This site is now running on Drupal 6. It was a useful exercise in finding out how much pain there would be to upgrade some of my customers sites.

The good news is that it is relatively straight-forward. But, unfortunately, contributors are being a bit slow at getting on-board with Drupal 6. This site uses a custom theme, and about 8 contributed modules.

I think it is time for Gallery to be retired from this blog. I will still keep it for Alison and Mum, but I am actively looking for alternatives for my photos. SmugMug is very nice, and looks like a good candidate.

So why? Well, although Gallery is a nice piece of software, I am getting seriously pissed off the the Drupal and Wordpress integration is ALWAYS the bit that breaks when I upgrade anything. This week I upgraded Alison to the latest Wordpress and WPG2 and her blog threw errors on every attempt to view a page only when she logged in. It was fine for me, and for non-logged in users. I traced the fault to a problem with G2’s embedded user mapping.

Next, I am working on porting this site to Drupal 6 – I do quite a bit of Drupal freelancing, and want to get up to speed with how Drupal 6 differs. My own site is good motivation to learn. But, how about Gallery integration. Oh good, there is a dev release. Oh bad, it requires Gallery 2 V2.3, which isn’t even released yet. WTF. So, the guys working on this (for nothing, I understand) think it makes sense to write the code to integrate a released Drupal 6 to an unreleased Gallery 2! I note, that ALMOST everything else is working for Drupal 6. There are some settling down issues with quite a few modules, the most inexplicable being XMLSitemap, but at least it works.

So, I think, what is it that wastes HUGE lumps of time every time I do an upgrade (and for my family, I have 6 sites). Gallery2, every time.

So, what do you think I can use as a replacement for other family members? It needs easy steps for linking a photo into Wordpress, other than that, just easy to use.

A little experimentation with the camera

Just a little note for anyone thinking of joining Hamiltons Fitness Centre, Colchester. Read the contract.

I attempted to cancel my membership, talking directly to the owners, in October, and have just discovered that the money is still leaving my account. When I rang to discuss a possible refund I discovered that they use the type of contract that the Consumer Association is touting as extremely unethical. This sort of contract auto-renews for an additional 12 months on the anniversary, and requires notice at least 30 days before that to activate cancellation. So, there is no one month notice period after the first year, or anything reasonable like that.

I would have thought that they would have told me that the membership (and money) would run for an additional 12 months as I handed over the membership cards, but it was all smiles.

Oh, BTW, don’t use the free vouchers! If you do, you find you have cut up your contract on the other side and have nothing to go to the solicitors with (well, I have HALF the contract left).

(PS. I have removed the link, no point advertising them too, is there?)

“Hi, I’m just testing blogging through SpinVox. I don’t know if this will work but if it does that will be really good. It’s a free service apart from the cost of the call but you know. Bye.”

spoken through SpinVox

I’m often amazed at how quickly the human body adapts. At the beginning of last week it was amazement at how the body dispenses with the resources it needs to be able to perform for longer periods of time. I suppose it is inefficient to keep the various pieces of metabolic equipment at a higher level of capability if it is not being used,

This week the amazement is how quickly the body starts to rebuild it’s capabilities. In three sessions I have gone from 40 lengths needing two breaks to catch my breath to 50 lengths without any breaks, and using another regular swimmer as a reference, I have also increased my speed by 10%.

Another couple of weeks, and I’ll be back down the gym.

(Update: And after another session, was managing to keep up with that other regular swimmer for the first 20 lengths, so up by another 10%).

When it comes to text editing, I got got by the Emacs bug practically from day one. The idea of an editor where practically everything was coded in macros, and could be changed in almost any way was very attractive. The Emacs I started with was a monster for the Vax 11/780 that the CS department had, and there often were complaints about the amount of resources it hogged, which in 1984 were considered to be quite exceptional.

As a consequence I never learned Vi. Often I regretted it, when remotely connected to some Unix or Linux system that didn’t have Emacs installed. A couple of weeks ago I read Why, oh WHY, do those #?@! nutheads use vi?. I sort of knew a reason why I should – it’s everywhere, unlike Emacs.

So, time to bite the bullet. I have installed gVim on my Windows working platform, MacVim on the Mac development platform and ViEmu into Visual Studio and have been forcing myself to learn as much as possible. It IS a steep learning curve indeed, but I was very, very surprised. Almost everything I use in Emacs on a day to day basis is in Vim, and quite a bit of it is quicker and easier to use than Emacs – it’s just that so much of the power is hidden from immediate view.

I’m glad I took the time to learn, as I think I’ll be sticking with it, and I know I’ll have a text editor waiting for me no matter which machine I use.

I was back down the pool this morning after a hiatus of around 10 weeks and it was hard, bloody hard. If this is what getting older is all about then you can keep it.

Only 10 weeks ago I was happily doing 100 lengths, hardly breaking a sweat and doing it in a time to be proud of. Today after only 6 lengths my arms were sore! No way was I going to give in, and kept on going, and going, and going. Someone else who I recognised as being someone I could just about keep up with, before, was lapping me constantly as well.

Anyway, I forced out 40 lengths at a fairly mediocre pace, and have decided to consider it a challange to see if I can reverse the damage in less than 10 weeks!

This week a City-Link attempted to deliver a parcel while no-one was in, so we were “carded” (their fantastic terminology). Fine. This sort of thing happens all the time, except City-Links depot is in Ipswich, and arranging a suitable delivery time was not possible with me away in Manchester and Alison working. Still, if we can’t be bothered sitting in all day for a parcel, then we should have the inconvenience of going to the depot, I suppose.

So, in order to avoid unnecessary journeys, I agreed to collect it from Ipswich on my way back from Manchester, this evening.

Anyway, to cut a long story short, I found myself to be in a queue of people, none of whom would they give parcels to….

1. One guy they had attempted “delivery” to 4 times. Except he was in on at least two occasions and the driver never even rang the doorbell, just popped the card through the door. The guy even ran out to the van, and the driver just drove off! He couldn’t have his parcel as it was being sent back to the sender.
2. A woman that turned up at 5:30, the time the customer service line told her to be there, to be told the driver wouldn’t be back until 6pm.
3. Myself, I didn’t have the card they’d put through the door, even though I had ID and the consignment number, no card=no parcel. Company policy, except it isn’t listed on their web site.
4. Another woman who had left a note on the door asking for the parcel to be left with her neighbour which had been ignored. Delivering to neighbours is also against company policy. Her parcel wasn’t back yet either.
5. Another bloke, on the way home from work with the same problem as me. He works in Ipswich, lives in Colchester and has to drive to-and-fro three times. Very ecologically friendly.

During all this time, only one person got his parcel and 5 were refused. The bloke behind the counter was “more than my jobs worth, guv”.

I think City-Link should be up for a largest carbon footprint per delivery award. Their approach leads to multiple failed attempts at delivery, hence unnecessary journeys, customers having to return multiple times, hence unnecessary journeys and parcels being returned to sender, hence unnecessary journeys.

Crap.

PS. Mr Jobs-Worth wanted me to point-out that they were following company policy to the letter, ensuring secure delivery of items which is what their customers want (customers being the senders).