David Angier Blog

As the blindingly red box above says…. Goodbye cruel server. I am off to SquareSpace where I hope to breathe fresh life into writing about aspects of life that interest me, but probably no-one else.

After 18 months of having my MacBook Pro, I started outgrowing the hard drive. My laptop has to be a desktop replacement for me, since I am away from home so much. So, it has 1000’s of photos in RAW format, hours of camcorder footage, all my development environments, all my iTunes music, scans of every bit of post I receive and so on. I knew I was at the limit when I was having to offload stuff onto an external HDD in order to be able to keeping doing things I wanted to do.

External HDD’s are great, but fiddly as hell when your laptop is a mobile system. So, it was time for an upgrade, and I bought a Western Digital Scorpio 250GB 7200rpm drive.

Unlike the humble MacBook (where you can access the HDD from the battery bay), the MBP requires quite a strip down to get at the drive, and I needed a couple of extra tools for the job (a “spudger” and a Torx screw driver).

The iPhone 3G demand has been predicted by various pundits to be poor, as it adds so little to the original iPhone.

Well, it is so poor that on the day the O2 make it available as an upgrade, in fact within the first 30 minutes of availability, it has crashed their upgrades website:

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

“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.