Archive for February, 2008

“No, we’re not ready…”

Wednesday, February 27th, 2008

“…OK, now we’re ready.”

This year I’m going to attempt to join the annual LugRadio marathon – initiated by mrBen (pictured below) – in the build up to LugRadio Live (the original and best UK version, unless someone wants to sponsor me to go to the USA one).


Creative Commons License photo credit: andy.d

I’ve already started with Season 1, Episode 1 “The Phantom Message“. Even though they’ve improved in both technical and professional terms over the years, listening to that first episode again reminded me why I like(d*) listening so much. Indeed I became their first official fan!

In the spirit of competition I’m going to see mrBen’s challenge and raise it by including all of hashlugradio as well. This is, of course, in preparation for hashlugradio Live 2008 – the event that allows LugRadio Live to share the same time, dates and venue.

* I can’t remember when or exactly why I stopped listening regularly. Maybe I’ll be able to spot it as I go through.

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Posted in Linux, Listening | 2 Comments »

Why developing your own blog software isn’t always a good idea

Tuesday, February 26th, 2008

David Goodwin made the following comment on my post about migrating to WordPress:

Despite every ‘web2.0′ language/framework having a ‘create a blog application in 5 minutes’ example, it’s amusing to see even a developer default to Wordpress, which is still written for php4

I can see his point, and I agree that is amusing. Of course I’m not going to miss a chance to get on my soapbox though. :)
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Posted in Developing | 2 Comments »

Migrated to WordPress

Thursday, February 21st, 2008

First of all, apologies for any ‘planet spam’ caused the change to my feeds.

After what seems like an eternity (but is actually just over a year) I’ve switched the backend of this site from Mephisto to WordPress. The main reason for the switch was my overall dissatisfaction with Mephisto coupled with its lack of development (or a least stable releases) along with the fact that I was maintaining a Ruby on Rails production environment for one application. Mephisto frustrated me in many ways, from its inability to handle archives/pagination to not being able to accept pingbacks to not working with external clients. All of these were fixable, but I really didn’t have the patience or the time.

Here is my tale of migrating from Mephisto to WordPress, and how I achieved it.

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Posted in Linux, Python, Ruby On Rails | 9 Comments »

PyRoom

Tuesday, February 5th, 2008

A while back I was discussing FOSS alternatives for cutting out distractions, and one of the pieces of software that I couldn’t find a decent alternative for was Writeroom which is commercial software for the Mac.

Now Bruno Bord (who’s basically French) has come to the rescue with the PyRoom project. I may have to get involved.

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Posted in Linux, Python, Writing | 8 Comments »