LornaJane

19 Oct

2008

Crochet Tutorial: Next Steps

If you’ve been following the previous entries in this series, you’ll have seen how to start to crochet, and if you’ve followed the instructions you should be able to add another couple of rounds onto your project and end up with something that looks like this:

There are a number of things you can do with these little squares. They’re a very traditional form of crochet (and a really good way of using up odds and ends), you can see the kind of thing I mean if you search for “granny square” on flickr. When I was first learning to crochet I made myself a coding blanket that I still love!

Crochet doesn’t have to be square and it doesn’t have to be traditional – I’ve seen everything from the subversive (crochet covers on parking meters) to the cute (amigurumi). I’m currently working on (currently in the sense that I’ve begun and I haven’t finished yet, rather than it being truly ongoing) a set of hexagonal string coasters. The idea is that they will tesselate and form either a big placemat to put hot pots on or several smaller cup-sized coasters. They’re not radical, but they’re not really your traditional granny square either!

I’m sure there are many more uses of crochet in general and granny squares in particular – answers in the comments please :)

12 Oct

2008

rsnapshot flag for usb drive

rsnapshot is a great tool that I use for all my backup stuff, its really easy and seems pretty robust (or rather, I haven’t broken it yet!). When I set it up most recently, I discovered that it has a very useful flag, no_create_root. The problem I often have is that since I back up to removable media, if the disk isn’t mounted, rsnapshot will back up to the local drive instead, in the mount point – and then I’ll promptly run out of space. Stopping rsnapshot from creating directories means no writing rubbish into your mount point, and this setting is designed specifically for this issue with removable media.

This setting does have a gotcha, however. It does the check for whether the directory exists before it calls the script named in cmd_preexec – so if you were hoping to mount your drive in the pre-exec script, you can’t! I was very confused why my rsnapshot configuration didn’t work to start with. My workaround is to run a separate mount script before calling rsnapshot in a cron job, not ideal but it does work for me.

06 Oct

2008

PHPNW Tickets On Sale

Tickets are now on sale for PHPNW – the PHP Conference in Manchester, UK, on November 22nd. This is a conference aimed at bringing together and promoting the amazing wealth of local talent and activity in PHP within the North West and wider area. The schedule is online already and tickets are priced at a very reasonable and credit-crunch-friendly £50 (with discounts for students and OAPs) – and all that isn’t enough to persuade you, remember I’ll be there on the day too :)

03 Oct

2008

3-minute Crafty Earring Tidy

Recently I was shopping for an embriodery hoop and I saw that you can buy ones which are ready-made picture frames, you literally put the fabric in, embrioder, then trim off the outside and tidy up the back. I decided that this would make a great basis for an earring tidy – I try to keep my earrings linked together in pairs, but it depends what kind of butterfly they have and whether I remember! Some days its a real challenge to find a matching pair at all, and looking for a particular pair of earrings is usually a waste of time.

Enter the earring tidy, my 3-minute craft project! Take some fabric ( mine is linen, so its easy to put the earrings through ), put into the hoop, trim. Now add earrings!

It would be cool to categorise earrings and embroider in some outlines and labels, but I didn’t bother. This now hangs by my mirror on a piece of string so I can pick it up and get the earrings easily.

02 Oct

2008

Mounting the VMWare Tools Installation CD

I was recently installing the VMWare tools onto a debian etch virtual machine which I downloaded from the thoughtpolice.co.uk site, and I ran into problems. When the installation instructions from thoughtpolice say to type

mount /dev/cdrom /mnt/

This gives me an error about “You must specify the mount type” or similar. I found that actually you should type:

mount /dev/cdrom

and see the disk appear in /media/cdrom0. Thanks to this article which helped me out (I am pretty sure its the same one that helped me last time we had this problem as well!).

29 Sep

2008

Tinyurl Shortcut in Opera

I am an irssi user – I have issues with mice (I don’t use one) and so the text-based IRC client works wonderfully well for me. It also looks less like a chat client and more like I might be working on a terminal screen, which was more useful before I worked from home. In most of the channels I frequent, there is a bot (Phergie to be precise) which turns URLs into a Tinyurl link and also posts the page title.

Opera has a neat little trick (I hear firefox also now has something similar) where you can right-click in any search box, and save the search as a shortcut which you can then use in the address bar. By default this includes google so you can type: g cowsay to do the equivalent of typing “cowsay” into the search box on google.com. I usually add a few more searches to it – and one of them is for tinyurl, using the search string http://tinyurl.com/%s.

So when I see a URL in a chat session, I can just wait for the tinyurl, then type t followed by the 6 or so digits on the end of the tinyurl to get to where I’m going – very handy!

26 Sep

2008

Schedule for PHPNW

Today saw the publication of the schedule for the PHP North West Conference – you can see it in full on their site. There are some great speakers lined up – Johannes Schlüter, Rob Allen and Stefan Koopmanschap to name just a few that immediately jump out of the page. Tickets aren’t on sale yet but will be in the next week or so – I know I won’t be missing out on this event :)

25 Sep

2008

Excitement at Ibuildings

I didn’t post much of a wrap-up after ZendCon – partly because that trip ran into the start of another one and I only got home properly yesterday, and partly because something happened in California that I couldn’t talk about until now. One thing I did want to mention is that I gave a session in the unconference while I was there. I spoke jointly with Matthew Weier O’Phinney – despite any previous panicking I may have done about talks, I had very few nerves this time around and really came away feeling quite inspired about speaking in general. We signed up for the slot the day before (many thanks to whichever people were involved in conspiring to get me to do this), put a few slides together over breakfast, and took it from there with surprisingly good results.

(this is us drinking, rather than speaking, obviously)

Back to my ZendCon story. A few weeks ago, my employers Ibuildings announced their PHP Centre of Expertise which we will be building up. Its an initiative to support the wider PHP ecosystem, particularly because so many key PHP community people and contributors are employed at Ibuildings. I’m not usually a big fan of towing the company line on personal blogs, but this story is important to me.

ZendCon finished on the Thursday lunchtime and after a long afternoon hanging around outside and acquiring some really impressive sunburn (English complexion, Californian sunshine, yes I know I should know better!), the Ibuildings people present at ZendCon went out for a meal – with the table booked for one extra person. When Cal Evans walked in the room, I was delighted to see him, and wondered for a moment if he had just popped in for some beer and chatter – but I was completely and wonderfully wrong! Cal is the Chair of the PCE – so he’ll be my colleague within a few weeks!! I have known Cal for perhaps two years now, he’s a great supporter of phpwomen.org and I count him among my personal friends. Having him move halfway round the world to work with Ibuildings on such an exciting project makes me very optimistic at the thought of things to come. This is Cal and I at the conference:

Ibuildings is often recruiting, and it seems like many friends have joined the organisation already. Could anyone looking for a job with Ibuildings please note that we do have a bonus for employees recommending friends … ?

23 Sep

2008

My Sister’s Graduation

Yesterday I attended my little sister’s graduation ceremony – she has a BA in Early Childhood Studies from University College Birmingham and I am so proud of her I can’t actually express it! She’s worked hard to get to here and the path was not always smooth. I uploaded a selection of pictures from yesterday to remember the day by.

I’m also very pleased to have been able to be here to cheer her on and also very pleased that we now have the sequel to a photograph taken at my own graduation day 5 years ago.

Well done, little one!!

17 Sep

2008

Update from ZendCon

I’m currently in California, at ZendCon. I’m having way too much fun to blog but there is a writeup on the phpwomen site of my experiences so far. I’ve met some great people, and its long days but I’m learning a lot! I’ve (been) volunteered for an uncon session later on today, at 5:15 I’ll be speaking alongside Matthew Weier O’Phinney on “Subversion Tips and Tricks” – if you’re here at ZendCon then drop in and say hi.

For everything else, see the zendcon photos on flickr! http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/zendcon08