Author Archives: lornajane

19 Mar
2006

Creating Storage

We’ve recently moved into (another) new flat, and we’re just kind of settling in and unpacking. Its a rented place so we can’t do much with it – we’ve brought shelves and sidetables and stuff and that’s about all we can do. Our bedroom is cunningly arranged such that on my side of the bed, the wardrobe doors open right across the space between the bed and the wardrobe (fitted wardrobes, before anyone makes any suggestions). So I can put things by the bed temporarily, but I can’t have anything there all the time.

Now I don’t know about anyone else but I usually have a fair stack of random stuff beside my bed – reading materials, a glass of water, a lamp, my glasses, my phone, ten abandoned hair accessories, a drawer full of toiletries, spare keys, and who knows what else. Having spent a week with my belongings in a carrier bag, I started to think I needed a better solution … and here it is:

picture of the box

from another angle you can see inside too:

inside the box

I feel like a blue peter presenter but I’m just so proud of it! Its made from the box from a laptop delivery with some leftover wrapping paper from a friend’s birthday (58p from ASDA!) I couldn’t find sellotape or glue so I went for complimentary shades of electrical insulating tape (£1 for 5 reels from the pound shop) which was lying around! The tape’s not great so I didn’t make the paper go down to the floor as the box is going to live under the bed and get slid in and out quite a lot, it might not stand up for long with flimsy paper and not-very-sticky tape.

Anyway I feel like I live here now and the box is already full of the odds and ends. All I need now is a light I can clip onto the bed frame …

15 Mar
2006

Weekday Carbonara

This week we kind of ran out of food … so here’s my recipe for improvised spaghetti something.

Dice two chicken breasts and place in a frying pan over a moderate heat with some oil.

While the chicken starts to brown, chop up a few slices of bacon into little bits (I use scissors which seems to work well), and put the kettle on for the spaghetti.

Make cheese sauce, and put the bacon in with the chicken once the chicken has started to brown.

Put the spaghetti on to cook (you need to do this earlier on if its not quick-cook!), and when the chicken and bacon is cooked take it off the heat.

Put the cheese sauce in the microwave for its final minute and drain the spaghetti, returning it to the pan. Throw the chicken and bacon in on top and pour over the cheese sauce. Stir and serve.

15 Mar
2006

Cheese Sauce

Here is my recipe for microwave cheese sauce.

Take one teaspoon-sized blob of margerine (the sort you can bake with), a tablespoon of plain flour and half a pint of milk. Stir together and place in the microwave on full power for 2 mins (I use my 1 pint pyrex jug for this).

Whisk well to remove any lumps, then add the grated cheese (200g or so, the quantity isn’t critical) and whisk hard again, try to dissolve the cheese as it melts. Add another half pint of milk and some black pepper, stir well and leave to stand.

Once you are ready for the cheese sauce, pop it back in the microwave for another minute on full power, then serve

13 Mar
2006

UK TV coverage of Netball at the Commonwealth Games

Well its that time again, the Commonwealth Games. This year they are in Melbourne which means that those of us here in the UK either need to be able to work the video recorder, or be able to stay up until three in the morning!

The groups are:

A B
New Zealand
South Africa
England
Fiji
St Vincent & the Grenadines
Malawi		 Australia
Jamaica
Samoa
Barbados
Wales
Singapore

Top two teams from each group through to semi-finals

I haven’t found any comprehensive list of what’s on when yet, so here are a few different sources (all from the BBC website) put together in one list. Also further down the page are instructions for videoing those extra freeview channels (coming soon)

17th March
Interactive 3 (sky) and freeview 3
10.00-11.30 Netball
11.30-13.00 Netball

BBCTWO
13.50-15.00 Netball
England began their 2006 campaign with what looked a straightforward match against Malawi; Wales, on the other hand, faced the huge challenge of playing the host nation Australia.

Interactive 2 (sky) and freeview 2
02.00-03.30 Netball

18th March
Interactive 5 (sky)
17.30-19.00 Netball

19th March
Interactive 5 (sky)
13.00-14.30 Netball

Interactive 4 (sky) and freeview 3
10.00-11.30 Netball

BBCTWO
14.10-14.25 Netball
Presented by Clare Balding. Wales play the second of their netball pool matches against Samoa.

20th March
Interactive 4 (sky)
13.30-15.00 Netball A
15.00-16.30 Netball B

Interactive 5 (sky)
21.00-22.30 Netball

Interactive 3 (sky)
22.30-23.00 Netball

21st March
Interactive 3 (sky) and freeview 3
12.00-13.45 Netball

22nd March
Interactive 3 (sky) and freeview 3
10.10-11.40 Netball

Interactive 4 (sky) and freeview 3
17.30-19.00 Netball

Interactive 3 (sky) and freeview 2
22.00-23.30 Netball

23rd March
Interactive 3 (sky) and freeview 3
06.00-07.30 Netball

Interactive 2 (sky)
06.30-08.00 Netball

Interactive 4 (sky)
08.00-09.30 Netball

Interactive 4 (sky) and freeview 3
17.30-19.00 Netball

25th March
Interactive 5 (sky)
07.30-09.00 Netball Semi-Final
09.30-11.00 Netball Semi-Final

26th March
Interactive 4 (sky)
04.00-05.30 Netball-Bronze

Interactive 2 (sky) and freeview 2
06.00-08.00 Netball-Gold

Interactive 3 (sky) and freeview 3
14.00-17.00 Netball Finals

I’ll update this site with more info as and when I find it. Please email [email protected] if you have any additions or corrections. The schedules are quite confusing because we’re in a different timezone and “day 5” there spans two days here :)

09 Mar
2006

putty function keys in AIX

I’m having fun and games with AIX! I have two telnet clients, putty (fantastic client) and KEA!. I’ve been using KEA! successfully but would like to switch to putty, however the function keys didn’t result in the same escape characters being sent as in KEA!.

After a post to google groups and a very helpful link I finally started to make some progress. I only need keys F1 to F20 working and I’m there.

What I had to do was set putty’s setting under Terminal -> Keyboard -> The function keys and keypad to “Xterm R6”. This doesn’t exactly match what KEA! output but its close. The big difference is that with KEA I use ctrl with F1 to F10 to access the keys F11 to F20; on putty this is shift instead of ctrl.

In case it is any help to anyone, here are the outputs of F1 to F12 on the first line, shift and F1 to F12 on the second line, and ctrl and F1 to F12 on the third line, for both putty and KEA!.

putty:





<sup>[OP</sup>[OQ^[OR^[OS^[[15~^[[17~^[[18~^[[19~^[[20~^[[21~^[[23~^[[24~

<sup>[[23~</sup>[[24~^[[25~^[[26~^[[28~^[[29~^[[31~^[[32~^[[33~^[[34~^[[23~^[[24~

<sup>[OP</sup>[OQ^[OR^[OS^[[15~^[[17~^[[18~^[[19~^[[20~^[[21~^[[23~^[[24~

and KEA!:





<sup>[OP</sup>[OQ^[OR^[OS^[[17~^[[18~^[[19~^[[20~^[[21~^[[23~^[[24~

l

<sup>[[23~</sup>[[24~^[[25~^[[26~^[[28~^[[29~^[[31~^[[32~^[[33~^[[34~^[[23~^[[24~

NB F5 is missing from the KEA! one since pressing it while running cat caused cat to coredump!!

Anyway that was today’s crash course in escape chars, my putty is now working well and I can use it for the apps which use the function keys too, which is good news.

08 Mar
2006

my first shell script

I have a new job, which involves working on an AIX box over SSH. It the first time I’ve used command line to do everything I do in a day and its an education – especially as I’m new to korn shell.

Today I wrote my first shell script, it sets the title of my putty window so I don’t get confused which window is which. Here it is:


echo "\033]0;$PWD\007";
if test -n $1
then
        echo "\033]0;$1\007";
fi

02 Mar
2006

ruby quiz

I was looking around the web today and came across this:

http://www.rubyquiz.com/

You sign up to the mailing list and they send you a little exercise to do each week – what a great idea! You can only really get to grips with a programming language of any kind if you have a need to create something or have a project of some kind.

18 Jan
2006

The Search

The search for the home page tool …. Has taken me to a number of places. These are they, in order.

  • Dokuwiki
  • PHPWiki
  • phpWebThings
  • TextPattern (ahhh)

DokuWiki

DokuWiki

I love DokuWiki! We had a requirement at my place of work for a way to manage documents, to replace our existing system of putting everything on shared folders in Microsoft Outlook. I looked into a couple of document management apps but came to the conclusion that what I actually needed was a wiki, for the App Support Team to manage its knowledge and keep updating it easily.

DokuWiki is easy. Its easy to set up, and it has no special requirements. It doesn’t even use a database. This could be seen as a disadvantage but since I was installing it in an environment where it is Microsoft SQL Server or nothing, nothing seemed like a good choice. We set up some access control and branded it to match our corporate identity. Its been embraced by everyone and is a great success.

So why aren’t I using it on this site? Mostly because this site is content-controlled by only me, so I don’t actually want a wiki … I did try it out on here, but really it didn’t work as a way to solve this problem.

PHPWiki

PHPWiki

PHPWiki should have been the answer. Its widely used and loved, and has a database backend, which seems ideal for this kind of site and since I’m hosting on my own servers I can choose what I like. To cut a long story short, it was kind of complicated to set up, possibly I was being ditsy but I don’t usually have problems setting things up. Once it was installed I just didn’t bond with it at all, so that is the end of that!

phpWebThings

phpWebThings

This was a step in the right direction, and a more straightforward installation. It also comes with a cute pink theme which helped its ratings enormously (I know, little things, little minds, etc). I started entering content into it but still hadn’t really made any sense of the admin tools …. when I was still looking for a replacement a week later, I knew that I still hadn’t quite put my finger on it.

TextPattern

TextPattern

A recommendation from a friend (dotjay) and so far, so good!