Author Archives: lornajane

20 Mar
2008

Bank Holiday Weekend To Do List

Its Easter, which means its the only time of the year we reliably get 4 days off in a row from work without taking leave. And one thing I don’t have is a lot of holiday allocation. So, we’ve got good intentions of getting as much as possible done in the house (or at least, I’ve got good intentions and will rope in anyone who crosses the threshold). Apart from a whole lot of cleaning and catch-up in the house which is normal, I’m hoping to get some or all of the following done:

  • coal hole sorted out – we have the original coal cellar in our hose which was full of DIY stuff and other junk when we bought it – not much has come out and we’ve put a lot more stuff in, to the point where you now can’t get in the door and can’t find anything!
  • workshop space sorted – this follows on from the previous point – all the tools and stuff are in B&Q bags all over the floor in the other basement room because we haven’t got any usable storage
  • garden digging – got about the last 20 ft square of digging to do in the garden before we can lay turf … weather forecast is lousy though so I doubt that will happen
  • runs to the tip – many many of these I should think, hopefully taking some of the junk out of the garage
  • living room woodwork – skirting boards and dado rails need cutting to fit, sanding, staining and actually fitting. Fireplace needs sanding and staining and reassembling. Window sill needs staining. Window frame needs repairing. Door needs a new handle. After that we might start on the shelving we’re going to build

We do have help (anyone else at a loose end please feel free to come over as well!) but if we get half of this done it’ll be a miracle, wish us luck and have a good weekend yourself :)

17 Mar
2008

Debian Change Keyboard Layout

I recently downloaded a virtual machine which had all the default factory settings in it – including an American keyboard layout. To change this on Debian Etch I simply used:

dpkg-reconfigure console-data

and then followed the online prompts. For reference (i.e. the next time I have this problem), the | (pipe) symbol on a US keyboard is mapped to the ~ (tilde) on a UK one.

14 Mar
2008

Kubuntu Installation – Disk Partitioning

I’m installing Kubuntu Gutsy Gibbon onto my Dell Vostro 1500 and the first problem I hit was that the Live CD was entirely unable to repartition the disks. There are a few partitions on the disk (as you’d expect from a Dell machine running Vista, its got recovery and things) and I kept seeing the error:


An error occurred while writing the changes to the storage devices.
The resize operation is aborted

To get around this I resized the main partition in Windows and created a new partition but left it unformatted. When I went back to the Live CD install I got the option “Use largest contiguous space” and that worked fine.

Hope this helps someone!

13 Mar
2008

First Manchester Girl Geek Dinner

Last night I attended the first Manchester Girl Geek Dinner. I am very excited about the Girl Geek Dinner events arriving in the north, there’s a lot of activity up here and I’m already involved in other local events such as GeekUp and BarCamp.

I’m based in Leeds, so it was about an hours drive over to Manchester. Thanks to the wonderful world of satellite navigation, I found the venue with no problems. The evening started with some mingling and drinks, and then we were all invited to take seats and help ourselves to the buffet, which was excellent. After the meal we had a variety of talks which were actually really good, I hadn’t been thinking of the talks as the highlight but they certainly were!

During the course of the drinks, the meal, and a few minutes after the talks (although it was a very late finish, 10pm or so, I didn’t leave until half past and then had to drive back to Leeds), I was able to meet and speak with an amazing selection of women of various ages, professions and backgrounds and had some interesting and valuable conversations.

Its early days for this version of this event and the plan is for it to be quarterly, I am looking forward to the next installment.

10 Mar
2008

Grand Entrance Hall

When the rewiring of the house was done in November and our parquet flooring was a casualty of the process. We’ve spent the months since then with a hallway that looks like this:

Please admire the retro red and orange floorboards!!

Anyway, things are looking a lot better now – we’ve got a new floor!! I am so excited by this that I am providing a cartoon strip style display :)

I forgot to photograph the doormat we got – its in the porch, fitted rubber-backed doormat stuff that you lay like a carpet. So first impressions on entering our place are now quite different (so long as you ignore the holes in the wall)

08 Mar
2008

PHP London Meet and Some Heckling

I’ve been in London on business again this week (hopefully my wild travelling will calm down a bit now) which had the nice side-effect of allowing me to get to the PHP London meetup on Thursday. It was nice to see people that I met at the conference the previous week and also to meet some people who I hadn’t managed to catch up with previously.

The talk was from William Coleman of Microsoft talking about FastCGI and using PHP on Windows. He’d have done better to not say “We’re all guys here” in his opening remarks as I found myself heckling a speaker for the first time in my life!! I counted 4 women there out of 35 or so people, so a minority but a definitely existing one. He did apologise (about 17 times and after digging a bigger hole) and I had a brief chat with him later on, and gave him my phpwomen.org business card.

The talk was good and interesting, and he brought with him a remarkable sense of humour, which he probably needed since there were lots of smart comments coming from all angles. He did however impress upon us that performance of PHP on Windows is now comparable to performance of PHP on Linux, which was actually very interesting to know. Personally I have been staying away from PHP on Windows for 5 years or so but since I now work for Ibuildings who are Zend partners, then I guess I need to have more of a clue! Other than a few confusing moments where a comparison was made between running PHP on Windows against running it on Apache (what? Is Windows a web server now?) it was a good session and its nice to hear about these developments. My feeling is that no matter how stable PHP is on Windows, its the stability of Windows itself that means I’ll be avoiding it in my production servers for some time yet.

The punchline of the evening? Apparently microsoft have invented this great thing, called a shell, where you can just type comands in to your server rather than clicking on things, so you can manage servers remotely …

02 Mar
2008

Farmhouse Cake

This is the recipe for the cake I made for php london, its a “Farmhouse Cake” apparently but it reminds me of Dundee cake and keeps really well for a good couple of weeks in a tin, which can often be useful!

8oz butter
8oz caster sugar
grated rind of 1 orange
4 eggs, beaten
8oz self raising flour
half tsp nutmeg
3 oz ground almonds
14 oz mixed dried fruit
3oz glace cherries

Preheat the oven to 160 degrees C, and grease an 8 inch deep cake tin (I have a great one with a bottom that comes out so the cake comes out in one piece).

Cream the butter, sugar and orange rind together, then add the eggs a little at a time. Fold in the flour, then stir in everything else and put the mixture into the tin. Cooking time is 2 hours 15 to 2 hours 30 minutes – but keep checking on it and if the top starts to burn then cover it with greaseproof paper.

01 Mar
2008

PHP London 2008

On Friday was this year’s PHP Conference in London and I must say it was a roaring success. The whole conference had completely gone up a gear from last year (the only other time I’ve attended) with a larger venue, choice of tracks, more attendees and better food.

I was there representing phpwomen.org with a stand and some t-shirts to give away as well as some information about the group. We took 30 t-shirts and they were all completely gone by lunchtime, which was a great response. Even after that the stand was buzzing all day with people dropping by to ask about the group and how to get involved/get more t-shirts/help us gain more recognition. I was surprised and pleased by the response of attendees, both male and female, I met so many interesting people that I can’t begin to list them here but it was great to chat to you all! Its great to be able to raise awareness at events like these and the phplondon committee were wonderfully supportive of us throughout the organisation phase and during the day itself.

My new employers, Ibuildings were sponsoring the event so I was also able to spend some time with my colleagues and meet some new ones. I also briefly rebranded to the distinctive red ibuildings shirts at one point, to look like part of the team while we took some photos. It was great to see the guys doing the Zend Platform demos and to be able to hang around with them – including the guys from the Netherlands who were there. Ivo Jansch (CTO over there) gave a talk which I enjoyed and was well received all round. I didn’t realise until then that I actually work in the tallest team ever! I’m one of the smallest – at 5’11” this is pretty unusual :)

Since I was doing so many other things on the day I didn’t get to a lot of the talks but what I did see was well-prepared and the audience were great, with some really interesting questions being asked in all the sessions I attended. There were two tracks, in rooms just across the corridor from one another, and the rooms were well-managed and ran smoothly throughout the day. The conference also provided a “recharge room” with juice for people and devices alike. The venue was great and was big enough for everyone without any crowding or bottlenecks.

All in all I’d like to congratulate the organisers on a great event – can’t wait for next year :)

28 Feb
2008

Offline Geeking

I don’t spend a lot of time hanging around with geeks in the real world. I spend a lot of time hanging around with them in virtual spaces and some of the people I have met there are my closest friends. Offline meets are … quite different. Lots of geeks are quite shy, for starters. Some are quite egotistical, like the guy I met last year at the pre-conference social for phplondon and was horrified to hear that I create PHP using vim instead of a “proper IDE” and said how happy I was that I had made the effort to reach out to the conference and that he was sure I would learn a lot – the implication being that anyone who writes code with a keyboard is clearly a n00b. I’m hoping to avoid a repeat of that experience. I know I don’t look like a PHP developer but the friends I meet online can’t see that and I kind of forget … until an offline meet.

Perhaps experiences like these put me off doing the real-life thing but I am honestly so excited about PHPLondon tonight and tomorrow that I can’t imagine staying away. I’ll be promoting phpwomen at the main conference and I’m really excited about that too – look out for flocks of girls in bright purple t-shirts!

(OK, maybe not flocks…)

24 Feb
2008

PHP London and Another Busy Week

I heard last week that the PHPLondon conference is completely sold out – I had a funny feeling it might be :) I will be there, this Friday 29th February and looking forward to a great event. I’ll be at the pre- and post-conference socials, if you are an online acquaintance please stop me and say hi – I should be easy to spot as I’m female, tall, and have curly hair, there aren’t a lot of us around! I would be very pleased to meet you anyway so do say hello.

PHPWomen.org will be represented there, we have information about the group plus some women you can talk to (whether you are a woman or not, we’re not discriminatory!). We will also be giving away a few t-shirts, we don’t have a lot though so do come and demand one if you want one.

Once again things are very busy this week as I am travelling on business so I won’t be online a lot. Only been back a few days and it would be an understatement to say that I’m tired but hopefully things won’t carry on at this rate forever. Anyway its Sunday which usually means I should be packing …