Author Archives: lornajane

18 Nov
2007

BarCampLeeds Recap

I did it! I went and spoke at BarCampLeeds, there’s flickr evidence to prove it as well :)

My talk was “Source Control Saves Lives”, a primer on what source control and why you should use it, with a definite subversion twist because that’s what I know the most about and I’m not a fan of talking about stuff I don’t know about! For posterity, here are the slides – I haven’t done any presentations for years and I couldn’t remember how to work powerpoint svn_saves_lives.ppt

I borrowed Kevin’s mac and downloaded the demo of iWork. Its a 30 day trial and after its expired I can still use it as a player. Which is excellent as using the mac remote in the talk worked really well and got around the awkward layout of the room I was allocated.

The event as a whole was fabulous – I met some amazing new people and have a stack of business cards of people to email and catch up with. I don’t have my own cards which is proving really awkward at this kind of event, perhaps I will get some in the future when I’m attending something like this since they’re not expensive. The new contacts I made could turn out to be really interesting in a whole load of ways – and the free beer and chatter with like-minded people was very welcome as well. Talking over experiences and projects with others has left me refreshed and inspired, in a way I didn’t expect. What more could a girl want?

15 Nov
2007

Thinking of BarCamp Leeds

Recently I found out about a phenomenon called BarCamp, where a bunch of people, mostly geeks, turn up and run their own un-conference. Every attendee speaks, at least that’s the theory, and there are a lot of concurrent sessions – so you just attend what you want to. It looks interesting and although nobody is making all attendees speak, I figure its good to join in with these things.

Bar Camp Leeds is this weekend, Saturday 17th November 2007, and its wildly oversubscribed. I know a few people who were hoping to go and haven’t been able to get places. At the time of writing, I’m still planning to speak but there’s less than 48 hours to go and I haven’t got further than deciding I may speak about source control, and subversion specifically. The nerves are starting to kick in …

14 Nov
2007

PDO for PHP on Ubuntu Edgy Eft

Today I was asked to add PDO support to PHP on our development box, which I thought was running Ubuntu Feisty Fawn. The first problem is that it’s not running Feisty Fawn, its running Edgy Eft, which is an older version. The next problem is that the PDO libraries weren’t bundled with Eft.

PDO is available in PECL so, using these instructions from Rich Buggy I grabbed the mysql client development libraries from aptitude and then got the PDO libraries I needed.

13 Nov
2007

The Tradesman Cometh

The house, as I may have mentioned, has been in disarray lately. Since buying the place at the end of May we’ve had the guttering and verge boards replaced, central heating fitted (involving moving the boiler), and the entire house rewired including the bonus addition of smoke detectors, outside lights, switches that are halfway logical, and a bonus extractor fan. I think its probably best if the stories of an electricity supply which has no earth, sockets were seen to be melted inside, junction boxes in every wall and floor, and the moment we discovered that turning off our electricity at source turns off next door’s as well, are all saved for another day.

All the building work has meant that we’ve done almost nothing to the interior of the house, knowing there would be mending to do when it was finished. So now I have channels in the walls:

Unfortunately due to the complications of doing the wiring (the electrician says he’s done hotels faster than he did our place), there has been some damage that we didn’t anticipate. Not all the the floors are going to back the way they were, so we may have to live with floorboards for a while. I was surprised to find that the floorboards in the hallway are painted:

We’ve done well to get all the work done quite early on, but its going to be a long winter of learning to DIY – wish us luck!!

PS If the title doesn’t mean anything, then you need to know of The Gas Man Cometh.

09 Nov
2007

Haywire Rewire

I’ve been away for five days, and got back home yesterday (Thursday) early afternoon, due to work Friday as usual and then head off a weekend away. While we were away the electrician was coming in to rewire our house – an expensive operation but a very much-needed one. The inside of some of the sockets had melted and the consumer unit regularly emitted sparks!!

Picture the scene, I flew back into the country yesterday, got back to Leeds, got a taxi home, and was wandering up the road looking in my bag for my keys when I realised I could hear something. Hammering. Coming out of my open front door into the street accompanied with a lot of brick dust.

We went in to the house to be met by an agitated electrician. He’s had a nightmare of a time with our house, the existing wiring was a mess and had junction boxes everywhere so he’s ended up drilling into more of our (solid brick, even on the internal) walls and pulling up more of our floors than he’d expected. So the floors are mostly up on the ground floor and they haven’t started the basement yet, i.e. they’re a bit behind schedule, and putting all the floors back down and making the house safe for habitation wasn’t going to help.

So I went in the house, opened my suitcase, removed the bag of dirty washing, replaced its void with clean underwear and t-shirts, shut the suitcase again and put the suitcase, the rucksack I had with me when I got home, and my laptop into the car. My employers were relatively relaxed about me working remotely today so we headed off a day early for our weekend in Northumberland and today I’ve been working from my parents’ place in Alnwick.

Fingers crossed when we get home on Sunday things will have calmed down a bit … although I suspect the mess will still be eye-watering!

07 Nov
2007

No Blogroll

I’ve had a few requests recently to exchange links or to add people to my blogroll, its a way of giving a bit of kudos to people that you admire and whose work you read. The thing is, I don’t have a blogroll, and if I did I fear it would cause more problem than it solves. As a minimum, I’d need to consider:

  • where to put it on the site, its already quite cluttered
  • who should go on it
  • how to maintain it to reflect my reading habits as they evolve – maybe a direct link to my feed reader?
  • how do I prune it if it gets too big? Its like deleting friends from your phone but much much more public!

Its not that I don’t want to share some link love around either – there are many blogs I read that I’d like to own up to loving. Including (but not limited to) GirlsCantWhat, PHPWomen, Lig, Sara, Davey, Matthew, Jon, Ubuntu Tutorials, DevZone, Simon, DevChix and of course XKCD and Dilbert.

Is it a problem if I don’t have a blogroll? I quite like my site the way it is, I enjoy reading other people’s sites too and I share my appreciation usually through commenting. I’m not sure I should add something like this when I clearly don’t have the enthusiasm for it, what do you think?

05 Nov
2007

Frankfurt Visit: First Impressions

I’m in Germany for a few days at the IPC and since we had some time spare I’ve been exploring!

First of all, we took trip into Frankfurt itself yesterday. The queue for the ticket office was wildly long but some people who had a weekend travel pass and had returned to the airport to catch a flight gave us their train tickets which was really lucky (and nice of them).

Once in Frankfurt I put my card in the cash machine to get some money out – we decided it would be better to take money out on demand rather than changing it before we travelled. I had a bit of a deja vu moment when I put in my card and out came strange-looking money … its just like going to Scotland really :)

We were quite lucky as apparently Frankfurt is usually completely closed on a Sunday (I didn’t know that) but it was a special day of some description so all the shops were open in the afternoon. Its too early for the Christmas Markets but there were plenty of sausages and Gluhwein stalls on the streets all the same. Loads of the cafes had tables on the street – personally I think its too cold in Northern Europe in November for that but we ate outside all the same and it seemed a popular choice. We took some photos but they will have to wait until I get home to my own computer and a faster net connection!

Today we’ve been into the local place, Morfelden, which is tiny but has nice cafes and so on. I even managed to sniff out the wool shop and couldn’t resist buying a couple of balls of wool! I’ll knit something to remind me of my visit here I think, not sure what though.

04 Nov
2007

Scottish Holiday

Recently we had a week’s holiday with the family in Scotland, which was lovely and quite relaxing as we were right out in Dumfries almost in Stranraer and there really isn’t a lot to do there! Its beautiful though and we were really lucky with the weather.

We actually took quite a lot of photos but I’ve uploaded them to flickr account and can’t be bothered to upload them again so pop over there and take a look at anything tagged “scotland”.

31 Oct
2007

Looking Forward to IPC

Next week I’ll be attending the International PHP Conference in Frankfurt. There aren’t a lot of PHP Conferences outside of the USA and as such this one is about as local as they get (other than PHPLondon of course!).

I’m hoping to learn some new things from the various talks during the 2-day conference, and to come back itching to try out new stuff! I’ll be meeting lots of new people as well, some of whom I’m “met” online already, and some of whom are completely new. Other than that I’m really not sure what to expect at all.

If you’re going to IPC, then pop over and say hi, I’m the tall, loud one in a phpwomen t-shirt :)