Author Archives: lornajane

12 Aug
2007

How does your garden grow?

I’m so organised that I forgot to take a before photo, but for those that this means something to, here’s my new-look front garden:

Previously it was a bit of a mess, with gravel just dumped on top of bits of plastic sheeting and weeds coming up everywhere. We went to the garden centre and bought a few bags of slate chippings, some edging stones and some weed-suppressing membrane.

We raked all the gravel to one corner, put in the new flower bed and laid weed-supressing membrane on the exposed ground left over. Then we raked all the gravel onto the new membrane and laid membrane on the other bit of the garden. To plant the shrubs we just made cuts in the membrane and put the plants in with potting compost and slow-release fertiliser, then raked the gravel all around them.

 

Finally we scattered our few slate chippings on top of the gravel – its an instantly much nicer effect and without either paying for or carrying vast quantities of them as well! We can add a few more bags of chippings in the future, perhaps.

Thanks to mum for helping us get this sorted! All that’s left to do is to plant some bulbs and then try to keep it looking as nice as this :)

09 Aug
2007

Women Together

Most people know that I’m active in the phpwomen community, women in technology is something that I really believe in but won’t start ranting about right now (or I’ll not get round to what I was going to say!).

Today I’m getting to grips with irssi which is a command-line IRC client. I was struggling with some quite dry documentation when I came across this tutorial from Ubuntu Women which has really helped me to get sorted out.

Yay for the women :)

09 Aug
2007

Wiki Wonder

I love wikis for workplace documentation. For anyone who doesn’t know, a wiki is a web page with an “edit” button, so you can change the content of it if you have something to add or something is out of date or missing. Wikipedia is the obvious example.

So why is it, whenever I set up a wiki, I spend the next six months fielding requests from people for me to add things to it for them?

09 Aug
2007

Happy Cat Holidays

We have a guest staying with us … a cat named Orbit :)

He actually belongs to a friend of ours who has gone on holiday, so the cat gets a holiday as well, staying with us. Its quite a responsibility but so far he’s doing fine. He’s pining for his owner and keeps going back to the door she left by and the room she had when she stayed, but he’s popping down for food quite regularly so I think he’s OK.

07 Aug
2007

Textpattern To Serendipity

I’m planning on migrating this site to a new platform soon, I’ve been looking around for an alternative to textpattern. Textpattern has been great but I’ve kind of outgrown it. Its easy to use but a bit “fluffy” and it eats my code excerpts which is really annoying.

I’ve picked serendipity as my intended target, its very modular and uses smarty for templating which I like and am familiar with. And if its good enough for sara and davey then I expect I will get along with it just fine.

Meeting Serendipity

So I installed Serendipity, nice easy installer, and started to look in the admin panel. There was a button for “Import Data” … you say what kind of blog platform you are coming from, and enter your database credentials and it attempts to import your old data. So I kind of tapped in my details.

Literally five seconds later I was looking at a blog with my entire history in it. Its got comments, posts, categories and users. I’m blown away, its utterly fantastic.

Finishing touches

The import didn’t cover stuff like images, which will need a whole series of conversions and text replacement on the posts to get sorted, and it seems to have chewed on some HTML entities. Also textpattern uses a post body with an optional excerpt and serendipity uses post body with optional extended body which has done some weird things to the import. It doesn’t help that I did use excerpts for a while in textpattern and then stopped after complaints from people reading on feed readers.

I’m also procrastinating over a theme for the new site … obviously it will involve a very empty stylesheet and at least two shades of pink but I’m not quite there with it yet. Once I’ve converted my content then I’ll just stop fiddling and use what I’ve got I think. I’ll also post the conversion scripts once I’ve finished with them.

Finally I will have to put together a bunch of HTTP 301’s since serendipity won’t support having article titles as the only thing after the domain name on the URL. I’ll keep you posted :)

06 Aug
2007

Home Help

I finally took a picture of the garden, with its new benches and no tree stumps:

I just wanted to post the photo and also thank the many people who have already helped us in the house and garden, and the many more who have promised help (or whom I have on my list of helpers, with or without their agreement). Between you, you have carried, cleaned, assembled, dug the garden, hung the curtains and the shelves, shifted furniture and generally helped us keep the whole thing in perspective. It means a lot to us while we are starting out on this project/adventure, so thanks to you all.

03 Aug
2007

grep: unknown directories method

The title of the post is the error message I got when attempting to grep a directory containing a file whose name started with a hyphen ( – ).

What has happened is that grep interprets hypens as switches, as if the idea was to convey options to use. This gave me a problem as I realised the file shouldn’t have been placed there in the first place and subversion was unable to remove it.

The Double-Hyphen Trick

The resolution is to pass two hyphens to the command, I didn’t know this before but this means “enough of the options, here’s the list to operate on”, or words to that effect. I used them to remove the file in question


svn rm -- \-*

Hopefully I’ll remember to look here next time I see this error message … but maybe not. So long as I don’t find myself on Google again

03 Aug
2007

Boost Your Popularity – Flame Facebook

I recently wrote that I don’t get social networking, with interesting results. I posted links to all my various profiles in various places, and I now have ten friends on Facebook (up from two when I wrote the first article) and one flickr friend as well.

I find it interesting that people respond in this way – its nice to be friends with my friends though so I’m certainly not complaining. It is a bit strange though when a website announces that you are now friends with someone … that you’ve been dating for seven years :)

Am I any closer to “getting” social networking? Not really. I’ve written on walls, given gifts, and joined groups. Suggestions for other exciting things to do are most welcome …

02 Aug
2007

Alternative Uses for a Shoe Rack

A few houses ago, I had a shoe rack.

I remember it in our first house together, and I’m not sure if it got assembled in the house after that. Its been in storage since then until yesterday. When I unpacked it, I discovered this sign attached to it (not before I had torn it though!)

It reads:

Shoe Rack. Alternative uses:
– small shelves
– large spice rack
– firewood

It turns out that the author didn’t consider the future of the shoe rack closely enough … its now a handbag store :)

What’s your most innovative furniture adaptation?

01 Aug
2007

Cleaning up Windows Line Endings in Vim

I have a file which has been edited in windows with an incorrect setting. All the lines have


^M

At the end of each line.

To search for these in Vim, you can type ctrl+v (to mean “take my next key combination literally”) then ctrl+m. To clean up my file I used:


:% s/^M$//

Where the ^M is typed using Ctrl+V, Ctrl+M. I’ve recorded it as a macro as I seem to be fixing the same thing a lot these days. Hope that helps someone!