Author Archives: lornajane

30 Jul
2007

Social Networking Sites Are Pointless

Social networking seems to be the buzzword of the moment, MySpace and Beebo are apparently a bit last year and now its Facebook, Flickr and Twitter. Call me old-fashioned, but I don’t really “get” it. I mean, its not that I don’t have friends. I do, lots of them. So many in fact that they all go months and months without hearing from me as I find it so hard to keep up with them all! My friends are (almost without exception) internet-enabled so they should fit well onto the social networking model. Some of them are people I only know through the internet, but that doesn’t seem to change my persective.

Its not that I’m actively avoiding these things. Here are links to my accounts on:

I have the accounts, but I don’t really know what to do with them. The most useful so far has been del.icio.us, which I use to keep hold of bookmarks between multiple locations but not to share stuff really1. I think I “get” LinkedIn; I try to keep up with colleagues that I respect and would work with again on there, and in fact have actually used it today to check if I’m linked to someone, which is nice. Flickr is fine, I put my friend’s wedding photos there for her, but I’m not raving about it. Facebook has landed in my offline friendship group recently and I’m still waiting for the penny to drop about why people seem to be losing whole swathes of their lives to it. I’m on there, but if I haven’t seen you for years and/or your number isn’t in my mobile phone, then I’m not adding you as friend because clearly you’re not! And as for twitter … this is just a mystery.

So has the world gone mad or am I simply missing the point, like people who read websites in real life rather than on feed readers? Your thoughts please!

1 Also I used its API to write a game earlier in the year.

27 Jul
2007

Seeing stderr from PHP exec()

Today I was using the PHP command exec() in a script, which runs whatever you pass to it as it you had typed it on the command line. Its possible to check both the output of the command and the return value, which I did since I wasn’t getting the results I expected.

When you look at the output of the exec call, it isn’t the same as what you would see on the screen when typing the command. PHP returns you the content from stdout, but if anything goes wrong it will go to stderr which PHP doesn’t provide.

Redirect stdout to stderr

To get around this problem I altered my call from this:


exec ('unzip '.escapeshellarg($filename));

to this:


exec('unzip '.escapeshellarg($filename).' 2>&1);

This collection of characters tacked on the end of the code tells the system to send output 2 (stderr) to the address of output 1 (stdout). And the upshot is that I started to see the error messages being returned by the unzip program.

Postscript

Not really relevant to my point but probably useful for reference – the actual problem was that unzip was returning 50 as its return value. This apparently means the disk is full, which it wasn’t.

What had happened was that I was unzipping a file in another directory and unzip was trying to place the contents into my current working directory rather than the one with the zip file in! I used the -d switch to unzip to direct the inflated files to the right place and this worked a treat.

26 Jul
2007

Painting Platforms

There’s lots to do in the house now – the list of jobs runs is frightening and has everything from “fix kitchen drawer” to “rewire house” on it. Redecorating is a long way down the list but I’ve bought beautiful red curtains for the front room … and the existing terracotta paint now looks ridiculous so something needs to be done.

I can sort out a tin of paint and a brush but our ceilings are so high that to reach them, I have to stand on the top step of the step ladder. The step ladder is of average height but I, at 5’11”, am not and I still can’t reach – this is one tall ceiling. So also on the list is finding something safe to stand on and paint/paper the house from. Not sure if we’re going to go with a platform or another step ladder plus plank, but we need something.

20 Jul
2007

Happy Housewarming

Last weekend we combined good friends, plenty of drink, a barbecue and a surprising spell of good weather to make a house warming party! We started mid afternoon and people dropped as their schedules permitted which worked really well1 . The barbecue was perfect and in fact we had two rounds – one where we fed people their tea, and another one at about 9pm where a few more people turned up and I also remembered I forgot we had marshmallows – they’re more fun after dark anyway.

The next morning I found myself cooking breakfast for eight people, most of whom has stayed the night, so all in all it was a successful weekend!! Big thanks to everyone that made it, we both had a great time and it was wonderful to see so many people wishing us well. Having hostessed quite so much I now feel more like the house is ours so thanks to you all :)

1 I completely failed to take a single photo, sorry!

19 Jul
2007

Open Office Font Shortcuts

When typing a long document the other day with sore hands, I looked up the keyboard shortcuts for applying headings in Open Office. Here’s a quick few:

._ Font Shortcut
Heading1 Ctrl + 1
Heading2 Ctrl + 2
Heading3 Ctrl + 3
Body Text Ctrl + 0
18 Jul
2007

Bash Idle Timeout

I’ve set an idle timeout on the development server at work in an attempt to cut down the number of sessions that have been left logged in on unattended PCs. It was really easy to set up!

You can set this in /etc/profile but I realised that ours just includes a file /etc/bash.bashrc so I added my line to that:


# set the idle timeout - logs you out after an hour
TMOUT=3600

New sessions logged in after this will automatically log themselves out after one hour of continuous inactivity.

10 Jul
2007

Garden Goodness

You’ve probably seen the garden photos we took already, but last weekend, it underwent rather a change. Here’s the updated version:

You can’t really see on this photo, but I now have flowers in my garden :) Here’s a better shot:

The two on the left are Hydrangeas, one is a cutting from Mum’s plant and the other was a gift from Enid. Mum and I went to the garden centre and bought the others – the big purple one is a buddleia which butterflies will like. The others I’m not sure but they’re pretty!!

Planting plants is easy, all you do is:

  1. Dig a hole
  2. Put potting compost in it
  3. Add ‘fairy dust’ (slow release fertiliser granules)
  4. Get the plant out of its pot (this is the hard bit)
  5. Put the plant in the hole and pat the earth you dug out to make the hole around the plant.

We also planted lettuce seeds, but there’s nothing to show you of those just yet …

02 Jul
2007

Strawberry Summer

Back in October, our first house sale fell through and our plans were rather up in the air. On my next visit home I was marched onto the patio by my father who pointed out the strawberry pot and strawberry plants that would have formed my housewarming present.

Eight months on and we’re in our new home and the strawberries are here too. Yesterday, I had strawberries for my tea :)

Thanks Dad!

02 Jul
2007

New Look Google Analytics: The Dashboard

Google Analytics have been migrating their users to a new interface over the last few weeks. I like analytics (something to do with an unhealthy fetish for statistics I think) so I’ve been pretty impatient waiting for my mail to come through. Anyway its here and I’ve been migrated – woohoo!

I thought it would be cool to blog about some of the functionality that is available in analytics … until I sat down to do it and realised what a very long blog post that would be. So here’s the first installment.

The dashboard

The first thing you see when you view a site’s stats in analytics is the dahsboard, and its quite a change:

The strangest thing I find about this is the changed date range – I’m accustomed to seeing my site stats on a per-week basis rather than the four weeks that it now seems to like to show. Its cool though and gives a better overall picture of what is happening, especially for people like me that often only drop in and even then not necessarily weekly!

There are so many options from this screen that I’m literally going to mention a few and save the rest for another day, making this my new mini series of blog posts1. To start with lets take a look under that temptingly clickable date range:

You can use either of these interfaces to pick your date range, which is really nice. The timeline one has grabbable side controls, so you can slide or stretch that range as you like.

Also note the compare control on the right hand side of the box … I used this with a week’s date range selected, and it projects last weeks data onto this weeks (although both date ranges can be altered) – look!

Its a nice touch and each point on that graph is hoverable, showing the exact number that has been plotted. Its possible to display all sorts of metrics against time from this one screen, look at that “visit” button on the top right?

Hidden in there is a treasure trove of options just waiting for you to drop in and get new perspectives on your traffic trends:

This simple section of the new interface kept me entertained for quite a while (although as I said, I do like statistics so am easily entertained by this type of thing), its slick and its easy to use and the flash does add a lot. I’ve found its buggy under Linux, although that might be more to do with the flash implementation than anything else, however it is a bit disappointing. I managed to borrow the MacBook though and that was much more stable (and hence the screenshots are raken in safari!).

I do like the new interface and I’ll be writing more about some other aspects of it in the future, if there’s anything you have found particularly useful or would like to know more about, add a comment and let me know.