David Morris – brassedoff.net

I’ll freely admin I’ve become an intermittent blogger since I discovered Twitter. I’m more likely to tweet several times a day than I am to update my blog which is sad, but some things really need a blog post.

After the car got stolen recently, it was a relatively easy decision to go for another Mini. I know some will probably throw their hands up in horror, but it’s me that’s driving it…

The last Mini was an 06 Cooper S. There’s no doubting that the MCS is a cracking car, fun to drive and goes live the brown stuff off a shovel, but to my cost I’ve also found out it’s quite nickable. After much reflection, I decided that something less nickable was probably in order, so I decided to go for a S Clubman. It’s still fun to drive and being that little bit bigger (it really does have boot space!) it’s a bit more practical.

There wasn’t anything I fancied in the second-hand market so I was nearly ready to bite the bullet and go for a brand new build. Unfortunately, the lead time was two months for a new factory build. As I’ve been driving Mrs Woolforbrain’s car for the last three weeks and she woudl need it once the school holidays were over, I had to come up with an alternative solution. Fortunately, the nice people at Sytner Mini Sheffield had an ex-demonstrator, registered less than four months ago in black. It nearly met my ideal spec, but was missing the bi-xenon headlights that my previous MCS had and were on my shopping list, but did have the MFSW (multi-function steering wheel) which incorporates the cruise control and radio remote which was also on the shopping list. The car also had the sports Chili pack. The dealers kindly agreed to fit the Mini approved iPod interface kit free of charge, so we shook on it. I’m now the proud owner of a 09 plate Cooper Clubman and it’s fun again! The bi-xenon headlights would have been nice, but they’re a £420 option. The iPod interface is around £250 and will probably get used more, so we’ll put it down as a result!

I seem to be getting more and more involved with activities centred around the Canal Trust, but even so, it was a pleasant surprise to receive an email from the Chairman inviting me to become a member of Trust board with pretty much immediate effect. Needless to say, I will be accepting. It’s a great honour to be involved in such a campaign I feel so strongly about. The Trust has brought me into contact with some really nice dedicated people and has given me the opportunity to play with some great toys! After all, I get to play with a nice narrowboat taking people out on trips, and today, I’ve been talking to members of the public about the work that the Trust has put in to an 80-year-old ex British Waterway working boat. It’s great for me as well. Most of the time I spend doing volunteer work for the Trust gets me out in the fresh air which is a major departure from my day job, and I get all the positive vibes that result from being involved with a charitable organisation that does so much for the community and the environment. Plus, I get chance to put something back from an IT perspective.

I’m lucky enough to be able to work from home on odd days. I normally try to aim for one day a week, and this week it looks like I’ve picked the best of the bunch because the weather looks set to make a downturn after today. Consequently, I’ve had the study window open and been listening to the sounds of grass being mowed and the birds singing.

I know the leylandii hedge at the bottom oft the garden is way way too big, but we can’t do anything about it now until the birds have finished nesting. There are certainly pigeons nesting in there…

…and possibly blackbirds and greenfinches too. Ok, it’s not much, but it’s our own little menagerie and it’s nice to watch. I’ve even seen the neighbour’s cat have a go at climbing the hedge so there must be something up there of interest.

On a completely different subject, my evenings have been taken up recently with the development of a new web site. Through my Canal Trust voluntary work, I’ve got involved with the organising committee for the 2009 Inland Waterways Association Campaign Festival which the Trust are gong to be hosting at Kiveton. For my part, I’ll be helping with event publicity and the first task is to get a web site up and rolling.

I know in the past, when talking about the Seth Ellis web site, I discounted the idea of writing my own content management system (CMS) in favour of a ready-to-roll open source one and implemented Joomla for that reason. Now however I’m having second thoughts because nice as Joomla is, it is rather overkill for my requirements. Also, I don’t really have the time to work out the templating that goes along with it.

So, I’ve thrown the proverbial baby out with the bath water and started off designing and writing a CMS from scratch to support the Rally. I can see me also using this to replace the current Seth Ellis web site and probably provide a portal for Killamarsh as well because I’ve got some ideas based around the forum.

It’s already been a significant learning experience for me because I’ve never really delved much into using CSS to this extent to control look and feel, always being more of the ‘less is more because I can’t be bothered to work out how to make it look really professional’ which is a pretty sad admission really!

So, what do you think for a first attempt?

It’s gong to take a bit more work, but already the templating system works, I’ve got a WYSIWYG text editing interface up and running (courtesy of the unfortunately named FCKEditor which is an absolutely cracking GPL-licenced lump of code) and ideas for a host of other plugin-type functionality. I do intent making the CMS available for others once I’ve got it to a reasonable stage of development. The main aim though is to try and keep it lightweight (although FCKEditor is hardly lightweight…!).

I’ll wrap up there for the time being, but there’s more on the broadband speed saga which I’ll probably share later on in the week.

Two things I’m quite proud of (in a sad sort of way).

Firstly, I got my Phidget kit working properly. Phidgets are really cool USB interfaced ‘things’ that can be programmed easily from a variety of languages and OS. I’ve had one kicking around for a while now, but I never really managed to get it working with my language of choice (Java) on Linux because of problems building the latest version of the library. The latest and greatest version uses JNI. The Java class libraries are shim between the Java language and the OS native code. After a concerted effort over the weekend, I cracked the problem and the picture proves it’s all up and working.

For the record, the display is running from a little multi-threaded Java console app that’s displaying a substring from Java’s Date().toString() and a conversion of /proc/uptime showing the uptime of the box that’s hosting this blog: 235 days at the time of photographing. Don’t you just love the reliability of Linux systems? 235 days without a restart. All I have to do is vacuum it out occasionally (being very careful not to disturb anything and crash it!)

My second achievement for the weekend was to create a cartoon character. Now I’m no artist (or at least not with a pen and paper), but I’d got an idea in my mind for a cartoon character that I could use on the Seth Ellis web site, probably as part of a series of articles aimed at providing information for kids about the canal. The idea was pretty much a narrowboat version of Thomas The Tank Engine or similar… you know the idea, take a real-life thing, slap some googley eyes and a smiley face on it and Bob’s your uncle.

This is probably OK if you can draw.

I can’t.

…but I can cheat, and after a bit of digging around, I found an image that I could use as the basis for my cheat, and after a couple of hours with Corel Photopaint, I came up with…

roll of drums…

Seth!

Ok, I know it’s not brilliant. It sits too high out of the water, and the real boat doesn’t have a big smiley mouth painted on the bows. Mrs Woolforbrains also thinks the bow fender (his nose) is in the wrong perspective, but that’s where my artistic skills fell over.

I can also see Seth making an appearance on a few other bits and pieces of boat-related stuff over time, maybe on the run up to Christmas. The next thing I have to do is give him a stern.

What an interesting life we lead here!

Daniel is happy with me. I found an update for his Nintendo R4DS which has fixed the problem with Ben10. He will now be plugged in to this for most of the morning I suspect. I’m idly wondering if this update will fix problems with some of the other ROMs we have that don’t work?

He won’t be plugged in for the day though because we’re off to Telford this afternoon to watch the Scimitars take on the Telford Tigers. Hopefully, Mrs Bong, the lady in my satnav will get us there in one piece.

The Seth Ellis web site is now linked in from the Canal Trust web site, so should hopefully start to pick up a few hits that way. through some judicious choice of keywords, I’ve managed to get it top of the rankings on Google if you search for ‘retford canal trip’, with the Trust web site coming second :)

I bought an iPod Classic last week, and being the type that I am, made a point of not using iTunes to get music on to it, preferring to use Winamp, simply because I’ve been using Winamp for years and upgraded to the Pro version some time ago to get full speed CD ripping amongst other things. The only problem was that the current iPod plugin for Winamp (the one it ships with) doesn’t do a good job of handling cover art. This was annoying, especially after I spent an hour or so the other week getting art for all the albums I’ve ripped myself.

A bit of digging around fetched up the alterative Winamp iPod plugin, ml_ipod which you can use instead of pmp_ipod. Some things it does less well. For instance the transfer queue isn’t implemented in ml_ipod, but cover art does work properly. Consequently, Coverflow looks really cool and when the album is playing, the correct graphic is displayed.

One of the reasons for buying the iPod was to be able to put video on it as well, and by way of an experiment, I downloaded the first episode of the new series of Locks and Quays with presenter Matthew Corbett (of Sooty fame) doing the coast-to-coast via the Trent and Mersey. This was an AVI and wouldn’t transfer to the iPod as is, but a quick run through ffmpeg on one of my Linux machines (it had to be the laptop because the server didn’t have ffmpeg installed and I couldn’t find the SuSE10.2 DVD to install it) get me an mp4 that went straight on to the iPod and plays a treat.

Finally for today, I don’t know whether I mentioned it the other week, but we won the 50/50 at the Scims game at iceSheffield. For those of you that don’t know of these things, you buy raffle tickets and half the proceeds go to the club, the other half go to the winner. Well, it was my turn! The picture (clearly not one of mine) was of Daniel and myself getting presented with the cash from Scims forward Rob Dowd. It’s actually one of the best pictures we have of Daniel and myself because we both look sort of sensible on it (apart from the hat). I don’t know exactly how much we won. I never counted the cash… I gave it back to the club and told them to splash it around the player sponsorship grid. After a bit of thought, we decided to use it to sponsor Tom Squires, one of the U18 lads that’s just made the move into the Scimitars. In a previous life, Mrs Woolforbrains and I used to travel to most of the Steelers games and remember Tom as a little four-year-old (or younger?) on the away travel coaches. Even then, all he ever wanted to do was play hockey like his heroes, and he’s obviously realising his ambitions. The night of the 50/50 win, he scored his first point for the Scimitars and got man of the match… a case of lager which he’s too young to drink! I’m sure some of his team-mates would help him out though.

Gotta go now… I’ve got a laptop to upgrade…

It’s been preying on my mind that I’ve not posted anything substantive for some time, excepting the picture of Daniel with his euph on Christmas morning. There’s been a few things happening lately, so I suppose some form of catch-up is in order.

Firstly, a little allotment news. On Christmas Eve, vandals attacked the Society shed on the site and set fire to it. Over £1000 of seed stock was destroyed which probably represents the seed stock for many of the gardeners for 2008. We hadn’t ordered ours, so we’ve not lost out in that respect, but it’s still a big blow and really akes you wonder what goes through the minds of these little thugs.

My last ‘real’ post was about the Seth Ellis web site. I said that we’d been given the go-ahead for development of the site and I was going to write my own content management system (CMS). I’ve backtracked on that in favour of an open-source CMS. After checking out a couple, I’ve settled on Joomla 1.5. I had a look at Drupal as well, but preferred the facilities available in Joomla. It’s taking some getting to grips with, not least because Joomla 1.5 is the latest, greatest version and most of the documentation and reference material out in the wild is related to 1.1 and there have been a few changes. I’m slowly working my way through it, experimenting as I go. I found a template for the site that I liked the look of and made a few changes to it. It still needs some more work, but it’s getting there. I’ve got the general public and boat crew documents separated so you can only get to the crew sections with a valid logon.

Also on the boat front, I’ve been doing some investigation into prices for magnetic sign boards to fit down the side of the boat above the windows. The general principle is that we want to have some advertising on the boat to try and drum up a bit more custom. Magnetic boards mean we can change them easily to suit the season and what we want to push at any time, and  it looks like we can get them for under £50+VAT.

At the ice hockey, it’s been and up and down sort of Christmas break with some good results and some that were, err, not so good. On the plus side, Daniel and myself won the 50/50 draw at iceSheffield last Sunday. The winnings came out at about £40 and it didn’t take a lot of thought what to do with the winnings… I gave them back to the club. After all, their need is probably greater than mine. The end result is that we’ve splashed it around the player sponsorship grid.

Daniel’s coming on like a house on fire with the new euphonium. He’s developing a much better sound, and once the valves have bedded in, I think he’ll do even better. It’s a nice instrument that will keep him going for a few years.

I’ve started working on a new boat. This time, it’s the Sentinel cutter from Model Slipway. I’ll be documenting the fun as I proceed!

Finally for today, I can report that we’ve all been suffering from Wii injuries caused by excessive play on New Years Eve. the main culprit has been Rayman Raving Rabbids 2, and I suspect, the branch sawing and burping games. I’ve also got Guitar Hero 3 which is great fun, but not injury provoking. Absolutely great fun!

Having got the go-ahead last night, I can officially announce that I’m working on a new web site.

This time, it’s www.sethellis.org.uk. We have got the OK from the Canal Trust Chairman, Keith Ayling to set up a web site dedicated to the Seth Ellis, the trip boat that I (amongst others) crew out of Retford.

The idea stems from several thoughts. Firstly, whatever is done must not conflict with any of the Trust aims or ideals, but there’s a lot of paperwork and other associated “stuff” related to the running of the boat that as crew there isn’t necessarily time to take in whilst working on the boat. There’s also crew rotas, details of upcoming trips that could sensibly live on this site. Also, for people that are planning on chartering the boat, there’s information about the local area and the boat itself that we can communicate in a manner that the corporate Trust web site possibly can’t. The example I used when selling the idea was that the Trust web site doesn’t need to have details on it of how to empty the boat toilet, but the boat web site does.

Anyway, we’re off and rolling now, so as well as building content over the coming weeks, I’ve got to build the management interface. This needs to include provision for a suitably secure area for crew-only stuff and a mechanism whereby someone else other than me can maintain content. I might borrow from some of the ideas I used on the Band web site for that where I produced a simple CM (content management) system. I’ve got some ideas about how to improve on that, and I’m also contemplating whether I can make this site predominantly database-driven at the same time incorporating all the secure and non-secure stuff I want to get in. In theory it should be possible.

Before anyone tells me I could probably go out and download an open-source CM system to do all this, yes, I probably could, but I could also learn a hell of a lot by writing one completely from scratch. If I wanted to be suitably challenged, I could write the whole lot in JSP (Java Server Pages). Now, that would be a challenge and a fantastic learning exercise. Whether I will or not, or whether I just go straight for the easier PHP option remains to be seen. For the time being, I’ll content myself with hacking the basic page design around. I’d be interested in receiving comments.