David Morris – brassedoff.net

A little bit of Killamarsh passed into oblivion today as the contents of our local architectural salvage yard on Station Road known as Havenplan went under the auctioneers’ hammer.

I don’t know about anyone else, but some bits of Havenplan were, to me at any rate, quintessentially Martian… like the old railway distant signal that stood watch over Station Road for years, or the old wartime mine designed to stop marauding German frigates that ventured too close to KJS Fisheries.

I shot a few pictures to preserve the place in digital form for posterity and to keep the memories alive.

Click on the thumbnails for larger images. Hover over for a witty description.

 

What was amazing was what some of the items were fetching. A three-legged round table (about a metre diameter) in a pretty sorry state fetched £40. Job lots of eight cast iron umbrella cups (like the sorts you may get on the ends of church pews) were going for £3-4 a set. Speaking of pews, you could have had one of those around 4-5 metres long for £10. If you wanted one in need of a bit of TLC, £5-6 was nearer the mark. A nice little cast iron stove fetch over £100 which didn’t surprise me particularly. Five pine doors: £10.

What will happen to the land I don’t know. There’s still a load of stuff (old sinks etc) in the old station building, and it’s a fair lump of land (on which once stood Killamarsh Station) in the middle of a housing area. I can see this being used for residential development some time in the future, although I hope if this did happen that the station platform would be preserved, otherwise that will be another bit of heritage lost forever.

I’ll put the tissues away now…

Something I saw on one of Mrs Woolforbrains blog contributors inspired me to write a little hack for Wordpress. WfB often has several projects on the go and I thought it would be nice if on her sidebar, she could have something akin to a progress report for her projects. The one I saw used a little graphic as the progress bar, but I’ve just, for the time being, cobbled something together quickly.

I created a little table in the Wordpress database called projects as follows:

+-------------+--------------+------+-----+---------+-------+
| Field       | Type         | Null | Key | Default | Extra |
+-------------+--------------+------+-----+---------+-------+
| projectname | varchar(20)  | YES  |     | NULL    |       |
| projectdone | int(11)      | YES  |     | NULL    |       |
| description | varchar(100) | YES  |     | NULL    |       |
+-------------+--------------+------+-----+---------+-------+

…which will hold one record per project; a project name, a %done and a brief description.

Then, a handful of lines in ’sidebar.php’ in either the wp/wp-content/themes/{themename} or wp/admin directories as follows:

(Sorry for showing it as a screenshot – life’s too short to convert the HTML! It’s not nice to read – if anyone’s that desperate for the code, email me and I’ll send it you… I’m not holding my breath!)

This slots in between the archives and the meta in the theme I’m using (blue-horizon). Your mileage may vary. (The last line is already there in my theme – I’ve included it for reference only)
Currently, it’s a quick command line or Access / myODBC hack to update the percentages, but I might cobble together a little page to allow it to be changed locally.

This is what the finished article looks like on my blog. Note that I haven’t succumbed to the knitting bug.

Finally for today, I’ve managed to be environmentally friendly.

On the way from my Mums to home last night (the bit of my daily commute in the car), I managed to pick up something like a carriage bolt, square in the middle of the back offside tyre. FOr those of you that don’t know, I drive a Peugeot 206CC 2 litre, and the tyres are nearly £100 each if you go for the Goodyear Eagle F1’s, so as you can imagine, I was a little concerned!

My local garage did a neat repair for me though, saving me a load of money (the repair only cost £10) and saving another tyre being consigned to the world tyre mountain.

Tomorrow, I might tell you about my Oracle fun and games today…. or I might not. You’ll have to come back and see!

(I know how to keep someone in suspense :-) )

Yesterday was Daniel’s 7th birthday. Rather than me writing to tell you all about, let’s let Daniel tell you in his own words…

Well, the weirdest thing happened last night. We went to TGI Fridays for dinner. I had chicken in a bun, smiley faces and beans. We had just had our dinner when the power went off! Then the alarm went off about seven times. It got so weird that we needed to have an outside party, and the funniest thing was that somebody lit Spongebob’s nose by mistake (Daniel chose a Spongebob Squarepants birthday cake : Dad)! We had to make a second candle when we got home because don’t forget that it was an outside party and it was a very windy day. Plus, one of the pictures is of the Spongebob Squarepants cake. That’s all.

…and this is David again…

Fortunately, we’d finished our main courses when the power failed and were just contemplating desserts. All credit to the TGI staff and other diners. No-one panicked or got stroppy. The staff worked hard to ensure that everyone was OK and not worried about what was happening, taking time to explain what the alarms we were hearing were.

As it was Daniel’s birthday and we’d taken a cake for him, our server went back into the kitchen to recover the cake after we’d all been evacuated and a group of the staff got together to give him a special TGI birthday ‘chant’. Also, we got our meal free of charge because, as there was no power, there were no till systems.

I’ve always liked TGI’s; last night the staff performed above and beyond the call of duty last night. Well done, everyone.

You download mySQL for Linux. You install it. It works.

You download Oracle for Linux. You attempt to install it on openSuse. You give up and download (Un)breakable Linux from Oracle in the hope that their OS will support it with a more trouble-free installation process. You spend several days updating and patching the OS to get it to work. You get the base database working. Before you can run some of the nicer tools (like the database creation assistant ‘dbca’), you have to mess about with environment variables.

This blog isn’t powered by Oracle.

Oracle. That’s what’s on my list at the moment.

We’re going to be moving over to an Oracle environment over the next few years, and along with the guys that work for me, we’ve got a lot of learning to do to get up to speed on what’s essentially a whole new world for us. There’s the basic proficiencies in SQL that many people (in IT) take for granted these days (but necessarily not if you’re a multivalue specialist), PL/SQL, and more new shiney toolsets than you can shake a fair-sized stick at.

I don’t think we’re going to be able to get everything we need through formal training, so a lot of what we have to do will be books and what could euphemistically be called “self-guided learning” (or more bluntly, get out and learn what you need yourself).

I’ve been browsing Amazon for some suitable tomes and a couple of O’Reilly Oracle ones arrived today. Those two amounted to around £40 between them, but as I don’t think I’ve ever purchase a bad O’Reilly book, I’m not upset. There’s another one coming; not O’Reilly and not for another three weeks which has got a five star review on Amazon so I’m hoping it’s a good one. That’s another £30+ touch. Is it worth spending all this money? I suppose it depends what you wnat to get out of your job. I like to understand the tools thath we’ve got available to us. Even if I end up delegating work to other people, I still like to know enough to be dangerous, or to try and guide people in the right direction.

Looking at the O’Reilly web site, I’m now seriously wondering whether to take out an annual subscription to Safari. The ‘no holds barred’ version costs $430 (USD) per annum (about £230) per person, and there’s a workgroup license available for groups of five or more. The way we’re going at the moment, it could represent extremely good value. I might fire off a couple of emails tomorrow and get some representative pricing.

The other thing is the case of the missing laptop. I ordered a new laptop for my Mum from eBuyer together with a wireless router (which I’m buying her for her birthday – I know how to pick ‘em) and it’s gone astray. eBuyer have spoken to Citylink and accepted responsibility – apparently, although it left eBuyer, it never got to Citylink, so if it’s not shown by tomorrow, eBuyer will ship another, FOC and priority. Let’s wait and see, huh?

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I love these. People kindly entering me into lottery draws I no nothing about. I really must ring that mobile number and make arrangements to claim my winnings.

Of course, it’s a scam, and not a particularly good one. Saturday wasn’t even March 8th, it was March 10th. Next time, you scammers, do a little bit of research, eh?!

Well, more like “All aboard the Seth Ellis”, but you get the drift? (If the title is lost on you, go google Noah and Nellie).

Anyway, today was my first trip aboard the Chesterfield Canal Trust’s Retford-based trip boat, the Seth Ellis (pictured below).

Because I’ve got my RYA IWHC, I can participate as a crew member. This means that I get my boating fixes without going far from home! Today, I was crewing along with Steve, Peter and Chris from the Gate at Retford to the Hop Pole. In actual fact, the boat was moored at the Gate. We had to take it up to the Hop Pole to pick our charter up from where they’d been out for lunch, then we took them down to the Gate, winded, had a 15 minute stop, then back up to the Hop Pole. Seeing as the boat now lives at the Gate, we had to go back down there when we’d finished, so it was a bit of a strange trip and we got to see the same bit of the canal four times in different directions. It was all new for me though because I’ve never been on that stretch of the canal before.

I even got to take a turn on the tiller… they must trust me. What’s more, I didn’t bang anything, and I negotiated the one lock and two bridges on that stretch of the canal with little problem.

If you hadn’t already guessed, I had a great time! Unfortunately (sorry Mark), we were later getting done than I’d anticipated (we were late leaving the Hop Pole), so I couldn’t get to the Steelers game at the Arena.

That couple of hours in the fresh air took its toll though (yawn).

I’m now looking forward to the next opportunity to crew. I can’t wait!!!

This post is cheerfully filed in the ‘boating’ category.

Two places visited in one day today!

First off, we were invited to witness Daniel’s alpaca, Coco, getting her feet done. Apparently, the alpacas at Mayfield Alpacas have to have the treatment three times a year, no mean feat when you consider they’ve got over 80 animals to attend to. Before anyone corrects me, the character on the left is in fact a llama, despite what the image tag says if you hover over it.

I should also point out that Daniel doesn’t in fact own an alpaca, he only sponsors it, although I think if it were up to Mrs Woolforbrains, she’d own a flock of them, because of course, you can knit with alpaca fluff.

It’s rather nice up at the Alpaca farm. The animals have got great character and there’s a rather nice cafe (check first to make sure it’s open). It can be a bit windswept up there though, commanding, as it does, stunning views over Sheffield.

On the way back from Mayfield, we decided to pop in to the Botantical Gardens in Sheffield, just up from Endcliffe Park and the far end of Ecclesall Road.

The early season planting brings a splash of colour to the gardens, and the purple and white crocuses under the trees (that’s what looks like snow in the picture above) provide a nice contrast to the bare trees. The glasshouse displays are interesting as well with plants from around the globe.

The tea rooms there though seem a little on the expensive side. The ham sandwich was probably very nice, but at £4.50 was a little OTT. We opted to lunch elsewhere.

No arguing there then! So, perhaps it’s about time I posted an update here.

Well, I had a few days off sick last week with flu. I hadn’t realised how much it had knocked me back until I got on the bike on Monday morning to cycle to work. It was terrible. Tuesday was no better. I was exhausted by thetime I’d got home on Tuesday night. So much so that I went in the car Wednesday and Thursday, and I’ll be honest here: I don’t like taking the car to work. It seems so defeatist.

This morning though, I felt much better, so out came the bike again, and it was really a pleasant ride. The only advantage of using the car is that whilst the weather’s nice, even though we’re still on the cusp of winter into spring, it’s nice to get the roof off! There’s not much use having a convertible if you’re not gong to take the roof off if the weather’s nice, is there?

Over on the Killamarsh Forum, we’ve had a handful of new joiners which has livened things up a bit. We get to discuss such important matters (this is serious!) as what to do when your dustbin gets full of disposable nappies now it’s only getting emptied every two weeks (we have green bins for cardboard etc which are emptied on the alternate weeks).

I wrote about Beryl the other week – the super-snazzy window manager for Linux and X11. Well, possibly prompted by the best desktop I’ve seen in years, I’ve spent the last couple of days Windows-free at work. The difficulty has always been what to use for an email client. I know Evolution will work with Exchange, but it’s so painfully slow. A colleague from one of our suppliers put me on to Crossover Office – the people that do WINE. It seems quite stable so far. I’ve managed to get it to crash a couple of times,  but nothing too serious, so currently, I’m running Outlook as a Crossover office application with a Beryl-enhanced Linux desktop, and it looks cool. In fact, as I look at my right-hand monitor (I have two in a dual-head configuration), I can see the icons in the distance from another window.

I’ve probably got a post to make this weekend about progress on the boat. I had promised to myself that I’d have it on the water by my birthday at the end of April, and there’s still a chance that may happen. Last weekend I got the electrics wired up. Because it’s got two motors – one for each propeller,  I’ve fitted two marine ESC (speed controllers) – MTroniks – which are capable of full reverse, a pair of paralleled 7.2V 2900mAH NiCds and a single servo for the rudders. I’ve got some photos of the internal setup which I’ll sort out over the weekend.

On Sunday, I make my first outing as crew on the Seth Ellis, the Retford-based trip boat for the Chesterfield Canal Trust. I’m able to participate fully as crew because I hold a Royal Yachting Association Inland Waterways Helmsmans Certificate which I did last year. Here’s hoping for a nice day. It’s only a 45 minute cruise, but it’s a boating fix!!

One of the reasons I’ve been blogging a bit less over.the last few weeks is that I’ve been busy rehearsing with the band for the annual contest in Bradford. That is in fact where I am now as I write this. We”ve just got off stage. It’s been a nerve wracking day for me personally because I’ve had several solos to play, especially in the middle movement. I think we got through it though. Not the hestray performance but certainly not the worst. In fact, I’m listening to another band pla the slow movement now and their tuning is all over the place. I think their confidence is going. We vetsunly played better than that which means we probably aren’t last!

More later!
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