I have problems with keyboards. I’m fussy. If I don’t get fussy, my wrists complain. So at work, I prodded and was duly presented with my choice of natural keyboards and I ordered a Microsoft one. Although I don’t particularly like providing such a huge company with money (I like supporting the little guy) this is a cracking good keyboard. The contact is firm and positive, not too loud, the layout is nice and you can elevate the -front- of the keyboard giving my wrists a far more natural alignment.
So when it arrived and I plugged it in, I was very happy…until I hit Alt-F2 which is the combination in KDE to bring up the “Run…” dialog box. Nothing happened. Hrm. Ctrl-Alt-F4 to try to change to a virtual terminal. Nothing. More frustrated attempts. Nothing. My F-keys didn’t work. And once I started fiddling, neither did the other keys, the “media” ones at the top etc. Damn. What’s going on here?
I’ll not go into too much detail (this Gentoo page on this specific device does that admirably) but it seems as though this keyboard is slightly odd on top of which the FreeBSD USB Keyboard driver has behaviour that clashes with it. So for those of you who find this via google and want to get your keyboard to work, someone has raised a bug report and attached a patch – it at least gets you back to the point where the F keys work – it will require compiling your kernel, though that’s not that challenging on FreeBSD.
Mountain rescue is very enjoyable, but we’re occasionally reminded of how dangerous the job is. We had one incident last year and it seems as though the north Wales teams had a tough time of it last night with 8 team members injured in a successful attempt to rescue two injured climbers from the slopes of Snowdon.
I’ll be raising my glass to them and hoping they all recover fully.
Tags: injury, Mountain Rescue, Snowdon
Back in August, I wrote about the project that’s underway to redo the team website. Mainly because I’ve been very busy with other things in life, very little progress has been made up until about a week ago. Last week I left Wales on Christmas Eve to head down to Sean’s in Hertfordshire and found myself with quite a bit of time on my hands. As a result, the project has come forward in leaps and bounds. Before Christmas I bought myself a copy of Building Powerful and Robust Websites with Drupal 6
So what are my views so far? Well, it’s a highly competent CMS for starters – at one point I despaired and started looking at Joomla, but the way it models content disgusted me even more so that Drupal. Now, in this respect, I’ve probably been very lucky. In my last job, I worked for Box UK whose main product is Amaxus, a CMS. Amaxus has been designed from the ground up by some very smart cookies – in fact, mostly by one very smart cookie indeed – Dan Zambonini. The conceptual design for Amaxus is, quite honestly, a work of genius. The model that it uses is simple, easy to grasp and provides incredible flexibility. Of course, it does mean that rolling out a site is quite a lot of work, but with a commercial CMS, that’s where your money comes in – the implementation is the gravy; the professional services part of the contract is normally for this kind of product worth far more than the product itself. So from that perspective, I’ve been spoiled. I’m used to an excellent model to work with…and that’s where I got stuck.
Quite simply, the amaxus model is this: take a navigation tree. Each node is a page made of blocks. Blocks can do anything from picking a single piece of static content, to providing a list of content that’s picked uniquely for each visitor depending on their browsing history through the site. Content is created independently. One piece of content can exist anywhere in the navigation structure more than once. Once you get your head around that lot, you start to see just how powerful this is. Drupal is…well…slightly different. It took me a little time to get my head around it, so here’s a quick run down for anyone currently trying to get theirs around it.
In Drupal, content is the key. The navigation system is only there to provide a convenient way for a user to get to some content. Therefore, the content has to exist before the navigation structure. Now, Drupal makes it easy for you by adding a panel in the content creation page that lets you add a menu item to that content piece, but it’s a paradigm shift for me. The other thing to realise is that blocks are configured on a site-wide basis. So instead of configuring blocks in each node, you configure the blocks once – however, each block has a whole bunch of options you can specify that tells the block when to appear. I’ve used this on our website to provide different kinds of users with different menus – members, non-members, content editors and admins. I have to admit I’ve been frustrated a few times by trying to create a menu before the content, although I think I’m starting to get the hang of it now.
Anyway, I’m impressed. I’ve built a fairly complex site in less than a week and I’ve learned a lot about Drupal in the meantime. Development will probably slow down a little over the next month or so as I learn about the next two things I want to implement – a workflow engine and the associated flows, and a custom content type and associated views for callouts.
Tags: cms, drupal, Mountain Rescue, website
On Saturday I went shopping and had a wonderful day in Cardiff. Yes, I went shopping on the busiest day of the year and enjoyed it. How do I manage to do this every year? T’Interweb, of course.
Every year I plan my shopping ahead of time and buy as much online as possible and do it at a reasonably early point. In this way, on Saturday I had to get three gifts, possibly four and another two were yet to be delivered (they arrived this morning). So, given that I already knew what I needed, I planned to spend all day in Cardiff. Eh, what?
I can’t be doing with all this rushing around. It’s far too stressful. By doing most of my shopping online, I know I’ve only got a few small items to get. So I get a group of friends and we wander around town all day. We go for a big fried breakfast at Calcio’s. We stand in queues chatting and catching up, not minding the time. We wander around the stalls of the Cardiff Christmas Market tasting mulled wine, whisky mead, sloe gin, cheese, nuts and crepes. We ooh and aah at the quality of the hand-crafted items. We spend ages pottering around that second hand bookstore not minding the time at all. And if the crowds get a bit much, we head into a coffee shop where we split up – one party goes to nab a table and one to the queue, so that by the time the drinks are ready we’ve somewhere to sit. We organise it so that friends can pop in and join us for a bit and then toddle off or whatever. Basically it makes for a fantastically relaxing time. I thoroughly enjoyed Saturday wandering around Cardiff with a host of friends. The evening was also festive as I popped over to Dan’s for a coffee and then headed back home where Mal came over for munchies and a DVD (Team America: World Police [2004]
Sunday started abruptly with the pager going off around 0800 though, but before I’d hit base, we’d been stood down from this search. I toddled off home and invited Jon for lunch but the pagers delayed that again as I headed back to base while we were on standby to rescue a dog. That didn’t take too long and I headed back to chat with Jon, eat food and watch Taxi
I had a cracking weekend, lots of Christmas spirit and friendship and it was great to catch up with people. This method of shopping is highly recommended.
Tags: Cardiff, Christmas, internet, Mountain Rescue, shopping
Every year the Mountain Rescue team get together and have our Christmas party. It’s a bit of a tradition that we stand down for the night and celebrate the year in good spirits – and one of our traditions is the dishing out of appropriate awards to celebrate the funnier side of Mountain Rescue life.
I’ve won a few awards in my time. Some good, some not so good, some funny, some serious. I won a penknife in the team a few years ago for my attendance at incidents. I won the “Kermit the Frog” award at my last job for a Friday afternoon mishap that was categorised as severe “muppetry”.
Tonight I won two awards. The first was the “What the sh** was that?!” award for going above and beyond the call of duty in rescuing a casualty as we crossed the range in an international archery championship and stopped the competition in order to rescue a young lady.
In addition to that, I won a second award – this one was the “Phwooar!” award for a “most convincing display of flirting with a member of the Royal Family”. In my defense, I will say I wasn’t flirting, though it might have been a different case if it had been his younger brother….
Tags: archery, award, Christmas, Mountain Rescue, party, royal
Nice simple callout for me today. We had an area call in the Neath valley for a young lady with a dislocated patella. In the pouring rain, I helped carry off the young girl, everything else was pretty much taken care of. Not much more to say than that really, nice job for us – lower leg injuries are bread and butter for us being about 60% of our calls if I remember correctly. Still, not bad, 3 hours from the pager going off to getting back
Tags: Callout, Dinas Rock, injury, leg, Mountain Rescue, patella, waterfalls
Those of you who know me on Facebook know that my juicer died recently. To be fair, it’s had quite a good innings – Mark will probably remember the joys of juicing in Leghorn Road in London. So I bought a new juicer…and it’s pretty good (though I have no idea if it’s ethical or not).
This is basically a review of it, so if you’re not interested, move on.
Tags: review
In the news recently was a report of the British Navy scope shooting dead two pirates who opened fire on them.
I find myself asking “What kind of stupid were these pirates?” Think about it – you’re faced with HMS Cumberland, a Royal Navy Type 22 frigate. Designed as an anti-submarine platform, it’s armed with a whole array of weaponry from the 4.5″ guns to Harpoon and Goalkeeper weapons systems. She also carries a few Royal Marines.
So, there you are, in a small wooden dhow, faced with a Royal Navy frigate and a bunch of Royal Marines in launches coming to board you. Do you think “I’ll take a few potshots with my AK before I turn and run, striking a critical blow to this armoured warship”? I’m sure I can see how that’s going to end so well…
Think we should award these guys posthumous Darwin Awards?
I’ve been spending a lot of time in Aberystwyth recently – the last three wekends have all been spent up there and I’ll be going up next weekend as well. It puts a little strain on the car and finances but it’s worth it. Sean’s been working all hours to get his production sorted – he’s been doing really well and impressing a number of tutors up there. It’s been a lot of effort for both of us – last weekend I spent pretty much the entire weekend sat next to him in the darkened theatre learning bits about his lighting desk as he went through his tech rehearsal. It wasn’t too much of a problem, I had Internet access and managed to grab some spare cans on the Saturday so I was able to listen in which made things easier. Nonetheless, he’s been working his ass off so I’ve been trying to support him as much as possible.
So when I was sat in the office today and one of the managers walked in and said “I’ve got flowers for you Aled.” my initial thoughts were “Yeah, right, whatever.” Failing miserably to spot the punchline I looked up as he put the flowers next to me and handed me the card – it had my name on it. WTF?
Suspecting I knew who’d sent them, I opened the card to find a note from Sean. I won’t regurgitate the whole thing here, but suffice to say it was sweet and thoughtful and I rapidly turned purple as everyone watched. The flowers are beautiful, the thought and emotion behind it far more so. I think that I’m a very lucky man.
Of course, me being a geek, my first thought was “I should take a picture of this so I can blog it…”
In an effort to really start shedding some of the spare tyres I seem to have accumulated over the last few years, I’ve stepped things up a bit.
Every morning I jog 2 miles, careful to keep my heart rate towards the lower end of the cardiovascular exercise range – around 65%. This ensures that I’m working my cardiovascular system and if it slows down a little I’m into the “fat burning” range, either way it’s good. It’s 2 hilly miles as well which gives me a few opportunities for a few sprints in there just to push things along a bit. So that’s 5 of those a week…
…at work, every Thursday, we play badminton for an hour. It’s fun, it’s energetic, it’s mostly aerobic exercise…
…today I started playing badminton a second time every week. So practice on Tues, play the league on Thursday…
…in the evenings I’ve started doing something – walk a few miles over the hill behind the house, a quick run, test my fitness using a multi-stage fitness test (aka bleep test), even cleaning the house which if you do it right can be aerobic exercise…
Throw into that the fact that I’ve cut down on my tea and coffee, replacing them with water and my eating has become a lot more healthy. Hopefully all this will work wonders and in a month or two I really will have lost some weight.
I do wonder however if I’m overdoing it slightly – I’m not sure if I’m tired today because I do too much, or if it’s because I didn’t sleep until late last night. Meh, early bed tonight I think…