Simon Rumble’s blog

I finally got sick of xmms being so flaky and installed mpd which was discussed on gllug recently. It's brilliant!

In the Unix tradition, it is a collection of small tools that do one thing well, and nothing more. mpd is a music player that happily sits in the background as a daemon. A bunch of clients connect to the daemon and control what gets played. gmpc is clean, stable and nice. I've also got lirc working for the remote control and a tiny web-based client to allow control from the PDA. Neat!

I seem to be getting a huge number of hits to my photo of a jar of snake wine from our trip to Vietnam. Sure enough, if you look on a Google image search, it shows up on the first page of results. Not sure why there's so much interest in snake wine though.

This image gallery, which has all my images up to when I bought my digital camera and changed to Gallery, gets huge numbers of hits. It seems to have massive Google Juice. I guess because they're flat image files, well named (not P1234567.jpg) and have been around for a long time helps.

My hacker tourist site now supports latitude and longitude for any location on the planet. Thanks to the geniuses at Openguides, the software handles it instead of the former British National Grid, which restricted it to the UK.

This means users can now add precise location information for anything in the world, which is just brilliant. I'd always envisaged it as a global site, and have a few non-UK sites in there, but the software couldn't do it yet.

Very exciting. If you're a sad bastard. Like me.

I've finally booked our ski trip. Staying at this apartment in Vallandry. Eurostar to get there. Can't wait!

And there's already snow!

Just brewed up a Munton's Nut Brown Ale kit. Added 200g pale malt, 900g dark malt and boiled a handful of the cheap, crappy Fuggles hops for a while. Should be good.

Following a successful brew, I cracked open one of my Exceptionally Bitter beers. It's only been bottled 21 days and it needs some more time. Nice and crisp though, but hasn't really conditioned yet.

Just went and saw Guantanamo Baywatch, one of the trilogy by the same writer as The Madness of George Dubya. That hysterical counted as the funniest live comedy I've ever seen.

Baywatch was good too, though sadly with a very small audience and loads of empty seats. Hilariously funny but with biting social commentary. It was certainly better than the dreary political "comedy" Stuff Happens on down at the National.

As with Dubya, the script seems to be updated day-to-day to match events. This had an Arafat gag, as well as digs at Abu Gharaib. The Rummy's Revue scene was just classic. Oh and if you saw Dubya, you'll be happy to know that Yasmina the Cleaner (a very nice girl) is also in this one.

I'm in the process of booking a week of skiing at Kranjska Gora in Slovenia for next February. Managed to convince Holly to come at last, so we're both going to learn to snowboard. There will be eight of us, it seems. Can't wait!

Anyone know where to get juniper berries? We're off to Scotland this weekend with a bunch of friends. We'll be cooking up eight pounds of venison and the recipe calls for juniper berries...

A new edition of Harold McGee's amazing book On Food and Cooking has been released. The original book is an amazingly detailed and interesting look at how food and cooking works from a scientific point of view. McGee can be credited with inspiring the interest in Molecular Gastronomy that has become so popular in recent years.

If you're interested in deepening your knowledge of cooking and how it works, I'd heartily recommend this book.

Who says Darwin got it wrong?