Simon Rumble’s blog

I went to the London Perl Workshop on Saturday. It was very good and I learnt a lot. The "Gimmes" session taught me a few things that were useful. The session on sort was very useful, as I've never really delved into it beyond the default behaviour.

The session on Testing was also good. Lots of useful tools in there. And finally, I'm intrigued by Class::DBI which turns database rows into objects, without the programmer writing any SQL. Very cool!

At lunchtime there was an OpenGuides BOF, so I got to meet all my fellow OpenGuiders.

All in all, an excellent day and I learnt a lot.

Yes I know I know, I should have moved registrars when Network Solutions lost their monopoly on .com, .org and .net domains. I didn't get around to it. Certainly should have done it when they hijacked the domain system for their commercial purposes.

Well yesterday I tried to redelegate my domain to different name servers. Their web site wouldn't accept my new servers, but happily blanked out the original (and still working) ones, which left me without a domain.

Support requests to them result in responses saying they can't resolve it by "email" (despite me being authenticated on their server), despite me giving me all the information they need. So they want me to call them, in the US, to resolve it. I can well imagine that would result in a long wait in a phone queue. Very high-tech of them!

For now I've restored my domain by using these clowns' name servers, the part of their site that works.

So, recommendations? Jamie recommends mydomain.com. Other suggestions?

Just listening to Nick Cave's latest album, Abattoir Blues / The Lyre of Orpheus and there's a great line in "Abattoir Blues":
I woke up this morning,
with a frapacinno in my hand.

Oh dear. Nick has been living the good life! Kinda reminds me, perversely, of Johnny Cash's "Sunday Morning Coming Down".

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!