Entries tagged megan

I am slowly recovering from a very hectic New Year Eve celebration in Edinburgh. I was surrounded by a several visiting schoolfriends of my girlfriend, and we even managed to meet up with a couple of visiting Canadians - the ex-girlfriend of an online friend and her cousin (both freshly arrived only a day or two ago).

Edinburgh weather was appalling, to the extent that the outdoor street party was cancelled - and several large trees were blown over in Leith.

The girls and myself spent the night walking around far too much before settling into a local pub and hearing the bells.

Now that I'm recovered I've just released a new version of xen-shell which allows you to control a number of xen instances rather than just the one.

I'm still not a nice person though.

Tags: edinburgh, megan, xen-shell | No comments

I'm trying to learn ruby, but having no inspiration of what to write with it.

My girl suggested I post "Will code for films" and see what people would pay to have written .. I expect very little. Still who knows?

I'm suffering connectivity issues again, which are making me actual freetime difficult to spend. Grr.

To follow the meme: Five random facts:

• I believe that garlic can be used to enhance all food. Even ice-cream.
• My first scar was given to me by my sister, when I was approximately six weeks old. Families, eh?
• I have lived in the same flat for 2.5 years, and in all that time have never opened the bedroom curtains/blinds.
• I have twelve bottles of Single Malt in front of me. Current favourite? A balvenie.
• I rarely dress before noon.

And for bonus points: "My girl" refers either to my sister, or my girlfriend. Context usually makes this obvious if it matters…

Tags: garlic, megan, whisky | No comments

Vienna.

Tomorrow.

:)

Tags: megan, travel, vienna | No comments

I'm back from Vienna (Ask Alfie for picture(s) of me wearing my partner's hat ..!) with a new need to update my killfile.

I use procmail to filter my mail, and my current setup looks like this:

# If the sender is in the killfile then drop the mail into killfile
:0:
# grep for it in the killfile
* ? grep -i `formail -rtzxTo:` $HOME/.procmail_killfile
/dev/null

This invokes formmail to get the sender of each incoming message and then drops the mail into /dev/null if the message is from somebody whos email address is contained in ~/.procmail_killfile - there are two problems with this approach:

• It doesn't handle killing threads, only senders. I guess using a similar approach to grep for message-id's in reference would work, but I'm having a hard time thinking it through properly.
• It doesn't cope with people who use multiple addresses. Perhaps message-id would be useful here, although again if people use multiple sending hosts then they would have different components.

Any improved recipes are greatfully received. And that's all I'm going to say about Debian communications for today.

Tags: killfile, megan, procmail, vienna | No comments

Surprisingly many local people seem to be catching icky-illnesses of death recently.

Both Megan and myself are under the weather recently. I managed to infect her with a nasty cough and cold on Wednesday and the pair of us have been mostly shivering indoors since then.

Today is the closing day of The Leith Festival (Leith being a district of Edinburgh. Where we live.) So we made it outside and consumed beer and pies for a while. Now we're back and I'm wishing I'd not left the house.

Still it could have been worse I could have been in the sun in a blurry suit and without any books! (Books visible and recognizable include the complete works of Terry Pratchett, minus two, the complete works of Steven Brust (Maybe Vlad will give me the edge in the assassins game!))

All being well we'll be more recovered in time for the Debconf7 activities, although I expect Meg to be driving around Scotland for part of the time with a friend and not completely available. (A three-day roadtrip with Emma - a local girl who is hoping that somebody at Debconf will be able to fix her Ubuntu laptop..?)

Update: - Debconf7 game of Settlers of Catan..? (I have only the Zarahemla set myself, but it will suffice for four players in a pinch.)

Tags: debconf7, health, leith, megan, pics, ubuntu | No comments

Today I mostly familiarized with Ruby On Rails coding, after an absence of several months.

I wrote a quick multi-user online DVD catalog program to replace my current online DVD list.

This is pretty neat as it allows me to actually edit the films via the web GUI, and should also allow me to create per-user lists of films.

Of course the hard part will be importing all my "old" data, then adding all the movies that Megan brought to the flat when she moved in ..

Tags: films, megan, ruby on rails | No comments

Debconf7 continues very well, with a nice trip to a local sauna this evening.

Unfortunately our party had to split into two, with the ladies going to one section and the gentlemen to another. Still it was fun, and I'm glad I went. It was probably just as well that Megan didn't get to see me being terrified of the cold water!

Apart from that things went well today. I saw half a talk on Xen, sufficient to see my name in lights, then half a talk on security, again managing to see my name on the big screen.

If people, at debconf7, would like to learn more about security I've volunteered myself on the "skills exchange" page of the wiki to demonstrate the process which Moritz described as "manual and complicated". (ie. releasing a DSA and updating the webpage.) I think this will happen sometime on Friday.

I also need to track down AJ and talk about debootstrap work.

One more thing, before I go to sleep. During the security talk Moritz did mention the idea of being able to grep through the source code of the entire archive. This is a topic which has been raised before.

Right now I'm keen to make this possible, so overnight I'm syncing the latest sid archive and I think I have a plan to make it work.

• Sync the sources of the given distribution.
• Once that has happened recursively unpack any archive we can understand. (.tar.bz2, tar.gz, etc).
• Either:
  • Write a simple script with "grep".
  • or import the unpacked root into a text indexing system.
  • Also it would be useful to recognize common files via SHA + MD5 checksums.
• make some simple GUI.

I think that the sync will take a while for me on my home connection, and I also believe that the unpacking will be grossly CPU-intensive. Still it should be a worthwhile job even if I can't get it done, because it will tell us the kind of machine which is required to actually do it.

I'd like to use a project machine because I'm not entirely sure I have the necessary space but that should become apparent fairly quickly. (The archive I can handle, the unpacked tress might be a little bit much for me. Still I have 100Gb free and I guess that is a good starting point).

If anybody has any tips for full-text-indexers that would be appropriate for fast queries against a large directory tree of source code then I'd be interested in hearing about them.

Tags: debconf7, debootstrap, megan, sauna, source-searching | No comments

The rinse tool has been sucking up a bit of my time recently, but happily it now installs:

• Centos 4 & 5.
• Fedora Core 4, 5 & 6.

(Debian package for Etch available here. Could be worth uploading to Sid? I'm tempted to do it myself .. at the very least it provides an alternative to rpmstrap and it shouldn't require constant updates... Yay? Nay?)

Each of the seven supported distributions may be installed as either "i386" or "amd64" flavours.

The current CVS version of xen-tools can use rinse as an installation method, so I can now create Xen guests of RPM-based distributions with a single command and a few minutes of patience.

Nothing else exciting is happening right now. My partner is still away in the United States. (Counting fiddler crabs in the Florida Everglades!) Still it isn't all bad - she promised to bring me back a Nintendo DS - and the pictures seem to suggest she's having a fine time. Argh! Pirates!

The only other thing I'm doing right now is working on the alternative dating site. That seems to be picking up steam in two geographical clusters. So I'm now spending a fair bit of time pimping, promoting and advertising specifically in the Edinburgh & London areas.

Tags: ctrl-alt-date, megan, pirates, rinse, travel | No comments

So that'll be me engaged to the most beautiful girl in the world then.(*)

This explains where I've been, what I've been doing, and should suggest I'll be catching up on two-three weeks of work tomorrow.

[*] - OK you might disagree. I don't.

Tags: engagement, megan, shock horror, weddings | No comments

So here's the hard part, if you start writing about people and relationships you have to continue, otherwise people who do follow will make assumptions, or not be aware of any potential gaffes they are about to make.

I've written in the past about some stuff which I now wish I hadn't because this post is suprisngly hard to compose.

I'm now single, and living alone.

No fiance, no partner, and no kitten.

The next time I write about friends I'll make sure it is for local people only. Unless I get carried away, in which case I should be stopped.

ObQuote: The Taming of the shrew; via 10 Things I hate about you.

Tags: megan, personal | No comments