I attended BarCamp last year and I heard this morning that details of this year’s un-conference have been confirmed.
The fun is happening on Saturday 21st June, 9am - 5pm in the Peter Froggatt Centre at Queens University Belfast.
See you there!
I read Trent’s post on preparing oats at the weekend and decided to write about my own process. I’m also relieved I’m not the only one doing this kind of thing 
Part of my weekend routine involves preparing my breakfasts for the coming week. I boil a large saucepan of eggs which end up in a tupperware box in my fridge and I start a process which results in the following:
Each container contains:
Each week-morning, after I’ve washed and dressed, all that’s left to do is dump the contents of one the containers into a saucepan, add water and shell a few boiled eggs while my oats cook.
This leads to my favourite part of the day: eating a cooked breakfast and drinking fresh coffee while catching up on my RSS feeds.
I’ve seen this on a couple of blogs recently so I thought I’d give it a go on the VPS this site is hosted on:
steve@decaf:~$ history | awk '{a[$2]++} END {for(i in a)print a[i] " " i}' | sort -rn | head -10 190 ls 80 cd 24 cp 22 sudo 19 rm 14 svn 12 history 11 tar 10 wget 10 vi
And as root:
172 ls 59 vi 56 cd 22 apt-get 20 less 20 apache2ctl 17 apt-cache 15 cp 10 pwd 10 ps
I’m kinda suprised that ls comes out on top each time
I wonder which commands Matt, Aidan and Philip have been using most?
In between support tasks at $BIG_CORP I’ve been slowly reading through O’Reilly’s Learning Python and trying a few things out with the command-line interpreter.
The first script I’ve written that actually does something useful is countdown.py:
#!/usr/bin/env python # countdown to 5pm # 2008 SJW import datetime now = datetime.datetime.now() home = datetime.datetime(now.year, now.month, now.day, 17, 0, 0, 0) total_secs = (home - now).seconds hours = total_secs / (60 * 60) minutes = (total_secs - (hours * 60 * 60)) / 60 print hours, " hours and ", minutes, " minutes until 5pm"
Very simple I know but I just had to share it
Thanks to Clintonfor the GeSHi WordPress plugin.
The last time a new version was released I decided to update my WordPress installation with Subversion with the idea being that this would make future updates easier.
Well, the good news is that this technique works 
All it took was 3 simple steps:
$ cd /var/www/sickbiscuit.com/blog$ svn switch http://svn.automattic.com/wordpress/tags/2.5/ .wp-admin/upgrade.php via web-browserTo be safe I backed up the database prior to the update and so far everything seems good, job’s a good ‘un!
For the past week I’ve been using up the annual leave that I’d carried over from last year and hit the road for Fermanagh to spend some time with my family.
My Mum and myself went to pay a visit on my Grandmother and while stopping to buy some flowers I spotted this on the dashboard:
I couldn’t resist.
Wikipedia artical for those not in the know.
I finally got around to replacing the default WordPress theme. Now it doesn’t look like I don’t care about my site
With so many freely available themes I found it difficult to choose but I stumbled upon plaintxt.org and my mind was made up: I needed one of those minimalist themes and I opted for the Barthelme which I am liking very much.
For posterity I took a screenshot of my old, hand-crafted design:
Over the past few months I haven’t been quite the gym freak that I’ve been in the past but one exercise I have continued to regularly train has been the deadlift.
Saturday mornings had become my sole weekly strength session so I had to ensure I was getting as much bang for my buck as possible and nothing works the body like this exercise.
I haven’t set a new personal record in any of the big movements since about November so it was a good boost to exceed my previous best. This morning’s effort was the culmination of 8 weeks work: starting off at a relatively low intensity and adding weight to the bar each time. I had planned on reaching this stage sooner but I noticed one Saturday that I couldn’t grip the bar properly and found I had developed a blister which proceeded to burst, resulting in missing my target for that session and slowing my progress.
I’ve recently been reading up on Mark Rippetoe’s techniques and slowly moving away from those of Stuart McRobert, hence the 5 reps, and I’ll probably start a “Practical Programming” style training cycle once I’ve finished reading the book and absorbing it’s material. Squats every workout? Brilliant
The question now though is, can I keep the progression coming and lift heavier next time?
As I mentioned yesterday, my broadband had been on the blink and this morning I decided to take action as I need to do some work from home this weekend.
Just before 9am I phoned tech support and was suprised to not have to wait on hold: my call was answered almost immediately. The support guy was polite and after I explained the situation he tested the line from his end and without any messing around scheduled to have an engineer sent out between 12 and 4pm.
At 12:15 my buzzer went and about 10 minutes later I had a new modem. The engineer had quickly tested the signal strength and determined that it was the hardware that was at fault and swiftly had it replaced. Result.
All that was left to do was ssh into my router and bring the external network interface down and then back up again and voila, the gift of broadband was mine again
This incident was a far cry from my experience of NTL’s customer support. Thumbs up for Virgin Media!