31.12.2004
Posted in life at 11:09 by nlawren
Or alternatively, how lucky are we? One of the great things about living in Australia is the beach but this has a downside (well, a few actually: global climate change causing the sea levels to rise will be interesting within my lifetime and lets not talk about skin cancer) that most of us live close to the sea (obviously enough). Having a holiday away like this in the little weekend shack is lovely but it is very close to the sea. So much so that when you see some of the footage, it is not nice to realise that if it had happened here, this house would just be a memory.
Doing my daily bit of internet browsing I came across some interesting (and thought provoking) links from a site in the UK (that linked to John’s site). The two particular days that made me think were a discussion on how much Britain spent on Christmas and the other was the fact that he had donated to the tsunami relief effort. So I toddled off to worldvision and did what I should have done a couple of days ago and donated.
The tricky thing about “donor fatigue” or whatever you want to call it, is that the West (or the rich nations) are always asked to donate funds to events like this - but why shouldn’t we? We have the money, we have the ability and in this era of flagrant consumerism, will we even notice the difference at the end of the month (ie what ever we actually do donate)? But a counter argument is that, for example, India spends rather a lot of money building up its nuclear ability, Indonesia has a very modern airforce (far better than Australia’s), so shouldn’t they spend that money? I have no idea what the answer is but it does tend to raise questions (and questions make people less likely to give - in my opinion anyway).
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Posted in life at 9:11 by nlawren
Another year is almost over and as I look back, I wonder where it all went. Mind you, in the space of 12 months, it has changed a lot, new job, investment property purchased and, for the first time in years (if not ever), I’m actually happy in my day job (for some strange reason, I like going to work).
One of the highlights of the year has been the number of good authors I’ve come across (or who continue to write very well). In no particular order:
Science Fiction
- Neal Asher for his Polity books. Looking at his web site, there are 2 books of his out I don’t have so I”m off to visit amazon after this.
- Alastair Reynolds for his Revelation Sapce books.
- Peter F Hamilton for his Nights Dawn trilogy and all the books following.
- Richard Morgan for his Takashi Kovacs books and Market Forces (which I’m currently reading again, having just finished Broken Angels for about the fifth time).
Fantasy
- Steven Erikson for his Malazan Empire books. An absolutely huge series of books and some of the most gritty, complicated fantasy books I’ve ever read.
- Janny Wurts for her continuing series of the Mistwraith/Alliance of Light books (and numerous other books including the excellent “To Ride Hells Chasm”).
In other things, I continue to play with MovableType and experiment more. Started looking into this whole concept of “pinging” other sites to announce/confirm updates and created my own technorati profile.
Anyway, things to do (for example head down to the beach and have a swim…)
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30.12.2004
Posted in blogging at 12:08 by nlawren
The upgrade of MT 2.6 to 3.1 was indeed painless (aside from not having the tmpl directory in the right location). Everything just worked…my existing templates were kept, entries stayed the same, the only thing I’m not sure about is whether the RSS/Atom feeds went haywire.
I then went looking for information on exactly what else might be needed to properly complete the upgrade. After all, everything stayed the same but there might be some new interesting things that I wasn’t taking advantage of. I ended up finding some very nice links indeed:
- anziblog’s Migrate Your MT 2.x Blog To Movable Type 3 page
- Learning about Trackback from Learning Movable Type - lots of other useful pages at that site as well. I intend spending a while going through the various tutorials there.
Now I need to sit down and start looking at moving the templates to seperate files so I can start putting them under subversion version control.
I then also need to keep reading my CSS book so I can start thinking about how to do a redesign of this site.
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29.12.2004
Posted in life at 14:57 by nlawren
This year has simply flown by - it seems like only yesterday that I was leaving my previous role as a win32 SysAdmin and now I’ve had over six months as a Linux Sysadmin. Of the two, I vastly prefer the Linux role (and that is putting it mildly). There is nothing like the sheer enjoyment of working with Linux for a living, it changes your viewpoint on life. My favourite comment at the moment “Work is just a large extension of the home LAN”.
After a long pause (and being as I’m on 2 weeks holidays over Christmas), I’ve upgraded by MovableType install to 3.14 (from 2.6) and have started to use it again (obviously enough). The upgrade was the normal painless setup that SixApart have had in the past and the new version appears to have some very nice changes indeed. Unfortunately, I’m too much of a miser to go for a mysql account with pair, so I’m staying with Berkeley DB. I did (and still am) having a look at blosxom but I haven’t quite got my head around that at the moment.
In other news, I’m playing games again - World of Warcraft is currently consuming large amounts of my time. Being a long time player of Blizzard games (all of the Starcraft games, Diablo 1 and 2), this is yet another example of a superb production of a great concept. The game is so good, it is stopping me indulging in much Linux play at all 
Now to see if this posts correctly.
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