Ape::Tracks

Returning

Another summer of overwork is winding down now, a bit earlier this year. I'm definitely a seasonal workaholic (I've kept a timesheet this year, much to my own discomfort) but I can't keep doing this, I'm not being fair to Arteth, or myself really. Now I'm trying to develop (and really enjoying) photography as a hobby I'm finding myself drawn away from sitting at a keyboard all day, which is good when I actually manage it.

La Princesse

La Princesse (1)
Originally uploaded by BinaryApe

We went to Liverpool on Sunday to see La Princesse. La Machine brought La Princesse to Liverpool as one of the 'Capital of Culture 2008' events.

We arrived to find a huge crowd watching a spider that was still asleep - the afternoon event had been cancelled. The crowd stayed, watching the spider.

I've not really been to Liverpool city centre before, so we went for a wander for a few hours and had a rather good meal at a nice Chinese restaraunt called Yeut Ben, then went back to Lime Street to watch La Princesse as she woke up.

The evening was absolutely wonderful, not just the spider itself but the music and the crowd. La Princesse was a truly fantastic work of engineering but had personality too, from the excellent performance of her operators.

I'm also really pleased that I managed to get some photos from the back of the crowd, in the dark. The video clip above was taken as La Princesse approached the end of her visit.

Hello. Hello Joe... Hello Mike. Hello Robert. Hello Mike.

Erlang: The Movie!

(Disclaimer: I've bought a book on Erlang, and I'm sure today's Rails videos will be just as funny in a few years)

Mod_rails saves the day?

Hosting has always been the weakest aspect of Ruby on Rails. You can't simply upload a set of files and expect them to run, as you can with PHP thanks to mod_php. FastCGI is flaky (I'm still trying to escape it at work). A proxied pack of Mongrels is great when given a dedicated server and enough care and attention, but awkward and demanding on shared hosting.

Phusion's Passenger, an Apache module also referred to as mod_rails, looks as if it's exactly what many people have wanted: upload a Rails application to web host using Passenger and it just works. Passenger looks after managing your application for you, restarting it and spawning new backend processes as needed. It's even easy to install - just type gem install passenger and then tweak your Apache config.

I'm not going to switch my production services at work to this for quite a while, in fact, as they're hosted on a dedicated box there may be little benefit (and Mongrel looks like a better fit) but if it performs as advertised it should be enormously useful for web hosts, ISPs and universities. The issue of RAM usage remains, but that isn't a problem only for Rails apps.

Well worth watching.

Link: Phusion Passenger (a.k.a. mod_rails)

Standing

I'm standing as a candidate in the May 2008 local authority elections, in the Manchester City Centre ward. I'm the Green Party candidate.

More about this in a little while.

Evil crumbles at her touch

Camera-shy Anne Diamond carefully reviews the excellent adult game 'Resident Evil 4'

This game shouldn't be allowed to be sold, even to adults

and gets so angry that games begin to dematerialise in her hands.

An excellent example of terrible image editing and lazy proofing, via Photoshop Disasters. Also, notice the Daily Mail's clever trick of scanning and uploading bits of their own newspaper.

Link: Anne Diamond gives her chilling verdict (Daily Mail)

What if one of them seems odd?

I'm a scruffy semi-bearded man who takes photographs of everyday things, usually wearing boots, baffling t-shirts and a hat. I often get puzzled looks from people: "Why is that man taking a photo of a wall?". I don't mind.

I expect to be reported as a terrorist at some point if this stupid campaign spreads from London to Manchester: "That man is taking pictures of a bus shelter! Call the police!" That's something I do mind.

* Petition to clarify the laws surrounding photography in public places
* Flickr spoof of the Met Police poster
* Birmingham police officer 'forced press photographer to delete images
* Free Download - The UK Photographers Rights Guide
* London's Spitalfields market: shoot the architecture, we take away your camera

Update: Austin Mitchell MP (a keen photographer himself) is going to raise this issue with the Home Office. More at BoingBoing.net. It's probably worth sending a letter or email to your local MP.

B(ack)logging

There a few things less interesting than bloggers blogging about their blogging. Stop reading now.

Well, you were warned...

I'm building up a new collection of unpublished blog entries again, although it's nowhere close to the previous queue of over 700 abandoned items. I'll often quickly write a few hundred words about something and then abandon the item.

It's hard to believe there's anything close to quality control going on here, but I only seem to publish about one eighth of the items I type into Ecto. Writing something is easy, editing something is much more time consuming. If the item is trivial then it's easy to post, but if the item's got actual content then I feel uneasy publishing it and tend to leave it in limbo until it's too late to be of use.

Most of the best things in the backlog are related to my day job and overlap with a great deal of the links I add to Del.icio.us each day. I've been toying with the idea of starting a second weblog for a while now, and I think I might as well have a go. I'll keep Apetracks as a relatively useless personal writing exercise while also posting to a blog dedicated to identity and directory tech. I'm already amassing a lot of information on this topic for my own use so sharing any gems I come across may be of use to other people. I'm not an IDM guru but I am rather active at the 'coal face'; there are plenty of blogs written by IDM consultants but few written by people who deal with real IDM issues day-to-day.

I'll have a go at actually publishing some content to the new blog before announcing it.

I'm also going to try posting some of the backlog this time rather than just deleting it.

While Apetracks isn't often updated my Flickr photostream gets updates almost every week, and my Del.icio.us feed at least once a day.

A New Oxford Road?

More planned redevelopment, this time around Oxford Road.

• Converting Oxford Road to be tree-lined, pedestrianised, and with it's own bus/tram: A great idea.
• Calling it "City South": A bad idea.
• Building a slow, confusing website entirely with Flash that contains almost no information: How very 1999! A bad idea.

It's common for a very well presented campaign to be nothing but hot air. This seems to the opposite: a great plan badly presented. Which makes a nice change, I suppose.

I shouldn't criticise without offering an alternative, so I'll suggest calling it "The Corridor", since people already talk of 'The Oxford Road Corridor' (and it sounds academic), and maybe presenting the idea using an accessible and usable site made with that new-fangled HTML.

Link: Manchester City South via Manchester Confidential Property - City South: where’s that?

Castlerigg Sunset

Sunset 10
Originally uploaded by BinaryApe

We've been away on a short holiday in the Lake District, with the aim of getting some fresh air and exercise, and some photography practise too if the weather was good.

The first evening at the hotel we witnessed a fantastic sunset. I've not seen rays radiating from a sunset before - very beautiful, and it resembled photos of the aurora borealis. They were slowly moving as we watched. Crepuscular rays?

Another guest at our hotel took an excellent photo of the same sunset from Castlerigg Stone Circle.