Your Inconstant Friend

As always, I have to start by apologising for not blogging more often - I'm just that kind of an overwhelmed person with too much to do in each 24 hours. And then more stuff (like tax season) comes alone :(
As some of you may know, I'm somewhat of a Fish fan, so when this emerged from his web site I was truly amazed !

The major surprise is that out of the blue I have been offered a 4 week North American tour in June. This will include the Nearfest festival and will take in a number of US cities, coast to coast, as well as three shows in Canada. This tour is looking very positive and Yatta is confident we can make it work. The dates are already going in the book and I will let you know more about the routing and other details once I get them in this coming week. It's the first tour over there in a very long time and we will need to call on every resource we have available to make it happen.

It is highly likely that Mexican dates will be added at the end of the North American tour.

So, if I'm very lucky, I'll be able to get to see one of my favourite artists. You should too - he's got a new CD out, his music's great, and he puts on a fantastic show.

Marillion have this to say on their site:
Marillion are back in the studio to finish writing and recording Album 15. Some early-to-mid-2008 festival dates are expected, but look for an extensive tour for the new album in the second half of 2008!

Since 1997, Marillion have changed their modus operandi and become much more "user-supported". Before then they relied on labels, but since what might easily have been the non-tour or the tour from hell, they're been releasing CDs on a pre-subscribe basis, so you pay now for a CD that'll be out in 6 months time. For that you get an extra disc, or your name on the sleeve, or something special. The record companies also see that it's a viable product and take it to distribute. Neat.

More later - I've got to go see some soccer

The Adventure (3)

Leaving Idaho Falls after lunchtime on Sunday we finally felt that we were "on our way", and started listening to the weather forecasts in earnest ! Lots of lovely cheer there - not ! Reports of giant pile-ups and many people dead in blizzards from Texas and Oklahoma north to Michigan. Were we really doing the right thing ?
We trundled south down I-15 in to Utah (passing our favourite ice cream truck-stop (stopping for ice cream and souvenirs, of course !) and on south towards Brigham City and Ogden (quick wave to Nana and Aggie in passing, but I guess they never noticed us in the gathering gloom of the evening !). Left (east) at Roy and onto I-84 to take us through the hills and out of Utah. Listening to the radio (we found that the CD player would play CDs if they were "warm" and then only about half-way - then it would just quit) we caught this absolutely hilarious LDS version of the 12 days of Christmas. It wasn't the one here (nor this one - also very good), and I'll try to track it down - it was from a radio station in eastern Utah and absolutely cracked us up.
Finally we merged onto I-80 East and so Sunday night saw us parked for the night in the Flying J truck-stop in Evanston, WY. Were we tired ? Oh yes (we thought) as we dragged the duvet over ourselves and fell asleep.

The Adventure (2)

So I got to the house in this huge (30-foot long) RV to find all the boxes waiting for loading. We loaded and loaded until dinner-time and felt pretty tired

So we then went out to Deseret Books for some CDs and presents, and to YarnToday to talk to Tola's Stitch'n'Bitch group.





Here's Miste, who was adamant that I couldn't take anything but a horror-pic of her. I think that she's absolutely wrong, but then, I'm just a man, so what would I know about it !

After that we took in Walmart for some supplies and went back home and continued packing the wagon ! You just would not believe how much will fit into one of these trucks, and that's what we found out ... we didn't actually leave until about 2.30 on Friday afternoon ! Talk about being late !
Anyway, we finally got on the road and went north to Malad to get a marriage licence (thanks to Shirlee in the office there !) and then on to Rexburg to the marriage ceremony. 90 minutes late - sorry everyone !
We had a great reception - pictures to come ! - and then retired to the CottonTree Inn in Rexburg. Nice room, jetted tub, comfortable bed, etc.
Next morning we headed out to Tola's parents and she, I, and her brother Guy repacked the wagon so that we could actually get at the bed to sleep ! That took all day, meaning that we started off a whole day late, and haven't caught up at all.
Sunday we stopped off to see Tola's brother Josh in Idaho Falls. His wife Charity gave birth to a new son, Riley, on Wednesday.

An Abrupt Change of Life

Well, I've gone and done it ! Here's the itinerary, just for those who consider masochism as a spectator sport:
Wednesday morning, 3.30 a.m.: I'm rung up by the taxi driver, asking to know where I am ! I tell him he's early - 24 hours early. No more sleep tonight :(
Thursday morning, 3.30 a.m.: I'm rung up by the taxi driver again. This time I tell him where to come to meet me and bring bags out. 4.30 sees me in line for a Southwest flight to Chicago Midway, and then to Salt Lake. Flight leaves at 7 a.m. On time ! Next flight leaves Midway at 9.25 on time ! These Southwest Airlines people are Good !
Thursday afternoon: take taxi to CruiseAmerica in Salt Lake. Got to see instruction video of how not to destroy an RV camper. In English, and then, for fun, in Dutch (well, waroom niet :) ? ). Do the walk-around and then get on the road. First instruction is to turn left on 4500, but not that it isn't marked in the direction I'm going ! I turn by doing a right-right-right-left around a 6000 block, go back the way I came, and find the road, nicely signposted (on this side of the light!).

Thursday afternoon was nice in Salt Lake City. By Ogden it was threateningly dark, and then, just as I bore right before Brigham City to go to Logan, the sleet began. 30 seconds later it was full-out snow and I was in that for the next 22 miles. Could see ploughs heading from Logan through Sardine Canyon, but none in front of us, so I just stayed behind the truck in front of me and hoped.

(this is the first of a catch-up: we're having breakfast in DesMoines right now, and the next one will be from Davenport or further east)

The Frustrations of Software (2)

Note to reader: Things here are seriously geeky :) !

Well, as you will have read in the last "episode", I was getting pretty frustrated with Ubuntu's installation system.

So, I did something else for a while and then went to bed. This morning I was slowly recovering conciousness when a stray thought wandered through my mind ..... was I looking at an error message about my instruction, or one about myself ??? When you try to do an installation in Linux you either have to be an administrator or provide the admin's password. What I had done was create the system and a user ID for me without ever setting up a password for the root (or administrator) ID. OK. Look up how to do that, and do that. Great. Now go find the instructions on how to set up LAMP again. The ones for this that I used are here and seem pretty accurate.

Next, set up Apache and try out looking at the localhost site. It works - yippee ! OK. I'm doing something right here, so let's try for PHP too ! I'm going to try out PHP5, as that looks like the one I'll need to use in the future, at the very least.

Two swift commands later it seems that I've done it. I create a small php test file and get FireFox to look at it - it does, and shows all the php versioning, which is great !

Finally, MySQL. This is a database system very popular for use with web sites. Actually installing the database isn't particularly difficult, but the intricacies of some of the later setup have to be addressed carefully.

After all this said, however, I have to say that setting up a LAMP system is an amazingly easy thing to do. I have set up AMP systems on Windows before, and none of them have been as easy as this. The easiest thing these days appears to be getting your head around what appear to be crazy insane Linux/UNIX commands, but, in fact, they do make sense after a surprisingly short period.

Next; onwards and upwards: a small intro page and some tricks !

Note to reader: End-of-geek :) !

To finish with, the AG's daughter is learning the saxophone. I can see that she has a political career ahead of her !

Other good points of the weekend have been two-fold. Firstly, England beat Australia by 12 points to 10, and then France beat New Zealand by a similar margin - 20 to 18. Boy but it was tense in the last few minutes ! Now it'll be England vs France in one semi-final and South Africa vs Argentina in the other. Association Football appears to be standing aside gracefully over there for Rugby Union Football to be seen, which is a great spirit to show: I just hope the Pumas can show really well against the Springboks. We shall see.)

That's it for now. Have fun.

The Frustrations of Software (1)

Being a software engineer provides me with plenty of [Aaaaarrrgghh!!] moments - a my own expense, as you can imagine ! Despite this, I still haven't learned not to do things like tear my hair out, grit my teeth, and claw at the wall when things don't work the way the documentation promises faithfully that it does ! [Grrrrrr] is, I think, the technical term for it, but I haven't ever been able to find it in the dictionary.

Note to reader: from now on things get seriously geeky :) !

[Grrrrrr] moments normally happen when you're working on a piece of software that's (for you) totally new, so not only have you not much idea where to get help from, you also don't really understand what the help says when you do read it, as it assumes that you've got lots more experience than you actualy do have! The most recent [Grrrrrr] moments have been coming courtesy of the installation packages of an operating system called Ubuntu - a version (or "distribution") of Linux.

As I don't just have a spare PC for this I created what's called a Virtual Machine (sort of a PC in software, not hardware) to put the new OS into, and then downloaded the system and installed it with no problems whatsoever. Of course, my luck couldn't last ! According to the OS manual the installation is a simple one-liner, but as soon as I started trying to install the popular set of programs (Apache, MySQL, and PHP) that one can use for developing web sites I got a very persistent error message seemingly telling me I didn't have permission to do the installation.

Like I say, a [Grrrrrr] moment, so I'm writing this while deciding what alternative strategy to follow, as the online bug-reports, etc., seem to show that this isn't an unknown problem. Others may have got around it, but I don't have the time.

Oh yes, and all the lights went out, so I should post this and close down my other PC, I think !

Back later !

Back by Popular Demand !

Welcome back my friends to the show that never ends ! Step inside ! Step inside ! ............. Yes, well. Since my last blog, that broke a fast of several months, I've been castigated for leaving it so long between blogs. Ok ! Ok ! I didn't actually realise that anyone out there read this stuff ([grin]) !

So, I've decided to make a to-do list (I can hear the cynical sniggering already ) of topics to cover soon:

Internet Music

Agile and Extreme Programming

A Second Riiview (see here on April 14, 2007)

TBA

I'll try not to wait 3 months between episodes! I would guess that some people will have no interest in programming, so I'll add light entertainment too !

Today I'm sitting in the bat-cave programming, so taking a moment off to write this. The AG just sent me this site - you should introduce you 7+-year-old to some of these tricks. However, there are some others:

• Is it Prime? For starters, not if it ends in an even number, 5, or 0 (that means divisible by 2 or 5). To check further, add all the digits, and keep adding until you have just 1 left. If that is 3, 6, or 9 then it's divisible by 3 and definitely not prime.
• The site gives an easier way of subtracting from 1000 (or similar). I find easier to take 1 from 1000 leaving 999. Then I don't have to carry at all. Afterwards I can just add the one back to the result !

Bye !