mehblog

Plesk upgrade removes webmail

paul — Sat, 03 Nov 2007 10:54:00 +0000

This morning I did an upgrade on my plesk server to 8.2.1. This mostly went ok, but the main problem afterwards was that webmail was no longer working for domains.

Instead webmail.domain was redirecting to the default domain on that box. The solution is to rebuild the web server config files with the following command:

/usr/local/psa/admin/sbin/websrvmng -a -v

Credit for this solution goes to poster on plesk forums…

My take on the 7 reasons...

paul — Thu, 27 Sep 2007 09:47:00 +0100

So the hottest topic in the rails community is seems is Derek Sivers’ blog post on why he switched from trying to reimplement his site in rails to php.

As someone who writes both rails and php for a living I feel that I have a good perspective on the rails vs php thing.

I’m sure the arguments will continue for some time, but all I know is that I write much better php since working with rails.

Right tool for the job and all that.

Upgrade to Typo 4

paul — Wed, 26 Jul 2006 09:58:00 +0100

I have upgraded my blog to Typo version 4 and it went mostly seamlessly.

The box that hosts this blog is running plesk which wasn’t a problem.

I tried just installing the new version of typo over the old 2.6 version and while this appeared to work it caused some problems, notably with the migrations.

In the end I deleted my old typo install and ran these commands:

This box is running Centos 4 . I had sqlite installed but not the header files. These are required to get the sqlite gem files to install which are required by typo.

yum install sqlite-devel

Install the typo gem:

gem install typo

Install typo in my webroot:

 typo install /var/www/PATH/httpdocs

The next command should have changed the configuration from mongrel and sqlite to apache and mysql but it didn’t work for me for some reason:

typo config /var/www/PATH/httpdocs web-server=external database=mysql

I had to manually change the settings in database.yml and I also had to create a .htaccess file in the public folder to get fastcgi working.

Then

rake migrate

to update the database tables.

I have moved the blog a few times over the last year or so and along the way various things got broken, so it is nice to have everything working again.

apache problems

paul — Fri, 26 May 2006 07:10:00 +0100

For a while now my blog has been going down due to a strange problem with apache. The error log always contains the same error message,

*** glibc detected *** double free or corruption (fasttop)

Now I haven’t been able to determine what was causing this problem, so I decided to start using Mongrel instead thinking that the problem was down to fastcgi. So I set up a proxypass directive in my apache conf to proxy to mongrel. Works well but apache is still crashing.

From there I decided “what the heck” and set up a cron job to restart apache every hour. And that seemed just fine also until this morning when I noticed that the blog was down again. To cut a long and tedious story short it was the old ‘apache leaving semaphores around when it restarts’ chestnut. I have seen this problem before on a redhat 9 box running plesk. I had always assumed it was due to the version of apache that was being used on that box. Not so it would seem. Anyway, the simple fix can be found here, among others.

I’ve also changed my cron job to only restart every six hours now.

So my apache really isn’t too well.

Moving House

paul — Fri, 17 Feb 2006 11:46:00 +0000

So we are making the big move this weekend. For a long time now I’ve vowed to pay someone to help us move when we finally get around to it. And I got my way.

This morning two guys and a van from Man with a Van showed up first thing and man were they fast! In two hours they loaded up their Luton truck thingy with nearly everything we have. It got to the point were I had to decide to get them to leave most of the stuff in the bedroom as we have loads of friends and family turning up tomorrow to help us move. If I had let these guys there wouldn’t have been anything left for them!

So, top marks to the men with a van. Awesome service.

Busta - Latest Dark Jungle Mix

paul — Mon, 23 Jan 2006 20:36:00 +0000

My good pal Busta has recently posted his latest mix.

Check it out for some dark jungle mix lovin.

[snippet] Cleaning up currency strings

paul — Wed, 18 Jan 2006 06:46:00 +0000

I was working on some data that I needed to import into mysql for a new rails project I’ve started.

Some of the fields are currency strings, eg £4,000.00. Now initially I was tempted to just bung them into the table as varchars but there is a good chance that at some point down the line I’m going to want to ‘do maths’ with these numbers so I really had to convert them to floats.

In the end I used this little bit of code which worked a treat:

return amount.gsub(/[£,]/,’‘)

So what this does is matches the characters £ and , and substitutes them with blank. Works a treat.

Happy new year!

paul — Tue, 03 Jan 2006 19:22:00 +0000

The week before christmas I grabbed a ryanair flight home for a long weekend with the family. In the thirteen years I’ve been in the UK I’ve usually managed to be at home for christmas. This year however myself and N are buying a house and there was a slim chance that we would be in our new lovenest by christmas. ‘Twas not to be.

As first time buyers we are in a stong position. One of the primary advantages being that we are not in a chain. Pfft. We are in a chain, just at the ass end of it. We’ve found a place we like, had our offer accepted, had the mortgage approved, surveys are done etc. We could move in tomorrow! However the sellers have found a place and are now waiting for their seller to find a place. Oh well, such is life. Hopfully we’ll get moved this month.

Anyway, the weekend in Ireland was great. It was good to see everyone at this time of year. Then back to brighton and a short sprint in the office to the christmas break.

I had great intentions of getting lots of work done but on christmas eve I was laid low by a stonker of a cold. What shitty timing. I never get colds!

So christmas day was a bit muted, but thankfully there was plenty to watch on the telly from bed.

Mr IP arrived down for new year’s eve and I quaffed as best as I could considering I only had one working air hole. New years itself was spent in the usual place despite our best intentions. On the way home we were witness to some hooligan bus vandalism first hand which was (I’d say memorable but things are a bit hazy) interesting.

Poor bus driver getting partially throttled by a little shit with too many chemicals in his bloodstream. Apparently at this point I did my happy drunk act and went to the drivers aid appealing for calm, only to be berated by IP. Something along the lines of ‘there are 8 of them and they are between us and the exit of the bus’. Got away with it anyway.

Back to work today with lingering coldness. Bonkers workload.

HNY!

360 first impressions

paul — Wed, 07 Dec 2005 20:06:00 +0000

Well, I’ve had my 360 since Friday. I haven’t played on it a vast amount, but here are my initial thoughts.

The console itself looks fine. Certainly more styled than its predecessor. No gripes there.

The power supply is enormous! No really, its huge. Got to be the biggest one I’ve every seen. There have been reports of overheating but I’ve not had any issues on that front.

Games; I got Project Gotham Racing 3 and Perfect Dark: Zero. The former is great. Really like. Fantastic gfx. Great gameplay. I haven’t ventured onto xbox live as yet, but as I have a gold account, my offline scores get recorded online and I can see how I’m doing against everyone else. Which is nice.

Perfect Dark: Zero however wasn’t really my bag. I’m not a huge fan of shooters on consoles generally. With this game, I wasn’t ‘feeling it’. The game looks pretty, but I really couldn’t get into it. I’ve exchanged it for Call of Duty 2. COD2 looks great also and I’m having fun playing it.

So, all good really.

xbox 360 core system today

paul — Fri, 02 Dec 2005 10:27:00 +0000

I got a call from HMV on wednesday to let me know that they had a 360 core system with my name on it if I wanted it. I had to think about that (for about 2 seconds) and went ahead and reserved it.

The surprising thing for me was that I had been allocated one at all as I only reserved it about a month ago. At that time there were reports all over the web that most places had stopped taking preorders early September.

So, I’ll be dropping a few quid this afternoon on the core system, a headset and a memory card. I’ll think about the harddrive, wireless controller and all that in the new year I think.

Games wise, PGR3 and Perfect Dark are my top choices. King Kong has been getting some very good reviews too …

Update this evening on first impressions (assuming it doesnt get given away to someone else before I pick it up of course).

Skype is actually rather good

paul — Fri, 02 Dec 2005 09:36:00 +0000

The recent announcement of video calling in Skype 2.0 prompted me to download it and have a look

For some reason I haven’t looked at it before.

Anyway, downloaded it and it worked first time, something I have yet to see with other voip providers.

The interface is polished, theres no setup to speak of and their pricing is very competitive as far as I can tell (I primarily use voip to call the family back in Ireland, none of whom have a landline…).

Good stuff.

Papercraft motorbikes

paul — Thu, 01 Dec 2005 13:53:00 +0000

Well I probably won’t be able to afford the real thing for christmas, but maybe one of these will do.

Asterisk faxes jamming

paul — Thu, 01 Dec 2005 11:53:00 +0000

We’ve been using Asterisk here in the office for several months now. It handles our voip phones and also incoming faxes.

We have always had a problem with the fax line ‘jamming’. Every now and then the fax would get stuck while receiving a fax. To rectify this we would have to restart asterisk.

This morning one of our clients couldn’t get a fax to us. It kept jamming at our end. They must have tried about four or fives times. Same problem each time.

So I decided to try and fix this problem.

To cut a long and boring post short, I found this posting to the Asterisk Users mailing list which has a fix. It involves increasing the gain on the card that has the fax line.

I gave it a go and on the next attempt the client’s fax came through perfectly. Coincidence?

Perhaps, but this tip from Paul is definitely worth a look.

Rails Express blog

paul — Tue, 29 Nov 2005 09:39:00 +0000

The rails express blog written by Stefan Kaes, author of railsbench is a great resource for anyone interested in wringing a bit (or a lot in some cases) more performance out of Ruby on Rails.

Some great tips on there.

Good stuff.

Passed my big bike test!

paul — Sun, 27 Nov 2005 13:35:00 +0000

As a fairly direct result to having my 125 stolen I decided to bite the bullet and do the direct access motorbike training course.

I went along to Sussex Rider Training one saturday for an assessment and we worked out a plan.

This past week I did their three day course, culminating in my practical test on Friday afternoon.

The weather this week got really cold. Well below zero with wind chill. This was a challenge but preferable to rain I suppose.

Day one of the course focused on the slow riding techniques (slow speed riding, U-turns, emergency stops). This is essential. Once one masters controlling the bike at slow speeds, the rest is easy (well, easier).

Day two of the course focuses on the faster stuff. ‘A’ roads, bends and dual carriageways. It is important for passing the test that you can show the examiner that you can get up to the speed limit quickly and safely. Its all about ‘making progress’ apparently.

The third day is spent warming up and drilling the U-turn and emergency stop. Do both of those a few times, then off around the test routes for a while, then more U-turns etc.

Mine was the last test for the day, and it looked like it was about to snow at any moment. Mid afternoon and the parents where out picking up their little darlings from school. Sticking their 4×4s in stupid places.

I was very nervous. However, once we got going I wasn’t too bad. I was sure I had failed the test on a number of occasions though.

The training I’d received really paid off, especially going over all of the ‘awkward’ parts of the various test routes. That really helped.

Towards the end of the test we were heading down this stretch of the A27. National speed limit (70). We’d been down this road several times over the last few days, so I knew what was coming.

Round the corner at 70. Speed limit changes down to 50, watch for cars to the right as outside lane vanishes. Down to 40.

“Ah crap, he’s going to make me to that nasty right turn.” The instruction is given. “Next right turn”. Spot the turn, move right, into the small run off area. Sit and wait for a gap. Of course its bonkers busy so I get stuck for a while. Gap comes and then I’m off.

Run through it in my head. Hmm, tight left hander at end of this street. Don’t run wide.

“Turn left at end of street”.

“Bugger.”

Nail it.

Back to centre.

Test passed.

Sweet!

4 minor faults in the end. All for not making progress, i.e. too slow on the twisty A road and being a bit hesitant at some of the junctions. I’m happy enough with that though as it is something I know I need to work on. It’ll come with experience.

So, I can thoroughly recommend Sussex Rider Training in West Worthing if you are thinking of doing some bike training. Great guys and top training.

Hmm, now how much for an R1 …

My Bike has been knicked!

paul — Thu, 10 Nov 2005 00:16:00 +0000

My pride and joy has been stolen! A black and red KMX 125.

Last night and tonight a car driver felt the need to park half of their car in the motorbike bay. This meant that I had to park my bike at the other end of the bay where I couldn’t anchor it to the lamp post.

I came back from networking to see a big kmx shaped hole where my bike should be.

My first reaction was “did I park it there?”. I definitely did.

We drove around the area trying to find it, to no avail.

I now have a crime number. It may or may not show up.

The bike was worth around the grand mark. But there was another 100 pounds worth of locks on it too (three seperate locks).

As it wasn’t anchored, and there wasnt any debris from severed locks, it must have been a ‘lift it into the van job’.

During the evening though? Damn cheek!

Anyway, poor me. Just need to make sure Im covered insurance wise.

typo 2.5.8 issue & fix

paul — Wed, 09 Nov 2005 13:40:00 +0000

There is a wee problem with the latest version of typo.

One of the lib files is in the wrong place.

Find the fix here

Rails, Mysql native bindings 2.7 on Centos

paul — Tue, 08 Nov 2005 16:58:00 +0000

This post over on the RoR blog a few days back talks about upgrading to the new mysql native bindings for ruby to get the best performance.

However, I’ve been unable to get it to install using gem, a la :


gem install mysql

as I have been getting compile errors:


ERROR: While executing gem - (RuntimeError) ERROR:
Failed to build gem native extension.

Despite the number of solutions to this out there, I’ve only now found one that works with my particular setup, namely centos 4.2, and that can be found in this post

I should point out that I didn’t need to edit the makefile or anything, I just ran make, make install in the


/usr/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/mysql-2.7

folder.

All working now, which is nice.

winter is here

paul — Wed, 02 Nov 2005 13:33:00 +0000

Last week was unseasonably warm; around the 20 degrees mark. This week however winter has arrived, with a vengence. The air temp has dropped and its been lashing down over the last few days.

Personally I don’t really mind this as I quite like winter. I’m built for the cold rather than the warm as they say.

Dark, wet weather always reminds me of christmas for some reason. Sitting indoors, the lights are on. All warm a snuggly.

Ahhh.

How to count the number of records in a table...

paul — Wed, 28 Sep 2005 11:30:55 +0100

Want to find out how many records there are in a table?

You could do a table.<a href="http://api.rubyonrails.com/classes/ActiveRecord/Base.html#M000674">find_by_sql </a> "select count(*) from table",

You could get all the records from the table and then count them, say records = table.find(:all).

Or you could do count = table.count.

How cool is that!

ruby on rails country_options_for_select helper

paul — Fri, 23 Sep 2005 00:21:55 +0100

So I’m still working away on this project using Ruby on Rails, and generally I’m loving it. It really is a great piece of software. Progress is good, but I often find myself stumbling on what should be the simple things.

Today for example, I wanted to use the country_options_for_select() form helper to generate a list of countries as a dropdown in a form, with a number of countries prioritised at the top of the list.

The list was being generated but the prioritised countries where not be generated. The code I had was something like this: country_options_for_select(priority_countries = ['United Kingdom','United States']).

Now the method signature in the api docs is this: country_options_for_select(selected = nil, priority_countries = nil), and I assumed that the selected = nil didn’t need to be included as it was the default.

Not so. Once I added the selected = nil argument to the method it worked.

And the lesson is?

Assumption is the mother of all feck ups I guess.

Formatting dates in rails templates using strftime()

paul — Tue, 23 Aug 2005 15:07:38 +0100

Recently I needed to be able to format a date that I had retrieved from the database into something more readable. In smarty one would do something like $date|date_format but I could not find anything like that in ruby.

Then someone pointed out that the date field in the database would be recognised as such and would be a date object in my View.

As the date is a Date object I can use strftime() to reformat the date any way I want to. eg. @event.start_date.strftime("%d %B %Y")

How to find the id of a record you have just created in ruby on rails?

paul — Thu, 21 Jul 2005 18:00:53 +0100

How do you get the id of a record you have just created in Ruby on Rails?

Well, the answer to this question came up on the rails mail list recently.

It goes something a little bit like this:


   @text.save   //insert something into the database
   @text.id      //get the id of the new record

stop gnome opening new windows

paul — Tue, 28 Jun 2005 14:22:02 +0100

I’m currently playing with fedora core 4 on my desktop in the office. One of my initial niggles is the way that the file browser app (nautilus) always opens new windows, i.e. when you click on a folder and then click on a sub folder, one ends up with two seperate windows. Very annoying.

Anyway, there is a way to stop this by telling nautilus to work in ‘browser’ mode which is much more like the windows explorer style.

Instructions on how to change this setting are here. Note, one gets to ‘gconf’ by typing gconf-editor from a console window, or by navigating to Applications | System Tools | Configuration Editor (at least on my default gnome setup).

Cannot send session cookie ....

paul — Tue, 19 Apr 2005 08:11:36 +0100

While working on a site last night I got this error when I uploaded the latest version of my code to the live server: Warning: session_start(): Cannot send session cookie – headers already sent …

Now, my first reaction was WTF! as I wasn’t seeing this on my development box. I was using the Apache Friends XAMPP product to run a WAMP install on my local windows XP machine so I guess there are some differences in the way apache works on win32 and linux.

Anyway, the Cannot send session cookie error is usually caused by outputting something to the client and then trying to send a cookie/write to the headers. So I start looking through my included files, trying to find a stray debug line or something like that. Nothing. Ok, go through it again, grepping for any kind of output. Nothing. Oh crap. I can’t find the problem and the live site is busted right now.

Ok, its late and no one will probably notice, but I have to find the problem.

Bang head on table a few times.

Ok, start again.

And then I see it. I had tabbed all of the source in one of my include files. Including the opening  < ?php  line! So, I was effectively sending a tab to output then processing my php.

More head slapping. General relief etc.

So there you go. If you ever have that problem and can’t see where its coming from, save yourself some wear and tear on the ole forehead and check for whitespace at the beginning of your source files.

Beware register_globals

paul — Mon, 07 Mar 2005 14:18:35 +0000

We deployed a new site last week. Over the weekend I got a bug report from the site owner. Within the administration section of the site a certain session variable was getting reset causing a certain operation to fail.

Initially I was stumped. It worked fine on the dev server...  So I made sure that we had deployed the code to the live server correctly. Yup, all fine.

Versions of php were the same.

Well, to cut a long story short, register globals had been turned on in an apache config file for the previous version of the site and hadn't been removed when the new site was deployed.

This was causing a variable initialisation in one part of the code to overwrite an object in $_SESSION elsewhere.

Weird. Lesson learned...

How to properly turn off comments

paul — Tue, 22 Feb 2005 17:50:39 +0000

I was still having problems with getting sh*t loads of spam via the old posts on this site, even though I had turned off all commenting in the admin as far as I could tell. Seems I needed to sort out some settings on the old posts. Info on this can be found in this post on the wordpress site.

Specifically:

UPDATE wp_posts SET comment_status = ‘closed’, ping_status = ‘closed’ WHERE comment_status = ‘open’;

Ahhh, peace at last.

Update: and now I can gleefully look at all those feeble attempts to spam me in my logs. :)

turning off comments

paul — Sun, 06 Feb 2005 12:43:53 +0000

I’m getting more comment spam on this blog than email spam to the half dozen or so domains I have registered so I’m just going to turn off comments for now. It’s really annoying but spam just really gets on my nerves, and I really don’t like the idea of these spammers burning up my bandwidth or more importantly my time.

If anyone wants to get in touch with me about this blog or anything else the follow the 'about me' link top right to my main site where there is a contact form...

nesting variables in smarty

paul — Tue, 01 Feb 2005 19:58:33 +0000

Ever need to use nested variables in smarty? I know its not very mvc, but on more than one occassion I’ve found myself needing to . So here is how to do it, as a reminder to myself more than anything tbh.

Improve Spam detection in Thunderbird mail client

paul — Wed, 20 Oct 2004 18:28:36 +0100

I’ve noticed recently that the junk mail filtering in the Thunderbird mail client wasn’t as good as I would have liked. So I had a hunt around and found this thread on the MozillaZine forums with a good tip to improve its spam detection rules. Warning, involved some hand editing of preference files…

wordpress update

paul — Tue, 12 Oct 2004 10:08:03 +0100

There is a new version of wordpress out, 1.2.1 . It is a bug fix release I believe. I was able to just copy the archive straight into my wordpress folder and all is well. Admin system tells me I am now running the new version.

SPF and Sender ID

paul — Wed, 15 Sep 2004 13:53:54 +0100

Recent reports on slashdot et al seemed to suggest that Microsoft’s Sender ID initiative was dead in the water as it had been rejected by MARID. It seems however that this was perhaps not so accurate.

I have only recently found out about SPF (Sender Policy Framework) and it sounds great. I run a number of servers for clients and I know how much spam is flying around out there and how hard it can be to filter it out. If SPF can limit the amount of spam that is coming from spoofed addresses I think this will be an enormous breakthrough. On the surface at least, it should force spammers to use their own machines to send out their noxious effluent. That should make it easier to block them.

In theory anyway.

In the next few weeks I’m planning on getting SPF and postfix working together and relaying some domains through it to see how it works. Fingers crossed.

chkconfig for debian?

paul — Mon, 12 Jul 2004 11:37:29 +0100

I recently switched to debian for my linux box at home. I have previously been using redhat (various versions and variants). Most of the boxes I work on and manage are redhat based in some way so I had become familiar with the way it is laid out. So, I recently installed ddclient to update my dynamic dns records at dyndns as I am on DSL at home with a dynamic IP. In the installation instructions one is told to use chkconfig to ‘turn on’ ddclient as a service. The problem is that (as far as I am aware) chkconfig does not exist on debian. Hmm. So a bit of searching led me to the debian policy documtent, which explains the debian equivalent of chkconfig, i.e. update-rc.d . That doesn’t roll off the tongue as easily as chkconfig but it does the job. Specifically check out this page<<" alt="" />~~-nextpage~~-> for info on how to use it.

In my case I just ran update-rc.d ddclient defaults (after copying the file ddclient from my distribution folder to /etc/init.d ) and it created symlinks from /etc/init.d/ddclient to the various init folders. I suppose I should really have choosen just the runlevels I needed but it was early and I hadn’t quite woken up …

hth.

latest IE scare

paul — Fri, 25 Jun 2004 22:16:09 +0100

Following on from todays revelations that various sites are spreading malware via IE, I’ve just updated my xp pro box to service pack 2, rc2. So far so good. Apparently this patch secures IE against this particular vuln. I must say I’m happy with the improvements so far. If you want to update to sp2 rc2 then you need to update your windows update client here: and then just do windows update as normal. Easy.

wordpress update

paul — Mon, 31 May 2004 13:16:02 +0100

I’ve just updated wordpress here form v 101 to 1.2. A few hiccups (should have checked where the tar file was headed…) but everything seems ok now. Some cool new featues too…

welcome back Mr Beattie

paul — Mon, 31 May 2004 13:01:00 +0100

Russell Beattie is back, posting away on his blog after a bit of a break. Good stuff.

QT & GTK

paul — Sun, 04 Apr 2004 21:27:39 +0100

I’m looking at writting some apps for the Linux desktop at the moment, probably using wxPython, but one thing that has been really confusing for me of late is the various toolkits for the two main linux desktop environments, namely Gnome and KDE. So, as a bit of an aid de memoir for myself, QT is kde and GTK is gnome.

the future of the OSS desktop

paul — Mon, 22 Mar 2004 15:31:23 +0000

Recently a discussion has begun about the future direction of the Linux desktop. Well perhaps ‘started’ isn’t the right word, but this article written by Havoc Pennington seems to have sparked off something of a blog war between himself and Miguel de Icaza. The crux of the discussion seems to be about what platform the future linux desktop is going to be based upon. On the one hand one has Mono which is an open source implementation of Microsoft’s ’.NET framework’, and on the other hand we have Java. And of course the current C/C++. Now, to be honest until recently I was pretty much ignorant of what all the fuss was about, but having read numerous blog posts and articles I am beginning to get it. It would seem that each ‘alternative’ has its benefits and drawbacks (like most things in life I suppose). Java has a lot of momentum behind it, and is backed by companies such as Sun and IBM. So there is a lot of support for it. However, as Java is not open source it can be troublesome for some developers, particularily when you add the GPL into the mix. Mono is completely open source and is backed by Novell. However, many open source developers are reluctant to use Mono as it is perceived as being linked to Microsoft, i.e. an OS implementation of a MS product. And there are lots of people who are nervous about the multitude of patents that MS holds with regard to .NET. Understandable I suppose. I have used java on and off over the years but I am certainly no expert. I quite like java in many respects. I hadn’t ever tried Mono though, so I downloaded it and installed the CLI and the compiler onto one of my boxes (a pleasantly painless experience I might add) . I compiled a simple HelloWord script and compiled it. It ran just fine. I then copied the binary to one of my Windows XP boxes which has the latest version of the .NET runtime on it, and the binary ran just fine there too which was pretty cool (ok, I wasn’t exactly stretching things with this example). Apparently the start of the binary file holds instructions for windows to run the file through the .NET VM or something like that, so on windows you can just double-click the file and it runs properly. Neat. Going beyond the HelloWorld example, there is GTK# for writting GUI applications. The Mono project is using GTK# instead of windowsForms as I believe a lot of the patent issues involve the windows forms classes, so using GTK# avoids the whole problem. Right, this post is getting very long and is turning into a review(ette) of Mono which wasn’t the intention. More later …

Happy Paddy's Day

paul — Wed, 17 Mar 2004 20:08:39 +0000

Hope everyone has a great day remembering their Irish roots. ;) Most notably today is my Dad’s birthday. Happy birthday MPD!

wax on

paul — Sat, 24 Jan 2004 19:16:18 +0000

Hans Nowak has written what can best be described as a wrapper for wxPython which is a Python port of wxWindows, an open source C++ GUI framework to make cross-platform programming child’s play. Well, almost.
Almost indeed. As someone who is new to python, and also to wxWindows, Hans’ wax is a godsend. It wraps up all of those nasty, hard to remember apis in nice simple objects. So, I should finally get around to doing some of these GUI projects on my list.

Hurrah, nokia are listening

paul — Thu, 22 Jan 2004 19:15:33 +0000

Just spotted this article on the The Register about rumours of Nokia potentially evaluating Python for their series 60 platform. Outstanding. Its a bit of a pity that its a limited trial initially, but I suppose doing the trials in a controlled manner should lead to quicker and perhaps better quality feedback.

Perl on the Series 60!

paul — Sun, 18 Jan 2004 08:12:32 +0000

It would seem that Nokia are going to release a version of Perl for their series 60 phones. This is very cool indeed. Why? Well, at the moment if you want to develop for mobiles (and series 60 phones in this case) then you have to either use C++ (steep learning curve, lots of power) or Java and J2ME (easier to learn, nowhere near as much power). Having a ‘third way’ is going to be great. Actually there is OPL which is quite usable but as I don’t have a series 60 phone (yet) I don’t know for sure. Of course, whether or not Perl is the right choice here is open to debate. Personally I would have preferred Python ...