Ah it's grand.
Sure.

Found the fuckers

.. life applying the shit kickers again. Was having an enjoyable week on leave, getting some stuff done at home and what-not. One of the good things was getting to do some work on my PCs. Alas, for some reason a number of HDDs have been toasted. What a fucker. I couldn’t believe it. Naturally, my 40GB was untouched and the 80 & 120 went up.

Due to the changes over at MovableType, I’ve decided to change the blogging software that I use on this site. I’ve decided to use WordPress which is a proper Open Source product. Will be interesting to see how this affects the development of my blogging client as I haven’t seen any of the documentation on XML-RPC usage with WP.

Well I’ve got Apache installed and working. Hoping Web-DAV isn’t going to be much of a trial. Will be interested to see what it’s like up against Samba. With a bit of luck I can get connected from the office and use it as a backup, kind of like my own iDisk service. Not much joy connecting to the VPN though. Think it might be the PC settings though. Bro’s website is coming along; amazing what some time off work and trial version of Photoshop can do for creativity.

I decided to take a couple of days leave so I could do some of the things I wouldn’t otherwise have time for. Here’s my list of to-do’s (yes, I’m such a nerd!):

• Install Apache on redbreast (FreeBSD 5.2)
• Configure WEB-DAV on same
• Work on my brother’s website
• Tidy up the rules on my firewall – it’s such a mess
• Configure the firewall so I can access the office VPN from my work laptop (that’s going to be a tough one)
• Figure out how to use NSOutlineView in a Cocoa-Java app – this has been bugging me for quite awhile

emusic have got their OS X download manager working again which is super news. Time to start making use of that download allowance once again. It’s a MP3 service that is well worth trying out. I’ve found a lot of very good stuff on there. Right now I’m downloading ‘The Future Sound of London’ album; Accelerator, Disc 2. I have Disc 1 from some time back and now I’ll shortly complete the set. I love my ADSL connection :)

In the absence of content I have to keep messing with the CMS to keep things interesting on the site :). I came across Mambo by accident yesterday and am fascinated by it. It’s very sleek and the interface is something else to behold. It has the standard modules in a portal approach but the implementation is much shaper than what I’ve used before.

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I haven’t had a chance to work with the content editor yet but it looks super. What is striking about it is the sheer effort that has gone into making it usable for non-techies. Of course that assumes that you have a team of people involved so that you can separate the technical aspect (i.e management of the site etc.) from the content (i.e. the publishers). For a one-man-show it’s very usable as well. You just have to know what you’re doing from start to finish. However, the installation is straight forward. One needs nothing more than a good FTP client and a decent control panel on your host.

After much frustration with NSOutlineView, I’ve decided to write a mini blog client that will allow me to post entries in the manner I want to. Here’s hoping it actually works!

This is the first posting from my alpha-build blogging client!!

As many before me have observed, more eloquently most likely, life has a penchant towards swinging for your nuts when you’re down. Things can be going quite well, as they were, and then life can go a bit shite.

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See, the weekend was looking quite good; going on the beer with some of the lads from LUGS until what started out as an unpleasant sensation in my stomach carried on to be a fiery pain in the arse for the rest of the weekend and most of today. That’s a general indication of what’s happening to me at the moment. So I’ve decided that I’m going to write off May here-and-now. Disappointing as I was hoping to leave it at writing off February and March for the time being.