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A little bit of web design

I was looking at Mark’s my365 page as he’s also doing a daily photo project, and rather liked his presentation on there.

So last night I put my mind to developing a few lines of code to try to put something similar together. So a bit of Perl code to parse the XML from the RSS feed (yes it’s technical, but fun in a geeky way) from my flickr oneaday feed and I was able to put together a web page of my own which automagically updates whenever I add a photo to the oneaday set on my iPhoto album on my mac (which synchronises with flickr).

Suzy helped me out today with the CSS for laying out the page and in the end this tutorial on floats was also very helpful to end up with my oneaday gallery.

I’l probably tidy it up a little in the future, but it’s not bad for a few hours of work, especially when I consider how long it is since I coded in Perl and php. Definitely a worthwhile exercise, it helps to keep the coding muscles in trim, and I’m teaching web development tools in a couple of weeks.

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Join the FSFE

Are you interested in Free Software, then why not join the Free Software Foundation Europe?

I’ve been a member for a number of years now, and it keeps you in touch with the goings on in Free Software with a European emphasis.

If you want to join, then click the link here: https://fellowship.fsfe.org/login/join.php?ref=richship

Oh, there is a little bit of a competition at the moment to refer new members, and the winner gets a cooking session with the Fellowship Coordinator, and that sounds kinda fun.

FSFE fellow Button

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IRC in aber

Especially for freshers…

There is a technology called Internet Relay Chat, which for many years was one of the few ways of interacting with your friends and colleagues around the world on the internet. Now we have lots of IM clients and protocols, but the cool kids all still use IRC.

There is a long and colourful history behind IRC at Aberystwyth, but to summarise (you can read the gory details in other places) bitternet is dead.

IRC is alive and well at irc.aberwiki.org.

Get yourself onto a Sun machine, start up a terminal window and type the following…
$irc
*** Connecting to port 6667 of server change.this.to.a.server
*** Unable to connect to port 6667 of server change.this.to.a.server: Unknown
+host
*** Use /SERVER to connect to a server
/server irc.aberwiki.org
… lots of joining stuff here…
/join #fresher
… stuff…
Hello I am a newbie

You may find yourself in a quiet empty channel, or it might have other folks around. If you feel really brave you might want to try joining #aber, but beware, here be dragons and *shudder* graduates of the department. You need to have a well developed sense of humour to survive for long on #aber, but it is worth the effort getting to know the regulars.

You may want at some point to graduate to another client with different features, but before using scripts, beware they may get you kicked or banned.

Also, get aquainted with http://www.aberwiki.org/ it is a fount of useful (and pretty useless) information.

Enjoy, and see you around

Richard

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FOSDEM geek-fest

Sitting here at FOSDEM, nursing a slight hangover from lots of Belgian beer last night at the Delerium Cafe in Brussels. they reputedly have over 2000 beers on the menu, but that’s still not enough for every one of the 4000+ geeks here to have a different one each!

It’s already been an interesting weekend, and it’s not lunchtime yet on Saturday.
The talk on How a Large-Scale Open Source Project Works is about to begin, so I’ll post this, and update later.