Kitten Technologies (by alaric)

For some time now, I've been sitting on the domain kitten-technologies.co.uk, intended as an outlet for my "intellectual property" - whereas Snell Systems is me for hire to do bespoke stuff, Kitten Technologies is meant to be my more generic packaged outputs; all open source stuff for now, although I have plans for some more commercial things later.

Anyway, I've slowly been working towards a fairly decent automatic release management site, based around all the projects being in Subversion repository and having standardised filenames at the top level of each project root (LICENCE.txt, README.txt, VERSION.txt, etc).

But with the successful upgrading of my server infrastructure to Apache 2, I can run Subversion over HTTP, meaning I can finally allow public Subversion access (with the option to give other people commit access to individual projects in future), so I've now got the project management page up to a state where I'm not ashamed of it any more.

So, for example, I've recently been messing around with a server status monitoring package, a bit like Nagios but done in a way I prefer, which I've called The Eye Of Horus.

There is a main project information page, and a download page which links to the latest official release, and to a nightly dev snapshot tarball; and gives the public read-only Subversion URL (http://svn.kitten-technologies.co.uk/horus/trunk/), and links to a subversion browser to look at the revision histories of everything.

Right now there's only me working on any of the projects, but if others collaborate (I have a few potential takers for Horus, since it seems there's a lot of minor dissatisfaction with Nagios), I can give them Subversion commit access, and set up project mailing lists as required; but I may integrate issue tracking into the Kitten Tech site itself, if it seems useful to let others submit bug reports and the like.

Halloween! Eeek! (by sarah)

Yesturday was the fifth Halloween(four yrs) me and Al have seen together as a couple - Halloween is actually the date of our first date!

We went for a wonder around Cheltenham and then like all those years ago we went and had dough balls in Pizza Express - the staff where all funkily dressed and we took Jean with us in her little spider outfit. The only strange thing was that as we came up to the van to load Jean in to head to Cheltenham it was a blood/firey orange sunset with a scary cloud formation that really did look like some sort of ethereal skeleton horse galloping through the skies - even Al commented on the fact it looked like this complete with colour!

This I have to say stupidly unnerved me - it just looked so creepy.

So after the meal we haeded back and I did a record punkin carving in about ten mins so that it would be glowing at our window at midnight - silly imagination running wild I have! We also made sure all the cats where in and worried when at 10 too Al found Babara collecting apples from the stream or some such. As the witching hour approached I had my remeberance/ancestor candle things I light for the dead alight (I know light appears to many times in that sentance!).

We then tidied to occupy us whilst the spookies were abroad then feeling a bit silly and sheepish we blew all the candles out and went to bed having a discuession on the fact that I have evolved my own symbolism and Al being proceeding to be the fourth person to state that I had come up with the protents or fundimentals or some such of Chaos Magik. What ever it is - it made me feel better - I have always burnt things like candles or presants I've made for the dead - I think it started when Nanny Pym died when I was like 7 - I had already made her birthday card and I found out she was going to be cremated so I chopped it up and burnt it cos obviously smoke rises and goes to heaven and then the particles get reconstrated in heaven. You should have seen how worried I was when I found out that rubbish was burnt! (I'm serious!).

Well that is a lot of silly waffle so I think I'll go to bed now!

p.s. edited cos I had an off by one error moment as Halloween is our 0 if that makes scense and I just counted the yrs!

Residual Current Blues (by alaric)

Bah. Yesterday the RCD tripped, shutting off the electricity supply to the house, while I was standing in the kitchen.

This means that, somewhere, something's leaking electricity. An RCD measures the current that goes out to appliances on the Live wire, and measures the current that comes back via the Neutral wire, and if they differ by more than about 100mA (in the case of our unit), then it knows that coulombs of charge are going awry somewhere - which is usually a dangerous situation, since it means either a short to ground of some kind (which can start fires due to electricity flowing through things it shouldn't and making them hot) or a short to ground via a human being, which is usually rather unhealthy.

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Life changes (by alaric)

My life has been changing a bit recently...

Firstly, I've resigned from the last company I don't own that I was an employee of. I used to be a full time employee, but nearly a year after the company decided to "downsize" drastically to save expense and stay afloat (ditching all of the staff apart from myself, the MD, an admin person, and the production guy and abandoning the office in favour of us all working from our homes, and cutting our pay by 10%), I went part time to start pursuing a freelancing career. Well, I've now resigned entirely, although I may take on freelancing contracts from them.

The difference will be that such contracts will have a beginning and an end; the reason I've resigned is that the work had become a constant stream of quite menial work, most of which came in with very little notice and tight deadlines, meaning it was an endless distraction. Also, if I spent all of my time on it I'd earn enough to feed the family at the end of the month, while freelance contracts would take months to pay back, which combined with the depleted state of my savings after the move, birth of Jean, and Sarah's illness meant I had to spend most of my time working as an employee to pay the bills. The proper lucrative interesting work had to be squeezed into the evenings.

So I'm hopeful about this change. The finances will be a bit tight for the next couple of months, but my pipeline is filling already.

The other change is that I've become a cub scout leader. This is because our village is restarting a scout group, with all three ages - beavers, cubs, and scouts. Sarah got involved, but the person who was going to be doing cubs backed out. Now, I'd always planned to do something voluntary for the community; either rejoin St John Ambulance or see if the Air Cadets take civilian volunteers (I was in the Combined Cadet Force at school, in the RAF section). Being a scout leader hadn't occurred to me, but the village needed one, so I decided to give it a go.

I was very nervous up until our first meeting with the children; but now I've met them and know a bit about them, I can start to actually have some idea of what they'll enjoy, so the fear of the unknown is ebbing fast. We have to go through a lot of training before we can run the group alone; we're being heavily supported by other groups in the area and central district resources, and while I'm sure the training will be useful, what I'm planning on doing is asking if there's a nearby cub pack that meets on a Tuesday and could do with me as a helper for a couple of weeks, so I can learn from others directly. I learn fast that way.

All of this means that I'm moving rather fast along my Life Plan.

• Married - check
• Father - check
• Self employed - check
• Doing some volunteer community activity - check
• Have employees - WORKING ON IT
• Become a magistrate - SCHEDULED FOR 2009
• Implement ARGON - WORKING ON IT
• Rule the world from an orbital battlestation - STALLED DUE TO POOR AVAILABILITY OF ANTIMATTER

Halloween! (by sarah)

Ok peeps - we are having Halloween festives on the weekend of the 27th - ie we would welcome visitors from Fri 27th to Sun 29th of October - there will be decorations and games to play 🙂

Hope some of you can face the long and arduous journey to Gloucestershire to join us for this festive occasion 🙂

Again we have a sofa bed, floor space and a tent.

If any peeps want to bring fireworks - we could have an early fireworks night type thing!