Plague! (by sarah)

We have been down with the 'plague' ie bad colds for the last two weeks - its not been good - Jean the first to be ill is just about over it, I the second to catch it am still feeling really grotty though better than the three days I spent in bed, now Al is sickening and has had to drink large quantities of cough mixture 🙁 He gets sinus stuff bad so we have all the joys of post nasal drips with him - not good.

Just thought I'd best blog as I havent for ages!

I've also currently got an acting up pelvis - sigh - its clicking painfully agian. Its my own fault I slipped over last week at the capfire - but like away from the fire and inbetween groups - it was a bit embarrasssing as I couldnt get up and the elderly camp warden and Al dressed as a Yeti found me and helped me up. I was carrying my coffee at the time, so that was split on me and was ouchy hot as the mark on my finger testified the next day!

I also fell out of the van yesturday as I thought our back tire was on fire (long story) this added to cold and damp (I dont care that Al says its warm!) has been a bit of a pain 🙁

Anyway enough of the maoning and self pity - hopefully I'll be back on form with the posts soon!

Little Baby Working Things Out :) (by sarah)

Jeani-Bow is really starting to work things out!

Sunday saw her do something very intreging - I walked past with some left over chocolate from Halloween in a bowl, Jean saw it and started asking for the Yummy. I told her no she couldnt have it as it was Mummy's Yummy, she wailed in ingdignation - that old cross donald duck face again. I put the bowl on the table, Jean went quiet to my suprise as I expected more wailing. But no, instead she crawled to the other side her room to her little blue bouncy chair, then round the back of it. She then stood herself up and pushed it along - stumbling after it. She pushed it right up to the table - meaning that the bit you sit on was under the table, she then crawled under the table and onto the seat. This was where her plan failed - she kept trying to stand up on the seat but off course it was half under the table so she kept banging her head on it! But the idea was there - thought out and almost perfectly exicuted - I gave her a little piece of the marzipan off of the choc orange pumkin as she'd tried so hard. Of course I probably should have told her off for still going for something I'd told her she couldnt have!

Yesturday saw her trying to blow her noise into a square of tissue to! She only tries to do this after I've had to blow my noise though and not when hers is actually runny! If I try and wipe her nose she still pulls away as fast as possible!

She has also reached the stage where she can arrange things - ok so her dexterity is not quiet good enough for what shes trying to do but the thought processes are there - I bought some plastic block things in the same vien as her rollar balls - made by Fisher Price. I got them in a charity shop and they are supposed to be her christmass presant - they where sitting on the stairs after being washhed, waiting to be hidden. Jean told me she'd pooed and started crawling for the stairs. I followed her - she found the blocks on the stairs and begain to arrange them - first of all she moved them all up a step but insisted that they all be upside doewn so their identical (but different coloured) bottoms where all visible. The she put them in two rows - then she got very annoyed cos mummy didnt understand and put them on a different step (I was trying to encourage her to go up the stairs). Then she put them bak on the step she'd found them on - trying to restack them in their original pattern - unfortunatly shes just a bit too clumsy still to manage that one!

Journalistic Arrogance Over Blogs (by sarah)

Ok I am sick of hearing/reading journalists refering to blogs of ordinary people as rubbish, or writen badly or as having nothing of interest to convey. If that's how they feel then they shouldnt read the bloody things should they!

What do they think the majority of blogs are for? Yeah sure a few people fancy themselves as journalists and if purporting to be one then I suppose they should act as one, but most people aren't. Most people are writing blogs as a an online diary and message board so that their family and friends can share things with them instead of having to write thousands of emails and a couple of dozen letters! Sounds very efficient to me. Some of them use them to have discussions with people about stuff that matters to them - good on them.

Of course there are going to be the odd ones here and there who are just after revenue form the ads but they are very few indeed but this would only work with high profile sites and who has them? Oh the journalists!

The arrogance has astounded me, I have to say - I think the real problem is that blogs are altering the way news is spread amongst people. We are back to the essayist and everyone pretty much can have ago at it, at least in this country. I think that the arrogance masks the fear - fear that people like Tom Reynolds and Abby Lee are pipping the 'professional' writers at the post.

At the end of the day blogs are a form of expression for the people writing and most are understandable no matter how bad the spelling and grammar (hence people actually understand what I write! - well most of the time). They are not well crafted pieces of 'literature' for some micky mouse degree somewhere so why fret about it and make the people writing their hearts and souls out feel bad cos perhapse they type quicker in txt speak for example? If you dont like it dont read it!

If it was some formal piece of work then by all means moan but they are not! And I for one like to see all the diverse goings on that blogging allows us access to!

Poor Jean :-( (by alaric)

Jean's been quite snuffly after her last round of jabs, so we were feeling sorry for her anyway, but this morning when I changed her she had really nasty nappy rash, and the elastic edge of her nappy was folded inwards rather than out - which happened to go right through the sore area and irritate it, causing it to bleed slightly 🙁

This, combined with her snuffliness, worried the nursery too much, so they rung us up to take her home again today, and I've been rubbing antiseptic ointment into her sores whenever I've changed her since, to help it heal cleanly, and washing them with cotton wool and water rather than baby wipes (because I bet they'd sting on a sore...)

Still, as usual, she is in good sprits, laughing and smiling and playing! She wails when I change her and clean the sores, but soon cheers up when she's back in a fresh nappy 🙂

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.