Archive for the ‘Life’ Category

I tried out my new lens at the pre-party. Unfortunately, I had to be in Donington the next day, so I was getting my coat out of the cloak room as people were still queuing to put theirs in. Never the less, good times were had.

Recently, we dined at Kendalls Bistro, a French restaurant on St Peter’s Square. They had long candles in wine bottles, where the way had all hugely overflown and run down the bottle, to the level where you can only assume it is some kind of art.

Unfortunately, I don’t have a photo of it, or could find a uncopyrighted photo that looked anything like it, but it looked something like this. Anyway, you can read my review of Kendalls Bistro over on Know Leeds.

Today marks the first anniversary of my 25th birthday. Thanks to the spread bet I placed, that means £100 in my pocket, and an additional £100 for each year after that I survive.

If you’re running Mac OSX Lion and trying to update your locate db, you may get the following error message.

-bash: updatedb: command not found

You can call updatedb by using its full path instead.

/usr/libexec/locate.updatedb

You could also create a symlink in your bin directory which would then allow you to just call updatedb as normal.

As part of my push to attend more conferences this year, and get out into the real world, I recently attended PHPNW12, a PHP developer conference that took place in Manchester.

I arrived on the Friday night and checked into the hotel across the road from the conference, the Britannia. With it’s sweeping balconied staircases it felt like I was in a 70s horror movie. The floors creaked and the light in the corridor outside my room flickered on and off constantly – indeed, it rather ruined the mood when they fixed it.

The Friday night featured a hackathon, though not feeling too well due to the tail end of a cold, I spent about 20 minutes hacking, then ate my pizza while I checked my emails for an hour and headed to bed, not to emerge until 12 noon the next day when I felt a bit better.

The talks were on the whole good – there was a real range in there, some had really interesting topics but due to their lack of experience presenting talks, where rather dull. Others were confident and entertaining speakers who despite presenting quite dull topics (caching is not going to be mega interesting) presented brilliant talks. On balance, I would certainly prefer them to focus more on speaker quality over topics next year.

On the Saturday night there was a social including dinner, at which I spent quite a bit of time getting to know some of the other people at Sky – I didn’t realise they were going as I hadn’t gone with Sky, but it was great to see some familiar faces there.

Overall, I found I learned a lot from it. If I can bring back just a few ideas to my own business then it will have been worth the expense.

Staircases in the hotel. I also tried the new panorama function on iOS6, on it’s side:

If you’re trying to install ThoughtWorks’ Go Server on CentOS (or indeed any Linux variety), you might run into a problem where it says you need JDK installed. Indeed, even if you have OpenJDK installed it may continue to complain.

This is because they have not officially approved OpenJDK yet, so your two options are to a) installed the actual JDK or b) to install OpenJDK to at least the version required (1.6 at time of writing) and then force the installer to ignore dependences. This can be done using the following command.

rpm -i --nodeps go-server.rpm

Providing you already have OpenJDK installed, this should work fine.

If you’re getting an error trying to connect to Postgres on localhost, the problem is probably that your system is configured for ipv6 but your Postgres isn’t. You can change this however.

First off, you need to find the pg_hba.conf file.

locate pg_hba.conf

Edit it and find the line which defines the localhost.

hosts  all all   md5

Below it, add the following line.

host all all ::1/128 trust

Finally, restart Postgres.

cPanel offers two options for installing PDO – using EasyApache which can enable PDO and MySQL’s PDO driver or installing everything via PECL. Unfortunately, under PHP 5.3, the PECL installers don’t work, so if you need any other PDO drivers, you’re in a hole.

Luckily, you can install it manually.

Download the PDO driver from the PECL website. Extract the archive and CD into the directory.

wget http://pecl.php.net/get/PDO_PGSQL
tar -xzf PDO-PGSQL-1.0.2.tgz
cd PDO-PSQL-1.0.2/

Once this is done, run the standard commands for building a PHP extension.

phpize
./configure
make
make install

Once this is done, you can add the extension to php.ini.

cd /usr/local/lib/
vim php.ini
extension=pdo_pgsql.so

Finally, restart Apache and the Postgres driver should show up in your phpinfo() output.

I’ve been meaning to do a photography course for a long time. But every time I look into it I realise I’ve just missed an intake or it’s at least some ridiculous amount of time until the next one starts.

However, being determined to get it done, I made an effort to hound Leeds City College – and I do mean hound because getting information out of them is like getting blood out of a stone. They simply don’t know when the courses are going to be running or provide you with any information on them.

Never the less, I managed to get myself and Elina booked on one, and we had our first session last Monday. The course costs about £150 I think, and for that you get ten sessions of two hour tuition, which seems reasonable.

The first session was general introductions, but was by no means non-informative. We discussed the problems we were having and what areas we wanted to focus on in the first part of the session and then dived straight in to the course material and practice exercises.

By the look of the schedule, it’s very focused around the kind of photography I want to do as well, so I’m very much looking forward to it!

Sometimes you need to add a new path to your $PATH variable. This is easy to do by adding a new line to your paths file.

cd /etc/
vim paths

Once you have added the path, you can execute any executables in Terminal, without having to specify the full path.