Archive for the ‘Life’ Category

Hey, do you remember SoBe? Probably not as it’s new. Well, forget about it anyway because it’s gone. It’s now called Hirst’s Yard. Confusing, it’s also located in Hirst’s Yard, along with a load of other bars.

Myself, Elina, Norm, George and Kat were recently out for post-Nando’s cocktails when we received a buy one get one free flyer, so decided it was worth a go. Perhaps they decided that the SoBe look was simply a bit too bright and happy for Leeds, but the essentials remained the same – quality, properly mixed cocktails, at reasonable prices (which changes to very reasonable when you have two for one vouchers).

It was reasonably quiet when we went in at around 9pm, though picked up soon after that, so head down early if you want a seat.

We followed that up with a trip to the ever-popular Call Lane Social where we ventured up to the tiki hideaway upstairs. You can question the wisdom of lighting drinks on fire when you have a tiki-style straw roof that is highly flammable, but we survived to tell the tale, so all is well.

At this point, myself and Elina left as we had to be up early the next morning, but I presume the night ended in a strip club.

If you need to view a file on the terminal, the traditional way to do it is using more. More is fine. But less is better.

less filename

If is very similar to more, but has extended capabilities, for example you can go back as well as forward through a file.

Back to basics today. Creating a user and setting their password.

useradd test
passwd test

While a great deal of fun was had at last month’s Wendy House, I arrived there to find that my camera’s battery had in fact died. So all I have is one photo that Hugh kindly took with my phone…

Following on from my previous post about installing ImageMagick from source, to get it working with Apache you need to do the following. First, we need to install something from Pecl. So make sure you have the pecl command at hand – if not, install it.

apt-get install pear

Then run the following.

apt-get install php5-dev
pecl install imagick

Finally, add the extension to your php.ini.

extension=imagick.so

There is an RPM available for ImageMagick on Debian, but it isn’t the most update to date, so if you need all the new features, you’ll need to compile and install it from source. Luckily, it’s very easy to do.

wget ftp://ftp.imagemagick.org/pub/ImageMagick/ImageMagick.tar.gz
tar xvfz ImageMagick.tar.gz
cd 
./configure
make
make install
make check

Following on from my recent post about adding JPEG support, I also needed to add PNG support. I couldn’t get the RPM’s to work, so I had to do this manually as well.

wget http://downloads.sourceforge.net/project/libpng/00-libpng-stable/1.2.39/libpng-1.2.39.tar.gz?use_mirror=kent
tar -zxvf libpng-1.2.39
cd libpng-1.2.39/scripts
cp makefile.linux ../makefile
cd ../
make
make install

Huzzah I hear you cry! Yes, I’m please to announce three new episodes of the podcast are on their way – the first one is available today, and the next two will follow on consecutive Fridays. This series features expert insight from Norm “The No Man”, Hugh and James (now possibly known as “Old James” given there is a new A-Soc president also called James).

I didn’t take any photos while we were recording, so here is a stock picture of Hugh.

If you have made the mistake I did of doing a fairly minimal install on Debian, you might have noticed it is missing a few fairly basic features – such as JPEG support! Luckily it’s fairly easy to install it.

wget ftp://ftp.uu.net/graphics/jpeg/jpegsrc.v6b.tar.gz
tar -zxvf jpegsrc.v6b.tar.gz
cd jpeg-6b
./configure --enable-shared
make
make install

Recently, I attended the launch of ODDTV, the new social video platform for Open Door Design, the design agency I worked at. It was great to see some old faces and although we couldn’t stay for long, drink as much free lemonade as we possibly could.

ODDTV is an interesting mix of videos that ODD has been involved with or generally likes the look of. Check it out.