Chris Worfolk's Blog

It’s interesting how there is a gradual change between the Gay Quarter where I live, and the Catholic cathedral.

Damn you, Patrick Stewart!

As part of International Men’s Day, an annual event that takes place on 19 November, local Leeds based charity Chris Worfolk Foundation is launching a new Men’s Issues awareness campaign.

The face of the campaign is a new website, MensIssues.org.uk, that aims to raise awareness of some of the issues facing men and boys in the areas of health, education, employment and family.

“This campaign follows on from our long history of campaigning for equality,” said trustee Chris Worfolk. “We have previously been involved in campaigning for women’s rights, and are currently piloting a transgender project, so it was only natural that we would want to get involved with all sides of gender representation.”

The campaign also sees the launch of the MILE Network – Men’s Issues in Learning and Education – providing a support network for those representing men’s issues in an academic context.

“We want to ensure men’s issues are not forgotten by equality and diversity committees,” said trustee Dr Gijsbert Stoet. Dr Stoet sits on the Equality & Diversity Committee at the University of Leeds.

If you’re using YAML in Ruby and have it installed via RVM, you might get a notice similar to the following.

It seems your ruby installation is missing psych (for YAML output).
To eliminate this warning, please install libyaml and reinstall your ruby.

You can solve this using the following commands.

rvm pkg install libyaml
rvm reinstall 1.9.3

You may (or even need) to replace 1.9.3 with your exact version number.

I’m very pleased to announce the launch of the Humanist Action Group’s 3rd annual Holiday Food Drive for local homeless shelters!

For the past few years, we have staged a food drive to bring some holiday cheer to those less fortunate. You can read all about last year’s event here and 2010’s event here. This year will be no exception, and we want to make it bigger and better than ever!

We need…

• Food (that lasts)
• Toiletries
• Warm clothing, gloves, blankets, etc

You can also donate financially, allowing us to buy in bulk, and indeed donate your time too to help us collect more donations and reach more people. If you want to get involved – get in touch!

We also have a Facebook event up and running, and you can find out more on the website, including how to donate!

Back in July, I wrote about Wing Commander, a little library I had written to draw together the very awesome Flight PHP framework and Mustache.php template library.

Times have changed though and everyone is using Composer now (you are using Composer, right? 😉 ), not to mention that even at the time, Wing Commander was using a slightly dated version of the Mustache library. So I decided it was time for an update.

Said update was then completed in a lunch break (and a bit of an evening too) and is now available, and listed on Packagist, which means you can easily install it via Composer.

{
	"require": {
		"xmeltrut/wing-commander": "dev-master"
	}
}

That is all you need in your Composer configuration file, and it will install Flight, Wing Commander and Mustache – plus, it’s now even easier to use than it was before. Full information can be found in the readme.

Last week, myself and James went to the MEN to see Evanescence. They played a very similar set to the one I saw last year in Leeds, but with a few changes, taking out some of the stuff from their new album in favour of a few classics.

Photos did not turn out well though lol.

For this month’s Humanist Community meeting, we met at The Reliance, for dinner.

We spent the first weekend of November over in Preston, where North West Humanists – a umbrella group composed of Humanist groups from Lancashire, Liverpool and Manchester, were holding their second annual conference.

The speakers included Professor Richard Norman, Professor Callum Brown, Julian Baggini, Pavan Dhaliwal and Martin Poulter. The talks were highly interesting, but even more importantly, it was great to meet other Humanists and really get fired up about what we’re doing and why we’re doing it.

The theme of the conference was “Humanism for a Better World” – getting away from the critical parts of our beliefs and looking to what positive changes we can bring to the world. Lots of food for thought and the discussions we had throughout the weekend will contribute to the rich variety of inputs that go into our policy making going forward.

Well done to everyone at North West Humanists for organising an excellent conference!

If you’re trying to run PHPUnit from the terminal in Mac OSX Lion, you may get an error similar to the following.

File/Iterator/Autoload.php failed to open stream

You can resolve this by running the following commands.

curl http://pear.php.net/go-pear.phar > go-pear.php
sudo php -q go-pear.php

PHPUnit should now run without errors (or at least, without errors in their code 😉 ).