Dear treasured blog reader,

I really need a haircut! But I’m putting it off for another month, because I’m taking part in the Leukaemia Foundation World’s Greatest Shave on 14 March 2009.

Please take a moment to look at my Profile Page. While you’re there, I’d like you to support me by making a secure online donation using your credit card. Or whomsoever’s you have to hand!

I’m told that every hour of every day, at least one person in Australia is diagnosed with leukaemia, lymphoma or myeloma and that every two hours, someone loses their life to blood cancer. So, please help me raise as much as I can for the Leukaemia Foundation. Their vital work provides patients with practical support during their long and tough treatment, as well as funding important research.

Photographic evidence shall be shared.

Many, many thanks in advance!

I understand that reports of the local bushfires has reached the international news.

Thank you to those from overseas who have been concerned for us. We’re fine, thankfully.

It’s hard to know what to say. It’s devastating that so many properties and livelihoods are being destroyed and people are dying essentially due to the weather. Some of the fires have been started deliberately, which I’m still finding incredibly hard to comprehend.

Some of our friends have been affected who have families and properties out in Country Victoria. Here in the suburbs we can’t even smell the smoke, which is very fortunate.

For those wondering what they can do to help those affected by these horrendous fires, please visit the Australian Red Cross website and make a donation. If you can, Donate Blood (we cannot, because we’re POMs and may have Mad Cow Disease).

This weekend I’ve re-started on a website that I was meant to have finished ages ago. Now that I have all of those extra minutes per day having extracted myself from Facebook’s clutches, I’ve resolved to get it finished and get it finished I shall.

Rather than re-inventing wheels, like I did with my own website, I’ve opted to build this site using Textpattern. So far it seems pretty straightforward. This is ideal as I don’t intend to maintain the new website (another good reason not to hand-crafting my own Perl, PHP or Python).

One thing that did take a while to get working, however, is getting ‘Clean URLs’, those without question marks and ampersands all over the place, to work. Thankfully like so many things, this is a solved problem. For future reference, the solution was easy for the virtual host on my MacBook Pro, with just one AllowOverride line needed in /private/etc/apache2/extra/httpd-vhosts.conf…

<Directory "/path/to/website">
    Order Deny,Allow 
    Allow from all 
    AllowOverride FileInfo
</Directory>

Incidentally, I’m keeping both /path/to/website and /private/etc/apache2 under source control with Git, as I am doing with pretty much everything I do these days. Git is version control done correctly. Thank you, Linus!

Happy new year, folks!

Here’s a little utility I knocked together yesterday to decrease the number of key-presses needed to switch between unit test and production code:

toggle_unit_tests : plug-in for toggling between source and unit test files

I’ve tested it with C++ and Python and it works nicely, but should work well with other languages too.

If you find yourself doing TDD in Python using Vim, you may find the following page useful:

Integration with PyUnit testing framework.

That is all.

I’ve deleted my Facebook account. Hip, hip, hooray!

Having never much liked Facebook, it bugged me that it still occupied far too many minutes of my days. I complain too much these days that I don’t have enough time to do this and that, so spending fewer minutes declining invitations to install applications letting me know who thinks I’d make a good rock star should mean that I can spend more minutes of my day playing bass. Makes sense, doesn’t it?

I appreciate that it’s a good method for some people to stay in touch, but there are many better (and in my opinion, more appropriate) ways to do this and they work for me, thank you very much.

Here’s a YouTube video that highlights some of my many pet hates about Facebook. FaceBook In Reality - idiotsofants.com and BBC’s The Wall.

Life is in boxes; about fifty boxes of purest cardboard. The removalists came this morning and in three hours the lovely apartment in which we have lived for the past year and a bit was a warehouse.

Tomorrow we move 18km (11 miles) across Melbourne to take up residence in our new house, which will be, I think, my nineteenth "permanent" address since I was born. It will be great to live in a house again, having lived in apartments since we moved to Melbourne in February 2006. I shall miss the terrific view that we have enjoyed from the tenth storey since moving in though. It really is glorious particularly on sunny days such as today.

Now we have mortgages in both of hemispheres, which seems terribly grown-up. I don’t feel terribly grown-up, not even just passed my 2⁵th birthday.

The good news for those of you who are fed up with updating your address books each time that I move home is that the Post Office Box address, which you’ve had since we landed in Melbourne remains valid. You can thank me later.

The bad news for those of you who like to keep in contact via electronic means, such as Skype or (the other multitudinous instant mithering and social networks to which I am connected) is that it shall be a little while before we have broadband connected in the new abode. I shall sporadically check my email on the iPhone, of course. I may even tweet, who knows.

But first, we must celebrate K’s birthday. Just think of all of the presents (read: "boxes") she’ll get to unwrap tomorrow. Aren’t you jealous?

This weekend I have upgraded my old laptop to run Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron). The experience was suitably painless and Hardy is running smoothly. Since I’ve had my MacBook Pro, I’ve hardly opened the lid on the old laptop, it has just sat (reasonably) quietly in the corner of the room listening for SSH connections and performing downloads for me.

Under Hardy’s predecessor, Gutsy Gibbon the connection to our HTPC (which is still running Windows XP Media Center Edition) had been a little flaky, which meant that often I would transfer files between the two using an SD card rather than simply copying them using smbfs.

It turns out that smbfs has been deprecated in Hardy and the time has come for me to move over to CIFS. This was actually pretty simple, but I understand some people have struggled with the conversion, so I thought I’d document what I did here.

1. Unmount the old smbfs mounts for the last time:

sudo umount -at smbfs

1. Grant all users full access to the mount point:

chmod 777 /media/<mountpoint>

1. Update /etc/fstab to use cifs rather than smbfs, changing the mask_s to _modes and ensuring that the octal modes have leading zeros, thus.

# Before:

//server/share     /media/mountpoint        smbfs
auto,credentials=/etc/smbcredentials,workgroup=WORKGROUP,gid=smb,uid=1000,fmask=770,dmask=770,rw 
0       0

# After:

//server/share     /media/mountpoint        _cifs_
auto,credentials=/etc/smbcredentials,workgroup=WORKGROUP,gid=smb,uid=1000,_file_mode_=_0_770,_dir_mode_=_0_770,rw
0       0

1. Mount the CIFS mounts:

sudo mount -vat cifs

And that’s it: fast and easy!

As reported elsewhere, I’m in Hong Kong (or more correctly, the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region) for work. It has been a long time since I last travelled for work and had to stay anywhere overnight (the last time I stayed in a Travelodge on the M1 motorway near Sheffield).

I arrived late on Friday night and was pretty bleary-eyed as I caught the hotel shuttle from the airport to Causeway Bay, having got up very early on Friday morning to go to our office in Sydney en route. However, a few things struck me (and thankfully not the bus!) as we journeyed to the hotel. Firstly, it was the first time I had ever seen rows of identical skyscrapers. In fact I don’t think I had ever seen even a pair of identical skyscrapers before. Then I noticed that vehicles have yellow registration plates to the rear and white ones to the front, evidence of the British influence still present. I was amazed at how much traffic there was, too.

The Hongkongers love their cars! The grey concrete veins and arteries around the city are constantly brimming with high-performance cars. There are also lots of buses, which seem to raise the temperature of the streets by a degree as they pass by.

Yesterday afternoon I took a walk in the drizzle and found an area where each street seemed to consist almost entirely of small commercial garages, each of which seems to feature mechanics working on German sports cars. I don’t think I have ever experienced such a smell of engine oil!

Last night, after a very nice meal, I took a wander around the shops. I was amazed at how bright it was as I left each of them. The sky remained the same grey as it had been during the day, except rather than the sun illuminating the cloud from above, it was the city lights illuminating the cloud from below. I shall not be seeing many stars here!

I think it’s too misty to bother going up to Victoria Peak today, so the City Centre beckons for a bit of exploration. I shall leave you with a link to a website I read about on the flight over: We Are What We Do.

I’m sure I have mentioned Freecycling before. It’s a fantastic way to prevent perfectly usable items from ending up in landfill before their time has come. Today we had a bit of a clear-out and put a few items on our local Freecycle group and now they have gone. Brilliant!

Thus I’d like to recommend Freecycling to you all. I offer you a top tip if you are advertising something such as a digital camera or a laptop or something else that generates a lot of requests. Once you have a single taker for your item and then send a ‘Taken’ message back to the list and then delete your original message (using the Yahoo! Groups page). This should prevent you receiving countless emails long after your item has been taken. We’ve started doing this ever since K got an email over a year after advertising some things on the Crawley group.

That was all.

Well, it’s well past midnight here, so I thought I’d take the opportunity to wish you all a very happy, healthy and prosperous 2008.

Stay cool, won’t you?