RIP Michael P Phillipson

Saad rang me last night to inform me that Michael P Phillipson recently passed away. I can't claim to have known him well, we spoke once or twice and I knew his name (and his middle initial) because he always signed everything with it. I knew he started out as a freeware aficionado but then got in bed with Microsoft and spent a year with them as part of his year out (I currently work in the building next door to where he spent his year in industry). He never looked well and, I am told, whatever it was that made him look unwell finally caught up with him.

His blog was last updated in 2005, not long after graduation. I know he moved to Liverpool to work, but what exactly he got up to between then and now I do not know...

Whenever I hear of people my own age dying it always reminds me of my own mortality. :-/

Update

Saad dropped me an email to say that Michael moved his blog to Blogspot in October of 2005. His last update on there was in January last year. Link.

Ack

I feel like I swallowed a tennis ball during the night, and it's now stuck in my gullet.

Content Management Sucks

It seems to me that most CMS systems out there are just plain crap: All I want is a quick and easy wiki-like system to build a new website with as I don't have the time to crank it by hand, yet all of the wikis and CMS systems I've tried are either made far too heavyweight and complicated (I'm looking at you TikiWiki) or completely over-simplified with no real control over the look, feel or maintenace (yes, you PHP Wiki).

On the CMS front, I tried Drupal which isn't too bad, but it seems geared towards the blog-style homepage users; I want a site with static elements, wiki elements, and a blog. Yeah, okay, it's perhaps a lot to ask of any system and I don't expect it to do all of these things perfectly, but I had trouble finding anything that can do ANY of these things particularly well. Drupal manages its field very well, but it didn't meet all of my needs so I had to move on.

Currently I am faffing with PHPWebSite which makes it relatively easy to do the site-building part, but not the Wiki elements I need. Still, I can probably just install something else to do that and try and theme it to look the same. Although I've not tried too hard, it looks like it can handle blog-like elements fairly well too, so it seems like the best solution at the moment. Now I've just got to wrestle with the themes side of it: There's no admin interface for installing them, you have to manually arse around at the filesystem level to get them to work, which is a shame as the admin interface seems fairly well thought out on the whole.

The next problem is the lack of freely available themes, I'm probably going to end up hand-cranking one: Which is exactly what I was trying to avoid.

This Country Sucks

I'm going to go and live in a hole in Mongolia, at least things would be a bit more organised that way. And the "public" transport companies wouldn't be able to piss me off either.

Schrödinger’s Pawn, Anyone?

A game of chess that borrows concepts from quantum mechanics: Chrome Cow - DD37: Schrödinger’s Pawn

It looks fantastic, although somewhat complicated. What I find interesting is the way that the pieces can perform illegal moves when they collapse, so you have to be ultra careful, and the resolution stages put a twist on the game that has something of a resemblance to drafts; You can theoretically force someone into a situation where they have to collapse piece upon piece which could ultimately lead to you gaining an advantage, just like forcing a jump in drafts.

Imagine playing this with a 10-second time limit ... :-s

3 Weddings

We're going to 2 weddings on the same day later this month. One in Swindon and one in Cambridge, so we're going to be busy on that particular day :) Still, it should be fun; it's just a bit of a pain that the two couples we know who have recently decided to get married should happen to choose the same blimmin' day.

Also my mother in law has just announced that she is re-marrying, and has asked me to be one of the photographers on the day. She's taking the same approach that Liz and I took: Get lots of people to take lots of pictures, and you're bound to get some good shots. I shall be stocking up on some quality film and some new equipment.

I found this earlier, it creased me up:

Found on Bash.org

Gentoo

Work on the process of turning my laptop into a nice Linux box began last night. After a few hickups this morning (where I hadn't loaded in the SCSI/SATA drivers for my hardware, because I couldn't find them in the Kernel configuration menus) I now have a working base Gentoo system. At present it is compiling package 53 of 109 of the Xorg X11 Server. Hmm, this might take a while. I may have a working desktop by the end of the week...

Today's picture is of some vegetarian canapés which were made by The Cottage Bakery (under construction at time of writing) who catered my mother in-law's birthday party back in February. They did a great veggie selection and I took a load of pictures for their website for free, partly as a "thanks".

Back to the Gentoo

Liz bought a new laptop over the weekend which came bundled with, dare I say it, Vista Home Edition. I refused to allow it in the house and so she promised to put Ubuntu on it instead.

I jest, she opted to put Ubuntu on it herself, entirely of her own free will.

Anyway I decided it was about time I got my finger out and sorted my laptop out. I've had it for well over a year now and it's still running ... oh god, it's too embarrassing to even admit, but I supposed you have a right to know ... Windows XP Home. There, I said it.

I only kept it on there because, at the time, I was too busy to format it and stick Linux on. I didn't really fancy the hassle of compiling up packages left, right and centre. But now that Liz was putting Ubuntu on her laptop I could hardly continue using XP Noddy(tm).

Unfortunately I now have about 47 Gb of data to back up before I can format the hard drive. Ouch. That's gonna take a while. But on closer inspection a lot of it was garbage and, with some careful binning of junk, I've got the list of stuff to back up down to about 7 Gb: 2 DVDs, I can live with that. With everything backed up the Gentoo'ing will begin tonight.

Today's picture is of Donnington Castle in Newbury. The sky came out completely white in two of the shots I took which gives a really strange feel to the photos: The castle looks like it's been cut out of one image and stuck onto a blank white canvas.

And finally:

The menu on the right is still malfunctioning. I will fix it ... one day.

21 Again

I'm still not dead.

We've been very busy for the last few weekends. This weekend gone, Liz was in Bristol meeting people from Teh Interwebs. The weekend before that we were both in Bristol meeting one of Liz's friend who is also from Teh Interweb. The weekend before that we were in Manchester for Liz's Mum's 21-again Birthday party.

And this weekend we will be in Manchester again for her uncle Barry's 60th. Blimey.

In other news, I am now looking for a new job.

Snow!

Well, it's snowing. I'd do the usual "here's a snow pic I took", but I haven't had a chance to take any. Instead, here's a picture of Katinka; one of our rats. She's currently a very popular little lady on Flickr. I really must take a look at the code on my blog at some point ... it seems that pictures don't always display correctly. Hmmmmm.

This week has been a bit hectic. I gave blood on Monday, we went to the vets on Tuesday, we had a new front door installed and we played squash on Wednesday, I got on the wrong train to come home on Thursday (and thus ended up in Didcot bloody parkway) and during all of this I have been doing roughly 3 people's jobs at the same time at work. Fun.

On Wednesday I also nearly crashed 3 times on the way to work. First, on the motorway when a lorry suddenly braked. I braked, and the front wheels locked. Then when I was on the A329(M) a woman nearly went into the back of a car in the outside lane. Technically I wasn't involved in this but it shook me right up. Then finally on the last roundabout on the way into work I skidded on ice. It was blimmin' treacherous.