Darren Beale

Today I put together the 10th iteration of Bealers.com which is a massive relief as it’s been on my to do list for 6 months+.

Initially as I was going to use external help (and I had some great offers of assistance, thanks all) but in the end I simply used a pre-built theme. The Fresh News Theme that I chose not only looks great but care has been taken on the server-side aspects too, which is not so common with WP themes IMO.

I’ve ditched all explicit references to PHP dev (if you can ignore the whacking great banner) and I’ll be posting much more general and personal items to the site moving forwards. This is not really new as I’ve already been making a conscious effort to take the emphasis away from freelance PHP development - which I only did for about a month between selling Exponetic and setting up Siftware anyway - but it’s still a shame as I was ranking #1 for a number of relevant broad phrases for a couple of years.

I’ve still a number of items left to sort out that will get nailed in the coming days:

• Finish re-categorising and tagging all 350 posts in a simpler hierachy
• Fix a few validation issues
• Check mobile version
• Re-markup popular technical posts with decent syntax highlighting
• Decent 404 page

Whether you hate it or love it I’d be interested to know your opinions either way.

When we downshifted in July 2006 - actually it turns out that it was Cathie that really downshifted, I simply started again from scratch albeit with a much healthier balance between my business and home life and with considerably less stress - one part of our due diligence was to sit down and write up some personal and joint goals. Nearly 2 years on with a another child, a growing business and a spare hour I thought it would be a good idea to revisit them to see how I’m doing.

Before I go any further it’s worth mentioning that each of these goals were made to be S.M.A.R.T. i.e. Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic and Timely. I feel it’s easy to set goals such as ‘be successful’ or ‘get fit’ but if you don’t apply the S.M.A.R.T. rules to your goals then how do you know when you’ve achieved them?! It’s also worth pointing out that goals such as ‘be a better husband|father|boss’ are a given.

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I’ve been getting these since the recent 2.5 upgrade. I had other issues that I managed to fix by massaging the data structure so I’ll need to fix this too. I assume it’s because my WP install is around 4 years old and one of the upgrade scripts missed off a few schema changes.

Anyway, apologies in advance if you’ve actually commented on something and it has not shown.

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On Sunday Kurt and I went to see Jean Michel Jarre at The Albert Hall. He was for the first time ever playing Oxygene - his first album released in 1976 - live in its entirety.

We had top-dollar seats that gave us a very good view of the antiques that he was going to be using; a total old-school analoge synth-fest. It really was live too. He had three musicians helping him, each with their own huge bank of synths whilst Jarre was running around all over the shop twiddling knobs and pressing buttons and of course knocking out the odd tune; he was visibly relieved at the end with only a couple of mistakes that we could notice.

Whilst I’ve seen Jean Michel live before at his docklands concert yonks ago I’m really glad that I made the effort to go see him again. It was a top night and a quality show, I’ve also finally been to the Albert Hall which is a stunning venue.

I took some movies on my Nokia N93 which as you’d expect came out pretty rubbish with people’s heads in the way, however the sound is excellent. Here’s Oxygene IV in it’s entirety:

Edit: This video - also of Oxygene IV - is better quality & taken by someone to the right of us and higher up. It gives a much better feel for the kit on show:

Edit2: YouTube gave me a slapped wrist for the videos so I’ve taken them down.

The Multipack describes itself as “a community of multi-talented Web professionals from across the West Midlands” and attending one of their meetings has been high on my list for over a year now. This Saturday I finally made the effort to get to Birmingham for the March meeting and it was definitely worth it.

I got there a bit late so didn’t manage to speak with all of the 15 or so people in attendance as the seating was initially an awkward L-Shape but they seemed a friendly, knowledgeable bunch and people started moving around soon enough. Discussions ranged from Mark James (of FamFamFam fame) describing the features of his pseudo-UML source code generator, the merits (or not) of twittering ones every mundane thought and super-mobile notebooks. I also got to put a face to the name of Owen Gregory, had a general business chat with Noel Welsh and Dave Gurnell of Untyped, bumped into Sukhi Dehal again and had a good chat with Tim Gaunt on the train home who also happens to be a fellow Underscore subscriber.

I’m particularly excited by The Multipack as it’s (as far as I know) the only general interest gathering of web types round these parts, I like its relaxed beer and geekage attitude and although it’s a bit of a mission for me to get to - 1.5 hr journey each way including a £20 cab fair for the last stretch home from the train station (although that’s my fault for wanting to drink and living in the middle of nowhere) - I do think Birmingham is a sensible location for the meetings. I did also raise the subject of there being a mailing list aspect to the group which, as I’ve mentioned previously elsewhere, would mean that people don’t have to remember to visit a website to have a conversation; everyone’s got email, right?

If you’re into web and available for the next meeting on the 12th of April then you should definitely come along. It’s already in my diary.

Update: There *is* a mailing list, hooray. http://groups.google.com/group/multipack

Are you a designer? Do you fancy making this blog look less rubbish? If so please get in touch.

Siftware is already in the process of getting re-done so I figured my personal site should get updated at the same time.

Ideally we’ll do a trade on services, e.g. I’ll provide some dev time to you, but if that doesn’t work then I’m happy to pay going rates.

Rough brief is:

• 2/3 column layout
• Deliver layered PSD ready for me to mark-up
• Must be able to cope with largish posted images, swathes of example code and a bunch of widgets
• There’ll be a lot of text

I’ll provide more should we agree terms.

Update: I’ve come to an agreement with somebody now thanks, more in due course.

..was born this morning at 4:59am weighing in at 6lb 13oz. Mother and baby doing well.

As long-term PhpED user I’ve always been well aware that I was not making the most of some of the more powerful features of my IDE, particularly the debugging capabilities. Well this week I finally got debugging set-up properly and as per most of my other blog posts I’m listing what I did here for future reference and just in case it helps anyone else. (more…)

I’ve already installed Trac and I now want to be able to set-up multiple projects with the minimum of fuss.

My requirements are:

• Not having to mess with the Apache configuration every time I add a new project because I don’t want to have to restart apache
• Make some simple modifications to the stanadard trac.ini so that, for example, the logo at the top links to the home of that trac project
• Improve upon the default authentication where logging out involves closing the browser (which is a drag when accessing multiple projects)
• Change the default wiki page text

The most important job is to get Apache set-up properly. I’m using mod_python so:
apt-get install libapache2-mod-python

I then set-up a VirtualHost for http://my.trac.url, thus:

<VirtualHost *>
DocumentRoot /var/www/my.trac.docroot
ServerName my.trac.url
ServerAdmin webmaster@my.trac.url
LogFormat "%h %l %u %t \"%r\" %s %b \"%{Referer}i\" \"%{User-agent}i\""
TransferLog /var/log/apache2/trac-access.log
ErrorLog /var/log/apache2/trac-error.log

<LocationMatch "/.+/">
SetHandler mod_python
PythonInterpreter main_interpreter
PythonHandler trac.web.modpython_frontend
PythonPath "sys.path + ['/export/trac']"
PythonOption TracEnvParentDir /export/trac
PythonOption TracUriRoot /
</LocationMatch>

</VirtualHost>

Note the LocationMatch. From the docs:

This will instruct Apache to use mod_python for all locations different from root while having the possibility of placing a custom home page for root in your DocumentRoot folder.

Therefore in /var/www/my.trac.docroot I’ve placed a one line PHP script that redirects users to our main website url.

After restarting Apache I then set-up a new project ‘project1′ as per my mini Trac install how-to and visiting http://my.trac.url/project1/ gives me the vanilla Trac interface so we know it’s all working.

The rest of the configuration is with Trac itself and is down to personal requirements and mine are already listed above. I’ve scripted everything I need to do to get a new project up and running and don’t intend to go though it all here. You can however download it and use it for your own purposes. You use this at your own risk and you should bear in mind the following cavets:

• Assumes that the Account Manager plugin is already installed. I did easy_install http://trac-hacks.org/svn/accountmanagerplugin/trunk
• The first user input is used as the Trac project name AND should match the name of the already set-up svn project
• I’m using MySQL on the backend
• A few of the trac.ini settings at the end are hard-coded though it is easy to change them

I’m a lot more impressed with this version of Trac than the much older version we were using before and with the above set-up I can now have a project up and running within a few minutes.
Related
http://trac.edgewall.org/wiki/TracModPython
http://trac-hacks.org/wiki/AccountManagerPlugin

I used to get annoyed when pasting text into a Vim window as each line would indent one more tab than the last line.

To fix it I used to add set noautoindent in /etc/vimrc, however this unsurprisingly turns off auto indenting, which is a useful feature for normal typing.

Today I came up with a definitive solution to this by setting a key binding for ‘pastetoggle’. Now in vimrc is the line:

set pastetoggle=<F11>

..meaning that should I need to paste in some formated text I simply press F11 when in insert mode to enter paste mode, paste my text in and then F11 again to exit paste mode (but still be in insert).

One could also do :set paste and :set nopaste, but this was far too much typing for my liking.

Note: This is working for me in Vim 7.0