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.

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.

So, my personal life goals and how well I feel I’m doing, in no particular order, are:

Do regular exercise each week, each month, each year
Rubbish

In London I used to cycle 6 miles per day but ironically since moving out into the Worcestershire countryside I’m too scared that I’ll get flattened by all of the lorries doing 60 on the narrow A roads or tractors in the lanes, so I don’t bother. To rectify this I recently joined the local health club and I am now taking the twins swimming at least once a week. Definitely need to get this one properly back on track.

Cook at least two meals from scratch each week and constantly try new recipes
Room for improvement

A life goal surely not I hear you say. Well for me it is. I really love cooking and derive a lot of pleasure from making dishes from their base ingredients. Currently Cathie keeps us all fed for most of the week but I reckon I’m consistently cooking from scratch (opening a few tins doesn’t count) twice a week but as it’s still limited to Roasts, Pizza, Chilli and a few favourite Nigel Slater or Jamie Oliver recipes then I’m still marking this one down as having room to improve.

Spend quality time with all members of my immediate family each week
Room for improvement

Compared to our old life things are *much* better with Cathie & I being much tighter and I get to see the kids every day and I’m hanging properly with them on the weekend. However I can’t confidently say that I regularly spend as much quality time with them all as I’d like, hence the need to further improve.

Have no debt*, live within means and ensure a contingency fund equalling 6 month’s living expenses
Done

I feel the above is a minimum in order for me to sleep well at night. Moving on from there we’re then looking to the future to see how to afford to meet our goals. This book has no hidden agenda and serves as an excellent non-cheesy motivator.

*Except mortgage although I’d be trying to pay it off ASAP, making sure I could afford payments if interest rates doubled and wouldn’t use my home’s equity as an overdraft!

Own a decent family home outright before I’m 40
Jury is out

This is not a small undertaking but it is currently my main motivation. I’ve 4 years left to do this and I’ve still a fighting chance dependant upon retaining good health, the economy (particularly businesses spending money on web), luck, aggressive saving and house prices resetting back to affordable levels*. To clarify the goal is for a house big enough to fit the 5 of us comfortably until the kids are teenagers, give us a garage (see later point) and have a decent sized garden (or two).

*average house price = 3.5 x average salary.
Based on current figures (average house price £222,000 and salary £24,000) I genuinely feel that a reset of 30%-40% isn’t unlikely although the drops may be somewhat hidden by inflation.

Own and use an Aston Martin before I’m 45
Working on it

Totally selfish, crass & materialistic I know, but it’s a genuine goal nonetheless. It doesn’t need to be a new one, or a museum piece DB5 or anything, but I must own one (and be able to afford to run it).

Go racing in my own vehicle (now and again will do) before I’m 40
Doable now, just not enough time & need a garage

This isn’t the same as owning and Aston Martin and is much more modest; I simply want to push a car to its limits, legally and safely, now and again. Current plan is for it to be a < £1K banger with a few spare sets of wheels and all extra weight pulled out. I’d plonk the lot on a trailer and pull it to a local race circuit a couple of times a year where I can pay ~ £200 to hoon around the track all day. As soon as I’ve the space to store it all, this will become a reality.

Have business interests that generate an income covering my outgoings without my day-to-day input
Working on it

My retirement plan. It’d need to cover all outgoings, including discretional spend (holidays etc). In contradiction to my S.M.A.R.T. point above I’ve not set a firm date on this yet as the house is the current primary objective, that said if I don’t nail this by the time I’m 50 I’ll be disappointed.

Do the swim in a cage with Great White sharks outside thing before I die
Currently made no attempt

*Shrug* I’ve always wanted to do it, better go to Auz at some point I guess.

That’s it. On re-reading them I’m aware that there’s quite a few material & wealth related points there but then I’ve always been motivated by reward at some level.

What are yours?

Photo courtesy of Peter Kaminski

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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.

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

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.

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

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

The server running Debian ‘etch’ is sitting within our DMZ and is only open to the outside world via port 80 for apache and also for ssh listening on a non-standard port. Internally we can access the repositories using the svn:// method between the internal network and the DMZ using the standard svn password-db authentication (and the handy password caching that this provides).

To give external access it seemed a no-brainer that I’d tunnel over ssh especially when I found out that I could set it up so that authentication would be dealt with by maintaining system (i.e. ssh) users for remote access (which all relevant staff have anyway) and could then administrate separately my local-only svn users that access via the plain-text svn://method. On balance I figured this would work for me as I’d rarely need to give access to an ‘outsider’ and when I did then them having a non-privileged user account on the machine wouldn’t be a big deal.

In the end it turned out to not be too difficult to get working though there was a bit of hoop jumping; I was expecting as much after reading this in the svn book:

Once you’ve jumped through these hoops, your repository should be accessible by all the necessary processes. It may seem a bit messy and complicated, but the problems of having multiple users sharing write-access to common files are classic ones that are not often elegantly solved.

Permissions were the biggest issue and the first thing that I did was to add all external users to the svn group. I already have everything chmoded 2770 with owner/group being ’svn’ but when accessing over ssh the lock files (amongst others) are read-only for everyone except the svn user. To fix this I had to create two wrapper scripts for the svn and svnserve binaries respectively that set the correct umask:

#!/bin/sh
umask 002
/usr/bin/svn-real "$@"

…where svn-real is the renamed svn binary and this script is /usr/bin/svn, repeat for /usr/bin/svnserve.

That was pretty much it except that for external access the way to connect was slightly different. Firstly the connection ‘URL’ was of the form svn+ssh:// for example:
svn co svn+ssh://hostname/path/to/remote/project/trunk

Also, because we’re connecting over ssh via a non-standard port I needed to set an environment variable for the user on the client machine. To do so I simply added the following to their ~/.profile:
export SVN_SSH="ssh -p PORT_NUMBER".

That was it.

So, in summary to give external access all I now need do is:

• Create a system account on the svn server
• Add that account to the svn group
• Tell that user to create a local SVN_SSH environment variable so they connect via ssh over the right non-standard port

Complicated to set-up? Not really. Easy to administer? Yes. Secure? As good as I could make it.