Caboose

I’ve added a list of recent films I’ve seen in the right-hand column on the main page, each one is linked to my entry about the film.

I’m hoping this will prompt me to start writing better film-related entries, all of them so far fall into the ‘could do better’ category . Do primary school teachers still give out bronze, silver and gold stars for work? I’d like to improve to at least silver star level :-)

I got an email today from somebody pointing out that I had been consistently misspelling the word ‘accommodation’, in the Journeys section of this site.

I apologise if this has been irritating anyone beyond endurance. The error has been corrected.

One of these days I might even run my posts through a spellchecker…

My Movable Type upgrade seems to have broken the macros that handle automatic acronym definitions and dash conversions. Must get round to fixing it.

Update: now fixed, I had forgotten to add the required bits to some tags in the new templates.

I’ve finally got round to upgrading to Movable Type 2.63. Now I just have to update the site templates to make use of the new features.

Let me know if you find anything that’s been broken by the upgrade.

I got round to changing the main index page template, so now you can see the music I’ve been listening to recently in the column on the right.

It’s working more or less properly but XMMS seems to have trouble with some of my MP3s. For example for Gorillaz album (also called Gorillaz) the track title is shown but not the artist, even though the ID3 info is correct.

Things still to do:

• work out how to upload listening information from my portable MP3 player (could be tricky)
• Upgrade to Movable Type 2.62

I’ve been playing about with a display of what I’m listening to on my PC, like everyone else has. I picked up some PHP code for doing this.

The server end works fine but the PHP script that runs on my PC was inserting lots of NUL characters in the list of songs, not good. As my knowledge of PHP is minimal I had a quick go at working out the problem before giving up in horror when I discovered there’s no built-in debugger in PHP.

I rewrote the script in Perl, I’m not going to publish it because it’s a quick hack and pretty ugly.

Until I get round to rewriting my main index template the only place you can see what I’m listening to is here.

Update: My server seems to be suffering from problems, almost lost this post…

Just noticed that I got a link in Metafilter back in January, look under January 28 here (shame they don’t have internal IDs so I could link to the right bit of the page).

This page needs more links. I keep forgetting about interesting things I’ve found before I get a chance to post them. Also, more of my favourite sites need to go in the links box on the right hand side.

By the way, if you’re the person reading this from Mexico: ¡Hola! I love my server stats.

I made the changes mentioned in the last post to an old copy of the site files, then uploaded all the old stuff. This is currently being fixed and things will be back to normal shortly.

I’ve added a note at the top of my CV for the benefit of recruitment agencies out there. It’s not acceptable to phone me at work, that’s why I don’t publish my work phone number, if you do I won’t have anything more to do with you.