Random

On Saturday I went to Birmingham for the Friends of the Earth West Midlands regional meeting. We learnt about campaign planning, and got an overview of the main national campaigns for the next year. FoE Birmingham use Edubuntu. On Sunday I went swimming again. Not so tiring - still need to get some prescription goggles. Today at work we were delivering a PostgreSQL database training course for a company in Leicester. BigG happened to be one of the tutees.

January 19, 2009 · Tim Retout

Things I learnt today

gLabels is a nice and simple app, and works well for making CD labels. Swimming appears to exercise completely different muscles to jogging, so is very tiring. I could really use some prescription goggles. The usual plural of no is noes.

January 16, 2009 · Tim Retout

O RAILLY

I am not having a good year. Traditionally, when annoyed, I make extravagant purchases that I may or may not regret later. In this new economic climate, however, I have found a substitute outlet. Arriving soon at a CPAN mirror near you: Net::NationalRail::LiveDepartureBoards 0.01 - an interface to a SOAP API from ATOC. Given a station code, you can obtain the next few arrivals/departures/both. This is in hacky Perl, but the module should be easy to translate to other languages which have SOAP libraries.

January 8, 2009 · Tim Retout

Campaigning

I had a reply from Jeremy Wright MP today regarding EDM 2141 - he's going to sign it. I'm going to think a bit about how to follow up on this. My desk is looking far too cluttered with House of Commons stationery at the moment.

November 17, 2008 · Tim Retout

Change

Of course, http://www.change.gov/ uses XHTML 1.0 Transitional.

November 15, 2008 · Tim Retout

EDM 2141

Following Dan's lead, I have emailed Jeremy Wright, MP for Rugby and Kenilworth, concerning EDM 2141. Watch this space.

November 9, 2008 · Tim Retout

mod_macro

Interesting discovery of the evening: the third-party Apache module "mod_macro", packaged as libapache2-mod-macro for Debian. Awesome.

November 9, 2008 · Tim Retout

Interesting Times

I haven't written a blog entry for a week; obviously I have been busy with interesting things. Like xulrunner. Procrastination may be a valid time management strategy. By prioritising tasks and doing the more important ones today, lesser tasks are pushed back. Occasionally these tasks then fall over a deadline, and disappear. Whether this is a good thing... I'm not sure, but this has happened to me with around three tasks this week. :)

November 1, 2008 · Tim Retout

That time of year again

I tend to update DateTime::Event::WarwickUniversity at around this time each year, according to the changelog. Version 0.05 will appear on CPAN with the next update. My testcases still pass, at least.

November 1, 2008 · Tim Retout

Atheism

A day or two ago, I donated to the atheist bus campaign. They have now nearly raised £100k, which is quite impressive. To follow up, I have joined the BHA. I have asked them about starting a Humanist group in Rugby - as if I have surplus free time. I realise religion (or a lack thereof) can be a controversial issue, but I have considered and respect the BHA's position on these matters. ...

October 24, 2008 · Tim Retout