Monday was my first day as a developer with Creative Online Media and I must say it’s great to be wearing my coding hat again. The culture-shock has been enormous: I’m not flooded with emails and phone calls all day, nor battling with bureaucracy and the people are really chilled-out. I don’t know myself! The adjustment period will end and no doubt I’ll be required to produce product but I think this gig has potential :)

I’m spending a few days down the country before I start my new my job catching up with my family, tinkering on some personal projects and just generally “getting my head showered.” I’m enjoying the break from the daily grind with my only real task being to steel myself for the upcoming change to my 9-5 existence. I find myself so resistant to change: my levels of Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt seem to automatically soar at the prospect of anything out of the ordinary, but I’m presented with a great opportunity to sharpen my development skills within a lower-pressure environment.

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I’m preparing myself for my last cycle home from $BIG_COMPANY. On the whole the experience has been, well, experience: neither good nor bad but worthwhile all the same. I do have gray hairs now though. Soon, process monitoring, environment management, receiving 700 emails a day and being on-call will be a distant memory. Along with my nemesis of the past 9.5 months, the Tibco TIC. And yes, before you ask, I have my name barrel in my pannier bag ;)

I attended BarCamp last year and I heard this morning that details of this year’s un-conference have been confirmed. The fun is happening on Saturday 21st June, 9am - 5pm in the Peter Froggatt Centre at Queens University Belfast. See you there!

I read Trent’s post on preparing oats at the weekend and decided to write about my own process. I’m also relieved I’m not the only one doing this kind of thing ;) Part of my weekend routine involves preparing my breakfasts for the coming week. I boil a large saucepan of eggs which end up in a tupperware box in my fridge and I start a process which results in the following:

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I’ve seen this on a couple of blogs recently so I thought I’d give it a go on the VPS this site is hosted on: steve@decaf:~$ history | awk ‘{a[$2]++} END {for(i in a)print a[i] " " i}’ | sort -rn | head -10 190 ls 80 cd 24 cp 22 sudo 19 rm 14 svn 12 history 11 tar 10 wget 10 vi And as root: 172 ls 59 vi 56 cd 22 apt-get 20 less 20 apache2ctl 17 apt-cache 15 cp 10 pwd 10 ps

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In between support tasks at $BIG_CORP I’ve been slowly reading through O’Reilly’s Learning Python and trying a few things out with the command-line interpreter. The first script I’ve written that actually does something useful is countdown.py: #!/usr/bin/env python countdown to 5pm 2008 SJW import datetime now = datetime.datetime.now() home = datetime.datetime(now.year, now.month, now.day, 17, 0, 0, 0) total_secs = (home - now).seconds hours = total_secs / (60 * 60) minutes = (total_secs - (hours * 60 * 60)) / 60 print hours, " hours and “, minutes, " minutes until 5pm”

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The last time a new version was released I decided to update my WordPress installation with Subversion with the idea being that this would make future updates easier. Well, the good news is that this technique works :) All it took was 3 simple steps: $ cd /var/www/sickbiscuit.com/blog $ svn switch http://svn.automattic.com/wordpress/tags/2.5/ . launch wp-admin/upgrade.php via web-browser To be safe I backed up the database prior to the update and so far everything seems good, job’s a good ‘un!

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For the past week I’ve been using up the annual leave that I’d carried over from last year and hit the road for Fermanagh to spend some time with my family. My Mum and myself went to pay a visit on my Grandmother and while stopping to buy some flowers I spotted this on the dashboard: I couldn’t resist. Wikipedia artical for those not in the know.

I read a few months back that Stuart Langridge was using Subversion to keep his WordPress up-to-date and I thought: “that’s clever” and didn’t do anything about it. Today I was talking to Matt and he mentioned updating one of his WordPress installations and I noticed I was due an update myself. I downloaded the latest release and was having a quick skim through the upgrade procedure to make sure I wasn’t forgetting about anything and I spotted a link to the Subversion update instructions… I’m off work sick today and have the time so I decided to give it a go.

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