Irregular Verbiage

I’ve been working on a little web-app that I call the “Alphabet Game”. It’s a simple little game where you drag letters on to objects that begin with that letter. It’s at a fairly early stage at the moment – it’ll be much more child-friendly when we add some sound with some HTML5 audio tags.

Eventually I’ll use it with my daughter, Katie. At the moment, she’s a bit young for it though we have had fun pointing out the names of the objects she already knows.

Let me know if you have comments or suggestions.

A few years ago, a group of my friends (who went to uni together and now live across the UK) were trying to arrange to meet up one weekend. A whole sequence of e-mails were sent suggesting days but we were struggling to find a day everyone could make. I spent a weekend starting to write a small web application that I thought would help. At the time I didn’t know any PHP so I didn’t quite finish it that week-end (and we ended up arranging to meet without it).

The application languished unloved for a few years, every now and again I’d spend an evening looking at it but all I would achieve each time was to learn my way around the code again.

For a few months now the application has been basic but usable and I’ve now registered a domain for it: WhenShallWe.com. You give it a few details about the thing that you’re organising, a little of possible dates and a guest list. It then email each guest a link to a web page where they can say which days they can make. It can make finding a suitable day much easier.

Try it out.

So is blog is basically dormant but I’ve been struggling with a computer problem and now I have the solution I wanted to document it. I’ve been trying to make VMWare Server 2 work on my Fedora 9 box; I could get to the log in prompt but once I tried to log in, it just said “connecting” until it finally timed out.

It’s taken me ages to find the solution, I’d read that VMWare Server 2 didn’t work well with SELinux but I’d assumed that couldn’t affect me as the boxes I’d tried it on (32 and 64 bit) both had SELinux in permissive mode. It turns out that permissive mode isn’t enough – to make it work you have to disable SELinux entirely.

I don’t understand it – in my limited understanding of SELinux I thought that it wouldn’t block anything in permissive mode but I’ve tried disabling SELinux and it works; so for now that’s what I’m going to do.

• Effortless Good: If you’re buying things from Amazon, then installing a little Firefox extension will cause Amazon to pay the referrer fee to charity.
• I’m having a play with Komodo Edit (which recent changed its license to GPL/MPL/LGPL), I’ve been looking for a replacement for the venerable NEdit for some time but this is the best candidate I’ve found. In particular the features i really want:
  • Search/Replace with regular expressions
  • easy to use block select mode (ideally using the ctrl key)
  • keyboard record/replay
  • tabbed interface
  • Easy to use keyboard shortcuts (i.e. not emacs/vi)

  all seem to be present in a simple UI with syntax highlighting, code folding and everything else you’d expect

• Best Sellers: I’m very pleased with our eeeps

Things are busy here, both at work (I’m doing overtime) and at home (getting Katie to sleep is a intricate art), when I do get a chance, I seem to be reading a surprising amount about the American primaries given that it’s only the build up to an election in a foreign country. Listening to Obama speak is inspiring, it seems that if he wins, the US will have one of the good guys in charge.

On the subject of good guys, given that Lessig has decided not to run for congress in the States, maybe we could get him to run for the UK parliament, though maybe Change Congress has a better ring to it than Change Parliament.

In other news, I’ve been watching quite a bit (much less than Em!) of the excellent West Wing on DVD.