Colin's Journal: A place for thoughts about politics, software, and daily life.
December 20th, 2001
This is the first entry of a new re-jigged weblog system. It should look exactly the same as the old one! The difference is that this is driven from an XML based system using XLST.
In theory at least it means that I can change the look/feel of the web log by editing one file instead of all the individual files that make up each entry.
July 22nd, 2001
How time flies! It’s been nearly a month since I last updated my journal – I was rather afraid that this might happen. Skating is going well, with a good trip to Des Moines, as well as skating down on the beaches. There is still plenty for me to learn, but I’m happy going a few miles now, and it’s definitely enjoyable!
I’ll hopefully have another go this evening and see if I can get better at it, but for now my feet need to rest. It has also become very hot here the past three days, and we have had to purchase another fan to try and keep things bearable.
June 25th, 2001
It’s been a while since my last update. I didn’t manage to do any skating for the whole of last week until Saturday. I’ve been out yesterday and today, and I can now turn, go up and down kerbs, easily break, and generally get about. I’m still learning much though, and I have the odd unsteady moment.
I hope that after a while I will become as steady on skates as I am ona bike, and that I can travel around without having to continually be thinking about what I’m doing.
For some reason www.owlfish.com keeps dropping out of the DNS here at Sympatico – hopefully this will clear up: what’s the point of a domain that you can’t get to?
June 17th, 2001
More progress on skating today! I did an hour last night, and another hour tonight, the result of which is that I can mostly stop. The road outside is on a slight slope, and breaking after going up-hill is certainly easier than breaking going down-hill, but I’m getting better at doing both.
It will probably be a few more sessions before I’m fully adept at breaking.I can also go a little faster, and mostly stay upright, although I still need to improve my balance. I also need to practise turning,staying still, and getting up and down curbs!
June 16th, 2001
I bought some in-line skates today! It took me a while to decide between two different pairs, but in the end I got some K2 skates, a model called “Tempest”. I spent about an hour trying to learn to brake on the path oustide the flat – and although I still can’t do it reliably I am getting further. The path is very bumpy, and on a slight slope – but it’s probably better than trying to learn on the pavement of road.
I’ll hopefully have another go this evening and see if I can get better at it, but for now my feet need to rest. It has also become very hot here the past three days, and we have had to purchase another fan to try and keep things bearable.
June 13th, 2001
It’s been a while since I last updated this journal, I’ve been to busy with people visiting. Notable event for today is probably the release of N6.1 PR1. I haven’t tried it yet myself, because the version of Mozilla that I’m using is both fast and stable today.
I’m thinking of purchasing some inline-skates. They seem to be pretty expensive, but it looks like a huge amount of fun, and I need to take up some sort of sport to replace the cycling that I used to do. I’m not sure where is the best place in Toronto is to shop around for them.
June 7th, 2001
It’s been a strange election for me tonight. My last (and from a voting point of view first) election was witnessed from York, and it was an amazing night of huge changes to the politics of the UK. This election has a large significance, mostly because of the rejection of what the Conservative party have become.
The other things that make it significant is that the Liberal Democrats seem to have done pretty well, tactical voting has been very evident, turn-out has been very low, and very few seats indeed have changed hands.
On a different front I recently read Stardust by Neil Gaiman. It is definitely recommended, a fun evenings read.
June 6th, 2001
The major news today is probably the hint that Netscape may be pulling out of the web browser market. Where this would leave the world is only too obvious to see – and while Windows users may feel a little lost without any real choice for browser it is the Linux user base that would suffer the most.
If Mozilla ever releases a stable/fast browser there may be hope, but without Netscape can they do it? Even if they did, could there be any significant take-up without the name recognition of Netscape?
June 3rd, 2001
I have finally put together a template for my web log, which means that I can now take this on line! I still need to do a lot of tweaking,but it’ll do for now. I need to find a better solution for web hosting now, I’m currently moving servers too often. I was hosting off a friends server, but it seems to spend a lot of time down (I can’t even resolve the address ATM!). I am currently on my Sympatico space, but I need somewhere that I can use my domain name properly instead of just using it for web forwarding.
Now I get to see whether I really will keep a web log up-to-date!
May 31st, 2001
By taking the thoughts that I had last night and spending a little time with python I now have a cross-platform,template based web-log solution. At least that is how I would describe it with my marketing hat on!
The system is actually very crude and simple at this point – but it does work, and it lets me concentrate on the content, design, and layout of the web log rather than worrying about the technology.
Software
The full list of my published Software
Email: colin at owlfish.com