Archive for March, 2007

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I miss pine

Friday, March 2nd, 2007

Does anyone still use ‘pine’? We used to use it at my University, and I loved it.

For those who’ve not come across it before, Pine is a very nifty text-based email client. And (as I seem to be going through a nostalgic love for all things command-line based at the moment), I miss it.

With that in mind, for no reason in particular other than that my mind was wandering in a particularly boring meeting, I thought of creating a pine-inspired email client for myself. A bit like pine, but more task-oriented to fit in with my GTD approach to personal organisation.

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Posted in code, tech | 1 Comment »

When you write to local politicians… they do something

Thursday, March 1st, 2007

I had a bit of a rant last week (surprise!).

To cut a long story short, one of the less fun things about where I live is that on a Friday or Saturday night, some local thrill-seekers like to liven up their walk home from the pub by breaking off car wing mirrors. What fun(!)

I’ve lost count of the number of Saturday mornings where I’ve come out of the house and looked down the street to see a line of cars, each with their wing mirrors either hanging off or broken off entirely.

So when it happened again last week, and I found myself with my PDA and some time to kill, I wrote an email to my local MP and councillor. It was rambling, it was whingy, and it was a little bit ranty. It was a chance to vent.

More constructively though, it was out of curiosity for the sort of response it would get. How politely can a politician say “so what do you expect me to do about it?” 🙂 I am interested in politics, and in the (often overlooked) role that our local policitians have. So I wanted to see what happens when someone actually raises a concern with their local representatives.

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Posted in politics | 1 Comment »

When WordPress make changes

Thursday, March 1st, 2007

WordPress made a change to the WebSphere MQ blog this week which screwed up a bunch of my posts. Yesterday morning I had a few people at work point out that code samples in posts (text surrounded in <pre><code> tags) were being chopped in half – the lines truncated at the point where they went off the edge of the column that they were in.

This included a post which I had only written the night before! It looked fine when I checked it before I went to bed, and then the first email I got at 6.40am the next morning was a message from Nigel to say that he couldn’t read the samples properly. Grrr.

To their credit, WordPress did respond to my query pretty quickly, and helped me get it fixed. They had changed the CSS stylesheet used on the blog to add overflow: hidden “…so that images and such so not flow into the sidebar and cause problems there….”.

For $15 a year, you can unlock the Custom CSS page, and change it back. The fix:

#primary {
   overflow:visible;
}

and now our code lines are readable again. Yay.

Posted in blog | 1 Comment »

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