Serendipity

Blosxom Plug-in: moreentries

The moreentries plugin for Blosxom, which gives "prev" and "next" links when an index exceeds a certain number of stories, did not work if the directory pathname contained special characters for regular expressions, such as '+' or '*' or '?'.

Steve Schwarz, steve at agilitynerd.com, did some good work on moreentries to add multiple prev/next pages, and brought the plugin up to version 0.3.

This minor fix solves the special characters bug for moreentries by quoting the regular expression it uses to select postings. This version is v0.4 (0+4i) and it is also safe for Perl's "use warnings" and "use strict".

Blosxom Plug-in: last_modified

The last_modified plugin for Blosxom adds an HTTP Last-Modified header to each Blosxom generated page. This reduces your bandwidth needs by permitting browsers and spiders to check for updates to older stories with an HTTP If-Modified-Since, rather than retrieving the full page each time. It also allows proxies such as Squid to cache older entries whilst refreshing correctly when newer ones are added.

By default this plugin will scan the list of stories and use the timestamp of the most recent one as the Last-Modified header.

The plugin uses the timestamps in %blosxom::files, so it is compatible with entries_index_tagged and other plugins which set the story time, as well as with standard Blosxom use of the storyfile.txt modification time.

Other plugins may if they wish place a standard Unix timestamp in $last_modified::last_modified to override the default Last-Modified time.

What happened when the signaller tried to route one of Direct Rail Services' newly repainted class 66s into a disused bay:

The line in question is known as the West End Back Dock though another, possibly more offical, name is South Dock Siding. I have never seen a locomotive in there within the last 30 years. For many years the dock was home to a derelict van, with Buddleia growing over it and apparently out of it.

Midsummer's morning, 2002

At Cambridge in 1978-79 I was njl2 @ phoenix. Phoenix was the interactive timesharing scheduler and command language on the Cambridge IBM 370, and very good it was.

Occasionally, people from the USA used to log into Phoenix from across the Atlantic. Either that or their chat sessions were very good Turing tests. No Eliza really in Cambridge could have passed so convincingly. One particular Eliza (I forget her actual name) on the Modular One system would eventually repeat user input from adjacent teletypes, which could be a harmless source of student amusement ...

One American who I chatted to used the guest 'epss' Phoenix account, which was provided for public access via EPSS, the Post Office's own pre-X.25 packet switching network. I've always assumed that the guy was coming in on Transatlantic packet switching from a US PSS network, but he claimed no knowledge of the technology, and since then I have never read of such a link.

This was advanced telecommunications for the period and for me it began a lifelong interest in telecomms. I later achieved dial-up access to Phoenix, using primitive Post Office modems and a minicomputer "glass TTY" emulator in my first workplace ! But with the cost and reliability then of transatlantic phone calls, I doubt anyone could have run a terminal session over international dial-up.

I'm still curious to know what US network was likely to give UK access in 1978-79 and what the routing was to Cambridge's IBM370 ? Would he have been hopping in from some other site, perhaps on SERCnet PSS ? Email me, thanks :-)

Blosxom is a CGI script and, in its usual configuration, it considers everything under $url as a Blosxom request. This makes it awkward to serve up static files (for instance, images, movies or tarballs) from anywhere under the Blosxom root URL. You typically receive a cryptic message such as 'Error: I'm afraid this is the first I've heard of a "mp3" flavoured Blosxom. Try dropping the "/+mp3" bit from the end of the URL.'

There are a couple of plugins which attempt to deal with this - e.g. binary and static_file - but both have the disadvantage that the Blosxom script is still invoked for each static file. Of course you can put all your static files in a /images/ directory or similar outside the weblog, but keeping track of a large number of images then becomes cumbersome.

It must be better to let your webserver handle static files, a task for which it is optimised, rather than invoking a CGI for each image. For instance, in apache httpd.conf, if your blosxom script is named /usr/lib/cgi-bin/blosxom:

Requires Apache mod_rewrite (run a2enmod rewrite). Of course this will bypass any Blosxom authentication or restrictions, and any remote user who can guess a filename under the Blosxom tree can retrieve it even if it's not linked from anywhere. You should make sure that no unwanted files are accidentally exposed in your Blosxom tree and that any source or passwords are held outside the Blosxom <Directory>.

This doesn't affect the static rendering of dynamic Blosxom pages, which are held in $static_dir and not served directly. Although if you do use static rendering, you could get even cuter with your rewrites - mail me if you have any further hints and I'll put them up.

Thanks to Gavin Carr on blosxom-users for the idea.

Following the UK rail franchise re-lettings of 2006-2007, I wanted to see what a list of UK franchise operators and their corporate relationships would look like now. The map of their connections was created in a relaxed evening's work with Freemind.

How to use the Freemind mindmap viewer : click in mindmap window below to activate applet. Make your browser fullscreen to see as much as possible. Scroll around the map with cursor keys or click-and-drag on the white background. Right-click on objects in map for context menus. Click anywhere outside mindmap window to return to normal browser keyboard control.

Download TOC Connections.mm Mindmap

Over a month since the last diary entry. What have we been up to recently, apart from lying on the sofa munching grapes ?

Well, we've finished the Boy's bedroom. He started moving in the minute the project team (me and Sylke) handed it over but take my word, it makes the Saint Pancras refurbishment look like a doll's house. We fitted blue LED feature lighting (10 quid remaindered in B&Q). The flooring is cheap engineered laminate boards (11 quid per 2.4 m2 also remaindered in B&Q). The lad and his mates are heavy-footed and fond of rough-and-tumble so we laid out for sound-absorbing board under the flooring (20 quid for 10 m2). Now we only hear them when they're getting loud enough to need shouting at anyway, heheh. With seven crates of old toys and games banished to the attic, he has a very nice room now.

The kitchen is taking second priority for a while as we can't afford to do it properly yet. Sylke chose a pale blue which lightens it up without making it look cold. I was really surprised how it improved the room, even though we've only done half of it so far. We discovered that the last people stuck the wood-chip on the kitchen ceiling with PVA glue, presumably due to the number of leaks they apparently had from their own bodged plumbing. I'm still peeling it off with the help of the wallpaper steamer. Every single waste joint in the bathroom above has a corresponding black and soggy hole in the plasterboard, and the skimming is coming down along the joins. If I ever find out which firm of dodgy builders did this extension, I'll let you all know !

So otherwise we're relaxing, right ? No, we hated the last people's living room decor so much that we've stripped every single surface back to the plaster - or the cement in the case of the floor. The plaster is in the predictably appalling state that we are now coming to expect from the previous owners' so-called professionals. When we moved in we covered up their red and green colour style with a big bucket of magnolia, but we'd like something a bit less anonymous. It still had fussy heavy woodwork, meant to look period but which just made the room look small, and wasn't even neatly done. I pulled off their naff dado rail and Sylke is painting the big dark bulky fake fireplace into white (less muss-and-fuss than ripping it out as we were originally going to do). I bought up B&Q's last few packs of cheap flooring and a large sack of finishing plaster — with that, a large roll of lining paper and the paint we have lying around we should be able to do it without any more expense. Reckon we can get it finished by Christmas ? We hope so !

DfT: sitting on the SoFA

In 2006-07 most of the first round of franchises came to the end of their terms and were put up for re-letting. In an unanticipated round of blood letting in search of “best value for the Department for Transport”, few of them were retained by the incumbents.

The early refranchising round was ushered in by the news that First Great Western (not a 1996 franchisee having bought out the original management team, but a TOC which did retain its franchise in the re-bidding) had gone back after a few weeks to renegotiate their terms and their DfT-approved rolling stock list, amidst widespread public protests from their passengers concerning short trains and withdrawn services. The DfT protested that fGW were free to restore services to any level they wished - but forgot to mention that fGW were under a tight agreement as to their bid for costs to run the services, or that their rolling stock had been allocated by the DfT to other forthcoming refranchises. The reason for DfT approving changes despite their own protestations of innocence in the cuts was that to restore the services altered, combined or withdrawn would cost more than the bid the DfT themselves had selected as "best value" for the tightly specified franchise.

One original 1996 franchisee to keep their franchise was Stagecoach with the TOC once known as South West Drains, thanks to a complete turn-around in their performance measures and passenger satisfaction from bottom to top. What probably also helped Stagecoach keep their franchise was getting the long-delayed "Juniper" units (an embarrassing bit of post-privatisation rolling stock ordering) into service on the Reading line, thus saving the DfT from even more embarrassing "trains that never turned a wheel in service" stories at a time when public focus turned to overcrowding and the need to restore post-privatisation cuts in train lengths.

Before a year was out came the collapse of GNER who had bid to retain their franchise on terms widely seen as ambitious, and were simultaneously hit by their parent withdrawing financial guarantees at the same time as business shrank following the July 2006 London bombings. They had no financial margin due to the tightness of their bid. After GNER, no further franchises went to the incumbent - I presume the DfT paniced and tried in this way to stop the increasing progression of optimistic bids from existing franchise holders.

Thus it became clear in 2007 that keeping the railway usable for its passengers and keeping the railway organised stably during temporary lean times were no longer political objectives - involving as they did "reducing value" for the DfT. Though at least since the IEP (Intercity Express replacement Programme) was mooted the DfT has now given up any pretence of not allocating the rolling stock to Train Operating Companies ...

Most recently, Virgin, another early first-generation franchisee, have lost their Cross Country franchise to Arriva. Virgin retained their West Coast franchise, whose length was previously extended to 2012 on favourable management terms in compensation for their losses under the Railtrack-inspired planning and management disaster known as West Coast Passenger Upgrade. PUG, like the APT project twenty-five years ago, was an object lesson in railway engineering evolution rather than airline inspired revolution &emdash; but one which cost many times more than the entire APT project, which delivered less than APT would have, and which inconvenienced passengers throughout years of topsy-turvey engineering closures and disruptions. Still the Pendolinos look nice, even though at 125 mph (200 km/h) they are scheduled slower than APT's 1981 speed of no less than 140 mph (225 km/h).

Also in 2007 Network Rail's first financial "Control Period" aka CP2 came to an end, and with it the generous funding they had been given to recover from the Railtrack mess. CP1 covered the disastrous tenure of John Major's and John Prescott's Railtrack, during which the reliability and safety of rail trackwork and signalling degenerated to appalling levels whilst the Directors sold off railway property they had inherited from BR in order to fund badly managed mega-projects and pay shareholder dividends.

For Network Rail 2007-2012 (CP3), a new set of funding rules are being tried. The DfT were asked by the independent Rail Regulator to come up with two documents: a Statement of Funds Available (the SoFA) and the High Level Output Statement (HLOS), a specification of what they wanted the railway to achieve. The hope is - and I write as these documents have just been published - that requiring the DfT to focus their minds in this manner will lead to a more stably funded railway, a more sustainable railway in the medium to long term, and one less subject to change of direction from Whitehall each time a new crisis or new flavour-of-the-month arises. The same goals as we originally hoped for from privatisation itself, in fact !

And so the money-go-round continues. Did you realise that the overcrowded privatised railway today is costing more than three times as much total from your and my pocket than BR did, at a corresponding time in the economic cycle and similar passenger levels ?

There was an "old BR" black joke that running a railway would be easy if it weren't for the passengers. If you thought party politicians meddled too much with British Rail, you've not kept track of the machinations of the transport Civil Servants "playing trains" during ten years of privatised railway ! Writing this in September 2007 the situation is not yet clear, but let us hope that the Mandarins of Transport have learnt their own corresponding lesson after once again getting their fingers - and our pockets - financially burnt.

Links

BBC / UK / Politics / The great train sell-off: Who dunnit? (20th October 2000)

The Guardian: The £10bn rail crash (April 2004). “James Meek reveals the saga of incompetence, greed and delusion behind Britain's biggest public works project” - the Railtrack West Coast Passenger Upgrade (Archive copy)

I mentioned a while ago that I could see the One Laptop Per Child product selling well in the first world too. I envisaged a scheme whereby laptops were sold here at a premium price, each one sold then subsidising a cheap or free laptop for a needy child (or more likely community) elsewhere in the world. It's just a shame I didn't write this vision down at the time :-)

At that time the OLPC had said it would positively definitely not be sold outside its target markets ! Now we find an announcement from the project: Give 1 Get 1, the programme will run from 12 November and allow consumers to purchase two of the OLPC organisation's XO laptops, one for themselves and one that will be delivered to a child in a developing nation.

Hurrah ! The OLPC might look like a My First Computer from Mattel (see picture on El Reg above) but as I wrote before, inside it apears to be a well designed and secure system which - at least until recently - should not have added to the world's problems with insecure "zombie armies" of computers all sending out spam and phishes. I really, really hope that the addition of a cut-down Windows capability (done I believe at Microsoft's behest) hasn't opened up all the loopholes that Windows brings with it through its faulty design.

But I fear very much indeed that this recent change to let the OLPC run Windows will lead to an explosion of spam and zombie networks many times the size of the present Zombie Army :-(

Memories of long happy nights at the Boxing Club in Reading :-) These pics must have been taken some time in 2002, give or take a year ! Sorry about the grainiess of some of the pics, I was experimenting with high speed film (result of the experiment was a decision not to use it again). Your DJs are Dark Angel and, err I forget ...

We came late to the stunning voice of Amy Winehouse, who has been around for several years. But we bought Amy's first album Frank as a Christmas present for ourselves late last year, and loved her sound the moment we first heard it. So when we saw the second album Back to Black was in the chart section of our local supermarket we seized on it with glad cries and carried it home to listen to.

Back to Black is an excellently bouncy album whose fun and rhythm just lifts you along. In the week we have owned it it scores an amazing Amarok rating: 5.0 Favourite, 5 listens. And I might have continued thinking of Back to Black as a dryly ironic window by an adult 24-year old woman into a theoretical life, were it not for the extraordinary actions of Amy's father concerning this album.

Yes, as Britain begins the 21st Century, a gentleman apparently attempted Victorian style censorship on this music by means of crude pseudo-moralistic economic pressure. As far as I am concerned Amy writes with humour and realism about what may have been, but probably wasn't, a life threatening episode in her life with drug use. As an adult Amy is surely qualified to decide for herself. Regular readers will know that I believe history shows that attempts to ban any substance will always cause more harm than would regulation and regulated availability of that same substance. And as for censoring the freedom to discuss such bans, words fail me.

I myself was told some years ago that I should "responsibly" censor my thoughts and writings so as not to offend the sensibilities of those who hadn't thought so deeply about the facts of Prohibition. This further apparent attempt to censor and ban both Amy's thoughts and feelings and my own, via calls for a boycott of this album, made me so angry that I went out and bought a second copy of Back to Black — and gave it to a DJ friend with instructions he play it during his sets :-) He seemed very pleased !

It would be presumptuous of me to call that Back to Black should be adopted as the protest album of the 21st Century, a call in favour of social reform and against the failed 20th-century authoritarian policies of the Bush/Blair Politics of Compulsion. But I'm going to ask you all to do something for me. When you go and buy Back to Black for yourself, buy two copies - and give one away to the first person you meet on the street.

Play it loud, sistah.

My good friend Acidfairy made some tunes :

Acidfairy - 666.mp3 - Fast kicking bassline with Prisoner stabs. Tune should be twice as long, it's great.
Acidfairy - Acid Angel.mp3 - Slower more measured but insistent bassline. Nice build-up into a bouncy and fun 303 main theme.
Acidfairy - Acid Illusion.mp3 - Soft yet moving bass under swirling acid themes, multiple layers of hooks and complex changing kicks take you down the rabbit hole. Recommended.
Acidfairy - Acidraaaaar.mp3 - Acid plings segue into hoover stabs and an accelerating techno bass, building under rising 303 based dischords. Keeps you on your feet and your mind on its toes.
Acidfairy - Chanter.mp3 - Rock your body and set your feet tapping with an acid ceilidh :)
Acidfairy - Distortion Pipe.mp3 - A piping hot medley of sounds for discerning dancers.
Acidfairy - Foreplay.mp3 - Just the thing to get you in the mood ;-)
Acidfairy - God loves the 303.mp3 - Well doesn't everyone ? 303s a-plenty in this short but lovely little piece of nostalgia.
Acidfairy - Intergalactic Bootleg.mp3 - quickly gets down wierd and dirty, bootleg techno stylee. Knock 'em up some more, sistah.
Acidfairy - Kicksome.mp3 - piratical screaming acid pipe ceilidh with leftfield Moby/Massive Attack influences. One for the dancefloor. Nuff said.
Acidfairy - Kicksome remix.mp3 - Kicksome kicks the pipes in !!
Acidfairy - On the 7th Day.mp3 - Bein a good Glasgow girl you have to have a religious song, innit. Recommended.
Acidfairy - Play it.mp3 - Rockin da massive, acid folk dub stylee.
Acidfairy - Sistah.mp3 - Kickin' up your skirts with Acidfairy.
Acidfairy - Somewhere around Barstow.mp3 - Nuff said. Top tune. More please !
Acidfairy - Special K.mp3 - not one for the Kiddies, but just go for it ...

Got odd little smears on your monitor ? Are you sure ? Try this new screen cleaner !

Credit to Ulrich Kirkegaard of Data Link Pacific, Hawaii

Clarence is a She. We decided on her name before we were sure of her sex! But we like the name and think it suits her, there are precedents in any case as in Sister Mary Clarence :-)

Gizmo, Clarence and Schrödinger

Unfortunately I seem to have blown my ISP's bandwidth limits two months running with that burst of downloading. Whilst I wait for the end of the month I'm going to mention some of these recent downloads we've been listening to here at the Warren.

On the big speakers first we have Rama OOOD - Chilli Om which I mentioned before. Smooth deep chill just the way I like it :-) Amarok rating: 5.0 Favourite, 2 listens

There are a load of Rama sets on Psytunes of varying style and I can recommend them all. Next up, Psysoup is a nice piece of daytime psychedelic trance on a sunny Saturday, with wide swirling riffs around a firm underlying beat building up to a crashing finale. Amarok rating: 4.0 Excellent

Third on the electronic wheels of steel is Planet Rama, a lilting journey around the oceans of Ram's home world with mists of African and Indian chords drifting over the sea. Amarok rating: another 5.0 Favourite, 2 listens

All Over The Shop dives sideways into the James Bond dub, rap, swing and underground Latin room of Rama's style. Well you get the idea it is indeed all over the shop. Got to be worth a listen just for the Bagpuss sample ... Amarok rating: 4.5 Amazing, 2 listens

Finally with Breaktime Rama shifts it into the breaks and off-the-beat house mood for some final jiving. Amarok rating: once again 5.0 Favourite, 2 listens

You can see why I'm so excited about the quality of music available for download on the net today. Needless to say new ISPs are being considered. I'd be interested to hear what Be are like as they have unbundled our exchange so should give a good speed and they are supposed to have very good transfer allowances. Mail me at the address near the top right of this page.

To: sar-L@yahoogroups.com
From: Nick Leverton <nick@leverton.org>
Date: Fri, 24 Aug 2007 18:16:13 +0100
Subject: Re: 15F 3007

Dear All,

I read that 15F 3007 arrived in the UK at Immingham on the east coast this week, and was moved northwards to Glasgow by road low-loader from my local firm Heanor Haulage over the last 2 days (Weds/Thurs).

The loco is initially on display in George Square in the city of its birth, Glasgow, to launch a £5 million appeal for funds for the Riverside Transport Museum. 3007 is to be restored and displayed there. The balance of the Museum's cost will be met by the National Lottery's Heritage Fund and by Glasgow City Council (Heritage Fund grants are usually conditional on matching some income from other sources).

There is a nice little photo-report attached to the BBC's news item here and also a video report if you can get it to work (I couldn't).

Clarence, at four months old (21st June). Clarence is a She. We decided on her name before we were sure of her sex! But we like the name and think it suits her, there are precedents in any case as in Sister Mary Clarence :-) She and her brothers are now six months old, doesn't time fly.
img src="http://www.leverton.org/blosxom/Cats/Kittens/Clarence/p6210013.jpg" class="image" title="Portrait of Clarence with Elephant" width="600" height="450" />

Favourite Meme Cats: Prozac

I wanted to give you a meaningful <title> element according to the story or category you are reading. Here's the existing storytitle plugin, which takes the page title from the current story, modified by myself to add category titles. Depending how you are accessing this story you may see the browser title bar as "Serendipity", or as some substring of "Serendipity : Software : Projects : Blosxom", or "Serendipity : Hacking on the storytitle plugin". Now before you all shout I know there are half a dozen other plugins which do this :-) This is as much an exercise in plugin documentation to keep my hand in, until I have time to attack Blosxom itself !

More Meme Cats

More Meme Cats

Igal is a jolly useful little web photo gallery generator which is easy to get started with. You run igal in a photo directory and just upload the resulting HTML and processed images. It's probably most widely recognised for the default "film strips" effect, but you can customise the appearance quite well via its generation options and CSS. At the time of writing you can see some of igal's output in varying states of customisation in the Tunnels section of this website. Igal is written in Perl.

I submitted an improvement concerning file mtimes to the author Eric Pop. He wrote, "this does seem useful, and if i do get around to releasing igal 1.5 at some point, it will definitely make it in there!" I subsequently submitted that patch and a couple of others to the Debian maintainer of igal as well.

However Eric's own igal page seems to have dropped off the net so I am mirroring the work I've done on Igal here. I am hoping that I can hack on photogallery to the point where it can replace igal for my needs, so my Igal category may become purely historical in due course except to document these changes.

Serendipity is coded in Blosxom, a lightweight text-based weblog written in Perl. I've been talking on the Blosxom Developers mailing list about taking Blosxom back on maintenance and enhancement in an organised way. In the meantime I'm also trying to get some of the content published for which I actually chose Blosxom ! Here's the result of a bit of hacking on the photogallery plugin: Shefstock 2007.

The neat result is thanks to the original authors, but I've updated the documentation with suggested usages and techniques. I also added a feature to help integration by reading .caption files from the web gallery software called igal. I have quite a number of igal based photo galleries, and this will make it much easier to bring them across into Blosxom. I hope to add other useful gallery formatting options to photogallery, and to be able to preserve the igal look for existing igal galleries if it can be done easily.

To Shefstock this weekend, for a day and a night of festivity and music. First time we've been there, but it has always looked really good in the pictures. Unfortunately we didn't plan well enough for the weather since I didn't take enough dry clothes ! But it was a great little festie anyway and I'm glad we went despite the damp. When it said "50% chance of rain", this proved to mean 50% chance that there would be 100% rain. We lost the toss but won the match with the weather as everyone seemed to be smiling and in good spirits.

We got soaked just putting the tent up and thereafter never really dried out much beyond the "muddy wreck" stage. Fortunately the place we camped was ideally located for the shape of the valley to get 3 or 4 of the major rigs in harmonious balance. For most of the night we had the pounding fast acid beats of the Preston Mad Hatters pointing down the valley from the top entrance; then a trancier rig with some deep progressive sounds - I think the Camouflage Disco - plus a world/folk/jazz stage and a dub/reggae one all mixing in - without even getting out from under our quilt. We thought the fireworks which punctuated the rain throughout the night were a particularly positive and optimistic note !

So I'm afraid we proved to be lightweight festy goers but we had a great time anyway, drinking wine and eating brioche in bed, with four or more distinct rigs somehow swirling and merging around us as if the DJs were all jamming with each other. Basically our own personal chillathon 2007 :-)

Thanks to all the relaxed friendly people involved for a great weekend and we'll see you next year !

Shamania 2006

I've adopted a new principle to help keep the place tidy, and it's working well in my study. "If it's worth keeping, it's worth keeping clean. If it's not worth cleaning, throw it out." Not only have I decluttered a lot of obsolete stuff, and made room to empty all the worthwhile boxes onto shelves and sort them out too, but what's left is all much cleaner. It even looks a lot tidier and we can now once again vacuum the corners of the room, woo-hoo !! Mind you buying a new book case from IKEA's Bargain Corner was a major help.

We have also decluttered more radically by removing a stud wall between two small awkward spaces upstairs to make one massive and airy bedroom. "And that is why I am carrying a crowbar, officer." In John's room we knocked down a fitted cupboard that was falling to pieces and full of very tatty toys and games. It should make his room too feel larger and give much more usable space.

Having also decluttered several black bags of rubbish from under his bed, we are going to replace the boy's combination bunk-beds-and-den with a divan bed which cannot accumulate clutter underneath, except perhaps in a controlled way if it has drawers. Meantime John is squatting the living room with his mates, whilst Sylke strips off this one small roomful of the heavily embossed wallpaper which pervades the whole house. Fortunately we have two studies / sittingrooms of our own and a bedroom to hide in ...

Adam had'em.

And so have we. For weeks we have been battling large numbers of jumping small black enemies on the six medium-to-large cats we seem to have now. The kitties - who are no longer small - are plagued with fleas and the three older ones likewise. They have been sprayed with solutions herbal and solutions chemical, they have been Spotted-On, dabbed, tabletted (under extreme duration usually and not always successfully) until they flee (har har) whenever we approach them ! and everything short of being bathed in lotions.

At the same time we have also sprayed all the nooks and crannies in the soft furnishings twice, washed all the bed linen and clothes several times too. Hoovered round the whole house at least once to remove all dust and eggs which is a major effort in this mansion ! We had already removed almost carpets to reduce dust (sorting out the ugly floorboards is a long term project but the concrete looks nice painted ...)

And still they come and after a few days relief we find the blasted black specs again all over the house. Getting immune to being bitten now, but I have had a couple of very itchy swellings. I know one favourite bed of the kitties outside that is going to be flea ridden for sure, so it needs clearing up. Some gardening is probably overdue anyway !!

... I can feel little black specs crawling all over me now ....

Things have been busy here with getting things done, step by step. I spent today replacing a broken toilet flush syphon which had been given the Order of the Flushing Bucket since last weekend. Took ages to fix as it incorporated a bit of a bodge like so much else previous work in the house. Previous syphon was flimsy modern plastic rubbish which was far too big for it, which had to replace with the same thing since it was all B&Q had in compatibility of fixing on horrid low level installation :-( We would have liked a dual flush one to save water, but we didn't get it ordered in time so bought said horrid flimsy duplicate one in B&Q.

Don't know why we didn't just go to Screwfix to get a trade one like we normally would. At least theirs might have been the right size and definitely far more robust - fitting the rubbish took so long anyway ! So we will probably have to do the job over again when we can afford. Remind me never to install another low level flush loo until I've vetted it for ease of assembly ...

I just downloaded a brilliantly funky set from a DJ called Doyley who played recently for Audiophile in Nottingham. If you insist on a name for it, I'd call it deeply twisted prog electro housey stuff. I think he hails from an outfit called Zerozero in Cardiff. You lucky, lucky sods down there, having talent like this around :-) I can see I'm gonna have to brave the students and get along to Audiophile one of these months.

And whilst I've got this editor open, here's another funky electro prog house set . I've had this one lying around my hard drive for a couple of years, but never listened to it before. It's a single-label promo mix of tunes from Hadshot by DJ Clown, not as dirty as Doyley's stuff (I mean it's even got psy-style house in it at one point, and ethereal hard house verging on trance!) Not to mention a couple of great remixes of familiar tunes (shame i haven't a clue what they're called, eh). Nevertheless rather good. Both of them are just the thing for a sunny Saturday afternoon relaxing with a glass of vino ... enjoy.

Yes. I remember Adlestrop–
The name, because one afternoon
Of wet the train-engine drowned there
Unmendably. It was monsoon.

The rain hissed. Someone breathed an oath.
Nothing left, nothing the same
On the watery platform. Above the tide
Was Adlestrop - only the name.

No willows, willow-herb, or grass,
No meadowsweet, not a haycock dry,
No whit less grey, more sodden far
Than the low rainclouds in the sky.

And all that night the torrent sang Close by, and round it,
mistier, Farther and farther, all the floods Of Oxfordshire and
Gloucestershire.

— Siderius Nuncius, uk.media.radio.archers, 24th July 2007

Many thanks to various people on Usenet in uk.railway and uk.media.radio.archers for all the links and pointers and most especially to Sid and Rosie for permission to quote their poems. Any further gallery pointers will be most soggily received. Thank you.

"For those who wish to combine railway voyeruism with flood voyeurism there are some suitable pics at numbers 6-8 in this set. They give some idea of why fGW stopped running trains."

In Berkshire, at the aptly named Marsh Bridge, Midgham and at Newbury station and here and Aldermaston station Newbury Railway Station
In Thatcham, a road picture shows how strong the current was in places: at least it's called Station Road :)

Red flag means no bathing for this 158 at Cheltenham
A Highly Soggy Train at a stand at a signal close to the Alstone Lane level crossing in Cheltenham
First Great Wettern HST at Cheltenham, notice the waterfall from the platform onto the tracks.
People stranded at Gloucester Railway Station

Appropriately named, a Voyager crosses the River Severn near Cheltenham.

One of a number of serious washouts and landslips on the preserved Severn Valley Railway. An appeal has been launched for funds to repair the line, which is cut in several places.

Banbury station is suggested for re-branding as the Banbury Canal, also here and also here.
Banbury buses,
even waterways

On the Cotswold line from Oxford to Worcester, there were extensive washouts near Moreton . Here are First Great Wettern's pics of the Cotswold line washout and some pics from Network Rail's Media Centre on the Cotswold line

Adlestrop (which is on the Cotswold line) itself in drier days.
"Nothing remains the same": Adlestrop village bus shelter with some railway relics

Not forgetting the amazing BBC4 Monsoon Railway programme on India where they handle flash floods from a metre of rainfall.

In summertime on Bredon
The rain it pisses down
Round both the shires the cars stall
In puddles deep and brown
Six miles from nearest town.

— Rosalind Mitchell, uk.media.radio.archers, 21st July 2007

Just want to give a biiig pointer to the new Manmademan album Free To Listen. By coincidence I was sorting my old email folders this past week. Did we really go and see Manmademan at Brixton Academy in July 2001 ? Doesn't time fly. I wrote that it was a really great night &endash; well it must have been because I don't remember very much ;-)

Anyway get yourself over to their website and download a copy of Free To Listen. Just select the album or track(s) and then use the "download" button on the right (the paypal option is there in case your browser doesn't run the plugin). Also available for free download are Manmademan's older albums Cell Division and Lovetechnology, which by some coincidence I already have on vinyl. However thanks to www.manmademan.com we now have a CD version too that can play on the hi-fi.

Free To Listen is an innovative album not only in its distribution format but in the sheer variety of ways acid noises are tortured into Manmademan's exquisite sound. Available in a smooth mp3 mix session or DJ friendly individual tunes, I guarantee you'll be hearing these beats on the dance floor and in the chillout. Get yerself sum now !

From: Nick Leverton
To: blosxom-devel@lists.sourceforge.net
Subject: Re: [Blosxom-devel] Project status?
Date: Wed, 1 Aug 2007 18:03:49 +0100
Message-Id: <200708011803.53695.nick@leverton.org>
In-Reply-To: <20070801072437.GA19249@katherina.student.utwente.nl>

On Wednesday 01 August 2007 08:24, Matthijs Kooijman wrote:
> > This then gives a way to move Blosxom forward by taking the canonical
> > plugins as mainstream, so that the relevant features will work in the
> > same way for all plugin authors.
>
> Another thing that would be useful is to define some standards for how
> plugins should (roughly) do their work. In particular, it would be useful
> if plugins could define their own hooks, which yet other plugins could
> fill in. These hooks could be somewhat standardized (ie, all the
> different comment plugins calling a "spamfilter" hook that other plugins
> can use to implement blacklisting, or captcha's or stuff like that.

Certainly. In fact I've seen another plugin implementation, the one in
qpsmtpd, which has some neat ideas that I've thought about borrowing - many
of them are included in my lists below.

The following seem to me to be essential principles to help us get on top of
the plugins and base Blosxom functionality. I think they ought not to be
too disruptive to the existing code base. Some of them are things others
folk have mentioned here, which I hope I've represented fairly.

If we are going to get Blosxom more widely used, we will need both to make
packagers' jobs easier and also to make it simpler to configure a package
without editing static files, so I have tried to have regard for that as
well.

• As far as possible, any changes should be backwards compatible. If an
  incompatible change is unavoidable then consider introducing a new hook
  instead and deprecating the old one.
• All plugin hooks should work in the same fashion
• All plugin hooks should support being hooked by many plugins (and the
  plugins should cater for it too)
• The effect of having multiple plugins on one hook will be defined (and, so
  far as possible, will also be useful !)
• As far as possible, the order of plugins should not matter. Consider
  introducing new hooks where this would make logical sense.
• If ordering the plugin calls is unavaoidable, it will not require renaming
  files (though this can still be done, for backwards compatibility).
• So far as possible all dynamic information will be cached. There will be
  standard routines for accessing filestore through the cache.
• All plugin configuration will be supported via an external config file,
  without the need to edit the plugin code.
• Failure of or inside a plugin will not lead to failure of the entire
  weblog (this one has caught me so many times as I try out plugins !)

These are some thoughts about important but IMO less essential principles,
which might make it easier to implement some plugins or which address some
of the other concerns raised here:

• Plugins may choose whether to work on the semi-rendered output of the
  previous plugin, or on the un-rendered origi