So we finished the run of How To Succeed In Business... last night with a pretty good performance, followed by one of the best aided get-outs I have ever seen - we had a good sized bunch of people helping, cheerfully, get the set out, everything cleaned up, and finally repainting the stage floor - the stage surface is hardboard with normally a coat of graphite grey paint on it, if someone wishes it a different colour for a show we have to return it to normal afterwards.
The real shame is that, despite a stonking show, lots of energy and really good staging and set, the audiences were disappointing because (we believe) its not a well recognised show (despite being a real big one back in the 60's).
Afterwards we had a post show party - pie and peas. And then I collapsed into bed, and still feel fairly zomby-like today.
Sunday 10 June 2007
Saturday 2 June 2007
More Bees
I'm back in theatre again - this time to stage manage a production of How To Succeed in Business Without Really Trying. The bees are also back. There were many wandering around and dying on stage in the morning - then I found one on a cloth I was tying up to a flying bar (it didn't like being found and stung me).
Setting lights was a problem because the things are attracted to them when on - my colleague also picked up a sting then.
Later we rigged an insect killer up on a flying bar near the root - it appeared to be picking up a large number of victims.
These are supposed to be Masonry Bees - which apparently are unable to penetrate human skin. However several of us were stung. Hopefully the maintenance guys can do something about them after the weekend.
Setting lights was a problem because the things are attracted to them when on - my colleague also picked up a sting then.
Later we rigged an insect killer up on a flying bar near the root - it appeared to be picking up a large number of victims.
These are supposed to be Masonry Bees - which apparently are unable to penetrate human skin. However several of us were stung. Hopefully the maintenance guys can do something about them after the weekend.
Wednesday 9 May 2007
Not Happy Mac
My MacBook has managed to trash my preferences again - not too drastic maybe, except that also means its lost all my Mail settings (glad the mail itself is on imap) and all the calendar settings including the actual entries....
It looks like changing the video setup whilst it is suspended is a good way to break things - suspend then unplug the external video and open it up again without the external video, and it can hang. Suspend without external video, plug it in, then unsuspend and again it can hang - to the extent that I had to force a power off and restart it.... at which point when logging in again a bunch of things had gone.
Normally I log out when transferring from office to home or back, today I had quit all the applications, but not logged out, so it used that as an excuse to trash things.
Pulling back the main preferences files (in Library/Preferences) from my backups (taken this morning, but on a live system) seems to have got most things back, but its a pain I could do without. Hopefully I should only have lost a couple of calendar entries and a bit of time - could have been so much worse.
Backup on a Mac is also a pain - well it is if you have an encrypted home directory, which seems like a reasonable thing to do on a laptop. How do you get a quiescent filesystem to work with. Maybe Time Machine will fix this.
But this should not happen!!!
It looks like changing the video setup whilst it is suspended is a good way to break things - suspend then unplug the external video and open it up again without the external video, and it can hang. Suspend without external video, plug it in, then unsuspend and again it can hang - to the extent that I had to force a power off and restart it.... at which point when logging in again a bunch of things had gone.
Normally I log out when transferring from office to home or back, today I had quit all the applications, but not logged out, so it used that as an excuse to trash things.
Pulling back the main preferences files (in Library/Preferences) from my backups (taken this morning, but on a live system) seems to have got most things back, but its a pain I could do without. Hopefully I should only have lost a couple of calendar entries and a bit of time - could have been so much worse.
Backup on a Mac is also a pain - well it is if you have an encrypted home directory, which seems like a reasonable thing to do on a laptop. How do you get a quiescent filesystem to work with. Maybe Time Machine will fix this.
But this should not happen!!!
Tuesday 8 May 2007
Whats the point of NewsForge
I mean, if I want to read linux.com I can go there, so whats the point of having a site that is 95% re-publication of linux.com content - except they only put the first paragraph in, and then link across to linux.com. Annoyingly NewsForge's RSS feed appears to push stuff out faster than linux.com's so I often see content on there before the same (but in this case complete and original) content appears on the linux.com feed.
I've solved that problem for now - NewsForge is off my feedlist.
I've solved that problem for now - NewsForge is off my feedlist.
Sunday 6 May 2007
Good news...
Reid to resign with Blair - if only a few of the other utterly incompetent idiots would go to.
Of Bands and Bums
Yesterday was spent in the theatre dealing with a wind band concert.
At one level this is a lot of fun - this band are a good bunch who are enthusiastic, have a lot of ideas although they vary between good organisation and a level of anarchy.
On another level its a real slog - in the first hour we got out and placed just about all our staging blocks (close on 40, roughly 1 meter square blocks which are stored in a 3 or 4 high stack on their sides behind the stage backwall (cyclorama) - extracting them is seriously hard work because the bracing behind the cyclorama means that you have to manoever the blocks over the bracing. We also put the orchestra pit lid on and moved all the chairs that are stored in the cellar on to stage.
Those 3 jobs are probably the most physically demanding standard jobs we do in the theatre and I did all 3 in the first hour....
I didn't get all the lighting placed until the rehearsal had finished, which meant I had no lighting states set up whilst the band were in place - the performance had to be run blind from my point of view.
So (following a quick bite to eat) I sat down to sketch out how they wanted the lighting and effects set for the performance. I was a bit uncomfortable on the chair - there was a feeling as though I had got something sharp in a pocket stabbing me... although it appears the wasp I had sat on was even more uncomfortable. Not a good way to do planning.
So I busked the performance and then we had what must the worlds fastest strike of everything - just over half an hour for an awful lot of kit to get packed away (this band gets everyone involved with a fair amount of enthusiasm for the strike).
Today I ache. Thankfully the wasp sting went off reasonably quickly given the application of an ice pack to the posterior.
At one level this is a lot of fun - this band are a good bunch who are enthusiastic, have a lot of ideas although they vary between good organisation and a level of anarchy.
On another level its a real slog - in the first hour we got out and placed just about all our staging blocks (close on 40, roughly 1 meter square blocks which are stored in a 3 or 4 high stack on their sides behind the stage backwall (cyclorama) - extracting them is seriously hard work because the bracing behind the cyclorama means that you have to manoever the blocks over the bracing. We also put the orchestra pit lid on and moved all the chairs that are stored in the cellar on to stage.
Those 3 jobs are probably the most physically demanding standard jobs we do in the theatre and I did all 3 in the first hour....
I didn't get all the lighting placed until the rehearsal had finished, which meant I had no lighting states set up whilst the band were in place - the performance had to be run blind from my point of view.
So (following a quick bite to eat) I sat down to sketch out how they wanted the lighting and effects set for the performance. I was a bit uncomfortable on the chair - there was a feeling as though I had got something sharp in a pocket stabbing me... although it appears the wasp I had sat on was even more uncomfortable. Not a good way to do planning.
So I busked the performance and then we had what must the worlds fastest strike of everything - just over half an hour for an awful lot of kit to get packed away (this band gets everyone involved with a fair amount of enthusiasm for the strike).
Today I ache. Thankfully the wasp sting went off reasonably quickly given the application of an ice pack to the posterior.
Monday 23 April 2007
Of browsers and software
Firefox has been crawling for me recently. I mostly fixed this today be uninstalling Google Desktop from my MacBook.
However I also fired up Opera - boy did it feel fast next to Firefox. I really do like the cross browser sync features of Google Browser Sync which allows me to keep home and office in sync, and things like Web Developer (which is only an occasional use, but invaluable), however Opera is a very nice browser. Its a bit worrying to see all the stuff on pages I normally don't see - I normally always use AdBlock, but other than that Opera is under strong consideration.
However I also fired up Opera - boy did it feel fast next to Firefox. I really do like the cross browser sync features of Google Browser Sync which allows me to keep home and office in sync, and things like Web Developer (which is only an occasional use, but invaluable), however Opera is a very nice browser. Its a bit worrying to see all the stuff on pages I normally don't see - I normally always use AdBlock, but other than that Opera is under strong consideration.
Theatrical matters
A gap in blogging - I have been running a show in theatre for the last week, which leaves little time for anything else (sleep is short too).
The main things learned, are never expect a stage gun to work - in fact expect anything technical to play games given the chance...
The abiding sound of the week was the click click click click bang of one of the stagehands attempting to get a working gunshot.
The main things learned, are never expect a stage gun to work - in fact expect anything technical to play games given the chance...
The abiding sound of the week was the click click click click bang of one of the stagehands attempting to get a working gunshot.
Friday 13 April 2007
Saturday 31 March 2007
Virtualisation
I've been looking at virtualisation recently - both for use within my group and for wider use with the company.
We need to be able to handle Windows VMs as well as proper operating systems, so unfortunately things like Open VZ or its commercial cousin Virtuozzo are not an option, which pretty much leaves Xen (both the Linux distribution hosted version and the Xensource packaged version) and VMWare. Live migration of VMs would be useful, although for its overkill for our group requirements (but having it means we can test how things work in a clustered environment with migration, so its down as a really want if not a must have).
The Xensource packaged Xen versions - we're evaluating Xen Enterprise - are interesting but appear a little early in their development at present, and have poor SAN/storage options and no current live migration support. VMWare is the most flexible, polished and capable - its also by far the most expensive. Xen running under a Linux distribution (intention is to use Centos 5) has yet to be tested.
More work to see what else is good needs to be done here....
We need to be able to handle Windows VMs as well as proper operating systems, so unfortunately things like Open VZ or its commercial cousin Virtuozzo are not an option, which pretty much leaves Xen (both the Linux distribution hosted version and the Xensource packaged version) and VMWare. Live migration of VMs would be useful, although for its overkill for our group requirements (but having it means we can test how things work in a clustered environment with migration, so its down as a really want if not a must have).
The Xensource packaged Xen versions - we're evaluating Xen Enterprise - are interesting but appear a little early in their development at present, and have poor SAN/storage options and no current live migration support. VMWare is the most flexible, polished and capable - its also by far the most expensive. Xen running under a Linux distribution (intention is to use Centos 5) has yet to be tested.
More work to see what else is good needs to be done here....
Tuesday 27 March 2007
Handling Mail
I pretty much live by email. I've been using it for around 25 years now, and have had good access to internet email for close on 20 years. I've been on open development mailing lists for all of that time, and have at times been receiving many hundreds (if not thousands) of messages a day.
I obviously don't read all those messages - not in detail - and since I maintain a bunch of machines that send all sorts of general notification mail, much of it is glanced at (ie just look at sender and subject) and either ignored or deleted.
All this mail means I have strategies in place to cope with it - for at least 15 years all my incoming mail has been sorted by incoming filters and dropped into appropriate mailboxes. List mail is filed in a folder for the list it comes from, admin email is sorted into a few categories, expected commercial mail is also sorted etc. And that rarest of commodities, real personal mail, hits my inbox (or one of the 4 inboxes I currently use).
During my period of using Email I have used elm, NeXTMail, MH, exmh, evolution and finally Mail.app.
I have to admit that I am really conflicted with Apple's Mail. One the one hand it does a lot of stuff really well (searching for example), and there are some really neat extensions - for example MailTags is great. But the foundations seem a little shakey.
Somewhere deep in its heart, Mail is a basic POP client - it does IMAP, but even though it handles this to a higher standard than many mail clients, it still isn't really happy with the concept of lots of folders which other things can manipulate.
For example, the rules mechanisms seem to handle mail that was delivered somewhere other than the Inbox poorly - sometimes they don't filter it, sometimes they do.
Obviously for me, since 99% of my mail goes nowhere near my Inbox, this is a problem. And one I need to work on further...
I obviously don't read all those messages - not in detail - and since I maintain a bunch of machines that send all sorts of general notification mail, much of it is glanced at (ie just look at sender and subject) and either ignored or deleted.
All this mail means I have strategies in place to cope with it - for at least 15 years all my incoming mail has been sorted by incoming filters and dropped into appropriate mailboxes. List mail is filed in a folder for the list it comes from, admin email is sorted into a few categories, expected commercial mail is also sorted etc. And that rarest of commodities, real personal mail, hits my inbox (or one of the 4 inboxes I currently use).
During my period of using Email I have used elm, NeXTMail, MH, exmh, evolution and finally Mail.app.
I have to admit that I am really conflicted with Apple's Mail. One the one hand it does a lot of stuff really well (searching for example), and there are some really neat extensions - for example MailTags is great. But the foundations seem a little shakey.
Somewhere deep in its heart, Mail is a basic POP client - it does IMAP, but even though it handles this to a higher standard than many mail clients, it still isn't really happy with the concept of lots of folders which other things can manipulate.
For example, the rules mechanisms seem to handle mail that was delivered somewhere other than the Inbox poorly - sometimes they don't filter it, sometimes they do.
Obviously for me, since 99% of my mail goes nowhere near my Inbox, this is a problem. And one I need to work on further...
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