Stroud Dance Festival 2012 (by sarah)

This is Jean getting ready for her dancing at the Stroud Dance Festival. She did really well though had to sit out one of the dances due to feeling sick towards the end - it was very hot in the hall and the kids were doing A LOT of dancing.

Spring Cleaning (by alaric)

I've spent more time building infrastructure than using it, I suspect. I love building infrastructure, so I've often built it because I can; however, with everything that's happened in the past six years, I've ended up struggling to maintain the infrastructure I already had. So I've had to change tack and become much more pragmatic about my infrastructure astronautics, such as getting rid of my limited company and migrating from a tightly-bound cluster to a single box for my hosting platform.

This has given me some time to tidy up and simplify the infrastructure I want to keep.

So this weekend, I got around to rebuilding the Kitten Technologies web site. This is where I publish my open-source creations; they were all version-controlled in Subversion, and I had a PHP site with some static pages, then a dynamically generated project browser that would pull out files called VERSION.txt and README.txt from the SVN repositories to build a description page, offered up tarballs of all released versions for downloading, and linked to an SVN web interface for browsing the repo. I wanted to get around to implementing ticket tracking at some point so folks could submit tickets.

However, for a while I've ached to migrate to Fossil for version control, mainly because it has integral ticket tracking and a wiki for each project, along with integral repository browsing; it provides a fully-featured project Web site, and it's a distributed VCS to boot, which is also useful. However, I wanted it to still all look like a nice integrated site for all my projects. So what I've done is to write a Fossil skin stylesheet that has my new look in it, then to build the wrapper site using the same CSS (eg, by using Fossil's names for div classes and overall page structure), based on Hyde; the CSS is actually generated from an scss master file that Hyde processes to generate the CSS as part of the static site, which the Fossil repos just refer to. My deployment script rolls the skin out to all of my repositories whenever it's updated, so they are all kept magically in sync. It still has a few rough edges (I want to improve the navigation with a consistent site-wide nav bar above the Fossil menu bar, that has the current project highlighted; this will be slightly more complex as I'll need to make the script modify the skin for each project to highlight the correct one) and I am still incapable of making non-ugly CSS, but it means that Kitten Technologies is now live on Fossil. I've a lot of projects still to migrate, but after I've done the "fiddly" ones that need some level of manual tweaking, I hope to produce a script to automate handling all the rest.

Secondly, I've been tidying up the home fileserver. It was down for some time for various reasons, which means that I've ended up with a new archive of photos, music, and PDFs forming on my laptop. I pulled our music collection out of the backups onto my laptop, too, which meant that I then had a diverging fork of that (as there was some new music on the file server since the last backup, which I later retrieved from the disks), so the re-unification of all those tens of gigabytes of files has been fiddly. But, it's now largely done, which is great; and there's now precisely one master copy of everything, and the home wiki is back up to date and pruned of outdated TODO items from several years ago.

However, this has increased my desire to implement Ugarit's archival mode. Rather than manually curating directory structures to organise my stuff (and the pain of merging changes to them), I'd love to just be able to pour files into a Ugarit library and tag them with metadata (maybe some time after the original import, if I'm in a hurry at the time), then create virtual filesystem views on that which reflect things like "All my music, organised by artist/album/title" or "All my photos, organised by who is in them, year, then event title". Combine that with the proposed Ugarit replication backend, and it will even manage replicas on my laptop as well as the home fileserver, all kept seamlessly in sync; having a home fileserver was easy when I worked from home on a desktop machine so I could just permanently mount the filesystem from the server, but it's a bit trickier with a modern laptop-based lifestyle.

Also, as the archive is already backed up into Ugarit, migrating it into a Ugarit "library" will be fast and efficient - Ugarit will automatically recognise that it already has the content of the files, and just need to upload the metadata!

I think with that and my workshop sorted out, I'm done with spring cleaning - my urgent tasks are now sorting out paperwork for my Cub pack, fixing an offline external disk on my fileserver, getting Ethernet to the workshop so I can do useful computer work in there (and move the home fileserver out of poking range of the baby, who loves to turn it off), resurrecting my salmonella install, hacking Ugarit, ring casting, and getting the foundry working so I can cast bronze, and wearable computer work! Not to mention endless minor DIY things in the house - we've got pictures to put up, dents in the plasterboard walls to fill, a flu to install for the fire, walls to repaint, ...

Not The Oxford Literary Festival 2012 (by sarah)

On March 30th I headed to Oxford to read some of my up coming collection Political Converse. Earlier that day I died my hair what was supposed to be purple - it came out not but that didn't matter. I had a weekend then week then month of readings and workshops, it was time to get rid of the four inch roots plus I was nervous and this sort of thing helps me cope and actually go and perform.

Then there was the issue that due to scare mongering there was no fuel to be had so we had which set up a panic but was quickly solved and we were on our way.

We arrived in plenty of time and then spent an hour trying to find somewhere to park - we didn't use the park and ride as our experience with it have not been good and as I'm still struggling with walking we need to be somewhere relatively near the event.

But we arrived in time to catch the end of an interesting session on self publishing and small indie presses. Including a talk from Dennis Hamley who I remembered from my school days! Though this didn't stop me saying that if he ever met my dad and drink was involved - they would never stop discussing the war (as in WWII).

We then had some fantastic music.

And no I don't remember anyones names 🙁 And that goes for the poets too!

This guy had been involved in the UnCut protests and got himself arrested for being in a shop and reading poetry which is menacing behaviour - if I understood it correctly.

This guy is an ex-solider and has PTSD - his poetry was powerful and I also found out that Westminster is trying to make it illegal to help the homeless to get rid of the problem before the Olympics which makes me sick. I shall be looking into that one a bit more - the guy is involved with various charities.

Dan Holloway the organiser and runner of Eight Cuts Gallery.

I'd bought a posse:

And then sang my Shit Creek I was very nervous and struggled to get my voice out - Alaric said it was just quiet at the beginning but I still did it 🙂 I then read my poetry.

More Poets:

The whole thing was run in the loveliest book shop in the world (that I have found so far). The Albion Beatnik in Oxford - it is almost what me and Alaric wanted to ran our Salaric Emporium (books, gifts, tea, think), back in my uni days.

The night ended on a high with much laughter and deep thought. People left to put poetry to the public - stringing it on fences and what nots. We left to grab a veggie kebab and drive back to Gloucestershire.

p.s. my set was similar but not the same as I read at the Art Tournament No Hoax on the Sunday which Alaric videoed.

Sound quality is naff sorry about that!

The Five Commandments of Sarah (by sarah)

My five commandments (in response to the author Anne Rice's question on Facebook)

1. Love all including yourself
2. cause the least possible harm
3. think for yourself
4. listen to others but make up your own mind
5. Do not be wasteful

What I found interesting was that many people just rehashed the biblical code with no thought as to the base concepts. I do not like the 10 commandments mainly due to them reguarding me as possession of my husband/family. But there was some under laying concepts there thickly overlain by the culture of the time. My 5 have no divine providence they are just the result of me thinking how I would like to live my life and how I think others should too.

The fifth is really part of the second in the same way that making up your own mind is thinking for yourself. Taking responsibility for your own actions I could have slipped in there but erroniously felt it was part of the thinking for yourself - though in hindsight it would make a good fifth.

Ten Things That Amaze Me About Me (by sarah)

1. My six year old daughter has a spelling age that is the same as I had at 18. Though my vocabulary has always been massive as in exceeded what is expected for an average adult in the UK in primary school.

2. I am obsessed with reading and learning things though I still do not have an adult reading age. Reading at all didn't really happen for me until about the age of 12. I am still a slow reader - I read text books for fun.

3. I got glandular fever and failed my first year at university - then had back and mobility issues involving painful weekly hospital trips plus a side helping of IBS with ulcers. And I still have a degree from one of the best Universities in the World and it was so close to a first it's painful.

4. I am so shy it is classed as a medical issue compounded by C-PTSD but I have a solution - it is called performing - as in stage.

5. My hearing needed sorting yet I have always been obsessed with music and probably because of this it is a thing I feel with my body and not just something I hear. I still struggle with comprehension if I can not see a persons lips moving.

6. Shyness and stutter plus the remnants of things like lisps mean that I like diction, languages and singing.

7. I am dyslexic, and I don't mean just a little bit - the educational psycologists said he had never seen anyone with such severe dyslexia even sit GCSE's let alone get the grades I got. The natural reaction to this for me? I have always had the ambition to write stories. I managed to get published before I was eighteen.

8. I am scared of heights and used to get bad vertigo, was the clumsiest kid around (called dyspraxia and is a cousin of dyslexia) - I became a climbing and archery instructure.

9. I almost died and was crippled by having a baby, I willingly decided to have another and do not regret it.

10. School and even university bullying made me feel that I was going to be single forever and never achieve anything. I have the most loveliest husband, intelligent and cute to boot and I have been 'going out' with him since I was 21. He supports me and seems to actually fancy me too.

Forgive the egotistical post but these things really do amaze me.