Memoirs of a Roadie

Another Town, Another Train

Posted on 23rd May 2007

Crewe Alexandra FC

Dario Gradio is the longest serving manager in English league football. In fact he's possibly the longest serving football manager in the world. On July 1 2007, he plans to hand over the reigns of Crewe Alexandra to the first team coach, Steve Holland, after 24 years as manager. Dario isn't leaving the club, as he will take on the role of Technical Director, but he will be missed as he's made a significant impact on the club and fans, even rivals, and will leave a lot to live up to, with an amazing legacy that will be a long time before anyone equals or betters it.

From the age of 11, I went to Crewe County Grammar School on Ruskin Road (now a comprehensive), and passed Gresty Road on the bus to and from school for 5 years. During the 70s the club was the butt of several jokes, as they were always struggling near the bottom of the fourth division. I can remember a few times when they were fighting relegation into the Conference League. I left Crewe in 1982, a year before Dario took over at the club. Partly because I missed the town and partly because I didn't feel any affliation to any club near Hinckley, my support of Crewe Alexandra grew. I've never been much of a football fan, but I did follow their exploits in the press and watch the games whenever they got televised, but I wasn't what you would call a die hard fan. For a while I was a member of the Alex Exiles, but never got to any of the meetings, as they mostly seem to congregate in London.

I still feel that my club is Crewe Alex, and even DanDan has answered Crewe Alex when he's been asked who he supports. The reaction is quite amusing, as he gets quite a lot of respect. That's mostly thanks to Dario Gradi, as he's been the longest serving manager for a good reason. He's given the Railwaymen a club to be proud of. Next time I go up to see friends in Crewe, I'm hoping to drop by the club shop and get DanDan some memorabillia. A 2006/7 strip would go down nicely, so he can wear it when he goes to football practice. Maybe I'll even get to take him to a game next season too ;)

Fan Mail

Posted on 20th May 2007

Dear Spammer,

Why are you bothering to try and spam this system. If you even bothered to check back after you'd posted, you'd note that your scheming spamming tricks don't work. This site has a very strict filtering system that you will not get through, so please don't bother.

This site gets hit by spammers at least once a day. However, as the backend gets to see more of these spammers, the less I get to see them. Hopefully it'll get to the point I see maybe the occasional post once a week, or once a month or even better never. The Scooter Do also has a similar detection in the backend, and both are accummulating a notable amount of knowledge. I've been wary of using something like SORBS, as for email is not reliable enough, but seeing as most spamming systems tend to use these open proxies, the chances are that legitimate posters won't be on those lists. So, I've started to look at using Net-DNSBLLookup, to see how well I can integrate it with what I have. It will hopefully mean I only need to clean the database once in a blue moon :)

Regards,
Barbie.

Somebody's Watching Me

Posted on 13th May 2007

I've had tracking code in Labyrinth for sometime, but it's mostly to track popular galleries and photos. It does count pages, but nothing as detailed as Google Analytics. I'd heard interesting comments about this Google service, and seeing as I can't use their AdSense service for any practical purpose, I thought I give it a try. So for the past few days I've been adding the appropriate code into several of my sites. I was looking at the reports this morning for some of the more popular sites and they make interesting reading.

Many of the sites are specifically aimed at the UK audience, so it's not too surprising to see the majority of visits are from UK residents. However, some, particluarly my Perl sites, are of global interest so I'm hoping to spot any interesting trends, and identify the popular pages. It's early days yet, but so far my CPAN Testers Statistics site is popular in Germany and the US. It'll be interesting to see what the analytics report when the CPAN Testers Wiki finally goes live.

However, the biggest benefit to using Google Analytics, is that I can show anyone I do sites for, a more active response to their site. Kev is always quite keen to see what the response is like after The Scooter Do has an event. The gallery for the night always seems popular, but now we'll be able to see whether that's true and whether site visitors browse the rest of the site.

Wordy Rappinghood

Posted on 12th May 2007

You may have noticed the addition of the image links on the side panel (unless you read this via a syndication feed). I am now officially scheduled as both a speaker and BOF leader at both this year's LUGRadio Live in Wolverhampton and at YAPC::NA in Houston. Click the links for more info.

At LUGRadio I'll be doing my Selenium talk that I've been presenting at several of the events on the Birmingham Perl Mongers World Tour. I wanted to speak again this year, but was struggling to think of something to speak about. Aq saw me do my Selenium talk and insisted I do that :) I'll also be organising a Perl Mongers BOF, which is primarily to encourage attendees to get involved with their local Perl Monger group, but will probably be a general Perl thing. If you're going to the event, please come and say hello.

However, before LUGRadio Live I have to prepare myself for the North American YAPC. Unwittingly I've managed to volunteer myself for 3 talks (lasting over 2½ hours), together with a 1 hour BOF. However, I'm also likely to be involved in 2 other BOFs, so I'm going to be extremely busy during the conference. Thankfully all the talks will be based on presentations I've given before, so I don't have to start from scratch, although there is a lot more material I'll be adding.

I'm quite surprised that the Houston guys have accepted me to talk so much. But seeing as both YAPC::NA and YAPC::Europe last year and this year have extended the event to fill 4 rooms, they can have a wider breadth of talk subjects and accept more talks. This will be my 10th YAPC, although only the 6th I've spoken at. I'm really looking forward to going, but I keep getting warned it'll be hot. Just so long as they serve Guinness I'll be happy ;)

Fly Like An Eagle

Posted on 2nd May 2007

I've been a long time fan of space photography, partly fueled by watching the movements of Jodrell Bank's Lovell Radio Telecope from my bedroom window when I lived in Holmes Chapel. Although I have never been moved enough to become an astronomer, I did used to enjoy looking at the stars in the night sky of an evening sitting on the nearby hills and watching Patrick Moore telling what to look for on The Sky At Night. These days I seem to keep meeting people who are astronomers in their spare time, and some have managed to get some amazing photographs, even though they are earth bound.

Recently I came across a site that features the Top 100 photographs taken from the ESA/NASA Hubble Telescope. All the photos are absolutely amazing, but the one that really impressed me was the one pictured on the right. There is something rather majestic about that photograph, and the colours are stunning. If I ever become the next Mark Shuttleworth and become a space passenger, I'd probably spend my whole time glued to the window .... with my trusty camera of course ;)

Smoke Get In Your Eyes

Posted on 1st May 2007

There is some talk of resisting the forthcoming government ban of smoking in enclosed places. Being a non-smoker I'm going to be quite relieved to not go home stinking of someone's smoke after a night out. If you're a smoker, take a step back and ask yourself the following:

• Would you light up at a restaurant?
  
• Would you light up at your work place, if you work in an office?
  
• Would you light up in the cinema?
  
• Would you light up on the bus?
  

In many cases, hopefully most, you'll have answered no. However, it wasn't that long ago that you could quite happily do all of the above without worrying about being fined or worse. The latest moves to make pubs smoke free, at least inside, will eventually become as expected as the 4 places listed above.

Although it doesn't stop me from going out, I do know of others who avoid smokey pubs for health reasons. For non-smokers it isn't a nice taste or smell to have to endure. I already help pay for the damage done through smoking related illnesses, I'd rather that money was spent on treating conditions and diseases that sufferers have not bought upon themselves.

Dead And Bloated

Posted on 30th April 2007

If you've ever bought a desktop or laptop in recent years, that has come with a version of Windows on it, the chances are that there is an awful lot of "bloatware" preinstalled and taking up valueable resources, which often hinder the performance of the machine. It's often a reason why I've heard non-IT people complain about Windows. Now a technical savvy person can generally get rid of most of the unwanted applications, but I am seeing far too many getting in under the guise of helper and support functions.

My sister had a problem with her machine, and asked me to take a look. Apparently it took ages to load up and wasn't particularly fast when it did finally load. Considering it's a 2.70GHz machine, this wasn't a good sign. I did suggest getting some more memory, so before I called round she bought a 512MB memory stick, to compliment the 256MB she already had.

I started by turning on the machine and watching it load. It took nearly 10 minutes! She was running Windows XP, and even though it's sluggish on my laptop, it's nowhere near that bad. Then trying to open anything caused the disk drive to be almost permanently spinning. Taking a first look at the Taskbar and Start Menu items revealed a large collection of apps that mostly just sit there, then come alive to "check things" every few minutes. I immediately removed them all, except a couple of essential ones. I then install TweakAll, which I've often found to be a handy utility for find all the "invisible" start menu apps. Several featured, which on closer inspection where phone home type apps. The worst offender turned out to be Hewlett-Packard. They have a "Motive Chorus Daemon" application installed when you install the drivers and image apps from their CD, which came with my sister's All-In-One Scanner/Printer. I've blocked some of the network traffic, but I suspect there's more.

It really is horrendous how many spyware and intrusive applications are bundled with software these days. All the unwanted apps on my sister's machine were all either preinstalled or installed by driver CDs with new devices. It took 5 hours to clean the machine, after which I'd reclaimed over 1GB of disk space. The machine loaded in roughly 1 minute, and opening a browser window now happened in seconds with the disk drive barely spinning. In fact if you blinked you'd probably miss the orange flash of the LED. Not surprisingly my sister is very relieved, as it's been a cause of frustration for sometime.

I recently bought a new laptop from Dell, and although I specifically said I wanted a bare bones system, I still got bloatware on there. Thankfully not very much, but enough to be a nuisance to uninstall. However, on both the laptop (even though I made a point of explicitly saying 'remove it') and my sisters machine, there was a little app that appears to have different names, but does exactly the same thing. Remote Assistant. If you ever see anything like it on your machine, I would advise you to get rid of it as soon as possible. It allows someone to remotely log on to your machine, without you asking or even accepting, and alter your machine. This cropped up recently on a thread in a LUG mailing list and was thought to be a hoax. Unfortunately not. I'm absolutely amazed that vendors have actually got away with this, but then Microsoft have finally found a way to sell you software to cripple your machine, so why not the vendors too.

Incidentally the BBC reported the fact that Dell are offering XP again on some models. If you email them directly, like I did, you can get XP on any model you want. There is no way I wanted Vista installed anywhere near my machines, and from reports around the internet, there are too many driver and incompatible device issues that would ever encourage me to use it. The fact that it also comes with inbuilt "security protection" of DRM is now just another reason not to go near it. I don't think I've ever seen such a negative response to a new Windows OS. At a recent Birmingham Perl Mongers technical meeting, the comment made about the fancy graphics was that if you wanted XGL that badly, why not just install Linux. I installed Ubuntu :)

Radio Free Europe

Posted on 26th April 2007

LUGRadio Live 2006

I've been wanting to upload my photos from LUGRadio Live 2006 for sometime, but just haven't had the time to sort through them. The event, organised by the presenters of LUGRadio, was great and I got to see several people I knew and even more that I didn't. I was asked to speak at the event, as I was in 2005, when I had already planned to speak in Toronto for YAPC::NA, and did a presentation about how MessageLabs use Open Source Software. The talk happened after I picked up Ade and took him to a WolvesLUG meeting and we talked servers all the way there. He was quite taken aback with the idea that we manage over 3,500 Linux servers in our infrastructure.

Unfortunately no-one took any photos of me during my talk, but I did get to take several of everybody else. I'll be speaking again at this year's event, so I hope to be a bit more organised and get someone to take photos of me too. The event took places over 2 days with a "disco" on the saturday night. It was a fun packed weekend and lots and lots and LOTS of Linux and Open Source related stuff to talk about. The guys put me up against Mark Shuttleworth, so I didn't get to see all of his talk, but I was quite pleased that I still got a decent audience. Obviously not everyone was that interested in what Mark had to say ;)

Anger, Bald, Beard & Ging

The second day of the event ended with recognition awards for various members of the community and the crew, leading up to the finale of the live recording of LUGRadio Live And Unleased, which went down rather well. With that the event was over for another year. The Four Large Gents has specially commissioned T-Shirts for the event, and seeing as it was a sunny day, Big Ron, Seth and myself grabbed the lads and took them outside for a fun photoshoot, with the idea that they could use the photos for promotional material in the future.

I've booked the hotel for this year's event and am looking forward to speaking again. This year I'll be talking about Selenium, which I've been presenting at various LUG groups on the Birmingham Perl Mongers World Tour. The benefit of doing it on the tour is that I've been able to see what works and what doesn't and improve the talk all the time. Plus as I've got more familiar with Selenium, I've been able to add more tests into my live demo. All being well it should be all shiny and slick by the time of LUGRadio Live 2007. Hope to see you there.

Hungarian Suicide Song

Posted on 25th April 2007

The other night Nicole and I were watching QI, the excellent BBC quiz show with Stephen Fry, Alan Davies and a selection of great standup comedians. Stephen asked the question 'What is the most depressing song?'. The answer was 'Gloomy Sunday'. It didn't register anything with me, until he mentioned that it was also refered to as "The Hungarian Suicide Song". At this point I got interested. One of the bands I used to work for, Prolapse, had an instrumental track called 'Hungarian Suicide Song' on their first album, Pointless Walks To Dismal Places. It started me off on a trail to see what the guys were up to these days.

Along the way I discovered an old site about the band. The page that amused me was this one, that lists ten official bootlegs released by the band through the fan club. It amused me as I was the one that recorded and created them. I still have all the master tapes in the loft from the original gigs. In fact there are some good ones I still have from the later tours too. I love live recordings, especially ones I've been to, so was rather enthusiatic to get the band releasing some of the great live gigs. They agreed and gave me pretty much free rein to come up with the titles and artwork. The titles were outtakes of some suggestions I had for song titles. Most Prolapse songs rarely feature the title in the song, and they were trying to think up some unusual titles to use. I can't remember if they used any of my suggestions, but I did come up with a list that filled 2 sheets of A4.

I had a great time working with Prolapse, although I only helped out on a few tours between 1995 and 1997. I was primarily hired as their driver for their European tours, but also ended up being Tim's drum technician and their lighting engineer whenever they did a gig big enough. They played some interesting gigs over the years, and I had a great time working with them all. It was a really shame when Tim told me they were planning to split. Although I could hear the influences, they were quite a unique band and I don't think I've heard anyone quite like them before or since.

I haven't spoken to the band for quite some time, so I was interested to see if individually they were still playing gigs. I knew Tim loved playing, so it was rather unsurprising to find him still playing drums with MJ Hibbett & The Invaders. I was delighted to discover that he has also married Emma, and even recruited her into the band. I'll have to try and keep an eye on their gigs, as it would be great to see them again. It seems I missed them playing The Jug Of Ale in Birmingham last year, so fingers crossed I can get to a local gig this year. I've just looked at the website again today and it looks like it's had a facelift in the last few days. Personally I think the old version looks better.

Of the other guys it looks like they've all got proper jobs and are pretty all following the careers they studied for at Leicester. Maybe one day, when they are revered as much as Joy Division they'll be persuaded to reform. It'll be a great day if they do ;)

Rock 'n' Roll Manifesto

Posted on 24th April 2007

Bleeding Hearts at The Roadhouse

On Saturday night (21st April 2007) Nicole's brother, Jon, and I went along to The Roadhouse in Cotteridge, South Birmingham to see Bleeding Hearts play a local gig. I'd never been to the venue before and was delighted to discover it. Almost next door, The Breedon Bar used to be an old haunt, and I played many a gig with Ark there. Gel, who was the bass player with Ark, is now the bass player for Bleeding Hearts, and incidentally the reason why Nicole and I got together. The venue reminded me of some of the better gigs Ark played in their time, so hopefully I'll have good reason to go along in the future.

Opening band were the German band Lack Of Limits, who have played with Bleeding Hearts several times, to the point where Bleeding Hearts help them to tour the UK and Lack Of Limits help Bleeding Hearts to tour Germany. The bands are well suited to each other, as although they play a similar style, Lack Of Limits lean more towards the folk side and Bleeding Hearts lean more towards punk. LOL have improved immensely since I last saw them, was very tempted to get a more recent album. Towards the end of the gig they got Gel on stage to help with percussion (tamborine) and tomfoolery (a Gel speciality).

After a short break, Bleeding Hearts took to the stage and played an absolute blinder from start to finish. A mix of old and new songs galore featured in the set, from Democracy, My Country, Sirens Song all the way to newer songs that don't even seem to have a title. I spoke to Nick after the gig and mentioned I liked the 'Ego' song, and he told me that he'd had people refused to buy their latest album because that song wasn't on it! They are much more than one great song, as they have plenty liberally scattered over all their albums. In fact at times, it gets hard to take their albums out of the CD player :)

After nearly an hour and a half, they left the stage, only to be called back for more. The calls for 'Caravan Song' and 'Glad 2B Alive' seemed to poll equal votes, so they ended up playing both. Two great songs to end a great set and a great night out.

The band are recording a live album next month, at Boarshead Tap, Worcester Street in Kidderminster on 12th May. During the last live album, Anarcoustica, Nicole can be heard to shout "We love you Gel!". We even had a placard with it on that DanDan carried around at the first Levellers' Beautiful Days festival. The band have now asked that Nicole repeat her performance, so she's thinking of other things she might be able to say. Whether it gets recorded or not remains to be seen. If you can catch Bleeding Hearts on the current or a future tour, do so, they are a delight to watch and listen to.

For those who might be interested, I culled a selection of the 1600+ photos I took on the night and you can see Lack of Limits and Bleeding Hearts in the appropriate photo pages.