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Entries tagged "edinburgh".

What day is it? What year?

2nd June 2009

For the past few days Edinburgh has been experiencing a mini-heatwave. This is mostly pleasant, but the downside is that I've become sunburnt and bitten by many insects.

Happily I've discovered that the mint plants I've got growing beneath my bedroom window are antipruritic ("anti-itch") which solves both problems.

Aside from the heat I've had a busy weekend wiring up some Lisp code to serve as an XML-RPC server, so that I can carry out some functions remotely.

I'm almost tempted to package the s-xml-rpc library if only locally, but I'm not confident I know what I'm doing. I mostly unpacked the source beneath /usr/share/common-lisp/source/s-xml-rpc and fiddled until things started working by magic.

In addition to getting more hooked upon Lisp I've spent a while tidying up obsolete pages on my websites, unifying services, and giving a minor overhaul to the appearance of things.

ObFilm: Terminator Salvation

Tags: edinburgh, lisp, xml-rpc. | 2 comments.

 

Don't make me laugh .. bitterly

30th May 2007

Debconf is coming up soon in Edinburgh, so I figured I'd make a couple of posts for people who are coming.

Party because I've been busy, but mostly because I'm always busy on the Mondays when meetings happen I'm not involved in organization - I figure when we get closer to the time I'll volunteer to collect people, give directions, and staff the information/reception desk at Teviot for three-four days. (I've got two weeks off work; so I'll be around for 99% of the duration.)

Steve's Guide to Edinburgh: Expenses

Compared to many places, such as the USA, Edinburgh is expensive. Partly because it is expensive relative to the UK, but partly because of the exchange rate.

Common costs, which will vary a little locally, but are approximately correct for the kind of places you'll be near:

  • 20 cigarettes £5.50
    • Inside a pub ~£7.00 - but ignore them because a) They'll only have 16, and b) You can't smoke in pubs/clubs/indoors nowadays..
  • 1 pint of beer £3.00
  • 1 pint of milk £0.50
  • Bus fare £1.
    • Any single journey, regardless of duration or distance travelled will cost you a single adult ticket.
    • Make more than three journeys in a day and you could get a single-day ticket which costs £2.20
  • Taxi fare from Teviot to my house ~£5.00
    • Alfie, Jacob Applebaum, and other random people who want to watch films, drink beer, and catch up.

That's most of the common prices I think people could care about. If you have specific products / items you'd be curious about feel free to post a comment and I'll give you a figure.

Tags: debconf7, edinburgh, prices. | No comments

 

All the pigs are all lined up

1st January 2007

I am slowly recovering from a very hectic New Year Eve celebration in Edinburgh. I was surrounded by a several visiting schoolfriends of my girlfriend, and we even managed to meet up with a couple of visiting Canadians – the ex-girlfriend of an online friend and her cousin (both freshly arrived only a day or two ago).

Edinburgh weather was appalling, to the extent that the outdoor street party was cancelled – and several large trees were blown over in Leith.

The girls and myself spent the night walking around far too much before settling into a local pub and hearing the bells.

Now that I’m recovered I’ve just released a new version of xen-shell which allows you to control a number of xen instances rather than just the one.

I’m still not a nice person though.

Tags: edinburgh, megan, xen-shell. | No comments

 

You say those thousand things

29th December 2006

Only three things to say today:

Second anniversary

Today marks the second anniversary of the Debian Administration website.

(I think that this is the first public mention of my intention to setup the site. It was the earliest I could find anyway.)

Edinburgh Trivia

Doing my own small bit for Debconf I went for a walk on Christmas Day.

For two years I’ve lived in the area of Edinburgh known as Leith. (Famous for being a port, and being a port of call for hookers)

During that time I’ve taken buses, and walked, up and down Leith walk hundreds of times. Almost every time I do I notice a large chimney by The Edinburgh Playhouse Theatre.. The top 20/30ft of the chimney can be seen from peeking over the top of local buildings, assuming you’re not blocked by other buildings. And now?

Now I know what it sits upon.

My little adventure in getting to know the city I’ve been living in; I wanted to find the bottom of the chimney and see what it was attached to. So if anybody coming to Debconf next year gets massively lost and curious about a large chimney en route to my house .. I can tell them all about it.

It is the little things in life ..

Xen Shell

I’m not sure that there are many people using this, the freshmeat listing has a few subscribers but I’m never sure how well that translates. (Plus of course nobody rated the software so it might be they hate it?). Anyway there are almost certainly far fewer users of the shell than the main xen-tools package – but as of last night the shell now allows you to control more than one Xen instance.

This is quite a large change, since previously it explicitly only supported one user controlling one Xen instance. Expect a new release shortly once I’ve tested it more, and updated the documentation.

Tags: debian-administration, edinburgh, xen-shell. | No comments