Train of Thought

I’ve joined another social website: last.fm

I’m digitalreality, and the house music computer is ladyhamilton. Spotting why it’s called that shouldn’t be hard if you know a little about me.

I’m looking forward to hearing some new music.

I’m one month in, and I’ve not even blogged about it. Oops!

I’m on sabbatical for around a year. I’ll try to write a little about what I get up to.

Late last year I was thinking through my options, and decided it was time to try something a little different. As I was wrapping up for this sabbatical, I ran through all my holiday records. In nearly eight years of working in the UK with 5 weeks of holiday time each year, I had only once had more than a week in one go (And that was to come out to far-flung parts of my family, so was good, but not stress free!). What would I be able to do if I had a little more time?

After ten years in the software industry, I’m in the position to take some time away from my regular job as a sabbatical. I want to see if I can learn some things about myself:

• Do I want to integrate more cycling into my habits?
• Do I have the capacity to start my own software company?

I’ve got a year to figure out the answers (Eleven months from now…).

I thought’d I’d share the pic that Jenny mentioned.I assume it was as tasty as the other products Konditor and Cook sell!

OpenID has been in the news lately. Having decided to get myself one, I discovered I already had ready access to two:

• Technorati
• Yahoo (I had to ask them to create it)

However, one of the points of OpenID is that no central servers are needed, and I could host my own. So I read Sam Ruby’s guide, which covered the essential details, and had a go. jh.mcaleely.com has three core components:

• An openid server (at /idservice) currently running phpMyID v0.7
• A Yadis/xrdf description of my local ID and the two others which are also me.
• A HTML page at the same location which is intended to help OpenID clients which don’t use xrdf to find my ID.

One key thing I discovered is that clients which use the HTML are quite sensitive about their parsing. plaxo.com, for example, would not parse a HTML4.01/Transisitional document, but was happy with the same document in XHTML 1.0. Given this sensitivity, I’m not hosting any actual human readable content at the URL - just a redirect to my homepage.What can I do with my OpenID? Join plaxo.com without a new password to remember for starters. I don’t think I would have bothered otherwise. I can also use it to log on to this wordpress blog. As I add blogs to mcaleely.com, I don’t have to add passwords.

I’m not the worlds biggest fan of Valentines day, despite being a bit of a romantic at heart. meish.org says it so well!

Hello to my readers from Symbian who may be missing this posting from ‘Chat’.

I was recently re-introduced to model railways, and decided I’d spent enough time (20 years?) procrastinating about building a layout. The trains run much better on a firm base, and look much nicer with some scenery around them. Inspired by friends and some good websites, I’ve spent the last few weeks building a little shunting layout. In order to blog about it in gory detail, I’ve created a new blog. You’re welcome to follow along there!

A second small victory (They just keep coming!) today. This blog now supports OpenID for comments and other login chores. This is mostly a benefit to me (one less password to remember), but will form the basis for more features here on mcaleely.com over time.

 As a bonus for commenters, all OpenID vouched comments are automatically approved. I will revoke this (and moderate them once again), when spammers add OpenID to their arsenal.

 If you’re not sure if you have an OpenID, you probably do (or can get one) if you use AOL, Livejournal, Yahoo or Flickr… 

Note that an OpenID is optional for comments. 

Today I managed a trick I’ve long wanted. I’ve abolished www from all mcaleely.com URLs, without breaking the ‘pretty’ URLs I use for wordpress blogs. The trick was to have multiple .htaccess files, and actually spend some time understanding what mod_rewrite can do for me. There should be no public impact (other than you don’t need to type www. anymore on this site) - all the old www based URLs will redirect to their new homes.  Any breakage, let me know! 

It’s taken a while, but yesterday I made it round the local loop I’m using twice in a row. Progress! Greetings if you’re reading from Symbian. Perhaps I’ll see you tonight? 

 My photo album for 2007 is now live. As usual, I’ve removed images of people who don’t appear on the web elsewhere. The rise of flickr and the like means there are more people here!