Posts in category "blogging"

• Safe European Home - The Clash
• My Corona - The Knack
• Germ Free Adolescence - X-Ray Spex
• Dont Stand So Close To Me - The Police
• Soul In Isolation - The Chameleons
• Ghost Town - The Specials
• Clampdown - The Clash
• You're A Germ - Wolf Alice
• Eat Yourself Fitter - The Fall
• All By Myself - Eric Carmen
• Waiting For The Man (with a vaccine) - Velvet Underground
• Paranoid - Black Sabbath
• Panic - The Smiths
• I Predict A Riot - Kaiser Chiefs
• Anarchy In The UK - Sex Pistols
• It's The End of The World (as we know it) - R.E.M.

We all love pub quizzes and like TV quiz shows. I think its partly because we are curious to see whether we can answer the questions and sometimes, to occasionally, laugh at some of the bizarre answers offered by contestants under time pressure.

One of my favourites recently was a lady who was asked:-

'Hydrocarbons are made up of carbon and which other element ?'

'Carbon dioxide'

I loved this answer because she replied, in part, with 'Carbon' which would have meant that hydrocarbons comprised of carbon, and well, more carbon. Then she added two atoms of oxygen for good measure.

Tipping Point is a very simple game; it's essentially the Penny Falls we all loved as children when we visited the amusement arcades at the seaside.

However, to tart it up a bit for TV, Tipping Point has introduced a load of silly phrases and words to make the game seem more exciting:-

• 'broad push' - when multiple counters fall and get pushed on the next level. These, in turn, get moved forward en masse to push more counters forward than a single counter could

• 'ghost drop' - when a counter takes a long time to fall, sometimes by lodging on a peg, so it takes longer to fall to the bottom.

• 'rider' - when a counter doesn't lay flat but lies over another counter, reducing its effectiveness.

This is probably the most common and irritating. We get contestants and the host, Ben Shephard, constantly urging 'Don't ride, don't ride, DON'T YOU DARE RIDE !' or 'OH NO ! DAVID ! I CAN'T BELIEVE IT - IT'S A RIDER'

• 'flat' - when a counter falls and just lies, err, flat so it's optimally positioned to be pushed onto other counters in an effort to move them too. 'JUST SETTLE FLAT. GO FLAT !'

• 'light up drop zone 3 please' - the contestant has a choice of four separate columns in which to place the counter. These are known as 'drop-zones' but it's incredibly irritating to constantly hear 'drop zone 3 please Ben' followed by 'drop zone 3 - light her up please'.

• 'ambient drop' - a rogue counter that falls, and may potentially dislodge more counters, but sadly when no contestant is active. Any fallen counters are declared null and void. Ben loves these rare events and almost screams orgasmically as he reiterates the rules to the disappointed contestant.

• 'rapid drop' - a counter that falls through the drop zone without hitting any pegs that disrupt or change its direction resulting in a fast, vertical drop.

• 'boomerang drop' - a counter that is dropped from one drop zone but miraculously is diverted (obeying the laws of physics) and ends its journey in an adjacent drop zone.

• 'lateral movement' - another common and incredibly irritating phrase. Used when the counter is simply going to do nothing of note other then fill an empty void. Ben immediately tries to dispel everyone's disappointment and boredom by fuelling a forlorn hope for some sideways motion and shrieking 'Janet, don't worry. We might get some lateral here', 'If we could just get some lateral, maybe the silver one will drop' or 'We could use some lateral here'.

Another element I find slightly irritating is the fake, forced bonhomie and camaraderie on the show. You are a contestant, competing for money against three other contestants, you don't know, on a TV game show. Please don't pretend you're all best friends and like each other by congratulating or otherwise commenting or providing lengthy, detailed Tipping Point analysis during other players' turns.

'Oh - marvellous drop, Peter. That's set you up very nicely indeed.'

'Oh - she's not being very kind to us today' (attempting to humanise the machine)

'Oh yes - well done Yvonne. You've capitalised on all my hard work there and won £450 but I don't care. Honest.'

'Oh - hard luck Brian. I can't believe that black one on the edge didn't fall.'

The best counter-example was a wonderful young man with a wispy, straggly beard (probably a student) who simply answered all his questions, frowned and silently cursed when he got a question wrong and barely reacted or smiled after a successful answer. He also grimaced, sighed inwardly and silently cursed when other contestants did well. He certainly didn't comment, praise, empathise with or interact with the other players. On the contrary, you could almost see him wince as other players luckily dislodged multiple counters to increase their total.

So that's why I hate 'Tipping Point'. Plus I have applied 79 times to go on the show and not been accepted.

have just put £15 into a hire car prior to returning the vehicle.

Theres just one gentleman is in front of me paying. He has a fuel card so he's asked for his registration. He can't remember this so looks out to the forecourt to check. Maybe this is a hire car too although that seems unlikely as it's an ancient, brown, battered Volvo estate. No problem. Then he's asked for his mileage which he doesn't know. This is optional so no problem.

He leaves and I advance to pay my £15.02.

'Morning. I'm on Pump 8.'

Cashier hits a button and asks me 'Sorry, what pump did you say ?'

'Pump 8. £15.02'.

The cashier then spontaneously closes the till, grabs a high visibility jacket, mutters 'Sorry, Sir' and runs outside to the forecourt where the gentleman who just paid for petrol is slowly getting into the passenger seat of the Volvo.

I stand and watch the shutters slowly coming down as another member of staff refills this hot tray with pasties. I sigh inwardly as I realise what has happened. Still, no problem. I'm not in a hurry and those pasties do smell lovely.

The Volvo passenger slowly returns to the till.

The panting cashier removes his high-vis jacket and says:-

'Sir, you can either pay £5 or cancel the original transaction and start again'.

The gentleman looks puzzled and remarks in a manner eerily reminiscent of Roy Hodgson when he was hauled before the world's press and sporting media after England's defeat to Iceland.

'Sorry - dunno. I don't really know why I'm even here'.

I helpfully offer:-

'I think you've paid for my petrol instead of yours'.

'Oh - well I ain't got any cash so we'd gonna have to cancel and try again'.

The long, drawn out transaction is re-keyed. The man studiously avoids eye contact.

Finally, he has successfully managed to pay for petrol and a copy of the Sun newspaper.

As he finally declines his VAT receipt, he catches my eye as he turns to go.

'No problem, mate. Don't mention it'.

'Mention what ?'

'Well, you've delayed me for 5 minutes just because you paid for the wrong petrol pump'.

'Not my fault, mate, so nothing to say sorry for.'

So now, in this festive season filled with the spirit of goodwill to all men, this wasn't the best thing to say to me at 08:04 on a Monday morning.

All it needed was a quick, polite word on the way out.

'Sorry, mate. Bit early in the morning for me. Not had my morning coffee yet.'

Alternatively...

'Sorry, mate but I forgot to check the pump number. Happy New Year !'

Or even...

'Sorry mate, Dave normally pays but he's busy phoning the depot'.

But no, he couldn't just bring himself to mutter the word 'Sorry'.

Instead he points at the cashier and says:-

'Anyway, it was all his fucking fault'.

'Come on. You fill a car up with petrol. You're supposed to know the pump number or the amount.'

'I'm just the passenger. Dave asked me to pay.'

'Yeah - but look. There's your car and there's a massive NUMBER THREE above your petrol pump. It's not his job to monitor what pump you've used'.

'So what am I supposed to do ? Ask Dave how much I've put in ? Oh yeah - that'll work. Let's try that, shall we ?'

Then the man walks to the automatic doors and bellows to Dave. Amusingly, the automatic doors kept opening and closing on him which angered him even more.

'HOW MUCH FUCKING PETROL HAVE YOU PUT IN DAVE ? DAVE ! DAVE ! HOW MUCH DO I HAVE TO PAY ? DAVE - HOW MUCH FUCKING PETROL ?!'

And with that, he left and got into the passenger seat and Dave drove off.

The cashier then shrugged his shoulders and said 'Sorry' to me as I advanced to pay for my own petrol at pump 8 which totalled £15.02.

I then apologised to a rather perplexed and anxious looking lady for the delay as she purchased her last unleaded fuel of 2018 as the shutters were slowly raised again.

It all started innocuously enough with this post from Alex Shroeder

https://octodon.social/@kensanata/101052266709264418

Writing tools. 1. Emacs 2. Wiki What about you?

I spontaneously replied.

Emacs Orgmode Nikola

This reminded me that since, I had recently migrated my desktop from Arch Linux to Fedora 29, I needed to reinstall Nikola and check that the blog I never use still could be built successfully.

Oh - how exciting. Nikola has recently released version 8.0.1[] and I was on the previous version - 7.8.15. I quickly created a Python 3 virtual environment and installed Nikola.

I generated my site as normal but encountered an error. One post failed to be processed correctly. This was strange so I created another virtual environment and tried using the tried and trusted Nikola 7.8.15 which I knew worked. Definitely.

Only, inevitably, Nikola 7.8.15 also failed. Oh well, a lot has changed since I last posted to my blog way back in January 2017. The version of Emacs has changed, the version of orgmode has changed. I examined the blog entry that was causing a problem. It was a fairly standard text article with a single source code block. As the source block was 'BASIC', the language wasn't explicitly specified. This isn't a problem in orgmode normally but the Nikola orgmode plugin got confused so I just pretended the code snippet was 'C' and everything worked again.

As I was researching the issue, I noticed that another static site generator, Hugo, had also added native orgmode support over a year ago. I had previously experimented with Hugo and found it was incredibly fast to generate my site - even when I added in my entire blog output (978 posts).

Clearly, there was no point whatsoever in experimenting with the Hugo orgmode support for a blog I never used any more. So I went ahead and did so anyway and found the Hugo orgmode support was pretty good. The orgmode headers were supported whereas Nikola used a comment section for the front matter.

Actually, there was a reason for this resurrected interest in maintaining a blog. After Google decided to pull the plug on Google Plus, I had ditched that platform in a fit of pique and experimented with Diaspora for longer form articles and Mastodon for microblogging.

The problem with Diaspora is that it doesn't currently federate with the ActivityPub protocol (which includes Mastodon sites) and the other problem is that, just like Google, it could disappear.

A Mastodon/Pleroma instance with no character limit might solve the problem but, to be honest, I prefer to read longer articles on a blog.

So I think there is still a place for a self-hosted blog, complete with an RSS feed.

What I have learned however is that blog migrations are still problematic and time-consuming. Even converting from a Markdown blog to another Markdown blog, the differences in the meta-data (categories, tags), inevitably no-one has though to standardise on a single, universal timestamp format and images (no matter where you locate them) are always a problem so there will always be some sort of migration effort required.

To guard against this, I have re-converted from orgmode to Markdown and my front-matter now consists solely of:-

---
title: "Another blog migration"
date: 2018-11-14T10:43:58Z
---

No categories, no tags, no author, no description, no keywords, no slugs, no comments.

Just words.

This is the famous Hello world program written in Python in colour using Markdown.

#!/usr/bin/env python
import sys

def hello(name='world'):
    greeting = "hello " + name
    print(greeting)

if __name__ == "__main__":
    hello(*sys.argv[1:])

This took me a long time to get working.

Although hosting on GitHub pages is an excellent option, I decided to move this blog to Amazon S3, mainly because I have used S3 before. Also GitHub pages only supports a limited set of Jekyll plugins and I wanted more flexibility to add any plugin and (potentially) run a different version of Jekyll.

I also took the opportunity to switch the theme to the rather minimalistic but stylish Poole and installed the useful s3website utility to automatically synchronise the static site to Amazon S3. As you are charged for upload/download traffic, an intelligent sync process (rather than uploading everything) for deployment is important.

Welcome...to the atrocity exhibition.

Fittingly, this site is powered by Jekyll and Github pages, but the precise details will probably take a series of 1,739 posts.

‘Is she a werewolf ?

No’.

'Does she have the ability to spontaneously transform into a fierce animal ?’

'No’.

'Is she a robot ?’

'No’.

'Is she a very early version of a robot that is running version 1.0.1 (alpha) of the software that meant she lost to that human-robot hybrid ?’

'No’

'Is she a normal human but just set 200 years in a post-apocalyptic world where water, fuel and sunlight are at a premium ?’

'No’.

'Is she a clone of that other slightly built but attractive girl who looks identical except for the hairstyle ?’

'No’.

'Is she an alien masquerading on earth as a normal human ?’

'No’

'Is she Sarah Millican ?’

'Yes’.

One of the main advantages of a statically generated blog (like Octopress) over a blogging platform that uses a database (WordPress, Drupal) is performance.

My humble blog doesn't get enough traffic for performance to be a consideration and I thought I wouldn't be able to discern any improvement.

This graph is from Google Webmaster Tools. Can you guess when the blog migration from Drupal to Octopress was done ? Yes - that's right - the middle of September (17th to be precise).

Undeniably, the performance is much better (fastest response time of 128 milliseconds) and reliable since the move to Octopress. Unfortunately, this 'before' and 'after' comparison isn't ideal. Previously, the blog was running Drupal 7, configured with a small number of modules using MySQL and hosted on cheap ($6 a month) shared hosting with Bluehost.

The performance spikes (high of 2.5 seconds to access a page !) are probably related to high usage of the Linux server my blog was co-hosted on (rather than a specific Drupal performance problem).

When I migrated to Octopress, I also moved the blog to Amazon S3 storage so it's not entirely clear how much S3 has contributed to the relatively stable and fast response times of the blog since mid-September.

With hindsight, I really wish I had phased the migration by deploying Octopress for a month on the same Bluehost hosting (using rsync) and then moved to Amazon S3. Still, it's a but late for that now.

However, it looks like I am ready for the SlashDot effect.

Diamond Geezer recently posted his annual analysis of how many blogrolls he appears in. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, the number is steadily declining and he finds it harder to find new blogs to add to his list.

I thought it might be interesting to look at the blogging platforms used by the 98 blogs listed. Here are the results:

• Blogger 60
• WordPress.com 11
• WordPress.org 11
• Typepad 4
• MovableType 3
• Livejournal 2
• Canalblog 1
• Drupal 1
• ExpressionEngine 1
• Nucleus CMS 1
• Serendipity 1
• Guardian (journo) 1
• Custom 1

The dominance of Blogger/Blogspot didn't surprise me that much. I have noticed before that it's very popular amongst UK bloggers; particularly veteran bloggers who maybe had less choice available that the plethora of options available today.

Which blogging platform do you use and why ?