Alan's Ramblings

I was driving to band practice tonight and an item came on Radio Four about Jenny Pope, a lady from Mossley who has gone missing in Ecuador. She was last heard from while she was in Banos, Quito on 9th January and shortly afterwards her bank account was systematically emptied. I don't know her personally but a lot of my friends in the Manchester drumming community do, and we had a big busk in Manchester a couple of weeks ago to try to help raise awareness (and money!). We managed to bring in £300 in a couple of hours, thanks to the kindness of the people of Manchester. The Manchester police were on the radio this evening saying that they were sending a couple of officers out to Ecuador to help in the search for her. Fingers crossed that they manage to make some progress, everyone who knows the family is obviously very concerned about her.

Posted by alan at 10:23 PM | Permalink

Ages ago, Bob asked me to put some information on my blog about his and Len's letterbox and I've been very laggardly in doing so - sorry Bob! By letterbox I don't mean one of these or even one of these! For those of you who are now thoroughly confused, letterboxing started on Dartmoor in 1854, and involves hiding a box containing a logbook somewhere (moderately!) accessible and challenging people to find it. There's a far newer form of this activity called geocaching that gives you a GPS coordinate to walk to, which is quite a bit easier to do, whereas letterboxing requires a fair degree of navigational expertise.

Bob's letterbox is on Mount Skip in the Dark Peak, and I've reproduced his map below:

And here are his instructions:

• Map: The Peak District Outdoor Leisure Map No. 1. Scale: 1:25000.
• Bearings: All bearings are magnetic.
• Area: Rough moorland and should only be attempted by experienced hill walkers.
• Letter Box: Maintained by Bob and Len. Please leave the box covered as in photo, thank you.
• Clue: A small isolated peat hag.

The photos referred to above are these ones below:

And if you are wondering what Bob and Len look like, you'll have to visit their letterbox to find out, there's a photo of the dodgy duo inside ;-)

Posted by alan at 09:38 PM | Permalink

Yesterday it was my friend Sylvia's 60th birthday, so a number of us from the two Samba bands that Sylvia plays in (Ruídogrande and Zambura), met round at a friends house for a surprise brithday party. The cover story was that Sylvia was being taken out by her daughters for a meal, and they were popping in to say hello to an old family friend on the way. We all hid in the garden round the back of the house and as she came through the gate kicked off with a Samba Reggae. Sylvia's a pretty composed lady, and the look of utter surprise on her face was priceless. We ate, drank and jammed until eventually one of the neighbours asked us to shut up. A great evening and one I'll remember for a long time, many thanks to Rosemary for allowing us to use her house and annoy her neighbours :-)

Also on the Samba front, I went with Laszlo to see Esquilo Atômico play on Sunday evening in Manchester. The band is made up of people who have just completed Dudu Tucci's Roots of Brazil course. They were extremely good. Laszlo (who teaches us) is on the course at the moment. I recognised some of the stuff we've been learning recently, although I think it will take us some time to reach the same standard!

Posted by alan at 01:24 PM | Permalink

Last Wednesday Gary and myself went for a walk to see the aircraft wreck at Higher Shelf Stones - he'd seen the earlier writeup on my blog and wanted to go and see it. The weather was a bit iffy - visibility down to 20m once we got up to the top of Crooked Clough, with a very strong wind. We found the trig point at Higher Shelf Stones, and took the obligatory photos to prove we'd been there.

The wreck is a few hundred metres north of the trig, so we wandered over to have a look - Gary has some photos over here in his blog. The rest of the walk across to Dowstone Clough, Dog Rock, Torside Castles then off over Glossop Low was all in the clag, which was a pity for Gary as we got to see bugger all. For me it was a good navigation exercise :-) As we were walking over towards Glossop Low a grouse shot out from under Gary's feet, half a second later and he'd have trodden on it. It had built it's nest right on the line of the path, and was sitting on a clutch of about a dozen eggs. Just proves what incredibly stupid birds they are. We didn't take a photo as it was pretty cold and windy and we didn't want the eggs to get chilled. See how environmentally sensitive we are :-)

Posted by alan at 11:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

At last! Perl 5.8.1 has finally been released. Unfortunately when Jarkko sent the announcement to perl5-porters, he omitted to mention that he has released a new book at the same time ;-)

Many thanks to Jarkko for the immense amount of effort he has put in to get 5.8.1 out, I'm sure all the other people on p5p are aware of just what a difficult job it has been.

Click on the thumbnail for a larger version.

Posted by alan at 03:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Anyone who subscribes to the perl5-porters mailing list knows just how difficult it is proving to be to get perl 5.8.1 finished and shipped, and how incredibly patient our long-suffering Pumpking Jarkko Hietaniemi is being. I often marvel at his seemingly superhuman endurance, and it occurred to me that he might well have supernatural assistance...

Click on the thumbnail for a larger version.

Posted by alan at 10:02 PM | Permalink

I have a copy of Paint Shop Pro 7 that I used to create the now-infamous spoof Perl 6 book cover, and I noticed that version 8 has come out, so I phoned up and ordered the upgrade for £50.00. Version 8 has loads of whizzy new tools for fiddling around with photos, and it is a fraction of the price of the more well-known Adobe Photoshop (£84.95 vs £585.99 for the full versions). PSP does more than everything I need, and for the life of me I can't see how Photoshop can justify being nearly seven times more expensive. I've only just started playing with the new version, but already I've knocked up this image of my friend Elaine, the CPAN administrator, I hope she will be suitably offended :-)

Anyway, Paint Shop Pro 8, highly recommended.

Update I found some reports of people having problems with PSP 8 locking up and being slow, but I notice that there is a patch to bring PSP up to version 8.01 available here. The release notes mention "crash" "lock up" and "performance" lots of times, so installing the patch seems like a good move.

Posted by alan at 08:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)