Got all the Christmas shopping sorted last week, just wrapping & labelling to do now and got to sort out when I'm visiting people, what with having to use the train and fit in friends & family. Feels odd getting done this early butatleast means I didn't have to put up with pitiful cheery music all the time - some of it even done round the market with the the background music of "all these bananas in my arms, only a pound!"

Also got a good phone call this morning for an interview in Manchester doing some PHP web development, heck I'd better revise it as I can do PHP just not off the top of my head. Anyhow, best get off to the office, but lol LJ decided to put a jobcentre ad on the side as I'm typing this :P

I've had a couple of winter flowering jasmines sitting under my front windows for the last couple of years, brought over from my last place in darlo where they brightened up the back yard. Came home this evening and noticed some bastard's nicked 'em, pots and all :(

I'm back, trying to recover in time for work tomorrow. EF was amazingly fun, caught up with  load of furs I'd not seen in ages. Brain's still fried from a 12 hour journey back *laughs* now watching bbc news, some of you will undersand this - *boop* *boop* *boop* *boop*

There will be photos later, gonna take days sorting through them - zoos, fursuits, scenery, arch :) a few hundred taken o.o

Wednesday, 10:45

I'm sitting in Frankfurt Hbf typing these notes up to be put online later, there's
free wireless here but can't understand German enough to get past the DB intro
pages.

Just had a very good bratwurst & coke - yea, niped out for breakfast & discovered the
local version of the good-old sausage butty, but its a big fried sausage in a crispy
short baguette *mmm*

The little differences are interesting, all the trains here are electric, coke bottles
are made of thicker plastic & the station has bins on the platform *shocked* odd
double-deck & low-floor trains for platformless stations too.

Went to Worms zoo yesterday especially to see snowfoxes but they'd been taken to the
zoo, but peeked in on a couple of snoozy redfoxes and spent a while watching &
photoing wolves running around & being fed. Meerkat fans will be pleased to know
that even over here they understand "simples".

Too hot for foxes though - 26C yesterday and I've only got the 1 pair of shorts,
being used to English summers.

Thursday 17:45

Well, still too hot. EF BBQ lastnight, plenty of inclusive beer & meats plus ice cream. Ended the evening sitting round a campfire.

Caught a bus into town this morning to get some Euros out the bank, had a camera-wander round Suhl. Even being German its a lot more English-normal than Frankfurt. Frankfurt's York but German and with more glass towers while Suhl has plenty of 1970s Sov-kitsch tower-blocks
.
Then went to the local zoo, mostly contains varieties of deer & sheep, no red foxes though they're still on the map there, had some wildcats there apparently but they look mostly like large tabbies.

Idled a while longer before coming back up the mountain on 1 of the 3 buses the local bus company runs each day.

I'll be staying around the hotel more the next few days - too much trouble going out & back.

Just had quite a relaxing weekend. Saturday I chilled out at home - few dvds, quick bike-ride up to tesco for some supplies. Got to email them about those daft self-service checkouts - use your own bag & it throws a strop so you've to wait for staff to come over and OK it. Then did a bit of linux codery & PS2 gaming in the afternoon.

Sunday morning, crystamartin came over really early and I took her out to watch a dressage show down by Middleton, then back to fox's pad for lunch, in between being a daft little floof. Spent the afternoon snugged up on the couch watching House.

Its now Monday, been at work an hour, and still only part awake though I have a trusty mug of brown here and some server reconfigging to do. Peace all

-- Snowfox out

Wishing good luck to the minitig, she's got an interview tomorrow for a job close to something she loves, so best of luck to her.

Kicking back from a bit of code this afternoon & listening to Riders on the Storm, oh that crazy guitar work's melting through my brain like a knife through warm butter *mmmm* Odd though, most of The Doors music's improved by not singing :)

and thanks to work for being quietly tedious today, I give you (found elsewhere) I give you Dr House pwning Dr Freeman

If I could have only one thing for my birthday, it would be to find whoever invented ebxml and emasculate them in a biblical fashion - by crushing of the nuts, then call in Brian to heal them & do it again.

You see, back in the day some boffins came up with SOAP, which became a normal standards-compliant way for different companies to communicate via interesting yet relatively simple to use XML, authentication optional.

A typical SOAP interchange is as simple as

• client software posts a request (function call) with various parameters to a server
• the server responds with the results of that function call

So, lets take an example from my field: ADSL ordering. This isn't quite real but is based on how the existing pre-SOAP XML interface works

• send a createOrder request containing ordernumber, cli, a few company identifiers and some authentication
• receive an accepted/rejected response in the same TCP stream

pretty simple, non?

Now to go ebxml (which for now I'll take as meaning extra BS XML)

• create an XML order request, add an extra header, signed with a certificate issued by the ebxml server, send this then close the connection
• ebxml server sends a signed xml acknowledgment to an http server client side, client-side then has to send a signed acknowledgment
• when the ebxml server has an actual response (typically within seconds for what we're dealling with, but could be any time at all) it sends a signed response xml file to the client's http server, which the client has to acknowledge
• further responses may be sent from the server to the client at any time, these have to be decoded, acknowledged etc

So we've gone from a simple remote procedure call, in which the client only needs to be able to connect out to the internet to a system with extra unneccesary encryption certificates and in which the client needs to create an externally accessable webserver, so another hole in the firewall.

So yeah, this has been causing me pain for the last couple of months though today its more-or-less cracked, still need to crush me some nuts though.

Bought this camera a couple of weeks ago and its working very well indeed even if I've got to judge light levels by eye & rule of thumb until some odd batteries come through from the online tat bazaar. On the whole, its very portable & quick to use and it looks like I'll be able to achieve aperture effects that aren't possible on the digital - there's aperture effected blurring on this photo but the digital will only do that out to a few inches, so not terribly good for removing the background in portraiture.

I'll have to get the next rolls developed elsewhere though, photoshop I've been using leaves paralell lines on prints though not on photo-cds they'll develop at the same time.

Interestingly enough, all the off-camera hardware (tripod, polarising filter, shutter cable) I've got for the fuji digital fits it too ... hmm, now for more ebay camera-porn :P

My toenail's just fallen off! Pictures later when I can find the camera cable.

( Read more... )

This pic: what we're meant to be worried about this week, spotted on boinboing




Its the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine.

Had a bacon butty earlier this week and I'm going to see Alestorm tonight :)

credits: image from Fabio Rex on Flickr

This post goes out to everyone who's had the privilege of being owned  by a cat.

 

Provisionally been accepted on a computing MSc, just got to apply & clear hours with work :)

Work also going well this week

I plan to do a bit of camping through the summer this year, but my usual site way up in the Lakes has closed so while I look around, is there anywhere people would suggest.

Not looking for anything fancy, or I'd book a hotel room :P

I had last week off work,  was great but now I'm back I can't see the point of being here. Trying to think of any code I've made in the last 2 years thats still in use & struggling.

Today's alternating between IRC, short bouts of work, question of the week on b3ta & pondering a part-time Masters at Leeds Met *hohum*

Email this morning from one of the chiefs- seriously, there's about as many managers here as there are regular working staff. There's 3 I report to directly, which can get amusing when they've all got slightly different ideas about the spec for my current project, or when they each try to give me something thats "do it yesterday" urgent, but I digress. Today's email from a director: 

Well thats my flight and an en-route hotel room booked for EF

Flying out the day before - Manchester to Frankfurt then going to visit worms zoo just for their eisfuchsen before catching the ICE the next day towards Suhl.