Peterbe.com

I haven't fully explored this site yet but it looks great. Some sort of blog about themed around Frank Zappa.

This site has got a great discography and lots of other misc stuff that looks worthy of some decent reading time. I also very much like the name which I guess you have to be a Zappa fan to appreciate.

I've now uploaded the photos from my latest holiday i Fuzhou, China.

Most of the photos are of kung fu training and that's because I didn't want to distance myself from the holiday too much by constantly being the the photographer. When we went training I lent the camera to our translator who at times got bored whilst we were just training and she loved to snap.

Basically, Chris and I had the great opportunity to learn the first form of Calling Crane by Master Ruan Dong and the first form of Dog Style by Master Hu Chen Wu both resident in Fuzhou in the Fujian province in the south-east of China.

I wouldn't call myself a diehard fan of Futurama but I sure as h**l love that show.

"Futurama was killed, but like some B-movie cyborg it refused to stay dead. The fans watched the 72 episodes religiously in syndication and shelled out $170 to get the entire run on DVD. So, in 2005, Fox green-lighted 16 new episodes. Cohen and Groening have reassembled many of the hundreds of writers, animators, and voice artists who'd gone on to other projects to create four DVDs of new material, including sexy robot stage shows. The first DVD hits stores on November 27, and the features will then be divided into half-hour episodes when the entire run of the series begins airing on Comedy Central next year."

I'm actually re-watching all of the previous 5 series at the moment at home and hopefully by the time I've watched it all, the new series will start to become available on DVD here in the UK (unlikely but one can hope).

I've been struggling hard this morning to get Jeditable to work in IE (6 and 7). Whilst everything was working perfectly fine in Firefox, in IE the clickable editable text would just disappear and never return. The solution was to use the latest jQuery 1.2.1. I was using version 1.1.4 which was why it didn't work.

Jeditable is a brilliant plugin with really good configuration options (hint read the source code's documentation comment) and I'll now send an email to Mika about this pitfall and suggest that he includes it in his documentation.

Today I'm back in London and working. I just got back from a 2 week holiday in Fuzhou in China where I've been hanging out with my friend Chris, eat and train kungfu. I've got a tonne of photos (mostly of kungfu training) that I'll upload in due course.

Long story short: It was great! Everything went really well and the training was well above expectations except that it was one of the hardest weeks (physically) I've endured in a very long time.

I've started exploring Last.fm now as an alternative and/or complement to Pandora which I still use.

Here's my profile page

I haven't yet fully understood how Last.fm works but I'm going to try to learn it the same way you learn to use a new wrist watch: baby steps.

The standalone player application works great on my mac at home but the Linux version segmentation faulted before the music even started so I'm going to use a much more interesting alternative on Linux which is to play Last.fm inside Amarok (which is tonnes better than iTunes by the way). Sadly the pause keyboard command doesn't seem to work.

One thing I do love about Pandora, is the ability to shuffle between various stations/channels. In Pandora I've got one station of heavy metal and one for Frank Zappa type music (amongst others) and if I stay for too long on one station it gets a bit boring. Let's hope this is possible with Last.fm too.

This took me a while to grok and perhaps by mentioning it here, it'll prevent other people from making the same mistake as I did and perhaps preventing myself from doing the same mistake again.

In the ZCatalog, when you set up indexes you can give them a name and an index attribute. If you omit the index attribute, it'll try to hook into the objects by the name of the index. For example, if you set the index to be title with no indexed attribute it'll fetch the title attribute of the objects it catalogs. But if you set the indexed attribute to be something like idx_getTitle you can do something like this in your class:

def idx_getTitle(self):
   """ return title as we want it to be available in the ZCatalog """
   return re.sub('<*.?>','', self.title)

The same can not be done with indexes of type DateIndex.

A friend of mine, Sam Dunstan has written a hilarious blog entry about his visit to Sweden that I find so amusing that people who are interested in Sweden and the swedes really should read. It's hilarious as a swede since there are so many embarrassing truths, especially if you live in Piteå.

"Piteå is about 50kms from nowhere. Despite the university (reputable) and paper mill (smelly), there is very little going on here. Granted, there are few towns that have a snowmobile drive-through McDonalds"

The blog entry isn't just about Piteå but also has lots of thing in general about Sweden that we should be proud of. Reading it from Sam's perspective is quite interesting because he sees it in a way only a non-swede could but still we recognize so much of it.

"I could hear my wallet creak in agony everytime I opened it to pay for something. I had to stop mentally converting prices to the old AUD when I bought things because it kept making me dizzy. To be fair, herrings were cheap and good. But how many herrings can you eat? I'm not a seal."

Thank you everyone who sponsored me for this weekends Kungfu endurance challenge to raise money for the Claremont project.

A reminder... The Claremont project is a venue where old people go to for activities in Islington. Many of these people are weak and lonely and doing these activities is practically all they have to meet and socialise with people.

Unfortunately I didn't win any of the individual events of the endurance challenge but I did try my best and I'm very happy that I participated and at least tried.

Thank you all who sponsored me!!

Here are some photos from the event

I totally don't approve of what they're doing but what they're doing is totally impressive.

It's a long clip of a couple crazy couriers racing through the streets of New York crossing red lights and zebra crossings and going in the oncoming traffic lanes. Mental!