Pictures of Sydney

In the extended hiatus in my blogging activity, I’ve acquired a colossal backlog of pictures. Before moving on to more current subjects, I feel it is nothing less than my duty to share these over the coming days, weeks and years. Won’t that be a treat?

One of the many awesome things about my last job in Sydney was the journey to work. A ten-minute stroll down the wharf, then a short ferry trip to Circular Quay. This was a chance to change pace from home to work. Every day there was something worth seeing on the harbour, and I became rather slack about taking pictures. Sometimes, though, you get something worth firing up the camera for:

A Double Rainbow on Sydney Harbour

Double Rainbow

As the sun sets in the evening, the bats come out. My phone isn’t really up to shots of those, so you can have some engineering in the sunset instead.

Sunset Sydney Harbour Bridge

Sunset

I may post some more tomorrow. Or I may go out for drinks with some colleagues. Who can tell? (my calendar for a start…..)

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Blogging Again!

The old blog was a set of Python scripts cobbled together with more expedience than elegance. I had a look, and frankly that stuff scares me. Rather than patch it up again, I’ve stuffed a WordPress install on here. Pros: One-click install! Easy! No Stress!. Cons: PHP. I mean, really. Also, there’s a database under the covers somewhere. I refuse to look. The old Python stuff was at least devoid of such nonsense.

I’m doing this because we had an awesome weekend, and I wanted to write about it. Facebook doesn’t work for longer-form things, and I don’t trust them. Since I have a perfectly good domain, I decided to use it.

Installing WordPress was wonderfully simple – one click, done. Changing the header image to one of mine was a little harder:

  1. Create Subversion repository on server
  2. Import all WordPress stuff into repository
  3. Sluck the code over the wire to a local copy
  4. Find an image I liked
  5. Edit and crop image
  6. Add image to SVN, commit
  7. Update server-side from SVN
  8. Remember that it’s Just Not That Easy, check code out, move directories around, update with new file. Success. Yay.
  9. Rootle around in guts of WordPress Theme to find out how to change header image
  10. PHP. Damn.
  11. Find relevant bit. Yes, it’s configured in the database.
  12. Carefully bolt the code back together. Close lid. Discard parts left over.
  13. Log in to admin  site and change header.

So. Yes. 1-click, if you can keep your fingers out of the workings. *Sigh*.

On the plus side, I have the whole thing under version control, so I should be able to recover from the inevitable screw-ups.

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