I've just finished another slowpoke, like one I made earlier, and this one is at least as cute!



I realised after finishing this one that they original pattern has them with their heads looking sideways, maybe this is why mine always look a bit strange!! This one also doesn't have a tail ... when I came to assemble him, I hadn't made one and somehow it just never happened.

My next project is a square (or maybe more than one, who knows?) for the Oxfam Baby Blanket campaign. The plan is for loads of squares to be knitted and joined together into one large blanket which they display places to campaign on the state of maternal mortality in the world. Then they'll turn the squares into lots of baby blankets to be sent to places where they will be useful. I think its a great cause, this is how I'm doing so far:



If anyone else is knitting for this then add a comment!

When development teams have people working on a variety of platforms, its pretty common to end up with wrong line endings. In vim these will look like ^M at the end of each line. To get rid of these line endings you can use the following command (in command mode)

:% s/^M$//

To type the correct ^M character, you'll need to press Ctrl + V followed by Ctrl + M (the first combination means "take the next combination literally).

To turn this into a macro you should do the following. In command mode, pressq, followed by any letter. This will be the shortcut to access the macro. Then type the command as above. Finally, press q again to stop recording and its done. You can use your macro by pressing @ and then the letter you chose.

This site uses a blogging platform called serendipity which is a nice little tool and I've been mostly happy since moving across from textpattern (I did write about the experience). Recently however, a few things have been going wrong with the feeds.

I edited an old post, because the image links were broken (I did have a nightmare migrating because I was so inconsistent about the format of the image tags in textpattern, completely my own fault). I was very careful not to update the published date of the article, however the edited article appeared in the feed, which wasn't what I had in mind! It turned out that this is by design. On line 262 of includes/functions_entries.inc.php (I have serendipity 1.1.3), I found this:

I've commented out this line, which was in an if($modified_since) clause. Hopefully this will stop updated entries from appearing in the feed - I have a few other old ones to fix images in so we'll soon see.

At around the same time, Ivo mentioned that he was seeing the order of posts change in his reader (google reader) when people commented on my posts. I suspect that this is part of the same issue and I'm optimistic of it also being fixed by this change. However when I was looking into the problem I noticed that the URL he was using to access my feed, http://www.lornajane.net/index.rss2, actually returned RSS 0.91. Not ideal! The problem is the rewrite rule in serendipity's .htaccess file, which looks like this:

When you request index.rss2 it should rewrite to rss.php?file=$1&ext=$2 but the "rss" matches first so the user gets redirected to index.rss instead. As a nasty hack to get around this I removed the rss from the above example and gave it a line of its own:


Requests to index.rss2 are now correctly rewritten as rss.php?file=index&ext=rss2 and will get RSS 2.0 format in the response. I have just noticed however that this is the most requested page on the site so I really hope I didn't break anything!

I've had this error more than once. On a debian virtual machine, with Zend Core installed, and when mysql doesn't restart when the machine reboots. It looks something like this:

This is for two reasons. First: you need to be up one level of directory to be able to run these commands. Some errors will tell you that but this one doesn't. Secondly, you need to use the mysqld_safe command.

This works for me - I have no idea if it is the prescribed method but background the process above and you're good to go.

There's an article competition running over at phpwomen.org where thre are two Zend Studio for Eclipse licenses to give away to the best short articles submitted in the Best Practices forum before the end of July. See the announcement for more details.

We spent the weekend at the wedding of a friend of ours, where Kevin was the best man. Here's the two boys together before the ceremony itself:



The weather forecast was rather bad and although we didn't get weather as bad as we might have, it did rain on the post-ceremony photographs which was a shame! The day was great all round, the happy couple were infectiously happy and everyone else was dressed up and being happy along with them. There are more photos on my flickr account - although in a rather wonderful testament to what a good time I had last night, I don't have any photos taken later than the cutting of the cake. The evening event was a ceilidh and I literally danced the night away, not realising Kevin wasn't taking any photos either, so hopefully someone else did!

Congratulations to Andrew and Rachel, here's wishing them a long and happy marriage.

The slides for my talk "PHP Deployment with Subversion" at the Dutch PHP Conference last weekend are now online, you can find them at http://www.slideshare.net/lornajane/php-deployment-with-svn/. If you have any questions or comments then either drop me a line or add a comment below.

Edit: I prepared a video of the nabaztag demo I did - you can find it over here on flickr - enjoy.

A couple of days ago I had the pleasure of speaking at the excellent Dutch PHP Conference in Amsterdam. I haven't done anything like this before and I did a lot of preparation - as you'll know if you read this blog regularly.

My talk was entitled "PHP Deployment with Subversion" and was a series of suggested tricks for using Subversion, both tools and structure, to help with deployment. I'm on holiday in Amsterdam for a few days (since I haven't visited the city before) so I'm currently not able to upload my slides but I will post them here in a day or two. You can get a sneak preview though as there is flickr evidence of my presentation available.

I included a demonstration in my talk which showed a nabaztag (electronic funky rabbit device) notifying of different events, such as tests failing. What I hadn't really taken into account was that I'd be speaking in such a large room - there was seating for 400 people (about half full I think) and the rabbit is only 8 inches high or so, he was a bit little! I wasn't following the chatter at the time but I was hugely amused to see this tweet from Breuls when I checked twitter the next day!!

Overall my talk was relatively successful in the sense that I said what I wanted to, I didn't talk too much or too little, and my nabaztag demo actually worked. I do feel however that my nerves got the better of me - I'm rarely intimidated but having never spoken at a conference before I found it very difficult to adapt to speaking in the main hall. This is the first time I've used a microphone, they clipped it onto me and then I started giving the presentation, that was really strange. And also having a large stage with my slides projected on a screen the size of a small house ... you can't look at them, or point at them, or anything. I thought I'd become less nervous with time but I'm afraid it never happened! On a personal level, to give a talk like that, perfectly competently, is an achievement in itself and I'm trying to forget how hard it really was and just feel proud instead :) After the talk I only got one question, which was "Where can I get one of those rabbits?", so I wasn't sure if I had put my technical content across well. However quite a few people came to pick my brain afterwards so I guess I did OK.

I owe huge thanks to everyone who provided moral support and tried to convince me I'd be fine, and even more thanks to my boyfriend Kevin who did the setup for the nabaztag (Naz the nabaztag needed his own wireless network) and helped me write the code to run the demo. I'll write more about the rabbit and the demo at a later point, looks like a lot of people will be getting them :)

Speaking aside, I had a great few days meeting old friends and new ones at the conference, and attending some really interesting sessions. Speaking was very very stressful although perhaps only because I didn't handle it as well as I might have. The definite upside though is getting to hang out with the very cool kids at the Speakers Dinner afterwards - thanks guys, I had a wonderful night. All in all I can't wait for next year!

It might not seem like a year since I announced a completed house purchase, but it is. A year and a few days in fact! Actually buying the house felt like a huge achievement, buying our first home took 9 months, cost a lot in surveyors fees and involved 3 failed sales ... read the contents of the "house" category in chronological order if you missed the story.

On that day, it felt like we'd come a long way. And today, it feels like we've come a longer way still! In the year we've been in the house, we've

• Thrown out most of the contents of it (but the garage is still full)


• Re-acquired our possessions which were in storage for 18 months and (mostly) unpacked them


• Cleared the garden (still no lawn and some digging still to go but its way better than it was


• Got all the guttering fixed


• Added central heating


• Rewired the house


• Become an aunt and uncle


• Completely made over the front garden


• Acquired a piano


• We've both changed jobs and/or been promoted


• Been broken into


• Redecorated most of the ground floor


• Paid the mortgage for 12 months

All in all its been a pretty exciting time, and its hard to believe its a whole 12 months since we picked up the keys, and wandered around the house, not quite believing it was real (it was, filth and all!). Its been quite a ride, cost more than we thought, and been at least as bad as we'd feared :) We've had lots of help from friends and family and we're very grateful for everything everyone has done to help, advise, or whatever. I was at my mum's house last weekend, and realised with a jolt I was homesick ... for Leeds. I've been homesick for her home pretty much since I left it - but this is my home now.

I know there will be other events in our lives, and harder times probably ahead. But for now we feel lucky; we're happy, we're healthy, and I hope it lasts!

Last night I had the opportunity to speak at the PHP London group, giving a talk entitled "PHP Deployment with Subversion". This is the talk I will be giving next week at the Dutch PHP Conference in Amsterdam, and giving the same talk last night was the last step in a whole series of preparation for next week. (The slides will be available after the Dutch conference)

As ever it was great to get to the event and meet the people there, I don't make it to the PHP London meetings very often but I always have a good time when I do. Although this talk was supposed to be a "test drive" for next week, I was actually very squeaky happy to get the invite to speak! Anyway the guys there were great as usual, helping me get set up with the projector, providing a pep talk, and buying me a beer afterwards.

The talk itself went fine, nothing more and nothing less. It was perfect for time, which is excellent as I had absolutely no idea how long I would talk for. I was greatly helped by using Powerpoint (yes, I had to boot into windows, scary!) with its Presenter View which has a timer. This view also shows you your current slide, the notes for this slide, and the upcoming slides which is all good (so long as you can read very tiny writing from standing 4 feet away from your laptop - happily I'm long-sighted!). The content I think is OK - lots of questions came out after the talk which was really interesting, and I certainly realised there were a few points that I need to mention when I give the talk again. The slides perhaps leave something to be desired, colours look different projected and there was a particularly horrible shade of yellow which appears on quite a few slides - oops!

I had a great night and although I wouldn't say I'm feeling confident for next week, I feel like there are fewer unknowns. I also came to terms with the idea that feeling terrible about a talk is just not something I'm going to get over until I have done the talk - its all part of the preparation I guess.

I'm pleased to announce that DevZone have published an article of mine - the examples article I wrote to accompany my recent podcast on the topic of importing and migrating data. It has some code examples which I think make a good illustration of the points I was trying to make waving my hands around doing a podcast, hope you like it.