Dave Holland's weblog

Response to DCSF's "Home Education - registration and monitoring proposals"

Fri, 16 Oct 2009 01:08:55 +0100

The Department for Children, Schools and Families is consulting on proposed changes to registration and monitoring of home-educated children.

This is my response, which was allocated number 2284. Many thanks to friends and others (including the Family Education Trust) for suggestions and ideas for points to include. Please feel free to borrow from it if you want - if it encourages you to reply to the consultation, so much the better!

Kwiki title bug

Mon, 21 Sep 2009 12:10:52 +0100

Note to self:

Kwiki has a bug in the tabnav theme where the page title doesn't get set properly. To fix, edit theme/tabnav/template/tt2/kwiki_screen.html and change page_id (line 9 or so) to be page_name.

Simples...

Spam of the day

Tue, 15 Sep 2009 10:17:43 +0100

Subject: INVITATION TO SUPPLY ONE MILLION BATH TOWELS

Do you know where your million towels are?

Weather forecast in the Gnome panel

Sat, 01 Aug 2009 00:04:13 +0100

It's annoyed me for some time that the standard Gnome weather applet doesn't display forecasts for the UK (it's a long-standing bug). So I scratched the itch.

Given that I'd be hacking something together in Perl, the Gnome2::PanelApplet module seemed like a good place to start. It didn't take long to get something that mostly worked. But, er, either I'm doing something wrong or there are still some lurking bugs; my applet wouldn't add properly from the Gnome menu, only if I started it from the command line first.

So I resorted to gnome-swallow-applet which is a clever (but revolting) hack to "swallow" any X window into the panel, and wrote a script to parse the BBC's weather RSS feeds and display icons for the upcoming days. This is what it looks like. You can download the script; change the feed URL for your location, and enjoy. If you fix any of the bits labelled FIXME please send me a patch!

False-positive spam rejections

Mon, 13 Jul 2009 21:30:05 +0100

To anyone I've erroneously rejected email from today - sorry.

It seems that Sanesecurity's Sanesecurity.Jurlbl.5624 virus definition is a little too wide-ranging; I've disabled it.

Vocabulary of a 16 month old

Fri, 08 May 2009 12:30:33 +0100

Stuart's vocabulary is quite extensive now:

key	key
door	door or window
doch	dog, quadruped
RAAAA	the dog that lives at the pub opposite our house
ee-ee	Mousey
brumbrum	car, bus, tractor, vehicle
don	gone
din	drink
dindin	dinner, food
Mumum	Mum
Dadad	Dad
dinky	stinky (poo), sticky, wet
hoch	hot, dangerous, mustn't touch