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Richy's Random Ramblings

Plans for 2016

January 2, 2016
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Well, here’s my plans for 2016 – let’s see what works out.

  • Blog more. In 2015, I made just 4 blog posts which is a bit crap and I want to address that and provide more high quality content which leads me on to…
  • Aim to release a substantial bit of free open-source content at least every two months. Whether this is a PHP library, a YouTube video, a tutorial series on this blog and details of a talk – it’s up to me. Just something to help “give back”. In December (just), I released the PHP Packagist package Bairwell/Cors and have another piece of work in development for January.
  • Get enough Patreon supporters that I can afford to spend all my time making and supporting open source software and content.
  • As part of the Patreon, have a public list of where my money comes from and where it goes – I spend around $90 per month on supporting other Patreon creators and donate around the same again each month to various projects/organisations that have, in some way, helped me or that I like the thoughts of.
  • Present a talk at a user group
  • Attend a user group/conference at least every other month (for February, I’m already booked in for the “Be a brilliant people developer” conference on the 12th and The PHP UK Conference on the 18th and 19th).
  • Read more. If 2015, I read less than a dozen books – yes, I’ve been getting content/enjoyment from other source (mobile games, YouTube videos etc), I but I want to get back properly reading – I used to get through at least a book a week, but it just really stopped dead around July.
  • Move all websites from our (getting on quite old) Dedicated Server to individual virtual machines and consolidate the sites/resources/admin.
  • Get certified in something.
  • Improve my health/general wellbeing
  • Increase the size of the household one way or another
  • Try and remember the mock Latin phrase “Non illegitimae carborundum”

Quick review of 2015

January 1, 2016
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Well, 2015 happened.

For us, it was quite a mixed bag. Good news was that in May, we managed to purchase a house instead of renting (after 7 years) and in July we added a little friend to our family – Max the chihuahua. The bad news front was that in September our cat was found to be suffering from hyperthroidism and bad teeth and needed quite a bit of dental work. She’s on pills now, but still not quite herself. And then in October, my Grandmother past away after trying to beat cancer for around 2 years. And there were quite a few other things on the bad news front which I don’t want to make public (some of them related), but meh – it’s been a year of ups and downs.

On the blogging front, it was quite a crap year – just 4 posts throughout the year (I’m hoping to change that for this year) – since there were just 12 in 2014 and 36 is 2013, I really need to stop the decline now 😉

Here’s looking forward to 2016 and hoping that some (if not all) of the plans I’m putting together come off.

Advanced Custom Fields 5 – Could not connect to update server

March 7, 2015
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Running Advanced Custom Fields 5 Pro for WordPress and getting the “Error. Could not connect to update server” message? Make sure your firewall can access connect.advancedcustomfields.com (for example, if you are running Bytemark’s Symbiosis software, add that to /etc/symbiosis/firewall/outgoing.d/50-reject-www-data

Tech: Allowed characters in names

February 10, 2015
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Inspired by Scattermoon’s tweet and Your Last Name Contains Invalid Characters, I just thought I’d make a quick “public service” announcement that British and Irish names can, and do include the following examples (all from current living people who are Irish or British born):

  • Apostrophe: Chris O’Dowd
  • Double-barrelled: Jane Heathcote-Drummond-Willoughby (technically Nancy Jane Marie Heathcote-Drummond-Willoughby, 28th Baroness Willoughby de Eresby): and it is technically valid for her to have the email address jame.heathcote-drummond-willoughby@eresby.uk
  • Long: Red Wacky League Antlez Broke the Stereo Neon Tide Bring Back Honesty Coalition Feedback Hand of Aces Keep Going Captain Let’s Pretend Lost State of Dance Paper Taxis Lunar Road Up! Down! Strange! All and I Neon Sheep Eve Hornby Faye Bradley AJ Wilde Michael Rice Dion Watts Matthew Appleyard John Ashurst Lauren Swales Zoe Angus Jaspreet Singh Emma Matthews Nicola Brown Leanne Pickering Victoria Davies Rachel Burnside Gil Parker Freya Watson Alisha Watts James Pearson Jacob Sotheran-Darley Beth Lowery Jasmine Hewitt Chloe Gibson Molly Farquhar Lewis Murphy Abbie Coulson Nick Davies Harvey Parker Kyran Williamson Michael Anderson Bethany Murray Sophie Hamilton Amy Wilkins Emma Simpson Liam Wales Jacob Bartram Alex Hooks Rebecca Miller Caitlin Miller Sean McCloskey Dominic Parker Abbey Sharpe Elena Larkin Rebecca Simpson Nick Dixon Abbie Farrelly Liam Grieves Casey Smith Liam Downing Ben Wignall Elizabeth Hann Danielle Walker Lauren Glen James Johnson Ben Ervine Kate Burton James Hudson Daniel Mayes Matthew Kitching Josh Bennett Evolution Dreams BBC News article
  • “Profanity words”: Brian Cox, Martin Hancock

And don’t forget there is Westward Ho! (and, yes, the exclamation mark is part of the place name) and “Arsenal” and “Scunthorpe”.

That’s just names in “standard English” with British/Irish roots: and ignoring Irish names (such the Irish for Belfast which “Béal Feirste” or “Bó?ar na ?Fáll” or Llandygai which is in Welsh “Llandygái”). If you can’t handle the above, forget about internationalisation!

People – please read https://www.gov.uk/service-manual/user-centred-design/resources/patterns/names and http://www.w3.org/International/questions/qa-personal-names before handling names.

VMWare Workstation Feature Request: Better Raw Disk Access

January 23, 2015
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I’ve made the following feature request to VMWare to improve the handling of raw disks under virtual machines in their Workstation product and was wondering if anybody else felt it’ll be handy for them:

Practically everytime I start a VMWare Workstation VM on Windows7 which uses a raw disk partition/physical disk, I receive the “Partition table changed” message and have to manually reset the hard disks for the VM. Can I therefore request a feature which will prevent this from happening (or, at the very least, make it easier to sort out).

Ideally, I’d like the VM to use the drive’s UUID to identify the physical drive instead of using “PhysicalDriveX” – this means that it shouldn’t matter if they drive is read by Windows reads the physical drives in a different order, the same drive will be found.

When adding a physical disk, could the drop down be modified to provide useful information – so instead of just:
Device:
* PhysicalDrive0
* PhysicalDrive1
etc
it is:
* PhysicalDrive0 – CRUCIAL M4-CT256M4SSD2
* PhysicalDrive1 – HITACHI HTS727575A9E364
(so make and model of the drive)
or at the very least the drive size or the partition count:
* PhysicalDrive0 – 689.64Gb (3 partitions)
* PhyiscalDrive1 – 238.47Gb (5 partitions)

This will make it easier to spot which drive and partition I’m after instead of manually selecting each drive to see which partition I need to reattach the 2 drives needed for my VM.

Finally, if there was a way of reordering the drives in VMWare Workstation, it’ll be appreciated (in case of reattaching the drives in the wrong order).