Little Snippets of News

Wednesday, January 7, 2009 at 09:50PM

Here are some random, miscellaneous items of news, concerning what’s been happening around here, around now.

• It’s exhausting, but lots of fun, to host visitors. Since just before Christmas, we’ve had visits from two good friends (separately) and four family members (one batch of three and one solo), as well as meals with other friends over the Christmas/Summer period. Much fun was had by all. It’s really easy to share good experiences in Melbourne with family and friends. Highlights have included Day 2 of the Boxing Day test, Shane Warne: the musical, and an evening watching (or re-watching) the Sound of Music and singing along.
  

• I’ve finally redesigned the site in a way I’m happy to see and to use. Again. There are two causes, one proximate, and one more long-term. The proximate cause was the superabundance of spam to moderate, on my own server. Logging in and cleaning out spam, arriving at the rate of at least one a minute, was depressing. So no more hosted weblog software for me. Instead, this site is now hand crafted on my computer (using Webby—it’s been fun to learn Ruby) and uploaded to the server as a static site. When I want comments on an item, I can implement them using intense debate or some other commenting service.
  

  The more long-term aim of the redesign was to make the information here more accessible. In particular, I’ve tried to make it easier to browse my papers, categorised by topic and these news items. Each news item like this one carry with themselves links to other news items from the same year. It was dead-simple to code up the scripts to do this, and I’ve found that it makes browsing around the past of this weblog a lot easier.

  The comments haven’t been transferred from the old site, yet, but they’re on my list of things to do. I hope you like the new site.
  

• It’s been a hard year at work, as I’ve hinted at before. There’s been a lot more going on than that going on. My leave over this summer break has been more than welcome. I’m away from the office for an extended period (for two weeks already, and I return only on February 23). For some of this leave, starting tomorrow, we’re going on a trip to the US, to get away from it all. The fact that we get to be there during Obama’s inauguration is a bonus! More on the trip, in the next post.