I live not far from the spot where Hussein Mohammed jumped in the Thames and drowned. Local youths have spray-painted their tributes in the underside of the bridge. Touching.

 

Respect the aeropress. If you don’t pay it enough respect it will explode, sending coffee EVERYWHERE.

STOP PRESS

Not wishing to be outdone, the Gaggia espresso machine had a go too. I should add that this happened to a colleague.

I’m working on a Django app which is able to serve content on a number of subdomains. The app has a number of sites, which appear as subdomains of the main domain. There’s some middleware to look things up from the request and do the right routing.

In the wild the subdomains will be done with DNS, but for local development, I’m creating entries in my /etc/hosts such as demosite.local, using .local as my ‘main domain’ locally.  After a colleague integrated some authentication code, I suddenly found I couldn’t log in on my development environment. It didn’t work with either the custom login screen or the Django admin. Very odd.

Came across this when deploying a Django app to a fresh VM, installing with Python PIP from a requirements file.

I have been banging my proverbial head against a brick wall (or my actual head against a proverbial wall) for the best part of a few days, on and off, trying to find the cause of an inconsistency in behaviour between Safari and Chrome in a Facebook canvas app.

In the week after the engine came out, I was left with access to my bilges. These are usually hidden away behind an unmovable wooden wall, with access blocked by the engine. As far as I can tell these had not seen the light of day for two decades (my boat was built in 1993 and there are no signs of the engine having been out since then). It appears that they weren’t even painted, or if they were, there’s no paint left.

I was appalled at the state of them, frankly. The rust was thick, and not in a good way. My boat is my home, as well as my boat, and the sign of that much rust really wasn’t a very comforting thought.

I come from an engineering family. I know no-one who enjoys playing with engines more than my father. Within days of me buying a boat he had opened up the engine and taken the cylinders off to re-fit the piston rings. Admittedly, the reason he did this is that the engine had failed and we were stranded thirty miles outside Oxford with an immobile boat. But I have a feeling it would have happened anyway sooner or later.

I’m developing a Facebook app at work and was stuck on an issue for a bit. This post is just a mental note, and to prevent this happening.

Music in the bandstand in Brighton. Cold wind and rain by turns. We played and danced to keep warm.

I took a couple of audio recordings but this one just seemed perfectly to sum up the day.

The BBC love their esoteric, obscure electronic music. I think it all started with Sigur Rós in Planet Earth and proliferated from there. It’s even started creeping into BBC Radio 4 trailers now. The trailer for Will Self’s ‘A Point of View: In Defence of Obscure Words’ had just such a music bed. I decided that I would very much like to know what that music was.