Archive - Nov 2005

One thing I have noticed since moving out of London is how little the weather previously affected us in the inner city. November seems early to have such a harsh frost and the ground has been frozen for the best part of a week. I haven't really seen a frost like this for many years. I went out early one morning to take photos of all the ice cystals covering the plants. The chickens weren't as taken by the beauty of everything - one foot on the frozen ground and they hopped up on my back for warmth. The other thing you really notice is the stars. In London a clear night meant you could see the stars. Out in the country a clear night means you see thousands of stars of different size, colour and intensity and some of them really do twinkle!

I was never quite happy with the old phpnuke site. Much of the site took a lot of php hacking to get it to look and function right. There were also ongoing concerns about security. I've been hunting around for a while now for the right replacement and fortunately came across a blog that mentioned drupal was worth a look. And here it is.

::Software::

squash ladder PHP
An open source game ladder written in PHP.
status - active

dive log converter

a web application to automate the process of running a sports ladder

>> To report bugs or make enhancement / feature requests please use the project tracker. <<

View squash ladder demo - Squash Ladder support forum - Free ladder hosting

Visit page on Source Forge - Sign up to the announcements list - GNU GPL Licence details

Current version: 0.7.9 change log

Download: slp_0.7.9_build_145.zip

Squash ladder is a complete browser based application that runs a sports ladder. If you have not heard of a sports ladder before it is a type of league that operates in many racket sports (tennis, badminton, squash, table tennis etc), normally on a paper wall chart. Players are ranked from first to last. A player in the ladder may challenge any player up to x number of places above them. If they win the game, they take the place above the challenged player (or swap places with them). If they lose no position change takes place. Over a relatively short space of time players find themselves in an appropriate place on the ladder so that they are being challenged by players slightly worse than themselves and they are challenging players slightly better than themselves.

Since installing Fedora Core 3 on my laptop I have been unable to access web sites with Firefox on an intermittent basis. The usual pattern is that google and most search engines produce a 'Connection refused...' error. What's doubly annoying is of course the first thing you do on getting an error like this is to google the answer! How many times did I try to do that - doh!

There were certain other sites I couldn't access too. I downloaded Knoppix and ran linux from a CD but still had the same error.

It's an often repeated piece of trivia that the longest ever recorded chicken flight is thirteen seconds - apparently the furthest flight was 301.5 feet. I can't find what type of chickens these were but I think Millie & Katie are warming up to take the record. They love to fly up on to me especially if I have some grain. I have also found them up trees, on the roof of the cottage and on the back wall. On one occaision Millie took off from the back wall at a steep angle until she was way above my head - I would guess between twenty and thirty feet. She then splayed out her wings and not entirely gracefully dropped down by my feet. We have decided not to clip their wings as they seem to like flying and have so far stayed within the back garden. I guess they have a better chance of escaping predators with intact flight feathers.