A slightly belated Happy New Year to my friends and family, and anybody else who stumbles across this blog. I'm not usually one for New Year's resolutions, but as they've been a popular topic in the blogosphere recently, I figured I'd join in :) In no particular order, here are some things I'd like to accomplish in 2006:
I just went to change Firefox's home page on my laptop, and I had multiple tabs open at the time. When I clicked 'Use current pages' for the home page, all of the open tabs were included in the list! So now clicking on the home icon opens up all my favourite sites! Brilliant!
I came across a link to Slim Device's Squeezebox on mozillaZine a few minutes ago.
When I have a house, I think I'm going to get a few of these :)
And just to prove how much of a geek I really am....
Numenorean
To which race of Middle Earth do you belong?
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A recent column by Slinger in the Toronto Star has me a bit upset. It's not so much that his column is completely uninformed, it's the open hostility towards the Catholic Church that offends me. Is Mr. Slinger really concerned if Paul Martin is excommunicated? How does it affect him? Does Mr. Slinger know what it means to be refused communion, or to be excommunicated? Let's give him the benefit of the doubt, and assume he's concerned for Paul Martin's status within his church. Then we must ask Mr. Slinger, what is wrong with the actions he claims that the Church is considering? What the Church is saying is that a person's actions should be consistent with his beliefs. Sounds reasonable to me; anything less is hypocritical. Members of public office, like Paul Martin, since they are visible members of the community and are in leadership roles, need to strive towards setting a good example. When Paul Martin states that he is a devout Catholic, yet supports legislation that is clearly against the teachings of the Catholic Church, his actions are not consistent with his professed beliefs. And because his actions are much more public than my actions, for example, the consequences of those actions must also be more public. If the Catholic Church decides that public officials should be refused communion if they publically, repeatedly, and persistently support legislation that is contrary to the teachings of the Church, then this is well within the Church's right. Paul Martin's human rights are not being violated. He has the free choice to decide to support unethical legislation and the Church has the free choice to discipline him for that choice. All's fair in news and war now; apparently you don't need to do your research before doing either one.
I was really impressed with the 20 minute wiki demo using TurboGears , so I spent a little bit of time today trying to get it running on my laptop, which is running Debian (sid). While I really like the motivation behind EasyInstall / setuptools / eggs, the implementation isn't quite there yet...
I spent quite a bit of time fighting with it since I didn't want to install these packages into /usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages. My first thought was to install this stuff into my home directory somehow...Well, I never figured out if that was possible...It seems that python doesn't look at .pth files outside of certain directories, resulting in errors like this when trying to run turbogears-admin:
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/home/catlee/python2.4/site-packages/turbogears-admin.py", line 4, in ?
import pkg_resources
ImportError: No module named pkg_resources
So, the way I got it working was to give myself write permissions on /usr/local/lib/python2.4/site-packages, create ~/.pydistutils.cfg with this:
[easy_install]
install-dir=/usr/local/lib/python2.4/site-packages
site-dirs=/usr/local/lib/python2.4/site-packages
script-dir=/home/catlee/bin
and then run the ez_setup.py bootstrap script to install TurboGears. Everything seems to work for now....
Well, it's long past time when I should have had something posted about our trip to Europe. So without further ado, here's a short account of our trip to Europe, starting with our adventures in Spain.
We left for our trip on May 18, leaving from Toronto, flying through Munich, and finally landing in Barcelona. Other than arriving slightly late in Munich and worrying if our bags were going to make it with us to Barcelona the flight was great. We caught a nice view of the Alps as we came into Germany. We'll have to make another trip so we can enjoy them properly! We met up with Nat without a problem. She had been travelling already for 2 and a half weeks with Mel's older sister, Pam, and was waiting for us on a corner outside a particular café in Las Ramblas.
Barcelona is beautiful; it seems to me (a non-architect) an architectural paradise. There are so many wonderful bulidings by Gaudàto see that I think you'd need a few weeks fully explore them all! We were in Barcelona for 3 days, and in that time we managed to see Las Ramblas, La Pedrera, Casa Batllo, the Palau de Musica Catalan, the harbour, the Olympic Park, Poble Español, Sagrada Familia, Hospital Sant Pau, and Parc Güell.
Where to start? Antoni GaudÃÂ. For me, Gaudàwas the highlight of our trip to Barcelona. The man was a genius, as demonstrated by his innovative ways of combining artistic and functional elements into his architecture. Again, I know next to nothing about architecture, so some readers may be stifling a laugh right about now, but I don't mind! Gaudàmade the functional beautiful. My favourite building was La Sagrada Familia (the Sacred Family, meaning the family of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph). Apparently the roof is going to be completed within the next 3 years, so they'll be able to celebrate mass there for the first time since construction began in 1882!
As a city, Barcelona is quite nice. For the most part we felt quite comfortable getting around, and safe pretty much everywhere. It seems you have to be on the lookout for pickpockets everywhere, and there are many people trying to scam gullible tourists. It also seemed like we met more than our fair share of people who were not willing to go the extra mile (or even a metre...) to help us out. Maybe it's just culture shock, but for myself these experiences really tainted my impression of Spain.
After Barcelona, we took an overnight ferry to Mallorca. We rented a little Fiat Punto and did some touring around the island before heading to the beach to relax for the day. Mallorca is beautiful, and the people are very nice. It was great to relax on the beach for a day after walking all over Barcelona for 3 days straight. Too bad we couldn't stay there longer!
After Mallorca, we took the high speed ferry back to Barcelona, then got on a train to Madrid. For some reason we didn't have very high expectations for Madrid, and were regretting not spending another day or two in Mallorca and skipping Madrid altogether. How wrong we were! Madrid too has lots of beautiful architecture, history, and is easy to get around on foot in.
In Madrid we did a LOT of walking. The first day there we did two of the walking tours suggested in our travel book. The highlights of Madrid were the Basilica de San Francisco el Grande (sorry, no pictures!), and the Prado museum.
Next up...Paris!
I just saw a link to the Python Challenge from Guyon Moree's blog Don't know if I'm going to get a lot of work done today now :)
I finally got around to watching Shaolin Soccer. It tells the story of an old man, a soccer star in his younger days, and a young kung-fu master who is trying to show people how kung-fu is great for everyday life. They team up together to form a kung-fu soccer team, and take over the world!!!! Ok, so they don't take over the world, but the story is pretty funny. Watch it.
