Jonty's blog

For some reason I spend ages keeping the software on this website up to date, but I never actually write anything on it.  Perhaps it'll be useful one day.

For those not in the know, I've spent more or less the last month of my life in a tent, or various tents to be precise.  The day after my final A-level exam I was whisked away to Norway to camp with some Scouts we made friends with in Iceland for a week, along with another week of sightseeing in Bergen, Farsund and Stavanger.  I had an absolutely brilliant time, other than being travel sick in Bergen!  English Scouts have something to learn from Norwegians, you can be sure.

After that, with only five days to recover, I spent a week with my own Scout group at Peak 2010 - about 4,000 people all camping in the Duke's garden at Chatsworth.  Some of our Norwegian friends came to stay with us, and apparently it was the best camp they've ever been on!

I had to leave Peak early though, and with the few clean clothes I had left I headed over to Stafford for Soul Survivor A with the church youth group.  Even though I was absolutely exhausted by this point I still had a brilliant time - definitely beneficial to my life, and we'll see what new avenues open up for exploration in the coming weeks and months in that department.

Now I am 'resting' at home again, although I have a pile of e-mails to act on and work on Friday and Saturday, so one can hardly call it proper rest.  I also need to buy a new phone pretty soon, because my trusty K750i is starting to wear out a bit (I had to charge it twice in five days from leaving it in standby!), my iPod's been through the wash and my PDA keeps hard-resetting itself for no apparent reason.  I've got my eye on a HTC Hero so I can keep my existing Pay and Go SIM card - even the iPhone 4 only gets 500MB internet on most contracts, so I'm sure it should be more than enough!

And next Tuesday? I'm off to serve on the stewarding team at Soul Survivor B down in Somerset.  I'm really looking forward to this - perhaps it's a bit strange, but I'd much rather be part of a staff team helping out at an event than just someone sitting watching it.  Plus, I get free entry and hot meals.  It's win-win!

Anyway, enough dilly-dallying, I have 8 e-mails to follow up.

I thought I'd take a look at how my various information stores synchronise with each other.  I have a Facebook account, a K750i mobile phone, an iPAQ rx3715 PDA and Google Apps (well, not strictly Apps, but close enough).

When I plug my phone in:

• It synchronises contacts with Google Contacts via myPhoneExplorer
• It synchronises appointments with Google Calendar via myPhoneExplorer
• It synchronises notes with Outlook

When I plug my PDA in, or use a data connection to ActiveSync:

• It synchronises Mail, Calendar and Contacts with Google
• It synchronises notes with Outlook
• It synchronises files into a folder in Documents

When I have an appointment reminder:

• The PDA goes "ping pong" to remind me
• Google Calendar takes focus to remind me
• Google Mail has a little notifier in the corner
• My phone vibrates to remind me (it's been on silent for the past five years)
• The next morning Outlook decides to remind me that I've missed whatever it was

Needless to say, I don't miss many of my appointments. 

I use Google Contact Sync to update my Google Contacts with their Facebook birthdays and mobile numbers.  Google Calendar Sync is supposed to keep my calendar in sync with Outlook, but it goes wrong a lot, so those appointments and contacts usually come from the PDA.  GMail is added as an IMAP folder in Outlook too.

Am I going a bit far with it all?!  Sometimes Google Sync doesn't work with my contacts, and they all get deleted off my PDA.  Apparently this is because of an error somewhere in one of my contacts, but I can't find any.  I've recently started to use my mobile a lot more as I've switched Pay & Go plans to one that gives me unlimited (read: 500MB) internet and unlimited (read: 12000) texts if I top up £15 in a month.  I'll probably end up using the free month, then spending the £15 the next month, and so on.  It's nice to be able to get on the internet wherever with either my PDA or my laptop!

I was going to end by saying "Life is better connected" but I think it's already someone elses' slogan and I don't want to get sued.

I came across this quote today on the intertubes and I absolutely love it.  I think it's more or less what I was trying to imply in that poem I wrote however many years ago, but I certainly didn't realise it at the time.

Before I start, I'd like to make it clear that 95% of this code came from Evan Fosmark, who also had the original idea.  I've just mashed together some different bits of code and customised it to meet my needs!

When I migrated my website from my old hosting account over to my Virtual Private Server yesterday, I soon realised I had overlooked something that, if left unchanged, would end up annoying me quire a bit - directory listings. 

My VPS only has 128MB guaranteed RAM, and that means it's running lighttpd instead of the altogether meatier Apache.  This doesn't bother me in the slightest - if anything, I prefer lighttpd anyway.  I've learned how to use it over the past few months and I find it fast, easily-configured, and definitely 'light'!  One of the sacrifices you make for this lightness, however, is that the directory listings aren't anywhere near as fancy as Apache's.  There are no filetype icons, and no option for sorting the file list by date/size/type. 

This led me to look for another way of generating directory listings for my stuff subdomain, which probably gets more use than the main site because it's where I plonk all the random things that I need to share, but don't deserve their own page on the site.  Finding Evan Fosmark's Enhanced Lighttpd directory generator saved me from having to use my meagre PHP knowledge to write my own script, but it only worked for the root folder that the index.php was placed in.  I wanted it to work, or at least appear to work, for the subfolders too!  This is where I remembered mod_rewrite:

1. Stick my modified index.php into your root folder and remove the .txt extension
2. Add the following to lighttpd.conf (or make your own config file, I saved mine in with the rest of my subdomain configs):

   $HTTP["host"] =~ "stuff\.jontysewell\.net" {
           url.rewrite = ( "^/(?!(.+\.\w*)).*$" => "/index.php?q=$0" )
   }
   

   Obviously, replace the host line as required.  This regex will make sure that any directories are sent to the generator to have nice indexes made, while files aren't redirected and are downloaded normally.

3. Get the CSS file I use from here, and edit the $css_file variable at the top of index.php to reference wherever you put it.
4. To get fancy pants filetype icons like I have, download whatever icon set you like (I'm using Tango icons) and save the relevant files into an .icons folder in the same folder as your CSS.  (thanks to Jace for this bit of script)

And that's about it, I think!  If you found that hard to follow, bear in mind it's the first time I've written a guide for this sort of thing, and feel free to ask for help if you need it.  I can't guarantee I'll reply within any reasonable timeframe, but it's worth trying!

If I ever get some more time I'd like to modify the script further so that I can put one copy of it in a central place, and use lighttpd rules to give fancy listings to any number of subdomains.

The winter of 2009/10 has certainly seen more than its normal amount of wintry weather for Derbyshire.  During the first snowfall in December I decided to pick up the camera and go for a walk through Holymoorside - a very picturesque place to be at any time of the year!  Here are some of the photos I took.