Lat night I was playing with Blender and created a particle system with metaballs. This basically chucks a load of metaballs up and as they get close together they morph into each other. I got the idea from reading a copy of DIGIT magazine where they used the same technique in the new Cat In The Hat film. Nifty stuff.

I think The Planet in Wolverhampton is haunted. I am a big fan of LivingTV’s Most Haunted, and on the programme they often see these small balls of light moving around. These are called orbs and are thought to be the first signs of a ghost taking on a visible form. Well, after doing lots of gigs at the planet, it seems there are lots of these orbs there. Spooky stuff. I emailed Derek Acorah from Most Haunted to see what he thinks. Doubt I will get a reply, but who knows.

I just got Mozilla Firebird installed on my Windows box and it looks pretty decent. You can set a stack of tabs as a home page. I like this. 🙂

—–

You know, it is amazing me how big Wolves LUG is getting. We have new people interested in joining popping up from all over the place. I am so proud of what we have with Wolves LUG – it is a great place with some great people. I am looking forward to meeting these new people and seeing how they enjoy LUG meets. There are also a stack of people on the mailing list who do not come to LUG meets at all. This is of course fine, and I am pleased we have a really active community. 🙂

I have been looking for a good PHP RSS parser to show the forge updates. I have got Magpie and it seems pretty good, but I need to hack some of the extra information in and its a little hairy at the moment. I think I will seek advice from Aq later tonight – I am off over to his place to discuss some ideas regarding a possible Linux in education seminar. We are going to flesh out some ideas.

I decided on a license for the documents that I have written on forge yesterday. After some considerable time looking around the net I found few options where there was not a problem with the license. The GNU FDL had issues with Debian, OpenContent seemed discontinued and there was the LDP license which seemed a little too tied to the LDP. I settled on the Creative Commons license which seems simple to use, suits our needs and will protect the documents as free software. Not sure if has been tested in court, but I think it is the best choice.

Lots to do today and I want to clear out a bunch of bits of work before I go out.

Well it seems that the Forge is running smoothly. I managed to get the first user on the ACL working fine (this is my buddy Matt Revell). I sent out some emails about it to those people who were interested in contributing to the charities documents. Everything is in place now, we just need to bods to make it happen.

Although pretty cool, MoinMoin is slow. Not only is it slow but it is unintuitive. I have found this about Wiki’s in general – there is no really easy to use Wiki available. All have a rather obscure kind of interface. MoinMoin does seem the cream of the crop though so I will stick with it. The newer version is heavily in development, so I will upgrade when the stable update is released.

My mum and dad got me and Sooz a Smoothie maker for christmas and we used it today. My sweet jesus is it good. We shoved in there some milk, bannana and a bit of mango and it is great. Go and buy one.

Right, work to do…
—–

Right, I have added a document development Wiki to the site and this Wiki will be used to develop community documents such as my charity documents. I have named this system Forge, and I will be dishing out some user accounts to those who have already been in touch about getting involved.

I have decided to use MoinMoin as the wiki for forge. phpwiki has proved to be a pain in the butt in terms of getting set up, and forge is a restricted wiki so only authorised people can edit documents. The phpwiki will be getting deleted soon. Oh yes, the URL…you can check out forge at https://archivedblog.jonobacon.com/forge/. If you want to get involved, mail me and let me know. 🙂

It is way to late tonight for me to be doing this stuff. I am up early tomorrow to get started on a build up of work and I should be sleeping. There are quite a few things that I am working on at the moment, and I still need to create some extra documents and add some updates to this site. I decided to get forge set up however as I have promised a few people that I will get this ready in the new year.

Right, I am off to sleep. Goodnight. 🙂

—–

Today I have started my vast flogging campaign. I have so much crap in this house that I should get rid of, I have decided to get it sold on Ebay. This inlcudes some books, games and…yes…I am selling the AIBO. The reason for this is so I can raise some money to build my studio up. Go and check out the things this address. Go on…buy something…

2003 has ended and we are now plunged into 2004. This is going to be an important year for a number of things that I care about – my career, my band and of course the free software that I use every day. This year should see the SCO madness end, the Linux desktop prosper and the charities project succeed.

We had a great new years eve. We went to the planet in Wolves and I got drunk beyond sanity. We had a great night and so many good friends were there. It was cool. The next day we played some games (Die Hard, Hitman 2) and went out for a curry that night.

Today I have started doing some writing and I have been playing with plugins with Firebird – I now have an all singing all dancing browser. Today we also had a mighty big TV delivered to our house. Oh…it is good…I *love* TV. 🙂

Right, better crack on…

—–

Got back from the great family visit today. We have spent the last few weeks rushing about meeting everyone. In this time we have visited Bedford, Leighton Buzzard, Doncaster, Richmond, Hope and more. We are now tired and Sooz is a bit ill with a cold. Alan, Jaymez and Lisa are coming up for new year and it should be fun. 🙂

After getting back and tidying the house up I have got a backup of this site done with rsync. It definitly beats my previous backup system and its pretty cool. In a few days I will start adding some new content and features to the site when I have time. The next few months are going to be mighty busy, so these updates may take a while to get finished.

Have a great new year and I will see you next year. 🙂

—–

I am a bloat machine. I am a lean, mean eating machine that has eaten his own weight in chocolate. I feel a bit queasy after all this food and yes, it is my own fault. I have enjoyed sitting in front of the TV watching the christmas The Office specials wearing chicken feet and blowing a kazoo though. Christmas is fun.

I spent some time last night being tortured by cgi-bin. I managed to squeeze a bit of time on the net and logged into angel to try and get the new wiki set up that will be used to develop the charities guide. I am playing with moinmoin as it can do a lot more than phpwiki seems to be able to do. The only problem with this is that I have not really played with Python much and it is taking a little while to get going. When it is sorted out it should be cool, but until then, cgi-bin is gonna get a kick in the happysack until it works.

I am hoping the Blender 2.3 manual should be released fairly soon. Ton said that it should be out around the end of December, and if I am right it is the end of december. I have been looking forward to this for quite some time. I am also looking forward to getting my Cannibal Corpse box set (from Sooz) and buying a set of electronic drums for the studio. I am particularly looking forward to starting back in 2004 with some new projects to get on with. Oh, and I am going to be adding some new features to the site then also, so keep ’em peeled.

Right, I am off to finish watching Eddie Izzard. 🙂
—–