Schnipp-schnapp-schnurre-basselurre (Georgette Heyer and Chick Lit)

Posted on May 17, 2012 by rukaya

“Can’t make the woman out at all, myself. Know what she said to me this morning? Asked me if I’d slept well, and when I told here that it beat me how anyone could sleep at all, with a dashed lot of cockerels crowing their heads off, she said that rural sounds exhilarate the spirit, and do something or other to languid nature!”

“Cowper,” said Kitty, in a depressed tone. “‘Restore the tone of languid nature.’”

“Well, it’s a bag of moonshine!” said Freddy. “What’s more, I always thought so! … It’s my belief, Kit, the woman’s touched in her upper works.”

“No, she is merely addicted to poetry,” explained Kitty.

“Well, that just shows you!” said Mr Standen, reasonably.

Oh Freddy! For you I’d give up my favourite most comfortable pair of pyjamas with the holes in and wear nothing but the most uncomfortably and beautifully tailored clothes forever. Continue reading →

A suffusion of yellow

Posted on May 8, 2012 by rukaya

So if there is a God, I think that maybe He doesn’t want me to go to Peru. I’ve learnt some important lessons along the way though:

Don’t imagine that just because you’ve been having an incredibly shit time that you deserve a holiday. The universe will soon disabuse you of this idea.
Don’t lose your passport
If it’s lost, don’t try and then get an emergency passport
If you try getting the emergency passport, don’t forget to ring up before hand to ask what you need so you don’t have to spend ages queueing at the police station in the city before they tell you that you need to report it at your local police station Continue reading →

Alters when it alteration finds

Posted on April 11, 2012 by rukaya

Oh sorrow! Oh woe!! T’ have seen what I have seen, see what I see!

Talk what you please of future spring
And sun-warm’d sweet to-morrow:–
Stripp’d bare of hope and everything,
No more to laugh, no more to sing,
I sit alone with sorrow.

I like to imagine dogs howling mournfully at this point, and big black thunderclouds with lashings of rain.

Strikes my soul with wild alarm

Posted on March 30, 2012 by rukaya

I saw the original of this once in London at a Millais exhibition, it absolutely took my breath away. It’s one of the most beautiful and detailed things I’ve ever seen, it glows so much it feels realler than real, if you know what I mean. I occasionally think about it and always thought it was the Lady of Shalott, even though she was looking out the window. I just looked it up and it’s actually supposed to be Mariana, from Tennyson’s poem. Which actually, I love, so that’s quite a revelation. It’s so cool how you can look at a painting like this, or read a poem, and … and… It’s like the most amazing music sweeping you up and carrying you away in its strong manly muscly sexy arms, it’s like:

Sweet sounds, oh, beautiful music, do not cease!
Reject me not into the world again.
With you alone is excellence and peace,
Mankind made plausible, his purpose plain.
Enchanted in your air benign and shrewd,
With limbs a-sprawl and empty faces pale,
The spiteful and the stingy and the rude
Sleep like the scullions in the fairy-tale.
This moment is the best the world can give:
The tranquil blossom on the tortured stem.
Reject me not, sweet sounds; oh, let me live,
Till Doom espy my towers and scatter them,
A city spell-bound under the aging sun.
Music my rampart, and my only one.

Python on windows 7 with Vim

Posted on March 28, 2012 by rukaya

Download and install Vim
Download this Vim script and put it in your <vim>/plugin http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=127
Download python syntax highlighting for Vim and put it in <vim>/syntax http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=790 (you could also look at http://code.google.com/p/vimcolorschemetest/)
Download and install python 3.2 from here http://python.org/getit/releases/3.2.2/
Under control panel > system click Edit environment variables and environment variables, and either edit the system path variable or add a new path variable for your user. Variable name is ‘Path’, and put in your Vim path and your python path separated by a semicolon, like this : “C:\Python32;C:\Program Files (x86)\Vim\vim73″
Edit runscript.vim (downloaded in 2) and open it in notepad to edit line 40 to “let s:PathToExecutable = ‘python’” and line 44 to let s:mainfile = bufname(‘%’). I’m not sure why the last one is needed but it seems to be!
Run cmd and type ‘vim helloworld.py’. Go into insert mode by pressing i, type ‘print(‘helloworld’)', press esc and save the file by typing ‘:w’.
Hit F9 to bring up the output buffer and F12 to run your program!

You know what fucking rocks?

Posted on March 28, 2012 by rukaya

Fencing fucking rocks. And it’s funny because it feels like chess, only harder and faster obviously. But you work out what works against your opponent and then you do feints and you try and get them to commit to lunge to get to an opening… It’s just that chess is easier because it’s more brain work and my wrists are WEAK. We need a lot more pushups and yoga and clay wedging and surfing there then.

Fighting with Vim

Posted on February 15, 2012 by rukaya

So, the whole point of Vim is that it’s supposed to be easy and require as few keystrokes as possible to make stuff happen, right? Well, isn’t it odd that simply saving your work requires double the number of keystrokes that it does in notepad++ or whatever text editor? The nervous tic, the repetitive twitch of the fingers to ctrl+s every few minutes whenever you stop to look over what you’ve typed is universal. So shift + ; and then w and then enter, vs ctrl+s? What’s with that! Weiiiiiiird.

Anyway, here’s a tutorial on how to do a quick key map for ctrl+s http://vim.wikia.com/wiki/Map_Ctrl-S_to_save_current_or_new_files

Complex workflows and multiple authors for Drupal nodes

Posted on February 3, 2012 by rukaya

A very common scenario: You have several users with different specialities who need to write nodes for your website. You have their colleagues who want to be able to comment on whatever they have written. Their supervisors wish to be able to look over their work before it gets passed through to your dedicated web editor/publisher. Individual users want their own task managers with only the pages related to them (in their capacity as author, viewer or approver), and their current tasks listed.

Oddly enough, this seems to be rather difficult to achieve with Drupal. There’s a Workflow module which lets you do something similar with user roles, but associating individual users with individual nodes is not something that’s intuitive using Drupal. Continue reading →

Top 10 reasons to hate top 10 lists

Posted on January 26, 2012 by rukaya

They are everywhere and they are annoying. Surely? Surely someone else is annoyed by them? Ahhh lovely internet, 5,140 hits for “top 10 lists suck”.
It’s depressing that humanity’s attention span is now so short that most article writers seem to have to bribe people with the promise of there only being 10 sentences for them to have to read. So much brevity in their writing makes it, well, even more tasteless and trite than normal.
It’s destroying the sexiness of numbers. And numbered lists. <ol> is nearly ruined for me.
They’re nearly always subjective opinions given as the gospel truth, and goodness knows how many impressionable young minds there are out there scurrying around clicking on them. Think of the children, people!
I usually get bored at number 5. This is sad because I only ever bother reading them when I’m bored in the hope that they’ll make me slightly less bored. It’s a sort of sadistic spiral of brief optimism, even briefer interest, a flare of irritation, a moment of distraction where I try to count the typos, and then I sink into an even deeper pit of boredom.
Based on this I’m going to guess that most people don’t bother reading any further than 6.
What do you think it is about cats that makes them like to sit in flower pots?
Yeah, she’s got the right idea. Find your flowerpot, sit in it, and then don’t move for anyone, that’s my advice to all you avid readers of top 10 lists dissing top 10 lists. And no, there isn’t actually going to be a #10.

The evolution of the painted cat

Posted on January 3, 2012 by brendan

To paint a cat, you can’t just reproduce its image – for some reason ceramic seems to lack the gravitas of paper. You try to paint a cat realistically and you get something offensive to cats – a generic image that says ‘painted cat’. To paint a cat on ceramics, then, and not insult all felinity, you have to capture its essence. And the essence of a cat is personality.

More prosaically, the other thing to keep in mind when painting a cat on a bowl or a plate or any ceramic item is proportion. It has to really claim the space (if it’s an open surface) or compliment the form (if it’s a closed or cylindrical surface). Because every painted mark is permanent, it’s quite easy to get this part wrong!

Otherwise, all you need is a paintbrush, some oxide or underglaze and a fondness for cats.

Here is where there should be a photo gallery of painted cats, showing a range of more- and less-successful efforts. But all I have to offer are the following two images:

This cat knows how to pose for a photograph, but the photographer has left a lot of white space…

Also, the glaze is too thin, so the end result is a bit watered-down looking. Will have to have another go at this one. It needs to be bolder and the blue needs to be richer to do justice to this noble looking specimen (he looks just like Vladimir Nabokov’s father – I refer only to his expression, of course!).

I like this bowl quite a lot. This cat has found a comfortable spot to curl up, and is trying her best to be inconspicuous, but those stripes are pretty strong! I bet she’s a great mouser.