Abi has recently decided that she wants a boat

Abi: Can you give me some money?

Me: How much do you need?

Abi: Mummy, how much do we need?

Mummy: £20,000

Abi: Yes (looking at me)

Me: Sorry I haven't got that much

(Drawn on the computer with a stylus)

I seem to have started more books than I can read at the moment, currently I've got the following on the go:

• The Bible - Both NIV and ESV (currently reading through Exodus, and dipping into 1 and 2 Peter)

• Know and Tell the Gospel - John Chapman

• Effective Men's Ministry - NCMM

• 15 Minutes Alone with God for Men - Bob Barnes

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I created the twitter feed based on a JSON feed of the geographic location of the minibus provided by my colleague. I then compare the coordinates of the minibus with a set of bounding boxes stored in a database. If the bus is within squares defined in the database, then the pre-defined description is sent to twitter so that anyone following the bus can receive updates as to where it is.

The current set of boxes are the bus stops on route and the car park back on site.

One possible future enhancements could be to allow you to subscribe to a particular bus stop and receive a twitter direct message so that you know when the bus arrives at that particular bus stop.

Links:

• Hursley Minibus on Twitter

• Digital Planet podcast (minibus mentioned at 21:37)

• From Spitfires to sensors - BBC News article on Hursley

lvextend -L +2G /dev/basevg/var_lib_mysql

Add 2GB to the logical volume var_lib_mysql in basevg

resize2fs /dev/basevg/var_lib_mysql

Resize the filesystem /dev/basevg/var_lib_mysql

Other useful commands:

vgs

list volume groups

lvs

list logical volumes

du -m | sort -nr | head

du -m

summarises disk usage from current path recursively (in megabytes)

sort -nr sorts the output numerically in reverse

head restricts output to the top 10 lines

adapted from Linux Reviews

I've been playing about with Portable Ubuntu for Windows, as a replacement for my secondary machine at work, and customised the system a bit for my liking. This is going to be a working post for me to add notes on what I've changed so that I can find it again! Initially I was planning to build my own image based on Cooperative Linux, but decided that as Portable Ubuntu for Windows had most things configured it made a better starting point.

Moving the notification popups

The default notification position is bottom right, which was appearing below the windows task bar - so I wanted to move them

• Open up gconf-editor

• Go to apps, notification-daemon

• Edit popup_location to suit your setup - I'm currently trying top_right

After quite a while of not being able to print from our laptop to the shared printer on our XP desktop, I finally got it working last night thanks to my Dad.

Here's the instructions:

Make sure you can see the XP computer from Vista.

If you can't:

• make sure the workgroup is the same (as the defaults are different)

  In Vista, go to Computer, System Properties

• make sure file and print sharing is allowed through the firewall - in our case we had to reset the firewall rules on our XP machine and re-add the ones we wanted for this to work:

  • Go into Control Panel, Network and Internet Connections, Windows Firewall

  • On the Advanced tab, click Restore Defaults

  • On the Exceptions tab, make sure that File and Print Sharing is ticked

Adding the printer:

• Go to Control Panel, Printers

• Select "Add a printer" from the bar at the top

• Select "Local Printer" (yes I know it's strange)

• Select "Add a new port" and choose "Local port" from the list

• Enter path to printer e.g. \computerprinter
  

(you can find the printer name from Printers in Windows XP - right click on the printer and choose sharing)

Last weekend we went up to the O2 arena for the Strictly Come Dancing Tour and we had a fantastic day. Getting up there went really smoothly - the roads were clear and the views of the snow on the surrounding countryside was amazing. We got up there at about 11 o'clock and thought that we'd beat the rush and head straight to Nando's for lunch - annoyingly they didn't open till 12 so we headed back to Starbucks for coffee and a snack to give us energy for the hour before we could eat! We then explored the 'Entertainment Avenue' and headed back to Nando's for lunch. We got in there first and were glad of that as we saw how big the queue was once we'd got our food.

After lunch we were originally thinking of going round the outside of the O2 to see the Thames and the other side of the building, but then we noticed that the O2 lounge was open and went to find out what it was. They let us in and we could then relax on comfortable chairs and sip cocktails until it was time to go into the arena.

As we'd been in the O2 lounge, When we headed into the arena we could just get the lift straight up from there instead of having to queue to get in at the main entrance.

The show itself was brilliant and the atmosphere was fantastic. It was great to see the dances that we'd seen on the television series live and there was a good balance of the familiar dances and new ones, with the different pairings that they had for the tour. I was also impressed with how they'd mapped the tv series into a live show so smoothly. There were 2 halves to the show with a 20 minute interval in between - the first half each couple did a ballroom dance, and the second half they each did a Latin dance. All the judges were there as well providing their comments and their scoring (although the winners were chosen just on the audience vote).

At the end of the first half, the lines opened to vote by text message for your favourite couple and at that point, I was undecided between Jodie and Ian's Foxtrot and Rachel and Vincent's Tango so I decided to wait until the second half to vote. In the interval we were able to go back down to the O2 Lounge, which was brilliant as it meant there was no waiting in queues, although it took us a while to get down there. In the second half, my favourite dance in the competition was Jill and Darrens' Jive - which was so much better live than on television and they pulled in their 40 points again from the judges.

After the competition, there was a group dance with everybody in starting off with giant feathery wings which looked amazing and they really filled the massive dance floor between them. Following that Kristina and Matthew did a fantastic show dance - it was amazing how fast they move and how well they went together.