Rick Hurst Full-Stack Developer in Bristol, UK

Blog

  • Another Plone skillswap

    I have volunteered to give another Plone related skillswap at the Watershed in Bristol (UK), on 16th January. The previous one (a general plone demo) went down well, and this time I am going to cover the basics of skinning a plone site, from basic Through The Web (TTW) customisation, to creating an installable skin product. I think it will be streamed live – check here for details. If you are in the Bristol area come along (it’s free)!

    I am going to rig up a device that gives me an electric shock every time I say the word “umm..”, to train me up abit better for this public speaking lark..

    archived comments

    Volunteering to promote opensource web applications is good work and should be appreciated.

    Also regarding

    “I am going to rig up a device that gives me an electric shock every time I say the word “umm..”, to train me up abit better for this public speaking lark.. “

    Find a Toastmasters club near you , (Bristol Toastmasters club) to improve your public speaking.

    Web developers 2007-01-10 10:52:39

    “I am going to rig up a device that gives me an electric shock every time I say the word “um..””, to train me up a bit better for this public speaking lark.. “

    Interesting but a bit drastic. There was a guy who tried something like that with a wrist watch back in the 60’s. He wanted a little shock, not much more than a watch battery back then would provide. He woke up dead or didn’t wake up as the case may be.

    There are better ways to reprogram the brain. Some will even argue that you can use the and-uhs to sound natural. The best is to just slow down, have a pause to allow what you said to sink in, and let the thoughts flow.

    Best wishes and how ever you may fare, may you fare well.

    Jonathan

    Jonathan Steele, RN 2007-01-10 12:03:32

    Hi Rick

    Can you advise on a Toastmaster’s club in Bristol please?

    Thanks.

    Kind regards
    Meera

    meera kumar 2007-02-07 12:27:32

  • stick a fork in me – i’m done



    it’s the start of day three of plone conference 2006 and I am stuffed with both plone knowlege and lovely delicious fatty food. This hasn’t been as debauched as previous conferences (for the netsight contingent at least) as the jet lag has made us flake out in the evening before we manage to to do any serious damage to our livers.

    Last night we took a cab up to a mall to try to procure some cheap consumer electronics – the cab ride there and back was an experience in itself – the first driver hadn’t got a clue where he was going and was asking for directions from us, while mysteriously changing lanes and indicating for no reason – the driver on the way back thought he was in Gran Turismo or something.

  • plone conference 2006 seattle

    space needle

    i’m two days into plone conference 2006 and it has all been a bit of a whirlwind so far. I’m eight hours behind UK time and travelled 26 hours to get here after missing our connecting flight in houston, thanks to some helpful individual at passport control who wouldn’t let us jump the queue.

    so far we haven’t ventured much further than three or four blocks away from the venue, but luckily there are ample bars and restaurants close by. The hotel has good wifi, the conference venue wifi has been intermittent but seems to be improving. I’ve been too busy to blog much, but I have uploaded one or two photos to flicker.

    The conference itself has been interesting and the keynote this morning has given me a clearer understanding of where plone is at the moment and where it is going. I was also pleased to note that I am not alone in having trouble with migrations between version and at least it is a recognised issue and much thought and effort is going into a solution, and that solution involves being able to dump a sites content into an intermediate format that can be used to populate a new site, thus giving me a way to get my content where I can see it, rather than hidden in zodb/zexp voodoo.

  • Plone conference 2006

    plone conference 2006 logo

    At the end of October, myself and two other Netsight Plonistas will be off to Plone Conference 2006 in Seattle [Broken Link Removed]. Looking forward to meeting up with some plone gurus over a beer or several.

    archived comments

    Bah. I’ll be in London at the GNU/Linux expo.mattl 2006-09-22 10:17:02

  • JSON – JavaScript Object Notation

    Another abbreviation(?)/buzzword that i’ve been hearing for months but I have only just understood what it is. From All in the Head (Drew Mclellan’s blog):-

    if you’re not familiar, JavaScript Object Notation is a method of describing data structures such as arrays and objects and their contents in plain text. On receiving a chunk of JSON you can eval() it to recreate the data structure within your script

    Read more about JSON here

  • Netsight Plone demo as first Bristol Skillswap

    Rick Hurst Plone demo bristol

    many moons ago, back in february myself and Matt Hamilton of Netsight did a plone demo at the watershed media centre in Bristol. This was the first in a series of “SkillSwaps” as part of the Bristol branch of SkillSwap based in Brighton. I’ve only just got round to blogging about it now due to my blogging hiatus!

    The video feed is online here (note that this link skips forward a few chapters to where I actually start talking – before that is several minutes of people arriving and introductions etc).

  • Plone snow sprint 2006

    plone snow sprint 2006 official hat

    I’m a couple of days into the Plone snow sprint 2006. Before we arrived at the sprint location, the netsight contingent took a couple of days snowboarding. After half a day of falling on my backside, I just about have basic control of the board now, at least I can carve down the slope quite comfortably if the run is wide enough – there were a few hairy moments on a narrow forest road where I couldn’t quite make the turns quick enough and wiped out at least one skier (luckily I don’t speak enough German to understand what they were shouting at me!). I’d definitely like to snowboard again, though it is an expensive hobby.

    We then attended the opening party for the newly formed lovely systems in Dornbirn. Free bar, Live band, games involving hammers, ’nuff said.

    I’ll be working on a few plone multimedia projects during the sprint. Myself and Tom Lazaar [Broken link removed] will be trying to sort out some kind of solution for blogging in plone. Currently we are examining the available options to see whether we are better off cherrypicking the best features from each and putting the together into something new, to “finish” one the existing ones off, or whether to work on a set of adapters (xml-rpc, trackback) and products to enable plone itself to be used as a blog application (using, say, news items instead of blog entries, and having a customisation policy to set a plone instance up as a blog).

    I will also hopefully be working (or at least shadowing someone else working on) a flash media player (a bit like google video thing), including server-side video transcoding. This should be useful for the online skate zine i’m working on!

    Hopefully I can also finish off what I started for ATAudio, tidying up the templates ready for a release, using so called “five views”.

  • not the best weather for skateboarding

    puddle in hotwells

    which is why I walked to work today.

  • windows xp display upside down

    If you are reading this upside down then chances are you are looking for information on how to get your display to appear the right way up. I had this problem the other day when one of my cats was wandering around on my laptop keyboard, and suddenly the display was upside down.

    This won’t work for all displays as it is driver dependent, but CTRL – ALT and either the up or down arrows flips the display over on mine.

    archived comments

    Thanks for this, this simple advice has just saved the life of a colleague who was at the point of despair!

    Linda 2006-11-17 16:32:42

    Great advice so thanks a lot. Do you know how difficult it is trying to access the web upside down? Very. Saved my life.

    paul 2006-12-17 22:11:04

    Thank you sooooo much!!!

    christine camilleri 2007-03-02 20:34:10

    I wasn’t looking at the display while typing, so I had absolutely no idea how/when it flipped… yours was the first google hit when I searched for the problem. Thanks for saving me a bunch of time.

    Dan 2007-03-09 03:26:23

    Fantastic! I was about to pull my hair out (or that of my 6 year old daughter who caused the problem!) but this solved it immediately.

    Neil 2007-03-15 16:26:10

    When I saw my 17months old baby in front of my notebook with the display upside down, I thought my life was over! Your simple advice saved me. Thank you soooooo.. much!!!

    Abigail 2008-03-30 07:43:41

    Cool stuff!
    Do you know if there’s also a way to flip the display upside down in OSX 10.5 on a Macbook Pro?
    Thanx!

    Flipmo 2009-08-22 12:44:42

  • plastered

    I’m sitting here with my arm in plaster. some people are being sympathetic, most aren’t. after all, I am too old to skate