Saturday, January 21, 2012

Annie

Alex's first musical today. I'd bought B tickets to Annie as her Christmas present. No desire at all to see it myself but as she has attended so many orchestral concerts on my behalf I really can't complain.

We caught the train down to Central and crossed under spitting skies into Belmore Park, filled with stalls and lanterns celebrating Chinese New Year. Alex was perched upon my shoulders holding the umbrella.

Entering Market City in search of lunch we encountered an acrobatic lion dance, jumping between the tops of tall and narrow poles. The food court range in Market City is now quite disappointing. At least you can buy cendol with sugar syrup rather than the usual palm sugar.

Alex was happy to catch the light rail down to the casino and Lyric theatre. Though he has had no exposure to the music of Annie before he has recently been watching a lot of Playschool episodes featuring music and shows. His greatest fascination with the production was the mechanics of changing the fantastic sets followed by joining in with the applause at the end of the songs. He fell asleep midway through the first act.

Halfway through the second act he began to get a bit antsy and so did I. It was difficult to fault the quality of the production, though Alan Jones really couldn't keep up his american accent as Roosevelt. I feel a bit bad that any of my money went towards the right wing radio jock, but I couldn't begrudge his seemingly genuine enjoyment. Julie Goodwin was a standout as Grace with a powerful and clear voice. It's just the story which was rather boring, along with a lack of standout music.

Frankly, if I heard a guy saying and doing some of the things that Mr Warbucks did, then I'd want to have them investigated as a potential sexual predator...

A very packed tram carried us back to Paddy's Markets where we purchased some fruit and vegetables for tomorrow's Chinese New Year lunch. Though it was a little early we had dinner at an Uiyghur restaurant. All of us enjoyed the flavoursome carrot and lamb pilaf and the succulent and tender chunks of lamb, though the thick bread was better at the other Uiyghur restaurant next door.

There are a couple of new Malaysian restaurants in the area: Mo-mo Teh and Nyonya. The latter had quite a queue, but we didn't like its parent Ginger and Spice at all. As we walked back we spotted another huge queue outside Mamak. It may be trendy, but I found I got much better Milo ais and roti canai for less than $2 at the rundown shed behind the Parkroyal Hotel in Kuala Lumpur. Silly trendies.

Alex had seen others eat ice creams at Annie and I had promised him one, so we popped down to McDonalds for a 50c softserve cone. He was so happy after that, walking the whole way back up to Belmore Park, where the festival was in full swing. We spent the last of the notes in our wallets on a ticket for him on the bungy trampoline. He loved bouncing high up, though he needed a bit of assistance from the operator. Forget Annie, I think that was his highlight of the day!

Friday, December 30, 2011

Haircuts and smiley faces

Alex had his very first haircut today. He's lasted over three years without one.

Earlier on we were in Bunnings where he had his face painted. When asked what he wanted he said "A smiley face."

"Anything else?"

"No, just a smiley face."


Thursday, December 15, 2011

XSS've coding

I had to rewrite one of my web applications yesterday to resolve a potential cross site scripting (XSS) issue. It was an interesting learning exercise, though ultimately the required changes were minimal. The Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) wiki proved to be a valuable resource.

Wednesday, December 07, 2011

No fun Microsoft

I had a lot of fun creating allrite@. There is something about learning and experimenting with a new programming language (Python) in Linux. As I trawled the web for instructions and tips there was a sense of participating in an enthusiastic group who took pleasure in contributing their knowledge to the greater community.

I never feel the same way about the Microsoft programming community. There is still a lot of enthusiasm, but it's a kind of bulldog enthusiasm, charging in and saying Microsoft is the way, the only way and get the f!@# out of my way. You want standards and interoperability? We've got our standards and interoperability between our own products: you don't need anything else.

Want some extra functionality? Somebody has a product/plugin for that. Now hand over your credit card details...

Microsoft's programming languages and tools may have a lot going for them and I certainly use their products on a daily basis. But it's not fun.

Friday, November 04, 2011

Announcing allrite@

Yesterday I released my latest website, allrite@, my new online travel journal. 

This was my first project written using Django, a python web framework. I haven't had time to do much programming lately, but I found Django's built in functionality, including sophisticated admin screens, to be a real time saver. I'm calling the journal platform Tatami (or maybe t@tami) after the Japanese straw matting that is a feature of their houses and ryokans. Plus it sounds like "ta ta me"!

Development was done on a $250 netbook running Ubuntu. It was such a pleasure using Linux again after being stuck in Windows land for so long.

Getting the system running on the Webfaction host was a bit of a pain. Somehow, through brute force mainly, I got it operational by yesterday morning.

I managed to add features such as an RSS feed, comments, image uploads, WYWSIWYG editor, nice urls and more. Planned features that I ran out of time to add include searching, faceted search using tags such as location and transport options (I had url issues with these), a better wider header image and improved layout and styling.

The reason I couldn't complete everything before initial release was because I was up against a very fixed deadline. My latest trip, a 10th anniversary holiday in Europe, started yesterday and I haven't brought the Linux netbook with me!

IYou can read about it at allrite@...

Monday, October 03, 2011

Our garden visitor

Look what we found leaving a trail of disturbed woodchips in our front garden.


Sunday, September 04, 2011

iView, therefor iCan't

I'm not certain that my desire for my son to be able to watch ABC television content on the iPad was such a good idea. Last month he used up our 25GB download limit watching ABC for Kids content using the ABC iView application on the iPad. For the last few days of the month we were limited to 64 Kb/s. Time to get some local copies of his favourite programs or do other activities not involving tablet computers.