OT: This year’s first Chillies
As some of you will know I’m a big fan of Chillies. Especially the hot ones and I also really enjoy growing my own too.
For this year’s crop I have decided to start them off quite a bit earlier than I have in the past. It will mean me looking after them for longer until it is warm enough for them to go out to the greenhouse but the extended growing season should help with the yields I hope. So this is a bit of an experiment and I’m going to document it for other budding chilli aficionados.
As you may recall I managed to get some seeds for the Naga Bih Jolokia at the West Dean Chilli Fiesta last summer. Today I have planted the first half of my Naga seeds and some other varieties too.
Small bag of Naga Bih Jolokia Seeds
In addition to planting earlier, I have also decided to try an alternative germination method for half of what i will grow. This method seems popular around some of the forum and – to be honest – it is a technique I used very successfully many years ago as a young man attempting to “grow his own”; if you know what I mean… The other half of the Naga seeds and other varieties I will plant in a more traditional way over the coming weeks.
This alternative technique is easy but different. Rather than dropping your seed into some potting compost in a tray or small pot, the seeds are placed on damp kitchen (or toilet) paper and put into the airing cupboard. Check regularly and keep moist until the seeds germinate (some chillies can take a month or so) and then immediately the seedlings are moved into small pots filled with compost – with a bit of the surrounding paper material- and grown on indoors on a sunny window sill until the weather is warm enough for them to be taken outside during the day into the greenhouse and brought in at night and then, once May (typically) arrives, they can stay out permanently.
Some chilli seeds hopefully about to germinate
Some chilli seeds hopefully about to germinate
Some chilli seeds hopefully about to germinate
Apart from the Naga and the Congo Trinidad varieties, all the the other seed packets were left over from last years season so I hope they will germinate OK:
- The top tray has 5 of the Naga Jolokia seeds and a half dozen of a variety called Congo Trinidad which is an extra large red habanero type and significantly larger and more ribbed than the average red habanero.
- The next tray has a few regular Habanero, a very hot and quite “fruity” chilli, and some Zimbabwe Bird Pepper which are a really small fruit but very fiery. I grew these last year and had a pretty decent crop.
- The final tray has some Habanero Scutaba, a smooth-skinned and flavourful variety of habanero that is more red in colour (normal habanero tend to be more orange), and some Nepali Orange, again a small variety that packs a real punch!
Once things start to happen I’ll drop by with another report and hopefully by mid October this year I’ll have a great crop of very hot chillies…
The Opposition to Open Source
It’s all over the web right now.
The Tories and George Osborne, Shadow Chancellor of the opposition Conservative Party and MP for Tatton, recently released a statement relating to the contents of a specially commissioned report by Dr Mark Thompson, of Judge Business School at Cambridge University. The report is being studied by the shadow chancellor as part of the Conservatives’ detailed preparations for government…
Dr Thompson said his report “shows how government could save hundreds of millions of pounds a year by creating a more open IT procurement process – including levelling the playing field for open source software”.
“It isn’t rocket science – it’s about creating a modern and efficient procurement system. Governments and companies around the world are making use of open source software, and we could achieve much more here in the UK,” he added.
But from what I have read of the coverage to date, journalists seem to have a very short-term memory. None of the pieces I read made any reference to the fact that George Osborne has been commenting on FOSS for quite some time:
From November 2006 in a speech entitled “Politics and Media In An Internet Age”:
… If the incredible development of storage capability continues at its current pace then by the year 2015 everything ever printed or broadcast in the history of the world will be available on a single iPod….
I remember when Eric Schmidt, the Chief Executive of Google explained this to me last month. He had flown over from America to speak at our Party Conference and I had taken him out to dinner with the editor of the Times and his political team…
…Another example is Linux. Linux is the open-source operating system that is the main rival to Microsoft Windows. Linux is constantly updated and improved. Yet no one owns Linux. No one is directing the improvements or updates. The code is available on-line and thousands of independent programmers make changes, fix bugs, and add new features – all for no personal gain.
I recommend reading all of that one. There is much to be lauded and many of the themes George covers are just now becoming hot-topics, especially with the change in administration in the USA. Do keep in mind that that speech was made over 2 years ago.
Also, the £600m a year savings figure has been bandied around for some time too. In this article for the Guardian On-line published in March 2007 we read:
… Looking at cost savings that have been achieved by companies and governments all over the world, it’s estimated that the UK government could reduce its annual IT bill by over £600m a year if more open source software was used as part of an effective procurement strategy. That’s enough to pay for 20,000 extra teachers or 100,000 hip operations.
For me, the most encouraging aspect of all this recent coverage is just that. Coverage. In the past few weeks, FOSS has been talked about several times on the BBC’s News website from a political perspective rather than a purely technology angle. There has also been plenty of discussion in the more mainstream tech press too but the background-noise level is definitely growing.
This can only be good for advocates of Free Software and Open Standards. You can’t really buy publicity like this.
OT: Did Karl Marx Predict The Recession?
Thanks to Clive for sending me this little gem of a snippet.
How prescient was [is?] this…
“Owners of capital will stimulate the working class to buy more and more of expensive goods, houses and technology, pushing them to take more and more expensive credits, until their debt becomes unbearable.
The unpaid debt will lead to bankruptcy of banks, which will have to be nationalised, and the State will have to take the road which will eventually lead to communism”
Karl Marx, Das Kapital, 1867
Information wants to be Free
I was pottering about on the internet today and stumbled across this site about Freedom of Information Act requests. It is a great resource and I found exactly what I was looking for. I also spotted a request that had been made to the Departement of Innovation, Universities and Skills about communication about OOXML. This was only mildly interesting, but it got me thinking. This request would have been better addressed to BSI itself rather than DIUS, but it wasn’t. The reason being that the BSI is not in scope of the Freedom of Information act, our national standards body is not considered a public authority and is not compelled to be open and transparent. This just doesn’t sound right to me, especially when I read the act itself and the schedules of bodies that are in scope. After an exchange of emails with the administrators of whatdotheyknow.com I decided that a question to my MP was in order, so off I went to http://www.writetothem.com and sent off this note.
Friday 23 January 2009
Dear Jeremy Hunt,
The British Standards Institution is a commercial company providing
documentation and professional services around standardisation. It also
acts under a Royal Charter to be the UK national standards body on
behalf of the Department of Innovation, Universities and Skills. It is
my belief that when acting on behalf of the UK as national standards
body it should be considered a public authority under the terms of the
Freedom of Information Act and listed in Schedule 1 Part VI of the act.
This would be similar to the situation of the BBC which is included “in
respect of information held for purposes other than those of
journalism, art or literature”.
Can you let me know if this omission can be corrected as openness and
transparency in the decision making processes of international
standardisation is of great importance to us all.Yours sincerely,
Alan Bell
Now I await his response.
Joomla! Hacking: Menus, Modules, Articles and Rings
I wanted to share a little Joomla! hacking I did the other day for two reasons:
- Because I think what I managed to do was pretty damn cool (someone else might think otherwise of course),
- Because I think there must be a better, less intrusive, way to do what I wanted. So I am hoping for some comments from hardcore Joomla! guys.
So, the scenario is this: A good customer of ours, ion design it a web design firm, asked me to build them a template, from scratch, for a particular client of theirs. This is something I’ve done before and will probably do again (basically, in this role, I help the artists with a fantastic eye for design make their artwork work in Joomla!). Clive, my customer, does come up with some cracking designs… Follow some of the links from his home page if you’re interested.
After being given the job, I started looking through the 5 page PDF which he submitted with the design. One page had a rather troubling menu layout…
Joomla! Menu in-the-round
After quite a bit of head scratching, this is actually what I have managed to achieve. The image is taken straight from Firefox 3 running on Ubuntu 8.10. That is Joomla! 1.5.9, the blue boxes arranged in an elipse are actually real Joomla! menu items! At this stage, the template is still being developed and doesn’t have the proper graphics but the basic physical layout and structure is there.
Each dark blue box in-the-round is a regular menu item in Joomla! that is a sub-menu of the menu shown along the top. Using the new split-menu technique in Joomla! 1.5 I am able to use seperate menu modules to display different layers of a single menu heirarchy, so that I can retain the “active” highlighting in the main menu for example.
Making the menu items appear in this ring arrangement isn’t really too hard; I just used absolute positioning of the <li> elements. Each menu item has a unique class such as <li class="item62">. It even mostly works in IE6!
However, there is a much bigger issue… On other pages of the site, the same sub-menu content needs to be displayed but with a different, more traditional, layout; as here:
Regular Vertical Menu in Joomla!
To achive this I realised there were several problems to overcome:
- The titles in the sub-menu needed to break across several lines so they wrapped consistently,
- the menu module responsible for displaying the menu had to be the same for both layouts or I would lose the active highlighting of the top menu,
- I wanted to have a single menu so it was easy for my customer or their end-user to modify and update the site,
- the ring menu really needed to be text based so it was properly indexable and accessible,
- Joomla! only allows custom CSS class or id tags to be added at the module level and not at the article level.
To fix the first problem, having line breaks (or <br /> elements) in menu items, I used an excellent plugin called yvBBCode. It enables you to insert BB Codes, such as [br] for example, anywhere in Joomla! Including in menu titles. The plugin then converts these BB codes to XHTML codes on the fly.
In the end, the solution for the menu layout itself was fairly straightforward, but required a minor hack to the Joomla! core (you can’t use the override facility here) and a small eval script on the template’s index.php page.
I added a custom radio list parameter (ring_menu) to the article.xml file in administrator/components/com_content/models/article.xml:
<params group="advanced">
<!-- Added by Alan Lord. 22/01/09 -->
<param name="ring_menu" type="list" default="vertical" label="Menu Style" description="Chose a normal or ring style menu layout">
<option value="vertical">Vertical</option>
<option value="ring_menu">Ring Menu</option>
</param>
<!-- End modification -->
On the particular article where I wanted the menu displayed “in-the-round” I set this radio list param to “Ring Menu”. The option is shown in the Article Advanced Parameters accordion (the default setting is “vertical” BTW). You can see how the custom parameter is displayed here. Note the first item in the Parameters (Advanced) menu on this screenshot.
Custom Article Parameter
Now we have a parameter to play with, in the template’s index.php file in the <head> area, I can read this value into a php variable ($class).
// This loads a custom article parameter "Ring Menu". The custom parameter is defined in
// administrator/components/com_content/models/article.xml. It defaults to Vertical, the other
// option currently is "Ring Menu".
// We can read this parameter and apply a different style to a module based on the page
$params = &JComponentHelper::getParams( 'com_content' );
$class = $params->get('ring_menu');
Further down the script, where the menu module itself is loaded, the $class variable is echoed into the surrounding div. Thus, when the particular article in question is loaded, the container div for the menu changes from <div id="sub-menu" class="vertical"> to <div id="sub-menu" class="ring-menu">. So my stylesheet can now do its magic and render the sub-menu, or any module for that matter, in the manner which I choose.
I hope this is useful to some and I would really love to know if there is a way to achieve the same result (i.e. adding a style class based on the article being viewed) without needing to hack the Joomla! core. I’m sure there probably is…
The Economics of Free: For Free
Remember the short piece I posted about the Radio 4 programme “In Business” a couple of weeks ago? Well, very kindly, the programme’s editor has provided me with a transcript of programme to
please use as you wish, but it has not been checked for accuracy. Good luck.
I have just read and listened again and didn’t find anything glaring although I did fix one rather amusing typo: “Linux Colonel” to “Linux Kernel”. It was sent to me as a Microsoft .doc file. I opened it in OpenOffice.org and exported it as a PDF so it should be readable by virtually everyone.
This programme does provide some excellent answers to the types of questions we repeatedly get asked in our day-to-day business:
- “How do they/you make money from Open Source”
- “Why should you/they give it away?”
So for those of you who get asked these sorts of questions and would like some non-technobable answers from a rather reputable source to use, the transcript can be downloaded in it’s entirety, for free, from our website here. On that page, there is also a link to the BBC’s permanent archive so the podcast can be retrieved too. As an interesting titbit, in his email with me, the editor said that about 600k people download the programme every month!
And just to whet your appetite, here is quite a nice quote from Chris Anderson – the editor of Wired…
… Microsoft’s financial success is about taking a product whose underlying economics are zero, the marginal costs of reproducing software is zero, and charging $300 for it. You know incredible net profit margins. Unfortunately, economics always wins. People recognised that the underlying economics of distributing software were zero and so they were like okay, so Microsoft is getting monopoly profits because they are in fact a monopoly. What we need to do is break the monopoly. Not, as it turns out, by regulation and regulator, but instead the marketplace broke the monopoly.
If you are involved in any way with the promotion of FOSS and/or CC then this really is well worth listening too and or reading,
And although the editor didn’t provide any specific license conditions with the document, I plan to repsect the BBC’s copyright, and provide suitable attribution when and where we use snippets etc; something like this http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/uk/ perhaps.
