Ciaran’s Random Writings

This is fun in a strange kind of way (it kept me amused for 5 minutes) - Wikipedia Vision is a mashup of Google Maps and Wikipedia’s recent changes RSS feed, using an IP address lookup as the link between the two. Presumably only anonymous edits are shown, because registered user’s IP addresses are not available, and I should think other caveats apply too. There is an FAQ* which I didn’t read because I was too busy staring at the map. Read it if you like, I’m off to bed.

I spotted this via Brady Forrest’s post - by all means follow the chain of ‘who saw it first’ back from there if that kind of thing floats your boat.

*It’s “an FAQ” because I say the letters. Does anyone pronounce the acronym? I don’t say “arse feed” either, though I might start now I’ve thought of it.

I’m over the moon many different ways about the new Radiohead album. You’d have to have been living on the moon to miss the story, but just in case you have, it can be summarised like this: You buy and download the album direct from Radiohead’s web site, and name your own price. That can even be £0 if you like.

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It only occurred to me just now that in August I passed the milestone marking 20 years as a professional software developer. I suppose it’s not surprising that the anniversary came and went without me realising, since the large cake and case of fine wine that any reasonable person would expect didn’t materialise. Perhaps they’re being saved for the 25 year milestone.

On one hand, I’m inclined to say that no cake and no fine wine means no speech, but on the other, I say you’re not getting out of it that easily, so listen up while I pontificate uninsightfully and at great length.

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Announcing Planet Ciaran, the place for those who don’t want to read what I’ve been writing, but might consider reading what I’ve been reading. Or something like that.

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I’ve moaned about Dell at least once on here before and in real life I do it quite a lot, so it’s only fair to redress the balance when things go the other way.

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Noah Slater has been very busy upgrading the CouchDB build system and the changes have been merged to the trunk version tonight, so it’s time to update my test box build scripts. This lot replaces the earlier stuff found here

sudo apt-get install libicu36 libicu36-dev libreadline5-dev
sudo apt-get install subversion-tools xsltproc automake libtool
svn -r 305 co http://couchdb.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/ couchdb
cd couchdb
./bootstrap
./configure --with-erlang=/usr/local/lib/erlang
make
sudo make install

Starting up CouchDB is now more straightforward:

couchdb