Towersey 2010

I'm late posting about our trip to the the 2010 Towersey Village Festival.  Here's the things for the memory banks:

• The children's story teller Tony Wilson was great
• Met Pete Coe who said that he was trying to get a CD out for Christmas with all the kids songs that he did in the 2009 Towersey kids-club.  Must keep an eye out for that for presents
• I've been inspired to try to play the guitar in open C tuning of C-G-C-G-C-D

Running Python 2.7 on Debian

Here are some quick notes about how I got Python 2.7 running on Debian.  The pointers come from the Python NW Google Group and the Debian documentation.

(1) Set up the apt/sources.list file as follows:

deb http://ftp.uk.debian.org/debian/ unstable main contrib non-free
deb http://ftp.uk.debian.org/debian/ experimental main contrib non-free
deb http://security.debian.org/ testing/updates main contrib


(2) Run aptitude and do an upgrade to refresh the package lists
(3)  I had 45 packages to update so I installed them all
(4) That left me with python 2.6 installed
(5) Searched in aptitude for python 2.7.  Marked it for installation
(6) Aptitude seemed to nicely manage all the dependencies.


With the above complete 'python --version' reports 2.6 and 'python2.7 --version' reports 2.7.

I'll keep the virtual box snapshot of the previous version about for a while just in case.

Multiplication Game they will Play

At last, a mathematics multiplication learning game that the boys will actually play.  Damult Dice from the Maths for Love blog.

Fixing the 'Sent Mail' Boxes

The wife now sends mail from Thunderbird, the iphone natively, from the iphone safari browser google application and the full google website.  When she does this the 'sent' mail ends up scattered all over.  Here's how I fixed it so that all the sent mail went to the same place:

1. First of all I went onto the gmail website, found all the sent-like folder and amalgamated them all into one. I had
• [imap]/Sent
• [INBOX]/Sent
• [INBOX]/Sent Items
• [INBOX]/sent-mail
2. Sent a test mail from each location to find out where it went
• The full google website went to the correct google sent folder, unsurprisingly!
• Thunderbird went to the google sent folder and to [imap]/Sent.  I changed this to [Google Mail]/Sent Mail, which fixed the problem of the duplicate
• The iphone native app put sent in just the google folder
• The iphone google app also put the email in the google folder
3. Check that all the clients look at the correct place to find the sent mail
• The google full and iphone apps saw the sent mail correctly
• The iphone native app was getting confusing with the old sent-like labels.  I deleted the labels in gmail and then it all made much more sense
• Thunderbird didn't really have a good solution.  The 'Sent Mail' was under the [Google Mail] folder in the tree which was a little confusing

Camping in Wales

Last weekend we had a great time camping at the Llyn Gwynant campsite.  It had nice fields roped off from cars, we could hire canoes to go on the lake, and best of all they allow open fires.  The wife and kids had a great time doing experimental cooking.

On the second day we had a very nice, and kid friendly walk up to Llyn Idwal.  Finally on the way back we stopped off at Penrhyn Castle.

Iphone and HTML5 Canvas

My father-in-law wants a program to mess about with the Mandelbrot set. Ideally this should work in a browser from the iphone. I'm thinking this would be a good little project to try out using the HTML5 canvas element. Any one know how well HTML5 canvas is supported on the iphone Safari browser?

#1 Son at the Opera House

Waiting nervously for #1 son to appear in a show at the Manchester Opera House. He's doing a medley of songs from the Lion King after a week of drama school.