stuart's blog

Chris has finally moved over now; she arrived late last week, and now both us and the cats are living in a small apartment in Toronto, immediately below an insomniac elephant in hob-nailed boots. Well, that's what it sounds like at 4am. Anyway, the webcam is offline because Chris needs the laptop that was running it, and the camera is pretty bad anyway - I'll need to start sorting out a webcam to run the thing, but ordering one here in Canada is not great due to Amazon's (in amazon.com) policy of now allowing their Marketplace to ship to Canada, even when the individual shop says that it can ship here. And amazon.ca doesn't seem to have an electronics section, so getting a used digital camera here is far from easy. Sounds like an Ebay task to me.

Anyway, that's why the webcam is down for now. We need to think of a way of getting a better system set up, and when our things arrive from the UK properly, including Chris's original computer, the SerengetiCam will be back on line.

It's springtime in Toronto, the snow has almost completely melted, and the squirrels are out in force! Wherever you go round here, you are likely to see gangs of squirrels hanging out, intimidating you with particularly large nuts. They're big, they're furry, and they're out in force! Watch out for your nuts.

Where I come from, most squirrels were small and grey, although these are the North American imports. In Aberdeen, where I used to live, there were still a good number of the native red squirrels around - not to be confused with American red squirrels, European ones are generally exceedingly cute and very playful. Here in Toronto, most squirrels are black, a phase of the grey squirrel colouring that you don't get in the UK. They do have black squirrels in Eastern Russia, but by all accounts they are far from cute (see: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/4489792.stm). Scottish squirrels are generally a tame bunch - they don't go around with St. Andrews crosses painted on their faces attacking English squirrels (perhaps they should!). Your nuts will be safe in Scotland.

Anyway, we have black squirrels here, and most every morning they are playing around outside the windows, climbing the trees and the wires, generally doing squirrely things, and eating nuts.

Unfortunately for the squirrels, we have cats. For squirrel-lovers, these are indoor cats, so there is no risk of finding Mungo with a large and bushy tail in his mouth. In practice - Mungo is a bit of a wuss in the catching small animals stakes. Although he has anger management issues, and is quite able to attack both people and cats, he is not so good at small things. Mungo's entire lifetime score so far consists of two small birds, about five mice, and a number of earthworms. Mungo likes earthworms, and has been observed hitting the ground with his paws, in an apparent attempt to bring them to the surface, so he could bring them into the kitchen and bite them in half. He seemed to have been adversely affected by the lies perpetrated in old Microsoft advertisements.

Morag has some way to go to equal this score. She has to my knowledge brought in a bee in her mouth, but she let it go after we spent considerable effort trying to persuade her that keeping a bee in her mouth was unlikely to be healthy either for her or for the bee. She has also managed to pull the legs off a number of spiders. But as far as I can tell, she has never dispatched anything with a backbone. You can only tell by the spider legs she has left scattered around the kitchen floor. Vertebrates are safe from Morag.

Back to the squirrels. There is a small gap just above the guttering in the garage roof that backs onto the apartments here, and one particular squirrel seems to have decided that it will make a fine nest! I've seen a large bushy tail vanishing into the gap. Unfortunately, it backs onto the window about one metre away from the Serengeti (no, not that Serengeti, but out cat activity centre.) Our cats spend a significant proportion of the day sitting on the Serengeti, although the elapsed waking time spent there is fortunately relatively brief - after all - these are respectably middle-aged cats, with rich inner lives.

So during the day, we've set up a webcam, which watches the cats. We have yet to see a cat/squirrel face-off, but I am sure it is only a matter of time. My money's on the cat; Mungo in a mood is slightly more aggressive than the aliens in Alien, and considerably more dangerous. After all, aliens don't look cute and sweet, put their heads on one side, do the silent meow, and then, just when you feel safe - eat you.

Be glad you aren't that squirrel.

See the webcam at:

• The SerengetiCam

Another day wrestling with Perl and versioning. I've been using Catalyst, which is great, but a few times, it has installed OK, then just failed to find stuff when I run it. I thought it was an old version of Perl first time, but today I got exactly the same behaviour with a brand new clean install of Perl.

The issue happens with ActiveState's PPMs, which you'd think would handle versioning, and to some extent it does. It stipulates which version is needed as a dependency. The issue seems to be that different parts of Catalyst are depending on different versions of something somewhere, so when you install Catalyst followed by Catalyst-Runtime, you get a different combination than if you do Catalyst-Runtime followed by Catalyst. The same thing doesn't happen with the cpan command line installer, but that upgrades almost everything everywhere, with no clear audit trail or reproducability, so that is less than desirable.

Anyway, it seemed today that:

ppm repo add http://theoryx5.uwinnipeg.ca/ppms
ppm install Catalyst
ppm install Catalyst-Runtime --force
ppm install Catalyst-Model-DBIC-Schema
ppm install Catalyst-View-TT
ppm install Catalyst-Action-RenderView


would get the basics of Catalyst in place and working correctly. Some other modules might be needed later, but this is the core. I have no clear rationale for the "--force", which is needed whichever way things happen, but the "--force" needed if you install Catalyst-Runtime first seems to break Catalyst in an odd way somewhere internally. If I ever figure out where and how to fix it, I'll blog it.

By the way, I think Randy Kobes deserves outstanding credit for maintaining his repository so well and for so long. I've been using it since early in the 00's.

It snowed today here in Toronto. More interestingly, it also snowed back in Scotland, where I have just moved from, and where we are still trying to sell our house (yes, it's still up for grabs; see: http://www-n.aspc.co.uk/cgi-bin/public/LiveProperty/258469?ID=GDOIIBMF#p...). There are many stories associated with selling the house, but I will save those for a rainier day.

Anyway, we had a little snow here, just an inch or so, nothing much. I Skped Chris this morning, and she showed me the snow there - so it was kind of nice to both have snow at the same time. They don't get that much snow in the UK any more. Certainly not upwards of two metres, which is Toronto's count so far this winter.

But a few folks have asked me, are we sending the weather over? Yes! Sort of. Well, the weather systems here generally come up from the US (bah!) before dropping a load of snow here, then passing up to the Maritimes on the east coast of Canada, then heading north and east towards Greenland. On the other side of the Atlantic, the weather systems generally come south and east, more or less from Greenland, so the systems often to make their way over eventually, after a couple of weeks.

Don't blame us, though - they don't start here, we just get them before you do. In fact, you should be grateful, as otherwise there would have been an additional two metres worth of snow which had to drop somewhere. And in fact, we're due a bit more in the next couple of days...

Well, it took a bit of doing, but the new system is now up and running. I'd initially started out using CentOS, but that was a non-starter due to the system using an ICH9 chipset, not yet supported. Enter Fedora 8, which installed like a dream despite this chipset, but was persistently fiddly. especially when it came to installing Skype, which took two hours due to audio drivers not working right (largely because it's a 64-bit system). The final nail in the box was VMware, which installed (barely) but then killed the whole of Linux rather badly. I'd tried KVM virtualisation, but it was sluggish and awkward - my guess is that it was trying to interpret rather than virtualise Windows, since Ubuntu was 64-bit and Windows x86. Who knows, but under VMware the system is running so snappily it is easily outperforming all my old systems. Anyway, finally Ubuntu installed fine, ran VMware fine, ran Skype fine - everything just works. Top marks to Gutsy Gibbon, which yet again shows how easy Ubuntu Linux is to get a system up and running effectively.

Windows was the other part of the story. As the system was delivered with Windows, but I wanted to run Windows within VMware rather than natively (essentially so I could switch between IE6 and IE7, etc., for testing purposes), this should have been easy. It actually was when I just started VMware to boot off the Dell installation disk. Nothing else had really worked, and the copy of Windows I'd used as a temporary attempt to migrate a backup from the original Dell partition to the new VMware system was flaky in the extreme. So eventually it worked out with the clean install from the Dell disk, and Windows XP is running happily within VMware within Ubuntu.

Throughout all this, I have had to cope with two cats - used to be able to roam a large garden - in a one-bedroomed apartment. They're sleeping right now next to me, as good as gold, but Mungo in particular requires a fair bit of wearing out or he just wanders around trying to attack his sister. She doesn't help as she growls as soon as she sees him, which just sets him off even worse. Tomorrow is a statutory holiday here in Toronto, so I even get to spend the whole day with the fluffy-bottomed so-and-sos.

So which is more annoying, computers or cats - answers on a postcard please...