Michael Sheldon's Stuff

I finally got around to finishing the design and custom content management system for a local band’s website. The CMS is written in Python and is an extension of the work I hacked together for the West Wales LUG a while back. It offers very easy WYSIWYG editing of pages and integration of gallery and planet. It’s currently available from http://midnight.mikeasoft.com.

There’s still a small problem in Firefox 1.5 due to a change in the way the body’s background attribute is handled. This stops the cityscape appearing at the bottom of the page as it does in previous versions and in all other browsers. Setting the height of the html element to 100% fixes this for pages shorter than the height of the window but breaks any longer ones.

Sometime soon I’ll try and package it all up in an easy to install form and clean up the administration tasks a little, just on the off chance that someone else might find it useful.

It would appear STX has had a rather favourable review over at tuxmachines.org. Hopefully I’ll be able to force myself to sit down over christmas and get the new LiveCD installer in to a working state.

We also had the developer behind SLAMPP showing an interest in our control centre and the new installer, so hopefully our tools can be of use to them :).

During a 2am perusal of Alex’s code we decided that watching gcc compiling stuff was rather soothing, as is listening to music. The potential for combining these two is clear, so I suggested an XMMS visualisation based on gcc. Today I hacked together a quick prototype.

The source can be downloaded from: http://junk.mikeasoft.com/xmms-gcc.tar.gz.

It’s still in need of rather a lot of fine tuning and needs extra compile phrases added to it, but it shows off the general concept nicely ;).

I’ve written a rather odd little F/OSS themed parody of Joss Whedon’s “Ballad of Serenity” (the theme song to Firefly). The guitar part was originally worked out by FIVEBYFIVE from the acoustic version played by Joss on the DVD extras. If I’m feeling particularly sadistic I might even record a version of it, all I can promise is that it’d be ever so slightly better than the Free Software Song ;).

A              G
Take my drive, take my files.
D               A          Em
Take me where I can't compile.
C             G
I don't care, I'm still free,
D                  A           Em
You can't take the source from me.

A           G
Take me out to dev null,
D                A       Em
tell 'em Windows was too dull.
C                  G
Burn the files and boil VC,
D                  A           Em
You can't take the source from me.

G              D               C

A                G
There's no place I can be
D                  A    Em
since I found Open Sourcery.
C                  G      D    A
But you can't take the source from me

G              D               C A