Boom Boom

Another evening spent at Jacksons but this time Dave and I were installing our new, in-boom outhaul system. The purpose of this was two-fold. The existing outhaul was not working correctly and got stuck everytime it was pulled on and the existing system looked messy with a 4:1 pulley system at the base of the mast.
By installing the outhaul and new Harken fiddle blocks into the boom, they will be protected and out of the way. The installation involved drilling a hole into the boom at the guestimated correct location… please take note that unless you are exceptionally skilled like Dave, you should probably look where you are drilling. Next challenge was to rig the blocks correctly and push a plated D-ring with a bolt into the boom using a long socket extention and attempt to get the bolt into the new hole. This actually only took a couple of minutes and meant the end of the hard work. This was bolted into position and sealed up with some heatshrink. Next we had to pull the new outhaul through the length of the boom using the old one which also went to plan without any problem at all. With everything going so well, I was starting to get a bit paranoid! We put the boom back together and gave it a proper test. Again… everything seemed fine.

Having cleared up and tied the boom onto the van we headed to the boat to put it back on for the race on the following day. 15 minutes later and the boom was back in place with only some rope to cut when we have the mainsail rigged up. With everything going so well up to now, I can only hope it doesnt fall to bits or something!

World66

I really like the [World66][1] website and now that it is growing they are adding some nifty new features. Below is the result of a test I took to see what kind of traveller I am. It has to be said that the result was very accurate!

</tr>

	Your travel type: Travel Yup The Travel Yup likes exotic and adventurous travel, but prefers big cities with fast paced life. He has a keen interest in other cultures and always brings home a few souvenirs. Shopping in Bangkok, getting a tailor made suite in Kuala Lumpur, that’s the kind of thing the Travel Yup is into. Even though he likes to get away, he prefers his travels to be comfortable. </td>
	top destinations: Paris New York Beirut</td>	stay away from: North Korea Ciudad Perdida Darien Gap</td> </tr> </table> get your own travel profile</div> [1]: http://www.world66.com

Mini Repairs

Here is Dave under Mac helping me (try) to fix the oil leak that has plagued the sump since St Martins Garage fixed broke it last time. We successfully fitted a new gasket to one of the drive shaft cover plates except it turns out that the leak may be from a small rubber ‘o’ ring underneath the plate. Needless to say that after it all went back together it still leaked… bugger! At least we managed to fix Dave’s exhaust with the proper and safe use of welding equipment! Tomorrow we will be aiming to order up a number of replacement bits from minispares to sort it out … again!! As usual, watch this space!

My Home

Just to make my php plotting software look rubbish, Google Maps can show you some pretty impressive sattelite imagery of your home. If you are interested in seeing where I live have a look here. Guernsey is the small island in the upper right in the centre of the screen. It would be good if they continue to add imagery for the European area that I live in. You can see to street level in some areas of the US that I checked!!

Macification – Day 3

Day 3 proved much easier and quite successful in my quest for Macification. The standard install of PHP in OS X lacks a few of the libraries that I regularly use so rather that figure out how to activate them I did the next best thing; Download an update! Entropy have an excellent ‘one-click update’ for PHP on OS X and it was a painless excercise. Including the download, it took 3 minutes to update to the latest version and activate all of the libraries I need. McDonalds latest advertising cliche ringing in my mind.. ‘Mmm… Lovin’ it!!’

My quest for a code editor was a bit more challenging in that I had found a number of candidates that looked promising. I wanted all of the usual things that people would want in an editor; Syntax highlighting being the most obvious and important. Other features I hoped to find were FTP access to my sites, tabs for each window and support for various filetypes. From the few I tried, the one that immediately had me saying ‘Wow, how much does this cost?’ was jEdit, an open source project!

jEdit supports over 130 filetypes as standard but new ones can be added easily if you need more! Initially it lacked a couple of features I would have liked but I soon discovered the plugin manager where there are hundreds of available upgrades. I installed a tabs plugin, an ftp access plugin, an autocomplete plugin a code beautifier plugin, a plugin that will make a webpage of code from any given selection… all my requirements and more!! At some stage I plan to experiment with the subversion integration it offers. Being a Java application I was initially very skeptical. My past experience tells me that they load and run as fast a fat man in treacle. In this case I was pleasantly surprised. Whether its the Mac platform or just the 7 years of development on jEdit, it ran just like any other application. I would like to test it on my PC (Have to love Java for that!) but I am not allowed to turn it on yet! If it runs ok on there, I will be very happy as that will give some consistency accross my platforms. If you want to see for yourself what jEdit can do, check the Features page on the website. You should probably check the active community site aswell.

The only niggling issue I have at this stage is the highlighting colours… just not what I am used to. Luckily, all I need to do is change the XML file and I can have any colours I want.

M$ like Macs

Sometimes it is very easy to get confused. For example, this lunchtime I headed off to the local computer shops to try and find a Keyboard and Mouse set to replace the existing Logitech one that I am using on the Mac as the buttons are falling out. From the 10+ products I looked at, only 1 Logitech set was Mac compatible yet all but 1 M$ sets were Mac compatible. Although I am sure you can get the drivers from Logitech, it seems peculiar that 90% of M$ products support Mac right out of the box!! The only one that didn’t was the finger print scanner which I can accept as it is an XP integration… 1 point M$!!

Infinity+1

What is Google doing now?? They no longer offer 1GB of storage for their GMail accounts. Sometimes I am amazed by the thinking that must go on there!! No not Infinity+1, its april fools day remember, even though it would be a very good idea! Instead, as they have been running for a year, they are now giving 2GB of storage for every user!! Thanks Google!

They have also integrated Rich Text formatting… at last!!!

I have a number of invitations available if anyone would like one (I am quite sure though that everyone has a Gmail account!)… please leave a comment.

Only OS X

I have just about completed my second day of a small task I have set myself that will be in two stages. Part one is to not switch my PC on for a week so that I force myself into using the Mac. This way, I figure, if there are any problems I will have to work through them. Yesterday I managed to get Apache and PHP running properly including a virtual host set up so that I can run different domain names for my sites locally. The second part will be go for a month if all is going well. So far, I couldn’t be happier!!

Yesterdays software search was for an FTP client. I ended up using two that I liked. OneButton FTP and Transmit. OneButton is open source and worked very well, it is lacking recursive operations at this stage so I will keep checking as that feature is on the roadmap. Transmit is $29 so not the end of the world if I decide to buy it… from my initial tests, it is a very well featured application.

Today I downloaded, installed and configured MySQL which was a result. I now have a replica of my blog running locally. Todays great software find was CocoaMySQL. It is quite possibly the best application I have ever used for accessing databases locally and over the net. Open Source aswell so that was sweet!

Tomorrow I am testing out some Editors. I have downloaded a lot to try out and I am really hoping that I can find something similar to Editplus+ I will update about that when I make a choice. All in all, no major problems but a lot of fun!!

A fun and foggy weekend

Over the weekend, H, Leigh and myself went to Jersey on Mystere to do some shopping, drink some Guiness and as it turns out nearly end up returning deaf!! This could have been appropriate as the actual travel elements included enough fog to realistically allow you to call yourself blind aswell. To read in detail about the problems we had with the boat and how we fixed them in our usual ‘At least it works’ kind of way, head over to the sailing bug! I would just like to reinforce a couple Leigh’s view aswell… the KFC was awful and Constantine was a very good film.

Aidy also went on a holiday over the weekend on his motor bike. He has made a few posts about his experience if you are interested.

Harbour at night

There were some other nice pics but the model would not appreciate being published here!