Phoebe's Jottings

Relief in Copenhagen as the cause of global warming is traced to a single address

2009-12-06T06:41:00.000-08:00

Entry in a caption competition:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/magazinemonitor/

Himalayan village has the right idea?

2009-12-04T02:20:00.000-08:00

http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2009/11/29/when_the_glacier_left/?page=full

When the retreat of a glacier left this village without water each year, they decide to move their village and build again nearer the river. Their new homes will have solar power and they plan to put in microhydro in the river.

Take Skibbereen, a town of about 2500 people on the Ilen river that floods regularly. If you compared the cost of endless repairs and capital costs of fighting the river against moving the town, how long would the payback period be? Financial and emotional. 10 years, 20 years, 100 years? This is a question that many low lying towns will be asking themselves over the next decades.

What could New Skibbereen be like? Warm, dry, cheap to run with renewables built in, cars separated from people, a square, trees, under cover market area, covered shopping area, A comfortable place for tourists to visit with trips, by boat, around Old Skibbereen!

Google Wave - After a day playing with the API

2009-12-02T10:58:00.000-08:00

Have very mixed feelings about Wave after a day of heavy use. It has helped clarify in my ming what I want and don't want from an online comms tool. Here is the summary of strengths and weaknesses developed during a wave conversation with Bart.

Blip: What is your impression of wave - strengths and weaknesses?

Strengths:

- It's an 'Excel spreadsheet' of the messaging - giving you the power to do things your way
- open API
- realtime
- great if you want to carry on a number of chats at the same time
- can bring in clever gadgets/custom gadgets in a way that is not possible with googledocs etc. eg. voting, map.
- can develop custom gadgets and have the interface provided by wave - I could see this as being used for particular tasks/conversations rather than being open all the time.
- can be used for document sharing and commenting it (altho probably not much different from editing these documents on googledocs or acrobat.com )
- will give a new set of standards/language for doing this kind of thing - shares many ideas with tinycomms, making tinycomms an easier sell I think
- saves time on 'reinventing the wheel' by many contributors as everyone sees what other are thinking and writing about - avoids repeating the same tasks/ideas by all
- Wave as a wiki?

Weaknesses:

- Too much freedom - leading to mess quickly if not very very careful
- Right now feels like an island - no email like clients - you have to have your browser opened on the Wave page and keep lurking there
- inconfigurable interface (for now)
- Yet another thing to monitor and distract me - don't plan on leaving it open!
- not really suited for multi-user editing / brainstorming - but how is it better than etherpad or the dreaded googledocs. Just a smaller screen with people able to create new threads all over the place.
- Making any sense out of an advanced conversation may be a challenge (many contributors editing and changing things in-line over time) - the playback feature tries to make that easier, but still it is far from perfect.
- lack of built in support for voice/video - voice provided by gadget verillio (sp?) - yes but that's third party, not built in, no guarantees on its stability or usability
- if other people are editing at the same time as you but not within the same few lines, I can't see what they have changed. Snap! / it's not easy to keep track on cursor position of participants in a large document.
- too many ways to chat - yet none of them seem to be natural or streamlined.

Overall I'm left feeling this is another tool to help me multitask even more manically, whereas what I want is a tool that will help me focus on one thing at a time! So don't expect me to monitor wave and respond to your posts, I plan to use it for particular tasks, which will depend on the 3rd party gadgets developed. But this is after one day of use.....

Mars Bar Brownies

2009-11-27T11:57:00.000-08:00

9/10

4oz butter
165g demerara sugar
- cream butter and sugar then mix in the ingredients below --

1 egg
1 tsp vanilla
1 tbsp maple syrup
cinnamon
2 tbsp green and blacks cocoa
150g cream flour (not the bread stuff)
2 chopped mars bar

Bake at 200g for 20-25 mins, better to undercook than overcook, want it cooked on top and gooey in the middle so if you are testing with a toothpick, don't wait until it comes out clean!

Roast banana pudding

2009-11-26T11:17:00.000-08:00

9/10

Peal and split bananas lengthways and put in a dish that is not much bigger than the bananas.
Add honey and lemon juice (for 2 bananas about 1 tbsp and 1/2 lemon)

Cook in 180C oven for only 8-10 mins. Just enough to heat but I like the bananas still with a bit of firmness. You might like them more gooey.

Lovely just as they are, but you could also add cream and/or ice cream.

Beef Casserole - plain but good

2009-11-26T11:10:00.000-08:00

Score 9/10

Fry pieces of T bone steak cut into large chunks. When brown, add:
- carrots
- celery
- onion
Cook for about 2 mins then add:
- red wine
- stock

Put in a low (180) oven for 2 hours

If eating straight from the oven and you want to NOT burn your tongue, add some frozen peas.
If it's a bit watery still, add some cous cous.

New task - My recipe book

2009-11-26T11:08:00.000-08:00

Have now been collecting recipes since 2001. I live in fear now of loosing the little notebook with all these recipes, so I'm going to start (slowly) to put the best ones in the blog.

I should add that in the interest of ensuring that no two meals are identical, I don't include amounts in most recipes! Ah sure it'll be grand.

Just discovered...

2009-11-12T05:51:00.000-08:00

How much is €60bn?

2009-09-16T03:02:00.000-07:00

If we are trying to solve our economic problems and we have €60b to spend, what could we buy?

Three of these: $21 BILLION ORBITING SOLAR ARRAY WILL BEAM ELECTRICITY TO EARTH - http://www.physorg.com/news172224356.html, which would add 50% to our generating capacity

All the top racehorse stallions in the world - really corner the market!

A load of overvalued properties

or

A lot of oil futures - just sit back and relax and watch the money come it!

Thoughts on NAMA

2009-09-10T04:42:00.000-07:00

When the main reason we are being given for NAMA is that it is the only game in town you know this is not a good idea. I did a bit of googling and chatting to various people who know more than me about these things, and reached these conclusions:

The reason for considering NAMA is to:
- Maintain Liquidity
- Restore Confidence
- Create an environment for recovery

Any solution must consider:

1. When given a choice we must choose to reduce risk rather than increase potential return - the government/taxpayers are not speculators
2. No plan can be justified on the basis of previous economic cycles - we are in uncharted waters with this global economic downturn and the impact of peak oil and spending on climate change not yet being felt.
3. The current banking model is not the only solution to maintain liquidity - banks can be bought out, new banks setup by entrepreneurs, new methods of lending and saving peer to peer etc.
4. No solution should have the objective of punishing or protecting individuals or companies.
5. Speculators have money but little time (they want a quick buck now), the government of a country has time but no money - any solution should play to our strengths.
6. Ireland has a finite amount of money it can borrow and spend over the next years - the opportunity cost of any solution must be compared against investing in projects which will support our economy in the future - energy, broadband, transport, food etc.

Risks
- What happens if, post NAMA, the banks are still unable to provide liquidity? Is there a Plan B? "There is still unexploded ordinance on the financial landscape..." FT

Questions
- Banks have already received an injection of cash but are still not lending. Is this a cashflow problem or a reserves problem? If it is a reserves problem, then they can do without cash!
- What would the impact on the economy be if our banks were bought by foreign banks or investors?
- Why do WE have to do the valuation? Take the bad assets on the basis that we will pay the banks the market price when they are liquidated - at some time in the future - and leave the banks to do the valuation for the purposes of their balance sheets?
- Why would nationalising the banks be worse than NAMA? We already own 25% of AIB and BOI at a cost of €7bn, why not buy the rest?

But I think the right questions to ask is, image we have €30-60bn to invest in the future. What are the best investments to relieving short term hardship and creating an environment for long term prosperity?

Liquidity - Buy a foreign bank or start one or support entrepreneurs who want to. Support local trading currencies. Support peer2peer lending.
Energy - building windmills is not enough to protect us from future oil shocks, we need the infrastructure to balance supply and demand of energy.
Transport - our infrastructure is predicated on the use of roads and the assumption that transport of people and goods is cheap.
Food - Ireland should be well placed to feed it's citizens in the event of disruption in trade or climate change disrupting harvests and supply surplus into the UK.
Broadband - without ubiquitous, affordable high speed broadband many options for change are restricted and new ideas are slower to develop.

I am not generally in favour of asking the country to vote, but in this case it's our money (or money we are borrowing and will have to pay back) so I think we should be asked. We will be voting anyway, whether the government is forced to call an election or whether we use the Lisbon vote, we will have our say.

Setting up Hardy Heron with Apache2 and multiple Domains

2009-08-18T05:46:00.000-07:00

Finally cracked setting up multiple domains on my shiny new Ubuntu server. In case it helps anyone else out of a hold, here are my tips for easy domain management.

1. Use GoDaddy and their total DNS option (google for instructions) This means you don't have to worry about a name server. Just setup your domains and subdomains with an A record that points to your IP address. If your domain is currently pointing to a nameserver other than GoDaddy's change the nameserver option to Forwarding - wait a few mins, then you use Total DNS.

2. in /etc/apache2/site-available, create one file for each domain, I just used the domain name for the filename, eg. mydomain.com This should contain something like:

ServerName mydomain.com
ServerAlias www. mydomain.com
DocumentRoot /home/django/mydomain

...and all the other usual stuff ...

3. in /etc/apache2/sites-enabled create a dynamic link to the file you just created in sites-available. Ordering is import so add a sequence number to the beginning of the name. Ensure sub-domains come before main domain entry.

eg.

ln -s /etc/apache2/sites-available/blog.mydomain.com 010-blog.mydomain.com
ln -s /etc/apache2/sites-available/mydomain.com 011-mydomain.com

4. And this is what I had missed. Ensure there is a default file in your sites-available that includes this line:

NameVirtualHost *:80

That's all I have in mine. And have a dynamic link in sites-enabled so that DEFAULT IS RUN FIRST.

eg, ln -s /etc/apache2/sites-available/default 000-default

5. restart apache eg. /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

6. Cross fingers and enter domain in the browser.

If you are doing this all at once, it takes a while for the changes to propogate through from godaddy, so be patient.

Dead Cat Bounce

2009-08-18T01:56:00.000-07:00

I'm not filled with optimism by the 'green shoots' spotted here and there. I think this is the dead cat bounce phase, or put even better in the Editorial of the FT this weekend "... unexploded ordinance still litters the financial landscape".

Have a nice day...

2009-08-18T01:52:00.000-07:00

Travelled up to Dublin on the new intercity trains last week. The toilets have these huge curved doors that you open and close with a button. There is another large button to press once you are inside to lock it and when you do the door says "Thank you"!? Whatever next. Reminded of the doors and drinks machines in Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy... "Have a nice day!"

Catchup

2009-08-18T01:31:00.001-07:00

Got out of the blogging habit with the long (wet) summer days so going to try and get going again with a number of small blogets. Items of note in the last months?

Christophe and Jérôme, two french wwoofers, have just left after a month that has transformed the farm. Everything is strimmed, the fencing is not only repaired but has handles to open on every field and a bank of switches from which I can turn each field on and off. (You probably have no idea how great this is!).

Great multicultural BBQ Polish, Irish, French, German, Brits and Americans. Great pics here: web4u.ie/phoebehouse/

Managed to make haylage after 7 weeks trying but never a gap of 3 dry days. Started raining as we were baling so not sure how good it's going to be.

Had a great Jumpstart with Fish Publishing and came up with a raft of new ideas on how to get more entries to their competitions.
Recession much in evidence, but life and showjumping go on...

Can you teach old dogs new tricks?

2009-07-23T15:27:00.000-07:00

I am trying to learn a new programming language, Python, the new 'it' language. I taught myself PHP 10 years ago and it's interesting comparing the two experiences. 10 years ago I bought a couple of books on PHP and immersed myself in the language. I had many, many frustrating days trying to do seemingly obvious things with no success. But after six months I was pretty competant and after 18 months I was pretty good. For the last nine months, I have been working on and off with Python and I'd still class myself as a beginner. So what's the difference? Is it just that I'm 10 years older and finding it harder to learn new tricks?

Firstly there's the attention thing. Sometimes I can't remember if I brushed my teeth or not, but when I was a child with only a few hundred brushes behind me I was still a novice, and paid close attention to my brushing. Now with many thousands of brushes behind me I pay little attention, the brain focused on what to do today or tomorrow or what I should have done. So it's hardly surprising, given my lack of attention, that sometimes I can't find the memory of brushing my teeth. So while I've been learning Python for nine months, very little of that time was actually spent concentrating on learning. I have far more distractions than I did 10 years ago, far more different areas of work, and far more horses! So I don't put my attention into learning I put my attention into solving the immediate problems at hand as quickly as I can.

And this is the second point. Youth is for learning, and once we grow up, we are expected to get on with it. Until I moved back to Ireland, I attended evening classes took up new interest and was always learning new skills and new subjects. But there are fewer opportunities here, and seemingly less time every year, so I don't expect to have the time to learn, I just fix. So rather than sitting down and trying to learn Python, I've created websites in Python and fixed problems as they arise. I didn't even buy a book until a month ago! With Google, fixing rather than learning is so easy. You type in the kind of problem you're trying to solve,"python difference between two dates", for example and up comes the solution. You didn't have to work it out you just copy and paste and move onto the next problem. So in a months time you find myself again googling "difference between to dates".

So I don't think that is a problem in teaching old dogs new tricks, as long as the old dogs recognize that they're going to have to pay attention and commit their energy to learning, a skill which may be a bit rusty. I need to bring a different mind to the table, sit down with a different intention and probably uses a different part of my brain. I need to stop being so pragmatic and remember the joy of mastering a new skill and finding a whole new view on the world.

Feelings vs. Thinking and Tidy Towns

2009-06-09T13:15:00.001-07:00

Listening to a discussion at the Transition Towns get together for Cork groups at Cork Institute of Technology last week reminded me of a field trip at Shumacher College back in September 2001. The discussion was something like, we are working with the Tidy Towns committees to try and get them to understand the benefits of not spraying the road sides. "They could poison us" said the road side food gatherers.

As part of a course in Business and Sustainability run at Schumacher College (and if you ever get the chance to go there it is a wonderful experience) we did a field trip with a deep ecologist. We agreed the green fields of grass were deserts of monoculture, admired the cattle in the ancient water meadow (as I scoffed some very tasty blackberries. Nobody else would eat them and I wondered if I had missed a part of the lecture where we were told to leave the fruit to the birds.) After a bit of experiencing the wonder of trees we came to a field which had clearly not been touched for some years, with a wide mix of plants up to four feet high. Our tutor asked us how this field made us feel. The class expressed their appreciation of the wide mix of ecology, the animal and plant systems dependent on each other. At last I could hold my tongue no longer, "It makes me feel awful" I said. It's uncared for, unloved. It makes me want to get in there with a mower and tidy it up!". The tutor could not understand me. "But don't you see how the mix of plants and insects and animals create an ecosystem?". I couldn't explain to him that I was simply answering his question. How the field made me feel had little relation to what I thought about the field. While I like to think I have strong sustainability leanings and try to run my small farm as organically as possible, some fundamental part of me believes farmers have a responsibility to tend their fields, keep the grass grazed, the ground fertilised and hedges trimmed. No amount of logic is likely to change that feeling.

I think it will be a long, long time before you could convince a Tidy Towns committee or the judges (or me) that the verges should be left to run wild. No amount of explaining the benefits of sustainability are likely to have much impact on our own feelings about what cared for or tidy looks like. It says something about our culture that we assume that if we can simply explain logically our thinking, that this will change someone else's feelings about something. Do other cultures suffer under the same beliefs?

Tidy Towns at Work:

Dolores in Foal!

2009-06-08T13:37:00.000-07:00

Dolores (broken pelvis horse) scanned in foal today to French Buffet (TB) standing at Kylemore Stud in Co. Galway (b. miles away). 10 months to go but with a bit of luck there should be a foal next april! So excited.

<-- The mother

The father

Survival of the Fittest?

2009-05-18T06:56:00.000-07:00

This blog post was inspired by Trevor Sargent's speech in Clonakilty today at the talk on the Climate Neutral Network. His mention of the phrase "Survival of the Fittest" reminded me of when I had been picked up for attributing this to Darwin. The phrase does not appear in On the Origin of Species and his theory has much more to do with survival of the Fitting.

It seems to me our western competitive, dog eat dog world (do dog's eat dog's?) is, in part, justified by this famous phrase. It's the natural way of things, survival of the fittest and yet I think that has only ever been true in the minds of those who wrote the history books, the victors who passed down stories of chief's slaying other chief's to become the mightiest chief in the world. Everyone else was busy surviving by fitting into their environment or trying to change their environment to fit their needs.

I am encouraged by the change in language I hear from many of those taking a positive attitude to the future. From Obama's "We can do it" to the haven of positivity which is our local Open Coffee group in Cork. I hope the war metaphors of "combat ting climate change", "a war on poverty", "fighting drugs" will give way to a more fitting language of cooperation and alliances. The kind of culture that is emerging from the Internet worlds of open source development and from the gaming world where hierarchies are leveled and mutual benefits are sought.

(Having googled Survival of the Fittest before publishing this I find that Darwin did in fact add the phrase in his 5th edition, but that it was intended as a metaphore not to be take literally! - see Wikipedia entry for why it is incomplete and misleading).

New Foal at Kippagh

2009-05-08T10:07:00.000-07:00

After four sleepless nights, Emy Lou finally put us out of our misery and produced a big, strong, bay filly foal. Grabbed a few pics before catching up on some sleep!

Another Victim of the Recession - Fred the ex-racehorse

2009-04-12T05:11:00.000-07:00

I'm another victim of the recession having lost my job as a racehorse. I tried to get a job as a flapper but I guess they thought I was too old so it looked like the scrap heap for me. But luckily I got on a re-skilling course and I'm retraining to be a show jumper. I got lame soon after I started the course and was a bit worried that was going to be the end of it, but after a break I'm back practicing hard. Here I am doing a jumping exercise, made a mistake the first time but got it cracked now! Next stop Dublin!

Installing Pinax 0.7 on CentOS

2009-04-12T05:07:00.001-07:00

So Easy!

Here is the complete list of commands I used to install in a pinax directory of /home

easy_install virtualenv
easy_install pip
cd /home
mkdir pinax
cd pinax
curl -o pinax-boot.py http://github.com/pinax/pinax/raw/master/scripts/pinax-boot.py
python pinax-boot.py pinax-env
cd pinax-env
source bin/activate
pip install --requirement src/pinax/requirements/external_apps.txt
cd /home/pinax/pinax-env/src/pinax/pinax/projects
pinax-admin clone_project basic_project myproject
cd myproject

amend settings.py to point to required database - I'm using mysql
setup mysql database
python manage.py syndb
python manage.py runserver

DONE!

Difference between men and women is in the knot

2009-04-11T05:32:00.001-07:00

I havn't read Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus and am sceptical of many of the differences attributed to the different sexes. But I do believe there are fundamental differences in male thinking and female thinking and I pondered yet another difference as I stomped back to the house from inspecting the resulting mess of wire and fence posts caused by SuperCub running through the electric fence.

Take knots. Men tie knots so they won't ever come undone. The rope is knotted and double knotted and then the ends of knotted just in case, and it rarely comes undone, ever. Women

have to undo this knot sometime, so let's make sure I can undo it, and yes sometimes it comes undone before it should.

When putting up electric fence, Men make sure the fence is strong and tight, wrapping the wire around the insulator so each section of wire if effectively tied to the fence post. Women think, something is going to go through this fence sooner or later, so lets put it so there is minimum work to repair it. This morning's fence was put up by a man and with four broken fence posts that need replacing it's going to take a while. If the wire had not been wrapped around the insulator, it would have pulled past the post and taken five minutes to put back up. Serves me right for not doing the fencing myself I suppose.

An on the subject of differences, what is the difference beween a male car and a female

car? Female cars are a bit unreliable, they sometimes fail to start and tend to have a few niggling complaints, but if you really need them to get you somewhere, they get you there, even if they are running on one cylinder when you arrive. Male cars are much more reliable, start on the first turn of the key every time, until that time when you really needed them to start...

Female vehicles I have had:

2 x Ford Transit

BMW 3.0s

Mitsubishi Shogun

Male vehicles:

Ford Cortina

BMW K75

Nissan Micra

Jaguar XJS V12

Jaguar Sovereign v12

Yahoo BOSS - no joy yet

2009-04-08T02:01:00.000-07:00

Am trying to get Yahoo BOSS search running in Django. It all looked so easy based on this site: http://www.peterkrantz.com/2008/yahoo-boss-in-django/ but I still can't get it working. So I'm adding a link to the site to see if that helps.

Visit http://dunmanway.ie!

The Barefoot vs. Shod experiment in West Cork

2009-03-09T14:42:00.000-07:00

Every interest group has it's battle lines, and there is one between the barefoot proponents and those who believe horses need shoes. I won't go into the arguments but just report the results of my trying to get my horses barefoot.

The biggest challenge here in West Cork is the endless rain and mud, winter and summer. This makes the hooves soft and encourages thrush and infection in the frogs and heels. It's all very well to show the wonderful hooves of horses in the mid-west of America, but you guys wouldn't believe the mud we have here!

I've been through the process of taking shoes off horses that are used to them, twice. The first month or so they get more and more sore and you really wonder if it is fair to put them through so much discomfort. I would advise riding them in boots from day one, there is no advantage to them getting sore heels and soles. Then they slowly start to harden up but it takes a good six months to get to the point of being able to ride them in a sand arena and occasionally on the road without shoes. But I could never get their hooves hard enough and putting eight lots of boots on to exercise two on the road and going back to look for them when they fall off is just no fun.

I've tried all kinds of supplements and potions for the feet and found none made any noticeable difference. The horse were in good condition anyway, shiny coats and out 24/7/365.

Re the boots. Marquis are goodish but they do fall off, even just trotting on the road. Easyboot Bares are better, but still fall off on the road occasionally breaking the gaiters, and they are black so not easy to find!

There are two major downsides to barefoot for me - chasing after the boots when they fall of and the need for studs when jumping competitively outdoors. So I have reached a compromise. When the horses reach serious competition level aged 5 or 6, the shoes go on in April, with stud holes. And come off again in October for the winter. This works well for me, and keeps the cost down (at €60 a set of shoes). I have had no problems with jumping the younger horses all summer without shoes, no swelling or lameness or splitting of feet or all the other dire consequences of riding without shoes that I have been threatened with.

But if a horse has had shoes for a number of years, don't underestimate the effort and discomfort you will cause the horse in getting him sound barefoot. Get some good boots before you start.

Fred the ex-racehorse

2009-03-09T14:06:00.000-07:00

Fred is a remarkably well mannered horse. He wouldn't dream of lagging behind when you lead him. If you ask him to pick up a foot, he snaps it up and holds it there for you. A joy after my lazy lot, who oblige you, generally, but at their own speed! But today, Fred showed the flip side of that anxious obedience. His feet are very sore after some weeks without shoes and when the farrier started hammering on some shoes, Fred's fear of reprimand was overridden by his desire to get rid of the farrier. With no warning at all, the farrier was thrown out the door. And this was the pattern for the rest of the feet. He would stand for as long as he could and then bang! He leapt forward or kicked back. Racehorses are generally treated with a lack of patience and understanding by a wide variety of people so their expectation is that people are unpredictable and often violent and the best policy is to appease them, if possible. Until anger and fear builds up to a point where the brain flips to fight or flight.

My nags and I have a escalation ritual. I ask quietly and politely, I ask more loudly, I shout and then start hitting with more show than effect and this is usually as far as it goes. The nags start with a look, a snap of the teeth, a raised leg, a nip if pushed and on only one occasion have I annoyed one enough to kick at me (got me by mistake I think).

It will be interesting to see if Fred can learn our escalation rituals.

After Fred, the farrier moved onto the two thoroughbred yearlings. It was time for them to re-learn that not only can we influence their behaviour, but they can influence ours. Both these two had been handled when small and would lead and pick their feet up. But in the last six months they have become a bit wild. Their reaction to having their feet picked up was, "no thanks, I'm off".

After patience and quiet has little effect a battle then ensues where the aim if to get them to a position where they discover that standing still makes the people relax. It's difficult to ensure they are learning the right lessons, and all to easy to teach them that rearing and kicking earns them freedom. But it's great when you see the light go on and they start to react to you as you react to them. I think many horses have no influencing skills when it comes to people. All they know is how to avoid trouble, how to run or how to fight. If only horses had money, they could go on management training exercises.