Paul Mc Namara’s WorldView

I just heard about elgg when I was thinking of adding some social networking features to a website I maintain. Fortunately, it has recently released version 1.0. The version without the bugs right? The first issue I came to was that my local versions of MySQL and PHP were out of date so I downloaded the latest versions and installed them onto the machine.
Great, now it was allowing me to perform the install and I came to the first settings page. Filled in the appropriate values and hit return. Then the message “The requested URL /elgg/action/systemsettings/install was not found on this server.” came up. WTF?
Back searching on the elgg google group and the the elgg troubleshooting page. Tried changing the .htaccess page and the apache httpd.conf file. Nothing changed. Tried everything suggested and nothing has changed. Now I’m just bored and going to leave elgg until version 1.1.

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It seems that in the latest version of Siebel Tools, some much needed improvements for developers have been implemented and let’s face, have been long overdue. The interface uses a tabbed UI where workflows, scripts and applets can be kept in context and accessed in the same way as Firefox works. One of the most irritating aspects of developing workflows in earlier versions was that the context of the workflow was lost each time you wanted to reference a script or fields on an integration object. That meant querying again for the workflow and bringing it back. Of course, if another reference lookup was required context again was lost. Think of it like using one instance of Internet Explorer and then using Firefox. it’s a vastly improved interface in my opinion.
The problem of workflow simulation working on a haphazard basis has also been improved. I think that in three weeks, I have only encountered the “Workflow Finished” message twice.
Referencing scripts was a bit better but it meant using the Windows menu item each time. Scripting has also been improved with the addition of auto-complete. For example, using ActivateField now prompts with a list of fields from the BusComp. This reduces lookups and spelling errors.
The only question is why did it take them so long to implement those changes that provide so much productivity gains for devleopers. Could it be that it is the first full release done under Oracle?

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The Dubliners - In The Rare Old Times

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Just added the plugin for Wordpress called Wordbook that posts blog entries into your facebook profile. Now I own the master data!

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Bertie Ahern is resigning. The end of an era but in reality he stayed on too long. He should have gone before the last election and left on a high note. Now, his image and the memory of his time in office is not as shiny as it would have been.

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From Spiegel

How many people can you squeeze into a British phone box? This question has obsessed some people for decades. Now a similar conundrum appears to have been solved by a family stopped by German police: How many people fit into a five-seater car? The answer, it appears, is 14.

German police stopped an Opel Vectra Wednesday on an autobahn in the southern state of Bavaria and discovered four adults and 10 children huddled inside, according to police spokesman Peter Grimm. The car came to the officers’ attention because it was driving at a snail’s pace of 40 kmh (25 mph) on a busy highway frequented by heavy vehicles.

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From Crooked Timber

Here are the things most people would happily pay for at an international transit airport: – a shower – clean underwear (for those of us who habitually forget to pack it) – daylight – an exercise facility to help with the jetlag and minimise DVT – nutritious but not too heavy food – a nap, lying flat, somewhere quiet.

And here’s what is generally available: – Gucci – Chanel – l’Occitane – Bodyshop – Lacoste – Nike – a few plastic seats – McDonalds, dougnuts, and the local variety of fried, sugary dross to add a sugar hangover to your jetlag.

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Country Diary from The Guardian with a nice piece on Achill.

North we went to spend a few days on Achill Island (it is joined to the mainland). We had Slievemore Mountain behind us and sat facing the great Minaun Cliffs which rise from the sea, sheer in places and angled backwards in others. Such soft brown where heather grows, deepening almost to black where turf (peat) is visible. The cliff slabs change in colour from dark violet to black as the sun slants on their adamantine surfaces. The smell of turf burning fills the air with its acrid, not unpleasant scent.

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I went back to my childhood today spending it, spreading turf. It is probably about 20 years since I have done this type of work that I did every summer as a kid. It’s pretty monotonous spreading the turf (or peat) so that it can dry in the air and the sunshine before being brought back to the house for the winter. Of course, harvesting turf is done a lot less these days in Celtic Tiger Ireland but it was nice in a nostalgic sort of way. It will be a world away from my new job in Germany next week.

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Many news sources are reporting that stocks are slumping for a second day on the back of the Shanghai index losing 8.8% of its value on Tuesday. However, looking at the web page of the Shanghai stock exchange, the index seems to be up by almost 4% on Wedesday. Is there a negative news bias on economic issues this week?

Update - According to the FT, bloggers seem to think that China was not the cause of the mass sell-off.

Trader Mike seconds that, and runs through the charts. “The selling was broad-based today [Tuesday] — 89% of Nasdaq stocks were down and 84% of NYSE stocks declined….I’ve said before that this move higher felt like a game of musical chairs and today the music seems to have stopped for real. There’s a whole lot of technical damage in the indices. All the indices crashed through their 50-day moving averages today.”

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