Zeltus

The village of Saint-Priest-les-Fougères, where we live in France, celebrated the festival of the Feu de Saint-Jean (St. John’s Fire) last weekend. Nominally named after the Nativity of St. John the Baptist, it is a celebration that is now pretty much extinct in the UK.

It is, as are so many festivals, based on a pre-Christian pagan celebration, in this case, one of mid-Summer. And indeed, in these modern times, it pretty much has reverted to that.

Here in France, the tradition is a sit-down meal (all meals are taken sitting down in France! D ) followed by a ritual bonfire (usually stuffed with fireworks) and then music and dancing until the small hours. The bar is of course open throughout.

In years gone by, the custom was to include cages of live cats on the bonfire – not nice, but not uncommon behaviour in those times. After all, St. Stephens Day in the UK used to involve the hunting and killing of wrens.

More photos on Flickr… click on one of the photos to view them.

Technorati Tags: cat-burning, feu, fireworks, john, mid-summer, saint-jean, st

I recently had to make use of Apache’s rewrite module in order to alter the behaviour of my site. In summary, I needed to a) remove the www. part of the URL if it was specified, b) insert a trailing slash if it was needed and c) stop hot-linkers abusing my bandwidth.

mod_rewrite is viewed as arcane and voodoo by many (umm, most?) administrators but in fact it is reasonably straightforward to use, especially the simple tasks I needed it for.

I’ve documented what I did and why here as I rather hope it will be useful to some of you out there.

Technorati Tags: apache, denial, deny, example, freebsd, hotlink, LinkedIn, mod_rewrite, non-www, rewrite, slash, trailing

I was given this link – The Ladybird book of Policemen – by a friend and felt it was irreverent and funny enough to mention here. Here’s hoping that there will be more titles in the series!

It doesn’t really help that we have a retired copper staying on one of our gîtes at the moment and he and his wife are perhaps two of the nicest people we’ve met yet. And thats saying something as we have had a lot of people stay with us who we now consider to be friends.

It’s our Feu de St. Jean festival this weekend – I shall attempt to take some photographs and start up a Flickr album.

But in the meantime, I’m busy trying to work out a set of apache rewrite directives that I need to tighten up my site… but it’s far too hot for that, I think I’ll head for the swimming pool.

Technorati Tags: fire, humour, police, st. john

I’ve downloaded and installed Firefox 3 and so far, I’m mightily impressed. It’s blindingly fast and renders all my own pages perfectly, as far as I can tell.

I’ll be even happier when all my beloved add-ons and themes are brought up to date but then, that’s down to the relevant developers – I can easily manage without for now.

The download was fast, the install was completely painless – for such a major component of anyone’s Web experience, that is not something to sneezed at by any means.

I highly recommend this browser.

Download it now from here and make it your default browser today!

Technorati Tags: browser, download, firefox

There is still a huge amount of interest and controversy (and inaccuracy) over the Trials performed by the Microbiological Research Establishment during the 60′s and 70′s on the Dorset coast.

Since I had some small involvement in these, I have pasted together a page detailing pretty much everything I can remember of those times.

The page is here

In general however, I have found that people today tend to believe what they want to believe and I suspect that there is nothing here that will change those views. Still, it might be of interest to some readers.

Technorati Tags: anthrax, bacillus, bacteria, bacteriological, C.D.E., death, defence, dorset, down, ebola, germ, germs, globigii, gruinard, icewhale, lassa, M.R.E., marburg, microbiology, MOD, niger, pathology, plague, porton, salisbury, science, secret, smallpox, subtilis, tularaemia, virology, viruses, warfare, weymouth, wilts, wiltshire

I have been playing with True Font Family quite a lot and have now set up a demo page for my pleasure and amusement.

I already use TFF for all the headers I use (the font is Tempus Sans ITC, for those who may be interested.) But I want to try and push the limits of this a bit. My demo works fine on Firefox and Safari, pretty much works on Internet Explorer (after a certain amount of faffing around) and fails miserably on Opera. Which is a slight surprise, as TFF generates the Tempus headers quite happily – it simply refuses to render the content. TFF’s author is a very helpful guy so I will contact him and no doubt receive an explanation and a fix in short order.

One reason I am doing this is that the web world is about to undergo a huge sea-change – Apple’s Safari browser uses Webkit as it’s rendering engine. And Webkit is already able to use downloadable fonts. So it is only a matter of time before Opera (Presto) and Firefox (Gecko) join in the fun. I don’t suppose Internet Explorer will be in any great hurry to adopt this feature anytime soon.

More on @font-face information can be found at Qodo and at css3-info – now get ready for a deluge of eye-wateringly bad web layouts, font copyright infringement accusations and general fun and mayhem!

My demo is here – altho’ I already feel the need for a more in-depth, technical demo once I’ve wrapped my head around everything that is going on where font handling is concerned.

Technorati Tags: cataneo, css, css3, font, font-face, font-family, opera, poet, poetry, rococo, safari, swinburne, webkit

A rant, albeit a mild one.

Why oh why do people write reams and reams of potentially useful (or even, not) information on their pages and then FAIL TO DATE THE DOCUMENT! :-SWEARY

The times I have looked for something on the ‘net, thought I’d found it only to find that it related to an obsolete issue or software version. This in itself it not so bad – after all, it might be categorised as “historical” – but only if it is dated! Even professional writers don’t seem to understand that without a date, readers cannot easily decide if the subject matter is still pertinent.

At least blogs auto-date their entries, which, if they do nothing else, is worthy of a cheer or two.

OK, <Flame off> normal service will now be resumed.

Technorati Tags: date, obsolete, page, pertinent, rant, web

I have already mentioned that I had an inordinate amount of trouble installing and configuring MySQL on my FreeBSD Virtual Server.

I have therefore taken the time to set up a short web-page listing my session details, which’ll act as an aide-memoire for me for the next time I have to re-install it! And you never know, someone out there might find it useful*

The page is here

*I searched all over the ‘net, including Usenet groups, for definitive help on this issue – whilst I found lots of tips and hints, I couldn’t find anything that specifically solved my problem. That’s the first time in a long, long time that I’ve experienced failure like that.

Technorati Tags: daemon, freebsd, install, installation, LinkedIn, linux, Mysql, mysqld, unix

Technorati Tags: ale, beer, humor, humour, lant, leint, word

Yep, I’m still struggling with this soddin’ system. I just could not get my spiffy Contact page to work – the mail send operation was failing (the backend is Postfix-pretending-to-be-Sendmail), with nothing much by way of a diagnostic, just “An error occurred”. But a quick hunt around the system logs provided the necessary clue, in maillog with an “Unknown user” error message. As the server thinks it is my personal server, only zeltus.eu addresses were affected – my work addresses (gites.org.uk & maisonfamille.com) worked fine, as Postfix determined they were not local) Fixed by editing /etc/aliases so’s that Postfix will realise the addresses are not local addresses, but managed elsewhere, and then compiling the changes using newaliases. It’s simple, it works for me, job done. Right, what’s next

Technorati Tags: alias, aliases, freebsd, newaliases, postfix, sendmail, server, virtual