currently capital one are running a series of ads featuring tv impersonator (forget his name, does a good one of richard madeley) going through peoples dustbins looking for personal information to use for identity theft. When I first saw the advert I thought that it was some sort of public "beware of identy theft" advert, but it turns out that it is a capital one advert trying to sell their cards on the basis that they apparently have better insurance against that type of thing.

This winds me up. why? because I take care not to leave personal details in my rubbish/ recycling, but this job is made all the harder because at least once a week, capital one spam me and my wife with letters with our details on and even pre-filled application forms for their credit cards, which I then have to remove from the envelope and store - I have a whole plastic bag full of them which I will have to hang on to until I can remember to borrow the office-shred 550 from work to shred them...

The second meeting went ahead last night and I think we managed to get a bit closer to defining what we represent and what we are trying to achieve. see this post on underscore for more details of what was discussed.

I also ate a big plate of nachos, drank a few pints of bath ales Gem and got an anxiety attack when I passed my powerbook round for people to enter their email addresses ;-)

i've been tinkering with these. I really like the way I can use the FTP interface to upload a whole folder of full size images from my camera and it creates CMFPhoto objects from each with a whole series of size options from thumbnail to full size, using Python Imaging Library (PIL). Once the images are uploaded you can even do transformations such as flip and rotate on the server.

A new plone based online photoalbum will be built soon*....

* not necessarily that soon

I am so enchanted with expose on my powerbook, that I couldn't resist joining in this silly game

I was trying to find a way to style the first and last items of repeat in a zope page template.

in a typical repeat, you can put a condition e.g. repeat/list/end or a python test e.g. python:test(repeat['list'].end,'last','normal') to style the last item differently - same applies for the first item (start).

The next step after the meeting that wasn't underscore - a proposal by Stuart Gallemore and Matt Hamilton:-

1. To promote the wealth of New Media talent in Bristol and the surrounding regions.
2. To encourage communication between New Media companies, helping us to work together, compete and excel.
3. To be a strong independent voice for the industry in our region and help public sector projects and funding achieve our objectives and better serve our industry.
4. Support education and the creation of relevant skills for recruitment purposes

see this pdf for the full proposal

The long time overdue meeting of active members of the Bristol new media community (who happen to frequent the underscore mailing list) went ahead last night at the watershed. There were about 25-30+ people I think - very informal so people came and went and a few of us stayed on until closing time.



There was a general concensus that something needs to be done to improve the profile of Bristol as a new media hub, and in particular the under-represented (but thriving and more so than many other cities with a higher profile) "interactive" (i.e. generally meaning web and related technologies) section. Bristol is known worldwide for it's film, animation and TV industry, and we want it to have a similar reputation for new media.

I have been an active member of the underscore mailing list for a fair few years now. it is a discussion list for new media professionals in Bristol and Bath (UK) and surrounding areas. The list has been active since about 1996 and has been an invaluable resource for new media industry people in the area, or with connections in the area. There have been a few meetings in the past but it has dwindled recently to the odd pub meet up. Activity on the list varies from heated arguments, to off topic in-jokery, to helpful advice, to libellous slander, but recently there was a "call to arms" to get things moving on a more elevated level, and this has instigated a fair amount of list activity, and a meeting has now been planned for next week at the Watershed.

export PATH=$PATH:/usr/local/bin

this adds /usr/local/bin to my path until the end of the current bash session, still figuring out how to make it permanent

update: from tim at twisty.com:-
-----
to make it permanent add the line to a file called '.profile' in your home directory. (if '.profile' doesn't exist, you'll need to create it!)

# Update path
PATH=$PATH:~/Applications:/usr/local/bin;
export PATH

a couple of references to help me with my planned future projects:-

How to install Quills from svn

kananov.com - Quills from svn(0.9) How To