What’s with the monkeys?

gibraltarAs you might be able to tell/guess, it’s a picture of the Barbary macaques on the Rock of Gibraltar, which my work as an IT infrastructure consultant took me to a few years ago. The monkeys in the picture are from the troop that hangs out at the visitors centre at the top of the cable car.

It was taken on a lovely afternoon after a busy few days racking up servers and getting sore fingers. The view was, as you can see, simply stunning. That’s North Africa in the distance, with the busy shipping lane of the straights of Gibraltar. Plus, monkeys!

I was fascinated most of all by the alpha-male munching on the lunch. He was utterly focused on the task at hand, completely oblivious to us tourists posing for our pictures (I’ll save you), and the other monkeys around him were equally focused on watching for scraps. Plus it’s fun to think he’d brought it along for when he got peckish.

In an odd sort of a way I thought it was a nice reminder that the simple things are often the most important.

An interview about parkrun technology

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Anybody who knows me will know that I’ve been rather involved with parkrun for the last few years. I did my first event in 2007 (back when it was the UK Time Trials), loved what I saw, and worked to bring the event to Glasgow in December 2008. It was the 11th event in the UK, and Scotland’s first (there are now eight in Scotland), and is comfortably one of the largest parkrun events. You can read more about the event on the event website at http://www.parkrun.org.uk/glasgow - Frankly I couldn’t imagine Saturday morning without it! 

Anyway, a year or so after starting Glasgow parkrun, I started getting involved helping parkrun HQ with technology problems. It’s what I do for a living after all, and it was nice to use some of my skills for something other than keeping a roof over my head. That involvement has grown, as parkrun has. The technical and organisational challenges are increasing all the time, with 25,000 people wanting their results on Saturday, 300 hits/second on the website website, and 15Mbit/s of data just now at midday on Saturday’s. Lots of reloads :)

Anyway, the weekly ‘parkrun show’ podcast interviewed myself and Alan, my fellow parkrun technologist, last week. You can hear Alan and myself from 16m15s on this weeks edition.

We’re buried with work at the moment (lots of shiny things in progress), and I need to fit it in around my other clients, but when we have a chance to come up for air, I do hope to write a few more bits and pieces about how everything hangs together, as I know very well there are lots of people out there who’re interested. Watch this space.

British Pathé snippets

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I posted these last week on facebook/twitter, but neglected my home page. So, a couple of videos from British Pathé that highlight moments from my family history:

  • Snail Eating – An excerpt from a 1965 report about my Grandfather’s restaurant in my home village of Priddy. My father’s the chef in the background, and my mother is at the table wearing the awesome glasses. Watch out for the great expressions and listen out for the great music and utterly bizarre sound effects when the snails are put in to salt. Oh, and the receipe didn’t feature garlic, but butter and herbs (my grandparents rather famously hated garlic) 
  • Bus House – If you ignore the misspelling of my family name, I loved this 1949 report on my grandfather’s solution to how to move about with the work he was doing at the time (this was before he built rockets or ran the restaurant). Love the expressions again (particularly on my Uncle Jeremy’s face) and the scope of my grandfather’s ambition, for what he squeezed in to the bus.

Hope you enjoy them as much as I do.

Fixing a persistent @evernote crash

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I’ve been using Evernote for some time now, but was suffering from an occasional crash when working with attachments. Sometimes double clicking, other times just right clicking, would cause Evernote to keel over horribly.

The latest upgrade (3.0.6), released yesterday, sadly appeared to make my problem worse, so much so that I opened a ticket with Evernote support and hoped for some guidance on some easy resolution.

A prompt response brought with it access to a pre-release version, but alas that didn’t seem to resolve the problem.

So I applied some thought, and a bit of judicious googling, on the stack trace. A few references to functions like “CFURLCopyResourcePropertyForKey” and I stumbled on a mention of contextual menus in Finder, and old plugins perhaps being to blame, with similar sounding problems in various applications or users.

Poked about about and found I had an old SCFinderPlugin.plugin buried away in /Library/Contextual Menu Items – I removed that, rebooted, and as if by magic, the crashing problem went away.

So, Evernote users, if you’re suffering from attachment crash related problems, have a look at your Contextual Menu Items. Note you may need to look in both /Library/Contextual Menu Items (system installation) and the one in your home directory (/Users/you/Library/Contextual Menu Items).

In my case it was the Subversion Finder client, but could be another perhaps pre-Lion, or just plain old, plugin you’ve long since forgotten about.