Happy new 2013 from all of me to all of you!
This will be an awesome year for sure. Did you know that 2013 is the first year with all different digits since 1987? Isn’t that amazing?
The sheet music archive is live again
One of the interesting features of my old web site was the sheet music archive, where all my bagpipe music was available and searchable in a number of ways. This was something I had programmed myself using the Drupal API to get it to display. It took me a while to get the same functionality going in WordPress. The plugin API is completely different – no surprise there. I took the opportunity to change my code to the better. I might publish this plugin on Github later so you all can admire it.
Anyways, here is the sheet music archive in all it’s glory. Enjoy!
Merry anti-christmas to you all
Hooray! This year I will be celebrating anti-christmas all by myself, just me, some nice food, cigars and whisky. It will be great – assuming of course that the world did not end at the 21:st as some apparently think. But to hedge my bets, I’m posting this little celebratory note already, instead of waiting until christmas eve as would be proper.
Anyways, have a great time whatever you do and where ever you may be on the day.
The Fronter era is over
Status
There, the last working day for Fronter has passed last Friday. It was a pretty surreal experience, since we all had the hard disks of our computers destroyed as a part of the ISO security procedures. It looked like this …
While this was going on, we all stood around drinking beer and cheering the destruction on. I did mention surreal, didn’t I? We then ended the day with a final drink-up at Haket. Now on to find something new to do. Wish me luck.
Multi-target publishing with Markdown
I have for a long time been a fan of writing everything as plain text. This started with me using LaTeX, which I still do when I want a perfectly formatted result. However, the last few years I have taken to using some of the many Markdown variants available. This has several advantages: First and foremost, the source is perfectly readable as-is, which makes it ideal for readme files and the like. And you can generate multiple output formats, depending of course on what markdown variant you use.
I initially started using Asciidoc, which is really good, and can generate output in HTML, PDF, ODF, and several different slideshow formats. However, it is not based on standard Markdown, but uses it’s own slightly different syntax. This is annoying if you sometimes also need to use normal Markdown. Recently I have switched to Pandoc, which is based on MultiMarkdown syntax with some extensions. It can generate oodles of different output formats, several of them text based, which for instance makes it easy to write MediaWiki pages. I always have problems remembering MediaWiki’s fiddly syntax, and having to write things like '''''bla''''' just makes me cringe. Continue reading
What am I doing to this site?
After having killed my site with a bad Drupal update more than a month ago, I decided to create a new site from the ground up using Ruby on Rails. This had been my intention for quite some time and was actually one reason why I switched web host to Site 5 (which I hightly recommend). I got quite far with programming the new site. But then I side stepped and started playing more and more with Play Framework and Scala. That is some awsome technology! But it is JVM based, so it can not (easily) be hosted by my web host. I will play (!) around more with Play Framework and Scala in the near future and host my stuff on Heroku for the time being. Watch this spot for more news.
svenax.net rebooted
Since I realise it looks bad for me as web developer to have a personal site that has gone to the dogs, I’m putting up this WordPress blog to replace the now deleted Drupal site. I will likely play with this site a lot the next few days to configure it as I want, and also create a custom plugin or two to replace functionality from the old site. Some of the pages from the old site will also come back, but not the (extremely scarse) blog posts. I may however add some image galleries from bygone days. On the new site, I may even get adventurous and post more than once every 6 months. 🙂 We’ll see how that turns out. Anyways, welcome to my new site! I hope you will enjoy your stay.
Termination finalised
Status
OK, now we are officially terminated. The papers are signed and the unions have agreed. We will work until December 14, after which we can all go home and take a long christmas holiday. Or not …
Glenfiddich Piping Championships 2012
Gallery
Myself, Mats, Marie, and Magnus T. went to the Glenfiddich Piping Championships in Blair Atholl again this year. A full day of great piping, a night of partying with the competitors, followed by half a day of fiddle competitions. Fantastic … Continue reading
Visit to Rome
Gallery
To celebrate my big birthday (yes, I’m an old geezer) I took a week in Rome all by myself. This was my first visit, so I thought I’d do a Tourist 101 thing, with several guided tours and visits to … Continue reading