We'd pre-booked our flight from Delhi to Ahmedabad which added a nice respite from working out what to do. Delhi's domestic terminal was an experience in itself, at the doorway and right up until you pass through security there are heavily armed guards wherever you look. Since everyone stared at us wherever we went this shouldn't have been a problem in the airport but having guards with machine guns staring at me was not a pleasant experience.

Back at the beginning of the year while I was travelling around South-East Asia with friends my partner, who I'd had to leave at home, came up with the idea of visiting an orphanage in India that her family had ties to. Being quite taken with this travelling thing I thought it was a fantastic opportunity for her with the bonus of getting to teach some kids who haven't had the best luck. Later in my first trip I decided I'd like to go with her and we decided we'd make a mini trip of it and take in some more of what India has to offer. She drew up an itinerary, flights got booked, bags packed and off we trotted (with only one hiccup of almost not getting a visa in time, I probably should have thought of that one...).

One thing I've noticed about coders on the internet is how many of them rebuild their blogs almost as a matter of habit and unsurprisingly I'm no exception. I've build three blogs, I only really have three posts...says it all really doesn't it? So here is my new blog!

This one is built using the static site generator, Jekyll, modified with some useful extras by my good friend RichGuk. A full list of the extras he added can be found on his Github page. The benefit of using Jekyll, for me, is the simplicity the system provides. I can create posts in markdown, haml or even plain HTML, let Jekyll convert it into an HTML page and view it locally using the built in server Jekyll provides. Since the whole thing is tracked in Git I can push new posts to the remote web-server where a hook is setup to run the Jekyll build command, thus automating the whole thing!

With the release of Snow Leopard Mac users have been provided with version 5.3 of PHP already installed and are one commented line away from running it with Apache. Upon installing Snow Leopard I thought "great! shiny new things!", then discovered all my projects down and out from all the shiny goodness. So I needed to get my PHP 5.2 working again. Back on Leopard I'd been using the Entropy PHP package created by Marc Liyange since it comes with all the extensions I needed. Now I didn't want to lose PHP 5.3 as I'd like to play around in it when I have some more spare time. So the ideal situation would be to have both installed and be able to switch between them with as little as an Apache restart.

I'm the first person to admit that I have some fairly obsessive habits when it comes to making things look nice and neat, more specifically in the media files department. So while playing around with getting my Films folder all neatly into XBox Media Centre (XBMC because I'm lazy and abbreviations FTW) when I found that my films in multiple files weren't stacking properly.