Supersonic Feet

Darshan and the House London crew just launched their first project, Lovebox, "a digital wristband to help raise money and awareness for different charities around the world via the web".

The idea is to donate to the current supported charity (Cancer Research UK to start with) and then share the love by putting the Lovebox icon on your various web presences (Facebook, Twitter, etc).

It could be a really cool way to create momentum around raising cash for worthy causes, so check it out!

Last Sunday I drove down to Dover (still not sure why) with Ken and took a load of photos. I also decided to start playing with HDR to see if I could do non-hideous HDR photos. I'm not there yet, but hopefully I'll improve with practice.

Being a child of the '80s I missed a lot of 'classic' films and have tended to shy away from anything in black and white unless I can't be bothered to change channel or move away from the TV, but that of course means I really have missed a lot of very good films.

My brother Leo got me a subscription to Empire magazine for Christmas and after a short but glowing review of an old Carry Grant movie, His Girl Friday, I decided to buy it. It just got re-released on DVD this week and is on Amazon for just under £6.

It's the tale of a newspaper editor who tries to win back his ex-wife (due to re-marry) through all manner of cunning plots over the course of a manic day. The dialogue is fast-paced and there are some real laugh-out-loud moments.

In doing a quick Google video search to find a clip to post here, I just found out Google Video has the whole film available to watch under a Creative Commons Public Domain licence, so here it is:

It's still worth buying on DVD (especially as it's so cheap), but I'm definitely gonna have to check out Google Video for any more old gems of movies under CC licences now.

EDIT: Just watched It's A Wonderful Life for the first time (I said I'd missed some classics) and it truly is a fantastic film.

Having just hit this issue on my server where I'd recompiled Ruby from source, apparently on doing so you need to compile the readline library yourself as well.

There's a good how-to at dirk.net (it's really simple), but if like me you're using CentOS rather than some version of Debian, then rather than the 'sudo apt-get install libncurses5-dev', etc., you need the yum equivalent:

sudo yum install readline-devel

You won't (or at least I didn't) need the ilbncurses5-devel package equivalent. Once you've installed the readline developer package, you can follow the dirk.net instructions again and all should be well with the world and your console will work.