Well, the new Christ the King College has been open for the past two days, and I’ve just about survived!

Monday was the last chance to get things done with no staff around (save for a few admin personnel who were very understanding when things temporarily fell over). Tuesday and Wednesday were spent in a whirlwind of last minute tweaks and fixes, along with my having to give a 45 minute presentation to the entire staff on the new network. When it reached 10pm on Tuesday I gave up on the idea of planning the talk, and somehow I managed to fit the whole thing into exactly the time-slot provided (even allowing a few minutes for questions!).

It’s been almost like old times, as I’ve spent pretty much the whole of the week at the College - leaving Luke to run around like a lunatic visiting all the other schools with the usual ‘new term problems’. With a bit of luck things will return to normality (whatever that may be) next week.

The official opening of the College is later in September and is likely to involve some interesting ceremonies (or so I’ve heard).

I pity the folk at the Bestival this weekend as the roads themselves were wet enough this evening, - I dread to think what state the fields at Robin Hill are in!

I’ve finally found the time to setup my web-based music player on the new (virtual) Ubuntu server. At the same time, I took the opportunity to make it all unicode compliant. Actually, I had to do that, since the music is actually on the Vista box, and accessed via a CIFS mountpoint setup in /etc/fstab.

I had a few issues that got in the way:

1. Getting the correct options in /etc/fstab to mount the share and make sense of the accented characters. This was solved by following this article on the Ubuntu forums. It would have been even quicker to sort, had I not forgotten that my SSH session wasn’t set to display unicode - so I still couldn’t actually see the right characters even when the fstab was correctly configured!
2. The current version of LAME in the Ubuntu repositories (3.97) is not the latest stable one (3.98). This probably isn’t crucial, but my transcoding makes use of some of the new features (such as embedding album-art). This was easily fixed by downloading and compiling the latest release.
3. The GD graphics library that is installed with the php5-gd package under Ubuntu is missing a lot of the features that the bundled PHP version includes (such as rotation). The proper fix for this is to compile PHP with the library. I took the cheat’s route, and simply extracted the bundled library from the Fedora distribution’s RPM file (note that that link is to the 64-bit version).

After a few tweaks to the PHP code to make sure unicode text was treated as such (and changing the collation type of the database tables to match) it’s all working properly. Or rather, it’s working as well as can be expected considering that it’s not actually finished yet!

The developers of Wordpress have just announced the (one month earlier than scheduled!) release of WordPress 2.6. There’s a fair few new features, with the major one being change-tracking - enabling you to view previous versions of pages and posts, and also compare the differences.

There’s been various other improvements too, including a real-time word-count, image captions and more.

As I’ve come to expect these days, the upgrade from 2.5 went very smoothly.

We’re having a fun time at work at present, planning all the summer projects that are due to be done while the schools are on the summer break. I’d like to know why this school holiday is only five weeks in place of the usual six? One of the biggest is the network for the newly created Christ the King College (web-site not yet available - we’re working on sorting that too).

Still, creating a whole routed network from scratch (including reinstalling all servers and workstations, both Windows and Apple) gives us the opportunity to try a few new ideas (including Paul Beesley’s very handy Acceptable Usage Policy tool), and refine our existing scripts and policies.