by R.I. Pienaar | Sep 12, 2004 | Photography
I first came to London in March 2000, we had offices in 1 Canada Square which is the tallest building in Europe at the moment. It was the first building to be built on the Canary Wharf estate. I took a couple of photos with my Epson PhotoPC 600 of the area.
When I discovered these photos again a couple of nights ago I had a look for other old photos around Canary Wharf and found one I took in 2002 from roughly the same angle as the earlier one but just from further away. The 2002 photo was taken with my Olympus C3000 Zoom camera.
Today I went back to the same spot and took another shot with my new camera. Unfortunately I cannot go to the same place as the 2000 photo since there is now a modern flat complex.
The full entry has the 3 photos for a comparison of the growth of this area.
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by R.I. Pienaar | Sep 11, 2004 | Photography
Attached to St. Pancras station in London is a huge victorian Gothic style building, it is the old hotel that was operated by the Midlands Railway. Eventually when the hotel closed it became offices and now its empty but listed as a Grade 1 historic building.
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by R.I. Pienaar | Sep 9, 2004 | Uncategorized
A few years ago I decided to switch to PHP as my web development language of choice – I used Perl before that – since then I have done all my web development in PHP and tend to pick projects developed in PHP over non PHP ones.
Most notably I use Horde with some of it’s modules, most notably IMP. Other systems I wrote myself using RoadSend Site Manager. These rely on PEAR modules to function, I keep Horde and IMP up to date as possible but my own system I wrote about 3 years ago have not been updated since, and neither has Site Manager.
Last week I updated some PEAR module using portupgrade and suddenly I ended up with weird behaviour in IMP where it won’t show some attachments in mail, but not all. Eventually I gave up and just started upgrading my whole PHP and Apache system to new versions since mine was getting a bit old and outdated.
So I uninstalled all the old stuff after making backups and started fresh, when it was all done and moved to the new FreeBSD PHP build system and PEAR all up to date I thought it will all be good, but it was not. Horde started having issues, strangely only with mozilla, it would not do the redirect to the login page correctly. My own code would fail due to some change in the DB abstraction that caused calls to fetchrow() on a DB Handle to return unknown method errors and still the attachments were broken. Essentially the stuff was not backward compatible at all.
I fixed things by getting hold of old copies of PEAR and placing it in the directories of each application and overriding the PHP include paths for those applications to point to their own older instance of PEAR. This kind of thing just winds me up and it is totally typical of the Open Source world where breaking backwards compability and forever redoing code is the order of the day.
I can understand that expecting 3 year old code to still work is pushing my luck a bit, but HORDE and IMP is recent projects that I keep up to date, you wouldn’t expect them to use functionality that is that outdated.
by R.I. Pienaar | Sep 5, 2004 | Photography
I went to drop someone off at Victoria Coach Station today, on the way there we walked through a little mall called Fountain Square, at first I thought its pretty grimy and dirty but on the way back I took another look and noticed it was actually a pretty kewl place. I took a couple of photos that can be seen here.
by R.I. Pienaar | Sep 5, 2004 | Uncategorized
Today a friend and I went for a walk on the Thames South Bank and noticed a photographic exhibition at the OXO Tower Wharf. The exhibition was by Colin O’Brien and showed a collection of his images from 1954 to 2004.
His work that was shown was all Black and White and shot for the biggest part in and around London where he lives. I picked up a nice, signed, book with the images that was on shown. His work is well worth a look.
