There is a blue plaque in Selsey, West Sussex which bears the inscription

This view across the sea to Bognor Regis inspired Eric Coates to compose ‘By The Sleepy Lagoon’ in 1930. It became the BBC signature tune for ‘Desert Island Discs’.

From the Wikipedia (“By the Sleepy Lagoon”):

Coates had originally been inspired to write the piece in 1930 while overlooking a beach in West Sussex. His son, Austin Coates, remembers:

It was inspired in a very curious way and not by what you might expect. It was inspired by the view on a warm, still summer evening looking across the “lagoon” from the east beach at Selsey towards Bognor Regis. It’s a pebble beach leading steeply down, and the sea at that time is an incredibly deep blue of the Pacific. It was that impression, looking across at Bognor, which looked pink – almost like an enchanted city with the blue of the Downs behind it – that gave him the idea for the Sleepy Lagoon. He didn’t write it there; he scribbled it down, as he used to, at extreme speed, and then simply took it back with him to London where he wrote and orchestrated it.

Here’s a link to YouTube:

Here’s a link to an mp3 download on Amazon:

By The Sleepy Lagoon by Eric Coates.

From the Wikipedia (“In Town Tonight”):

In Town Tonight was a BBC radio programme broadcast on Saturday evening from 1933 to 1960 (except for a period of 26 weeks in 1937 when The BBC presents the ABC was broadcast instead). It was an early example of the chat show, originally presented by Eric Maschwitz.

Its theme music was the Knightsbridge March by Eric Coates. Its introductory sequence had a voice crying “Stop” to interrupt the sound of busy central London, before an announcer said “Once more we stop the mighty roar of London’s traffic …” At the end of the programme the voice would say “Carry on, London”.

This is definitely one of those tunes which you’ll recognise when you hear it. Knightsbridge is the third and final movement of the London Suite and was written in 1933.

Here it is on YouTube, for your listening pleasure:

And here’s a link to an mp3 download on Amazon:

Knightsbridge March by Eric Coates

I’m kicking off now at the very start of May 2012, and my theme for May will be the music of Eric Coates.

So, my very first Dr Jan’s Tune Of The Week is…

“Calling All Workers” by Eric Coates

From the Wikipedia (“Music While You Work”):

Music While You Work was a daytime radio programme of continuous live popular music broadcast in the United Kingdom twice daily on workdays from June 1940 until September 1967 by the BBC, initially in the Forces / General Forces Programme, and after the war in the BBC Light Programme and, in the mornings, on the BBC Home Service. The programme began in World War II. By playing non-stop popular / light music at an even tempo it aimed to help factory workers become more productive. For a period, a third edition was broadcast in the late evening for night-shift workers.

…

The programme began and ended with Calling All Workers by Eric Coates

This is such an energetic tune, it really does make you want to jump up and start producing things

There is a second or two, just after the initial fanfare, when I’m reminded of the music used for the mini-game of Back Attack in the Wii Party Games suite. It’s just a drum and possibly some bass strings playing a classic ‘oom-cha, oom-cha’ rhythm.

Here it is on YouTube:

How stirring is that?

And here’s a link to an mp3 version on Amazon.co.uk:

“Calling All Workers” from the Eric Coates plays Eric Coates album.

Look out for more Eric Coates gorgeousness next week

I had some problems with an old version of WordPress, which didn’t like one of its plugins. The effect of this was I couldn’t log in to the blog to post new things or do anything else.

I’ve resolved that problem now, and taken the opportunity to update to the latest WordPress too.

Hurrah!

OK, first things first, stackoverflow.com. This is a joint venture between Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood. It’s a programmer’s question and answer site. Probably the best description I’ve heard is

It’s Expert’s Exchange without the suck.

Anyone can ask a programming-related question, and normally an answer will be posted within a few minutes – that’s how active the user community is. It’s likely that there will be a number of answers for any given question, and the asker can select their ‘best’ answer.

If you register on the site (using OpenID) you will collect ‘reputation’ or ‘karma’ points and ‘medals’ as you use the site. Anyone (above a small threshold of karma) can vote both questions and answers up or down, so in theory the best answer should find its way to the top of the list.

Stackoverflow.com has been around for several months now and is proving to be an invaluable resource. Googling for almost any programming-related question will probably get a result on stackoverflow.com.

Just this week serverfault.com has come out of private beta. This is very similar to stackoverflow.com, except that the focus is server, network and system administration rather than programming. Of course, there is a fair overlap between the two sites in terms of users.

You may also be interested in the weekly podcast by Jeff and Joel, which is always worth a listen.

I can heartily recommend both sites – obviously it depends on your focus as to which (if either) will be useful to you.

At work, I can now use 2 screens again, thank goodness

The 2 screen set up is slightly different now to how it was with KDE 3. Previously I had 2 separate X screens defined, one on each physical screen. The downside of this is that you can’t move windows between screens (the mouse pointer is the only thing that can do that). If you have Thunderbird email in one screen and the Firefox browser in the other, when you click on a link in an email message you get a message saying you can’t open another instance of Firefox because there’s already one running. So, the work-around is to just copy and paste the URL between the applications.

Anyway, with my new configuration I used the nVidia configuration utility (nvidia-settings) to configure Twinview. Now I can happily move windows between screens with no problems. Pop-up dialog boxes tend to appear on a random screen, but it’s not a big problem

So, overall, KDE 4.2 is what KDE 4.0 should have been to begin with.

Finally, KDE is back! Congratulations to everyone involved

I recently found myself in the position where the battery had discharged completey, due to a prolonged lack of driving the car. This means that neither the key-fob nor the internal switch will operate (they are both electrical).

Don’t panic! Pop open the bonnet, and on the passenger side (mine is a right-hand drive model) near the bonnet hinge there is a black plastic cover. Open this and there’s a small rectangular plastic cover under which is a fairly substantial terminal which connects to the battery in the boot. Attach your battery charging equipment here

Full details are on my personal blog here: The Beast Lives.

I’m using TigerTom’s SEO Citrus WordPress Theme from http://www.tigertom.com/

So far I’m reasonably happy with it, but I’m not terribly keen on having post extracts rather than full posts shown on the home page. Still, if everyone uses a reader that’s not so much of an issue

UPDATE: To change from extracts on the home page to full posts you need to edit the index.php in the theme directory – just use the WordPress Theme Editor and select the Main Index Template.

Change this:
<div class="entry">
<?php the_excerpt (''); ?>
</div>

to:

<div class="entry">
<?php the_content (''); ?>
</div>

Details are on the TigerTom website here: http://www.tigertom.co.uk/forum/viewtopic.php?t=957&sid=48d8e0e35be2846c74914006b8e7867f

http://www.dr-jan.com/newblog/2008/10/22/hilton-stockholm-slussen/

Fedora 9
To upgrade, I followed the excellent instructions at http://www.gagme.com/greg/linux/f9-tips.php. The key point is to use the ‘preupgrade’ package to sort everything out:

yum -y install preupgrade
preupgrade

This downloads new F9 versions of all the RPM packages you have on your system and then sets everything up so that when you re-boot your machine it will start F9.

It’s an excellent idea, and for me It Just Worked.

KDE 4
KDE version 4 is all rather new. Initially I had version 4.0 installed. The biggest drawback to this version was the absence of the Fuzzy Clock. However, I’m pleased to say that on my first ‘yum update’, my system was upgraded to KDE 4.1, complete with Fuzzy Clock. Whilst version 4.0 was looking a bit rough round the edges, 4.1 is a far more polished affair.

One of the new features (on System Settings, Desktop, General tab) is the ability to ‘Enable desktop effects’, which makes the whole machine much more Mac-like in the prettyness of the desktop. However, I noticed that with this turned on, even when nothing else was running, I was using about 50% of my CPU power just to run the desktop. So I turned that off

The other annoyance in KDE4 was the lack of launch buttons on the panel for my favourite applications. This was really getting on my nerves until I realised that the default ‘tab’ shown initially when clicking on the ‘K’ menu button is the Favourites tab. To add things to the Favourites tab just find the application in the labyrinth of menus on the ‘K’ menu, click it with the secondary mouse button and select ‘Add to Favourites’ from the context-sensitive menu. Now all your favourite applications are just 2 clicks away on the ‘K’ menu button.

UPDATE: Neither KDE 4.0 nor KDE 4.1 can cope with dual screen display systems! I’ve seen comments that imply dual screen configurations are very rare and so fixing the problems is not a priority. Boo : -( See my comments below for details.