readingtype: 08/01/2008

Type and Media students report

Nearly missed this one. My former housemate Gus has just completed the Type and Media masters at KABK in the Hague, and on Friday his classmates posted a rather good little roundup of the year’s activities with some atmospheric photos. Worth a look.

Labels: type education

Party non-stop

I rather liked this status update from the Circle Line twitter feed.

Not just the ticket

It is sad to see that the last of the old ticket vending machines at Reading are being removed. Although even I can avoid being emotional over the loss of a ticket machine the truth is that the replacements are in some respects considerably inferior. From the software point of view, there is the decision to use an alphabetic rather than querty keyboard layout. Whatever its faults, to anybody who uses a keyboard the querty layout is far more familiar; I would guess the alphabetic layout is there because it means the ‘keys’ can be really big. I will accept that those who are fleet of vision should learn another skill if it means that those less able to see can use the keys, but I do wonder whether there was any user testing done, or if the mantra was simply ‘as big as will fit all 26 letters on the screen’.

The second thing that is bad – and much harder to fix – is the position of the card reader screen. It’s about four foot up and points directly forward. The rather dim liquid crystal display is behind reflective glass. If your eyes are four foot above ground, it is perfect. For the rest of us, it's very difficult to use. This is seemingly in direct contradiction of the spirit of that giant virtual keyboard on the main screen. And why can’t the messages from the card reader be shown there instead – why is a second screen needed?

A brief Apache 2.2.9/Subversion 1.4.6 diversion

If you read the SVN Book chapter on serving SVN via Apache 2 you will see very simple Apache 2.0 virtual host examples that are implicitly correct. They’re in a book, after all. Apache gives good error messages but the one I got when I set everything up following the second example, like so:



  DAV svn

  # any "/svn/foo" URL will map to a repository /usr/local/svn/foo
  SVNParentPath /usr/local/svn

read like this:

client denied by server configuration: /usr/htdocs

referring to a path that is nowhere in any of the .conf files for my Apache instance – it must be hardwired in somewhere, but I didn’t find out where.

I played about with permissions, to no avail*.

What I needed to do was add the conventional access controls, which of course might form part of the main Apache config on a given server (and therefore be inherited by the virtual host). In my case, and reflecting what’s happening gradually across all distributions and indeed the Apache source, there is much tighter security in the default configuration. Explicitly adding


Order allow,deny
Allow from all

(plus authorisation directives) got me back on track.



ServerName my.example.com

 DAV svn
 SVNParentPath /path/to/repositories
 Order allow,deny
 Allow from all
 AuthType Basic
 AuthName "Subversion repository"
 AuthUserFile /path/to/htpasswdfile
 Require valid-user

* this is Linux therefore whichever user will run the Apache process that serves the files needs to have read and write access to the repository and also read access to the parent directory, so check your group and world permissions on that directory.

Twitter: d’you follow…?

Is it just the wine, or is this genuinely incomprehensible?

Travel back to the eighties at Marylebone

In the eighties you would never have seen a rail operation like the Wrexham & Shropshire. But if blue and grey BR InterCity carriages make you nostalgic for your Hornby train set, how about a chance to ride in the real thing, on a ludicrously-short express train from Marylebone to the Welsh Marches and beyond. Three unprototypically-clean Mk3 coaches and a class 67 loco? OK, the engine's an anachronism, but Mr Hornby must have the boxed set ready to roll...