Lamb Shanks and a Play

Out last night with the usual bunch for dinner and a play.

First, to Regatta’s on the Torrens for dinner. I love Regatta’s – the food is excellent, the ambiance is great and there’s plenty of elbow room so you can hear you friends when they talk. It’s a shame that the STC always schedule the plays to start at 7:30pm, so we have to eat and run (literaly) as well as starting at 6pm, which is a bit early for a Saturday night. And it was a great shame this night that they didn’t listen when we said we had to be done by 7:25pm. Service was slower than it should have been. Anyways, my main course (only course) was Lamb shanks, and was delicious. For some reason though, some of our party decided at 7:05 that they wanted dessert, so a little performance art ensued when it hadn’t arrived at 7:25 and we had to go.

So, made it to the theatre at the last mo, and climbed over all the ppls who had tickets for the end seats and therefore elected to get seated early (wtf?).

And so to The Play.

The play was Blue/Orange, by Joe Penhall, and won some awards for best new play in 2000. Never heard of Joe, but I know nothing. According to the cheat sheet, he was screenwriter for Enduring Love, which I also never heard of, or forgot.

Anyway, this play is set in a London Psychiatric hospital, and revolves around patient Christopher, who does a splendid impression of lunacy, a young trainee psychiatrist and an older consultant. Christopher was brought in by the police 28 days ago after an incident, and is due to be released. Young doc wants to detain him for longer because he thinks he’s schizophrenic. Old doc wants to release him to “community care” because they don’t have the beds. Yadda yadda, lots of dialogue ensues, with the usual about funding, NHS, beds, institutionalisation, drugs, side effects, etc. plus some interesting stuff about labels such as schizophrenia being detrimental long term to the patient and not helpful if there’s no effective treatment anyway. Oh yeah, and also stuff about race and diagnosis.

Did I mention this was a comedy?

There are some witty lines, and a couple of belly laughs, mostly courtesy of Christopher and the older doc. But overall the tone is a little heavy and depressive as a comedy, so the effect is a bit uneven. And none of it entirely credible.

Performances were great from Robert Jordan (the patient) and William Zappa (the Consultant). A bit less so from Renato Musolino as the trainee shrink – a little too hysterical.

Wound up the evening with a hot choc from Amore.

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Incident on main street

Had one of those test of character on the way home … and failed.

Here’s the story:

I’m walking to the carpark along North Terrace after work, when this woman weaves across the footpath in front of me, walking in that special drunk fashion — two steps forward, one step sideways — and goes into the gate of the Masonic Centre. I’m naturally (and not unreasonably) wary of drunks — they can behave unpredictably, such as by vomiting on you unexpectedly. So when she weaved across my path my reaction was to sidestep and keep going.

Anyway, as I continue to the car, I’m thinking, well, that wasn’t very charitable, and what if she was not drunk but sick. She looked quite well dressed — OK, about as well dressed as me — so maybe it was something more serious. So, getting into the car, I decide to drive around to North Terrace instead of going home, just to see if she’s still there.

Well, guess what? When I get around there, there’s this little knot of people standing around looking at a sad little bundles of clothes on the ground, and I’m thinking, oh shit, oh shit, I’ve killed someone, oh shit … etc.

So, I get out of the car and go over, and she’s on the ground, and someone’s already on the phone to the ambos, and I check and she’s breathing but right out of it.  Her head is on the wet ground and I’m feelng really guilty, so I fold my scarf and stick it under her head.

Fortunately, we’re only one block from the hospital, and the ambos arrive quick smart and take over. They try rousing her, check pulse etc. Then the lead does something snaeky with the woman’s fingernail, and that wakes her up, and she’s very groggy and they have some trouble getting my scarf off her because she’s clutching it like a safety blanket, but eventually I get it back.

At that point, it seems safe for me to leave, so I go back to the car while the ambos try getting her onto a stretcher.

And the last thing I see as I drive off is the woman standing on the footpath, waving her arms in angry drunk fashion at the ambos, who are retreating in all directions.

Damned random character tests. I wasn’t prepared.

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Lightweight Archive System

Last week I had an email from Archives. Seems they were unhappy with their current CMS approach (enter into an Access database, export to Excel, run code to generate HTML pages, upload pages) and wanted something a bit smoother, simpler and more immediate. Can I help?

As it happens, I had been thinking already about building something for our Special Collections digitisation projects, so I was happy to take a look.

We have already been attempting to use DSpace for this purpose, but DSpace is not really good as a presentation service, being designed as a repository for publications. For Special Collections, and also Archives, we’re talking about interesting, heritage material that needs to be nicely presented.

So, I sat around thinking for a while about design. Also looked at the EAD (Encoded Archival Description) XML spec, to see how “real” archivists approached the problem. And of course to make sure there was nothing open source already out there. Eventually I arrived at what I am calling the Lightweight Archive System, or LARK.

The basic design objectives were: simple to use; simple to build; simple to maintain; configurable.

That required a simple architecture, so instead of trying to use a database for storing items, I decided to make use of the Unix file system. Content and other files would simply be stored as unix files in a directory tree mirroring the structure of the archive.

First, we have to be clear about what kinds of object we’re talking about. To keep the design simple and tight, I defined “object” as follows: an object is any “thing” in the archive which can be considered as a whole or as a collection of parts. An object may be a simple document (a photograph, letter or other digital copy of a real thing); or an object may be some kind of container (room/cabinet/drawer/folder, or box/envelope). Containers are not defined or constrained as to type, because in LARK all containers are basically the same: a container is an object which may contain containers or documents.

This nested structure keeps the coding really tight, because there are really only two kinds of “thing” to deal with. We don’t really care what those things are.

Having sorted all that out, the actual coding fell into place quite easily. An XML config file is used to configure a particular collection, defining the fields applicable to objects, and the HTML header and footer. Creating or updating an object generates a new HTML page for that object, with links to contents etc. And there are simple options to add and delete objects.

So there we are: a lightweight archive system, written in Perl as a 500-line cgi script. Nice and simple.

At least I hope it’s simple. I am now at that dangerous stage in development where I have to show it to the “clients” and get their feedback and (hopefully) acceptance. Will let you know how *that* goes!

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