The day started ominously misty. Given the pretty amazing weather we've been having this left the awkward British summertime conundrum - to take a coat or not. Decided to throw caution to the wind and go without. I need not have worried, as by the time we were scudding over the levels the mist was already lifting, and we appeared to be in for a glorious day. Our first winner of the day was Advenza's recently recomissioned 66841 which was stabled on the former Bath Road spur at the back of Temple Meads. Plenty of time to wander over for a shot before getting much needed coffee and heading for the 07:00 Voyager.

The destination was the Dean Forest Railway, a location I'd visited years ago on foot but had never travelled on. Their small summer diesel event was competing for punters with some major tours to Cornwall and a couple of locos being out of traffic also kept a few punters away. However, arriving early due to the poor service to Lydney, we made a quick tour of the site and were encouraged by staff to have a good look at the locos undergoing refurbishment in what appear to be huge 'polytunnels' standing on what appears to be the course of the former line to the docks. Having spent almost an hour enjoying the sunshine and exploring the site, the first train of the day arrived with 'Teddy Bear' D9521 in charge. A swift loco change to get E6001 on the front and we were off.

The timetable was generous but not intensive, and featured the Class 14, E6001 and the DMU in addition to the star attraction for me, the recently repainted 31466. Our first move was to switch between the high and low level platforms at the unusually laid out Norchard station to get the DMU. Intelligence from previous galas indicated that this would stick around in platform 1 at Lydney Junction for most of the day as a sales stand and buffet. Thus this was a sensible way to get an arrival into the less preferred platform and to guarantee a ride on the DMU. From here, we settled into a pattern of trips back and forth the full length of the line. A decent gradient up from Norchard and some spectacular scenery made for some entertaining performance from 31466 in particular.

With the sun seemingly stronger by the hour, we took a mid-afternoon break for refreshments and photographs at Norchard before a final run on E6001. Much as I enjoyed this loco, it seemed to crop up on one too many trains, and it will be a real boost when the line gets either its resident Class 27 or 37 back up and running for a little variery. After some final shots of an absurd lash up of ED and Teddy Bear leaving Lydney we wandered over to the mainline station to find services heavily delayed. Hung around in the still intense sun and waited, speculating on the chances of a Class 60 hauled freight passing. Eventually, a mercifully well air-conditioned Class 175 arrived and took us to Gloucester, where the much delayed service terminated to head back to South Wales. Took the opportunity for a break in Gloucester, and arrived back in time to see 60013 curving into the station with a train of empty fuel tanks! An unexpected bonus. Worked our way back to Highbridge via a change at Filton Abbey Wood, arriving in time to position ourselves for a photograph of Spitfire's 'Kernow Growler' tour on it's return leg in fine early evening light.

I was sceptical about today's excursion given last weeks rather amazing trip, but the Dean Forest Railway produced some fine entertainment in a spectacular setting, despite limited locomotives in operation. Definitely a railway to revisit when a few more are up and running. As it turned out, a pretty good day out with plenty of surprises.

Many years ago, as part of a project to make lots of tiny applications, I wrote a web browser. It linked with the Gecko rendering engine from Mozilla and even though you had to have a whacking Mozilla install around, it was a quick and useful way to view URLs from chat programs and suchlike. FuzzyTheBear loved it, and spoke highly of Denzil far and wide - and a fair number of people downloaded it and used it for simple, quick tasks. The source code has lived on this webserver ever since, and I've dutifully moved it when hardware has changed or the site has been updated - but it's fair to say I haven't thought about Denzil for a long time!

Last night, I wandered into the #lemmings chatroom on Freenode to see which of my old friends was around. It's been a while, and following a few turbulent times lately I felt like I needed to catch up and relax a little. It was good to see some old faces around, and I was welcomed back into the fold like I hadn't been away. Later, when I was happily chatting and completely off-guard Fuzzy posed the question:

I'll confess I've wondered myself in the past - and even experimented a bit, and I shared my thoughts on how it would work. We even managed to get it building and running - but things had changed a little and it crashed on https:// URLs. We also talked about how the configure ought to try to check for Firefox or Mozilla and proceed accordingly. After agreeing this would make someone a great project, and remarking on how I'd used mental muscles which hadn't been flexed for years, I slipped off to bed happy to have chatted with friends again.

Well, a curse on FuzzyTheBear because I think he knows that once he'd woken me up and placed the trap, I'd fall right in! I never could resist a challenge, and tonight in an unguarded moment I set about figuring out why Denzil crashed on secure sites. I soon cottoned on to it being something to do with the Firefox and Mozilla profile system, and found a neat fix by looking for a user profile in .denzil. If it wasn't there, the libs were smart enough to set things up. Great! Next I tried to fix up the configure script. This was tougher, and the arcane syntax took awhile to resurface from the depths of my mind. After a bit of playing, tweaking and research I got the application to check for either Mozilla or Firefox, but always to prefer Firefox - because it just seems lighter and neater to do so. Inspired by this success, I fixed a bunch of warnings and complaints caused by building an ancient package, and even got the .desktop file installing correctly into the Applications menu.

Soon, not noticing how much time had passed since I sat down to 'just see if I could fix that bit...' I found myself bumping the version number, writing up my ChangeLog entry and doing make dist...

...and that's how Denzil managed to get it's first release since 15th July 2003!

Denzil still does what it always did, still has its funny 'self-contained' bookmark system, and still relies on wget to download things because I still haven't managed to figure out a smarter way. Best of all though, the stripped binary is still less than 20Kb in size! I'm sure that there are still lots of ways to break it too, and I'd be interested to hear of them - but for now it seems to work well enough.

You can download the source code for denzil here:

denzil-1.0.6.tar.gz

If you find it useful, I'm glad to be of service...and don't forget to thank FuzzyTheBear for knowing just which buttons to push to get me working!

I set out to install a printer, and ended up destroying my imap set up!

Don't ask me how. It involved installing a few updates, fiddling around with some configuration files, and amazingly I was on a day-long mission to get mail working again. Finally got things going again about an hour ago - no idea how much has bounced around the net in the meantime, probably nothing important.

Consequently, didn't get much done today. Had planned to read and write a bit, and to get some paper for the printer to test it properly. Also planned to visit my father in hospital. Finally set out on the 1630 bus to Weston General, after a long wait for missing buses and getting drenched on the way to the stop. He is much brighter and feeling better today, which was a relief. Bumped into my mum, also visiting. Left a little earlier than planned due to further bus uncertainty.

Now to try to get webmail working again...

An almost solid week of School Admission Appeals - all seems to have gone well, and only one was really difficult or unpleasant. Nerves almost got the better of me first time out, but otherwise I think I've done my best for the school in question. The decisions remain in the hands of the panel of course. Impossible to pre-judge outcomes. Otherwise, I've achieved (indeed, had energy for) little else. Caught up with someone I don't talk to nearly enough. Drank too much wine. I'm having dreams about Net Capacity Assessments. Got James Fenton's 'An Introduction to English Poetry', which is a pleasant enough read, along with a bunch of CD's I could ill afford. A week I've been worrying about for a long time is unbelievable over!