Music by Programmers - Launch Party

Jason Gorman and five of his programming chums have put together an album of original electronic music to raise money for educational programmes at Bletchley Park and The National Museum Of Computing. The charities get every penny of the profits, split 50/50 between them.

The album goes on sale in late April, and Jason's target is to sell 2,000 downloads and raise £10,000. The music industry isn't what it was, and selling music is much harder than it used to be - even for a good cause. Between now and the release date, they're going to need as much help as they can get to spread the word.

• They have a web site - http://www.musicbyprogrammers.com/
• They have a Twitter handle: http://twitter.com/ProgrammerMusic
• They have a Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/MusicByProgrammers
• They have a YouTube channel with a sneak preview: http://www.youtube.com/user/MusicByProgrammers

Please feel free to publicise their efforts by any means at your disposal.

A special listening party to launch the album on 23rd April is not to be missed. It's going to be small and intimate at a "jolly spiffy pub" near Holborn. Every penny of the £20 ticket price goes directly to Bletchley Park for maths workshops and a programming club at The National Museum Of Computing. And every ticket holder will get a very limited edition CD with bonus tracks!!! Only 100 of these special edition CDs will be produced, so it promises to be a veritable collector's item.

GCalendar in Joomla: Daylight Savings problem

We recently launched a new Web presence for my German Church using Joomla 2.5. At my suggestion, GCalendar was installed to provide a searchable event calendar and an "upcoming events" module. It all worked splendidly until British Summertime began on 31 March 2013 - and suddenly all calendar events were shown starting an hour early.

We spent days trying to find a way to configure Daylight Savings into the calendar. All it allowed us to do in the global settings was to choose a time zone - of course we had set it to Europe/London - but without an option of respecting Daylight Savings automatically. In despair, I eventually uninstalled the component and reinstalled it. At this point there was a new version (3.0.0) of GCalendar available, so I chose that. In the component control panel there turned out to be an options button at the top right of the screen, which we may simply have missed seeing before. In the options you can set the time zone and once I had done so, suddenly all the times appeared correctly again within the web site. Huge sighs of relief all round.

Could the "Hydrogen Age" be about to dawn?

A team of researchers at Virginia Tech has used bio-engineered enzymes to release high-purity hydrogen from xylose in biomass and waste heat from industrial processes. Sounds too good to be true, but it was not published on 1st April.