Jason Oakley : The life of an Aussie geek!

I use multi-million dollar satellites to find tupperware in the bush!

Archive for October, 2005

Writing php plugins

Sunday, October 16th, 2005

I wanted to have a plugin on my site to pick random images and display them. Unforunately, there were no plugins on the WordPress plugin site which automatically add in the image height, width and alt tags. I don’t know why. It’s so simple. So, in the end, I did it myself. You can see a new page linked from my sidebar to my "RndImgDisplayer" WordPress plugin.

You can also see it in action on the top of my sidebar to the right there. It was fun to write and killed a couple of hours (mostly refining it). You would have seen errors on my website while I was testing it. Unfortunately, I do not have a test blog set up for testing plugins. If I decide to make any more I will create a demo blog just for testing purposes.

Plugins for WordPress

Sunday, October 16th, 2005

I finally got around to upgrading WordPress to the latest version. I thought I might add a few plugins while I was at it.

I’ve chucked on the antispam plugin "Bad Behaviour". That should help cut down on spam in my comments, hopefully.

Another one I added was "del.icio.us links". Now when I bookmark something you can see it on the right-hand side of this blog page.

You can now see the local weather via the "WeatherIcon" plugin. I had some trouble with this one. It wouldn’t show the data it downloaded. I posted on the forum and talked to one of the devs, but that didn’t help. In the end I decided to try another airport up north instead of the closest one down south and the plugin worked. I guess the data it downloaded from the weather website was faulty. It’s close enough to show our weather anyway.

The "time of day" plugin shows in human terms the approximate time I’ve posted to the blog. Nothing major but nice to have.

One of the most useful plugins I added was the "Twilight Autosave" plugin. This one automatically saves the text you type in your blog to a cookie on your computer. If the interweb goes down or your browser crashes or something, your text has been autosaved in the cookie so you can come back later and finish your blog post. This is fantastic simply for the reason which you’ve already seen: I’ve had crashes, etc which have wiped out my blog. Usually this seems to only happen once I’ve typed a shitload of text and it really pissed me off. Let’s hope I don’t have to worry about that any more. It got so I’d be typing my blog into notepad and saving it periodically then doing a C&P to my blog.

I finally joined up to LastFM aka Audioscrobbler. If you’ve never used this, you sign up for an account and get a plugin for your music player. In my case, Windows Media Player. Whenever you have played over half of a song, it uploads the ID3 tag details to your LastFM account and records it there with pretty graphs, etc. You can also join groups and find other people with similar music tastes. It provides an RDF feed of your songs which you can display on a website. I added the "WP-Scrobbler" plugin and you can see it on the right in my sidebar with a list of the last five songs I’ve played with WMP.

I had a funky plugin to use Ajax to display the calendar on the right called "LiveCalendar". Unfortunately, once I got it working it stopped all the other Javascript plugins (WP-Scrobbler and Del.icio.us) from working so I had to disable it. It’s handy but not essential.

I also tried a plugin to display the current value of this website on BlogShares, but that kept giving errors about ‘headers already sent’ so I had to disable it too. No matter. You can see the BlogShares icon on the right there. I have to put that on my site so I can claim my blog on BS.

Pot is smart making

Saturday, October 15th, 2005


CANADIAN researchers have discovered that smoking marijuana could improve a person’s memory and mood.

A team at the University of Saskatchewan headed by Xia Zhang found that injections of a potent HU210 synthetic substance that mimics the active ingredients in cannabis increases the production of neurons in the hippocampus area of the brain in rats.

Shit! Scott is going to be a fucking EINSTEIN!!!

Last night I held my breath and flashed my mobile phone to the lastest firmware. It seems to have taken hold, which is always a good thing. The menus and other things seem to be a bit faster and the icons are a lot nicer. Let’s see what happens over the next few days while using the A1000 on the network.

Blake and Sienna are outside chasing each other around the backyard and having a good time. I didn’t take Sienna swimming today as she has been unwell.

Does anyone know any decent websites to read these days? I’ve been on the internet nigh on ten years and there has to be millions of sites out there to look at but all the ones I can think of are pretty damn boring. Suggest some in my comments block if you like, but no more phentermine, texas holdem poker or "women being crucified while having orgasm" sites thanks. My link collection is full already. Besides, I never visit your damn spam sites anyway and just mark them as spam when I go to validate comments. It’ll never happen buddy so WHY DONT YOU JUST STOP!!!

The server seems to be behaving itself at the moment. I’ve got a cron running on a temperature monitor application and it seems reasonably stable: 46, 45, 45, 47, 45, 47, 45, 47, 47, 45. That’s over two drives with interleaving results.

Mandrivalinux 2006 has just come out. I might have to upgrade some of the world-facing applications but I’m still not keen on doing a complete update which might break something. I’d rather start with a new HDD and install the OS brand new on it. Might do that once we have a few more dollar$. It’s only network-upgradable atm, but in about 3 weeks you should be able to download the DVD ISO from their site.

Find out about yourself – Numerology

Wednesday, October 12th, 2005

http://www.paulsadowski.com/Numbers.asp

There are 16 letters in your name.
Those 16 letters total to 50
There are 7 vowels and 9 consonants in your name.

Your number is: 5

The characteristics of #5 are: Expansiveness, visionary, adventure, the constructive use of freedom.

The expression or destiny for #5:
The number 5 Expression endows with the wonderful characteristic of multi-talents and versatility. You can do so many things well. The tone of the number 5 is constructive freedom, and in your drive to attain this freedom, you will likely be the master of adaptability and change. You are good at presenting ideas and knowing how to approach people to get what you want. Naturally, this gives you an edge in any sort of selling game and spells easy success when it comes to working with people in most jobs. Your popularity may lead you toward some form of entertainment or amusement. Whatever you do, you are clever, analytical, and a very quick thinker.

If there is too much of the 5 energy in your makeup, you may express some the negative attitudes of the number. Your restless and impatient attitude may keep you from staying with any project for too long. Sometimes you can be rather erratic and scatter yourself and your energies. You have a hard time keeping regular office hours and maintaining any sort of a routine. You tend to react strongly if you sense that your freedom of speech or action is being impaired or restricted in any way. As clever as you are, you may have a tendency to make the same mistakes over and over again because much of your response is glib reaction rather that thoughtful application. You are in a continuous state of flux brought by constantly changing interests.

Your Soul Urge number is: 7

A Soul Urge number of 7 means:
With a number 7 Soul Urge you are very fond of reading, and retreating to periods of being alone and away from the disruptions of the outer world. You like to dream and develop you idealistic understandings, to study and analyze, to gain knowledge and wisdom. You may be too laid back and withdrawn to really succeed in the business world, and you will be much more comfortable in circumstances that are tolerant of your reserve, your analytical approach, and your desire to use your mind rather than your physical being.

You are very timid around people that you don’t know very well, so much so at times that casual conversation and social situations can be strained. You tend to repress your emotions to the extend that some people have a good bit of difficult understanding you. You tend to be very selective with friends and you don’t easily adapt to new environments or to new people very quickly.

The negative traits of the 7 include becoming too much the introvert and isolated from others.

Your Inner Dream number is: 7

An Inner Dream number of 7 means:
You dream of having the opportunity to read, study, and shut yourself off from worldly distractions. You can see yourself as a teacher, mystic, or ecclesiastic, spending your life in the pursuit of knowledge and learning.

Your birthstone is Aquamarine
The Mystical properties of Aquamarine

Aquamarine is often used to experience love and mercy. It is said to help ease depression and grief.

Some lists consider these stones to be your birthstone. (Birthstone lists come from Jewelers, Tibet, Ayurvedic Indian medicine, and other sources)

Jade, Rock Crystal

Your birth tree is

Oak, robust nature

Courageous, strong, unrelenting, independent, sensible, does not love changes, keeps its feet on the ground, person of action.

Bangrocks intermittent, Credit Cards and stuff

Wednesday, October 12th, 2005

Take two. I had just finished typing this damn blog and my browser crashed.

Apologies for Bangrocks being up and down like a yoyo. There has been some server problems at Micfo:

Your server is currently being reviewed by our admins after a manual reboot failed. I do not know an exact ETA to when this will be back online. I should hope that it is fully back online within one hour.  Thanks for your patience.

We’ve had to cancel our credit cards *sigh* Last Saturday morning, Bec asked me about a new transaction she found on our statement. The transaction had a website on it so we looked it up and it was a car audio place over in Texas, USA. I couldn’t do anything about it until Monday as our bank’s customer service is only available 8am to 8pm weekdays. They said they would investigate it and we were going to fill out a form to confirm we did not make the purchase. They said not to cancel the cards unless it happened again, so we were waiting for the form in the mail.

Tuesday morning, we found another transaction. This one was for Paypal. This one worried me more than the other transaction. The reason is, this was to ACTIVATE a Paypal account. Once the crook did that, they could transfer all the money out of our credit card up to the limit into a Paypal account and never need to use the credit card details again. Then they could buy whatever they wanted. I quickly rang up the bank again and had them cancel the credit cards post haste! Unfortunately, it means we get new cards with new numbers and have to ring every company we pay by Direct Debit (all of them) and tell them the new details. What a pain!

Want to know the scariest part? The perpetr perpa purp BAD GUY had the Security Code off the back of our credit card. This means he would buy whatever he wanted and be validated. So much for safe purchases over the internet. I used to wax lyrical about how safe it was to purchase things over the internet with credit cards "Sure! I do it all the time. Never had any fraud problems. It’s all a bunch of hooey!" Well, guess what? I’m now eating my words. And don’t say it’ll never happen, because we all remember that thing with what’s-her-name.. click click, you know.

I’m going to have a holiday in just over a week. Going to fly down to Sydney and catch up with some friends. Should be good to get away from work and have a break.

Blake had a great weekend at his grandparents’ place last weekend. Sienna has been sleeping all the way through the night, which is great. Even sleeping the whole night on her own mattress.

The internet is for porn

Wednesday, October 5th, 2005

The internet is for porn

Flash » The Internet is for Porn

 

All from a production : Avenue Q on Broadway

Classic! If I was near Broadway I’d go see this!!

The funny thing is it sounds like Cookie Monster singing it, but it’s Trekkie Monster.

Footage includes "If You Were Gay", "The Internet is For Porn" and "Everyone’s a Little Bit Racist."

 

What is AVENUE Q about?

AVENUE Q is the story of Princeton, a bright-eyed college grad who comes to New York City with big dreams and a tiny bank account. He soon discovers that the only neighborhood in his price range is Avenue Q; still, the neighbors seem nice. There’s Brian the out-of-work comedian and his therapist fianceé Christmas Eve; Nicky the good-hearted slacker and his roommate Rod — a Republican investment banker who seems to have some sort of secret; an Internet addict called Trekkie Monster; and a very cute kindergarten teaching assistant named Kate. And would you believe the building’s superintendent is Gary Coleman?!? (Yes, that Gary Coleman.) Together, Princeton and his newfound friends struggle to find jobs, dates, and their ever-elusive purpose in life.

Server up and going – wish me luck

Tuesday, October 4th, 2005

I booted the server back up again and somehow remembered the root password. I mounted the partitions manually and they worked fine. I looked at the dmesg file and found the errors then looked it up in google. They all said it was hopeless and the hdd is on it’s way out. I found out it was my 200Gb HDD which I had put all the important stuff on emoticon

I kept reading through and someone on another forum said it could be related to heat issues. If the HDD gets hot it could cause those errors.. also if the cable is a bit dodgy.

I changed the HDD cable and also opened the case somewhat and took the front faceplate off to (hopefully) allow more air to circulate. It’s in one of those really tiny micro cases which has half-height cards in it since it’s so small. Hence not a lot of air circulates.

The server is back up and running now, so lets hope it keeps that way.

I’m tempted to buy a new PC and put the HDD’s in there and install the latest Mandrivalinux 2005 LE and put the PCTV card and DVDROM in that PC and just have the one PC for server and TV. No reason to have two separate PCs really. It’s just using up extra electricity.

I’ve been looking at prices on Gamedude.com.au and it seems that to purchase the parts in either 32bit or 64bit would be approximately the same give or take $50. I may yet get an AMD 64bit CPU and Foxconn or Asus 64bit motherboard then run the 64bit Mandrivalinux on it. That’d be hardcore and fast!! I thought the price difference would be staggering. If I ran Windows there’d be no point in getting the 64bit versions as 64bit Windows is crud from the reviews I’ve seen. It actually runs slower than the 32bit at the same GHz. For around $300 I could have a new fast PC for watching TV, DVDs and XviD movies. Hooray! emoticon