Oct 19, 20071
Oct 2, 20070
Go Pink For October - Be Breast Cancer Aware
October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month. Please help raise awareness by placing an image on your site. Some people are changing their whole colour schemes to pink; if I had more free time I would join in too! You can find out more at Go Pink For October. Thank You.
Sep 23, 20070
Taming The Fedora Beast
As some of you might be aware, I have rencetly been having some problems with my web/development server. It’s a Fedora 7 machine with a LAMP install, Java 5 and a few other odds and ends, and although I appreciate that Fedora tends to be an experiment vehicle on which Redhat tests new bits-and-bobs I was a little put off when I discovered problems with my network after updating the kernel to 2.6.22.4.
Essentially, everything seemed to be working okay, but for some reason I couldn’t ping any other computer on the network from the web server; nor could I ping the web server from any other machine on the network. The eth0 interface was up; I could ping localhost, and the static IP address I’d assigned the NIC; the Ethernet cable was good (I tried two cables, both of which I was certain were good). However, the LED on the hub was constantly on for the web server connection, and ‘ethtool etho’ indicated that there was no link.
After several days of trying to fix the problem, I tried building an older kernel to use. It was the first time I had tried this, and it all went well - however, this did not fix the problem. It would seem that my initial assessment that the kernel update was causing the problems was incorrect.
Then I came up with the solution. Prior to the problems, I had been using the onboard NIC, a SiS900 based interface. I disabled the onboard, and put in a PCI SiS900 based NIC. This solved the problem and all was well. I still can’t think what the problem was - and don’t have the expertise to go through the logs and reverse the updates. For some reason - beyond my ken - updating the system interfered with the onboard NIC, but a PCI NIC with the same chipset worked fine. It wasn’t the kernel because I reverted that to the version prior to the update.
All’s well that ends well as they say… I now have my web server up and running. Well, almost. I used to do a lot of coding and administration using FreeNX over SSH to get a desktop. FreeNX has now stopped working! I’ve won the battle, but still the war goes on!
Sep 5, 20070
Needless Signup for Online Services
Why must so many online services insist that you sign up in order to use them? If you are trying to use a service such as finding out train or bus times, then there is no need that I can see to request that you sign up before being shown the result of your search. I would happily sign up for a service if I was expecting some sort of email feedback; making a purchase; or making use of some other user-specific service. I have often left a site when asked to sign up before finding out the results of a search, and this has a really negative effect on my experience as a user!
Sep 2, 20072
Bioshock - Succumbing to DRM
I’ve finally given in to the SecuROM DRM that ships with the PC version of Bioshock. After reading so many good things about the game, and an equal number of bad things about the DRM I had planned to boycott 2K games and resist purchasing Bioshock.
Unfortunately, I downloaded the demo version last week (complete with rookit style SecuROM) - and I have to say I was very impressed! I decided to part with £30.00 of hard earned cash and buy the game. Things aren’t as bad as they were; you can now install Bioshock up to 5 times on 5 different machines so this should give me plenty of wiggle room. It’s just a shame that DRM has become so restrictive that attempts to prevent copyright infringement result in the customer being punished.
Sep 2, 20070
A Gorilla and Phil Colins… Odd Combination? You Decide.
This has got to be the most original piece of advertising I’ve seen. It had me in hysterics. What do you think?
Aug 22, 20070
Analysing Oracle Application Server 9i Webcache Logs
Recently I had cause to report on the usage staff at work made of the corporate intranet. This would ordinarily be a simple enough task if the logs were plain standard Apache logs. However, I was dealing with Oracle9iAS, a very different beast indeed. Oracle9iAS is built on top of a customised version of Apache and incorporates a caching proxy server, the so-called Webcache; an implementation of J2EE called OC4J (Oracle Containers for Java) and various other bells and whistles, making it something of a behamoth. [Read more]
Aug 21, 20070
A First Wordpress Plugin
As you can see from my previous post, my first attempt at writing a Wordpress Plugin was a success. This plugin is very simple and allows the user to embed a YouTube video into their post. The main function calls a callback function that replaces every occurrence of the tag ["youtube" video_id] (minus quotes) with a flash video corresponding to the video_id parameter.
Just paste the code below into a file called ‘youtube.php’ in your wp-content/plugins directory. You should then be able to activate it via the Plugins admin option. Once activated, you can place a YouTube video in your post by going to code-view and inserting ["youtube" video_id] (minus the quotes). The video_id parameter is the ‘v’ parameter in a YouTube URL. In the example below, the URL is http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lL4L4Uv5rf0. Therefore, the video_id parameter should be lL4L4Uv5rf0. In the code below, you will need to remove the quotes around the word “youtube” in the regex on line 5, I had to put these in to display the code without it interpreting the tag… it’s a work in progress!
Code (php)
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<param name="\" value="\"></param></object>");
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function youtube_plugin_cb($match)
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{
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$html = YOUTUBE_LINK;
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return ($html);
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}
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function youtube_plugin($content)
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{
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}
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add_filter(‘the_content’, ‘youtube_plugin’);
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add_filter(‘comment_text’, ‘youtube_plugin’);
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?>
Aug 21, 20071
Scrubs Musical
Every time I see this clip it makes me laugh out loud, so thought I’d share the laughs.
