September 2003 – Page 3 – Something Odd!

Basing my work on that done by Dougal before me, I’m going to try and write a Cork City slang filter for the site. Don’t worry, it’ll be optional, because as it says here, “C’mere biya.I realise some of de feenos and de wans have pure hassle with de Cork speak like. So have a lash of it and there’ll be less gowls around. How bad!”

New poll on the CorkLUG site

It’s OT for the site, but important IMO. A new poll on the CorkLUG site asks, “Should smoking be banned in the work place and pubs on January 1st?” I’ve already voted but please don’t abuse it by voting multiple times.

Piratizing your blog

Thanks to Dougal Campbell for writing a Pirate filter on his site. I copied the code and put it into a Smarty plugin. It’s available here for everyone on blogs.linux.ie to use as follows:

Open the Template Editor of your blog and bring up the “Posting” template.
Look for the {$the_content} variable in there.
You have to pass that variable to the pirate function: {pirate content=$the_content}. If you’re using the highlightsearch modifier, then use this code instead: {pirate content=$the_content|highlightsearch}.
Save the template and reload your blog. If it doesn’t update, then click on the “Refresh Site” link in the backend.

Oh, of course, it’ll only work today, as it’s Talk Like a Pirate Day!
UF has a special Pirate Talk Day feature today! 🙂

openssh & sendmail updates

Advisories for both OpenSSH and Sendmail were released over the past few days. Both packages had remotely exploitable bugs.
I forgot to blog this yesterday, but the RPMs available from Red Hat are also on apt-rpm. Just do an apt-get upgrade to upgrade your server.

Looking for a house?

Eddie Irvine’s house is for sale, and a steal at the €6.5m guide price!

The RIAA For Dummies – 60 Second Edition

Tim has a frightening cartoon explaining copyright. Dare you sing’ Happy Birthday!’ now? You might get busted!

PHP Newsletter software

PHPList was mentioned on various blogs a few weeks back and we’ve used it here a few times. I’m not 100% happy with it however as it’s missing some glaring features and those make sending emails very difficult.
I searched freshmeat.net earlier today and installed LetterIt, a similar piece of software from Germany.
It’s a fairly simple program, doesn’t look very flash, but it does work well, and we just sent out a mailing to over 1,000 customers this afternoon with it.

WordPress and Smarty

I was drafted in to help on WordPress a long time ago. Unfortunately I haven’t done much work on any OSS projects in a while and it was bothering me.
I did do some useful work though – I found out that the Smarty register_resource construct was buggy when using caching. That rules out using MySQL as a backend to hold templates. (I posted a mail to the Smarty list but nothing came of it. *shrug*)
Finally, after re-installing Linux on my new hard drive last weekend I Smartyised WP! Here’s a WIP snapshot.
What does it do? Well, I wrapped some of the Smarty template API (ie. bloginfo(), etc) in Smarty functions of the same names. I’ve only done enough to get the default template working, as it’s laborious work and I wanted to get something out quickly!
The template is split up into 3 parts: top.tpl, post.tpl and end.tpl. They live in users/main/templates/ and can be edited there with a text editor. The online editor from b2++ will make it’s way there eventually probably.

Before trying this, please be sure to backup your WP installation. The files in the tarball don’t conflict with the files in CVS but I can’t guarantee that this won’t delete all your WP install files if you’re not careful!

Download the WP – Smarty mod. (40Kb)

F 16

Wow! Amazing photo of an F16 at an air show in Poland.
At the Chicago Air and Water Show last August I went snap happy but never got anything near as good as this shot. He was lucky the fighter was banking just over his head (see the comments).
I tried in vain to snap 600mph jets as they passed a few hundred feet away but by the time I’d found them in the sky and zoomed back, in the plane was a few miles away..