Monthly Archives: January 2005

Photography roundup

Ken says you should shoot jpeg while Petteri Sulonen says shoot raw! I can only shoot jpeg at the moment but when I do upgrade I’ll be sure to give my opinion 🙂
Ken also has an extensive Canon 20D vs Nikon D70 test. Considering he’s a huge Nikon fan it’s reasonably balanced! You may find his Canon 20D review useful too. Apparently Nikon lenses can be used on Canon bodies! You need to buy an adaptor though.
And finally, he has a great write-up on batteries. I have several sets of NIMH batteries at home that are getting a bit long in the tooth and not performing as well. He suggests that, you can easily rejuvenate them by running them through a full discharge-charge cycle a couple of times.

From Better Digital Photography..

Missing Person – Robert Holohan

If you live in Ireland please be on the lookout for Robert Holohan.
The news of his disappearance has been in the papers and on the news continuously but here’s a photo of the young 11 year old who vanished on the 4th of January:

(further description)
Update: 2005/1/13 2 bodies have been found. One was found in Midleton under a bridge and the other near Inch Strand. An examination of the body will be carried out this afternoon. RTE News has more, and breakingnews have a page devoted to news about Robert.
Later Still.. The body found at Inch Strand has been identified as that Robert. Ar Dheis De go raibh a anam.
Much Later.. A murder investigation has now been launched by the Gardai.
2005-01-19 – Student Wayne O’Donoghue was charged yesterday with the manslaughter of Robert.

Attic Insulation, Energy Bills and Conservation

One of those things I have to get around to in the next month is insulating the attic. I had a look up there last week and it needs replacing badly – it’s worn away completely in parts! I rang a local hardware store and they quoted me a price of EUR199.89 to cover the approx 56m squared of the attic. I have to check yet if that had a vapour barrier or not.
Here’s a few links for me to come back to soon:

Later… Comment posting was broken for a short period after the last CVS update but it’s working again – thank you to the person who says they have 60cm of insulation, I don’t think Cork/Ireland is cold enough to justify that amount however!
Much Later… The ESB and Bord Gais have very good but brief pages on energy tips. The ESB recommend 6″ of attic insulation, while Bord Gais recommend 4″. I’m going to install 6″ myself!

Testing Gnome-blog and WordPress

This is a test post from Gnome-blog. Very simple interface, but I prefer the javascript/html bookmarklet myself!
Later… It works, sort of. I was able to post the above text but I couldn’t:

  • Pick the category to post to
  • The post title wasn’t set.
  • The Smarty cache wasn’t cleared so I presume xmlrpc.php doesn’t go through the usual wp-admin/ backend.

The point that I lost all respect for Bill Gates

Haven’t MS and ol’ Bill been spreading FUD as described in this essay for a long time? Isn’t the GPL a communist threat to American jobs in IT?

After ridiculous comments this week at CES, where Gates equated the last three years of my work with Creative Commons as some sort of Red Menace that needs to be stopped, it’s clear he’s off his rocker.

WordPress Multiuser Jan 9th Snapshot

Here’s a major update of WPMU. Go download it now!
New in this snapshot:

  • Use PEAR Function Cache if available. Several plugins have been rewritten so they’ll cache their output to save on databases processing.
  • Main WordPress loop has been cached in a better way. If a page is now cached all we need to do is get a few settings from the database.
  • The last release was plagued by the wp-login feature that redefined the site url if the blog was moved. As all wpmu URLs are virtual this was a big one!
  • Kitten’s Spaminator will now import keywords from the “main” blog to help detect spam in other blogs. (As there’s no registration page yet you’ll have to trust me that it works great!)
  • Previously when comments were posted, regardless of whether they were spam or not, the Smarty cache was cleared. This wrecked any performance gained by caching content so now the cache will be refreshed from the backend.
  • Because of too-vague mod_rewrite rules, posts with titles containing 4 digits failed.
  • Misc bug fixes and WP upgrades.

WPMU Update – Improved Caching

Hopefully you should see this site run a little faster, I’ve moved most database accesses to inside the cache loop.
For most users caching and processing of requests should be faster as the whole WordPress posts-loop is now cached, however there is a trade off. I can’t check if there are multiple or single posts on a page so every page, including the front page, is cached with your comment credentials and user login (if any). In other words, if I visit the front page and then you do, the front page won’t be cached for you, but if two anonymous users visit the second visitor will get a completely cached copy.
If you see any problems please leave a comment on this post, or email me at donncha @ linux.ie!

A bit later…I’m watching the logs and I’m glad I made that change. We’re being hit by 240 280 attempts at referer spamming from sex 4singles.com. After the first hit, all they get served is static html! 🙂

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