July 2006 – Something Odd!

The Pigs, they are a flying

The impossible has happened. When you're outside over the next few days watch the skies. If you looks carefully you may see pigs flying through the air! Why? My Apple MacBook arrived yesterday and I'm playing with it now. After some initial problems with my Linksys WRT54G wireless router I got the laptop online using the neat "network setup assistant". Soon Firefox and Thunderbird were downloaded and now I'm trying to figure out how to migrate my email from Linux to the Mac Thunderbird. Hopefully it's as easy as copying over the data folder.

Despite myself, I am impressed. It's going with me to San Francisco so I'm going to have a busy few days installing Apache, PHP, MySQL, Subversion and whatever else I can find to amuse myself on a long trip!

Now, where are all those Unix tools hidden?

Update – writing in Mac Flock, ripping a DVD with Mac Ripper, iTerm, VLC, Samba on my Linux box allows me to browse my mp3, movie and photo collections, from the living room! Bottom of the machine is very warm. No need for central heating this winter!

iPhoto likes to do it's own thing with my photos. Not sure if I'm comfortable with that but I'll give it a go. I knew the DOOM Collector's Edition I bought a few years ago would come in handy! PrBoom works a treat, but avoid the 2.4.3 release. The "Launch" button is greyed out no matter what WAD file you throw at it. 2.4.2 works fine though.

XAMPP for Mac OS X is downloading now. Like the well known version of Windows, this is an installer bundled with Apache, PHP, MySQL and PHP. Along with Vim and Subversion I should have a complete dev environment for the long wait in the airport tomorrow! Later – I spoke too soon, XAMPP doesn't work on Intel Macs yet. I'm going to give MAMP a go now.

Later still! Lots of tips for new users switching from Windows to Mac on this wordpress.com page. Podz saw it on the top posts list! I still don't know how to switch between Flock windows. ALT-TAB switches between applications only. Anyone know how?

We [heart] WordPress

Via Podz, the I [heart] WordPress thread continues and is a sticky on the wordpress.com forum. If you like penguins then you'll enjoy this message! Make sure you turn up your sound too!

I'm still quite fond of my original "We [heart] WordPress" on the beach!

We Love WordPress

Ray and Jenny Expecting

Radio DJ, Ray D'Arcy and Jenny Kelly are expecting a baby in a few months time it was revealed yesterday in the Tribune. For those of us who don't buy that fine newspaper, Ian Dempsey announced the news this morning. Ray and co. were inundated with texts this morning congratulating the couple on their good news!

Good luck guys, hope the pregnancy goes well!

The referrers list on In Photos shows the interest people had trying to find photos of the couple. Luckily my US Book photos have always featured highly in Google searches for them! 🙂

Five common PHP design patterns

Over at IBM Developer Works there's an interesting article on PHP patterns. If you've never come across patterns before it's a good introduction. Just remember that these methods of solving software problems are most useful when you've got lots of code. Using the MVC pattern to print "Hello World!" is probably a little overkill!

For the curious, the patterns covered are: factory, singleton, observer, chain-of-command and strategy.

Elsewhere on dikini.net you can find a collection of design patterns. Vlado updated his collection recently and there's now 20 techniques or patterns. He openly admits that, 'not all can be considered "officially" design patterns, but to be honest I don't really care.' (via)

Holy Shmoly, it lives!

This site has moved. It's now at ocaoimh.ie where I can play with a more up to date version of WordPress.

Upgrading was a breeze:

I dumped the old database tables and copied them over here.
I installed this site with the usual defaults included near-empty tables.
Then I fed my old db tables back in, changed the prefix in wp_config.php to point at those old tables.
I changed the siteurl and home in the options table to point at the new url.
Finally, I visited the upgrade url which magically brought the db up to date!

I decided on using K2, and modified the default theme slightly to match my old theme somewhat. Unfortunately I had to edit index.php so I have to watch out when I'm upgrading.

I decided I needed a related posts plugin as well as one to display the latest comments. Both required a little bit of massaging to work with the development WP 2.1 which I'll update this post with later. Next in line is something to resurrect my "popular posts" list using data from my referrer plugin!

What about my old site? I used some rewrite magic to bring you here didn't I? 🙂

Damien had a nice lunch, I had sandwiches. Thought you'd like to know!

Cyclists Beware!

I just caught a few minutes of a report on Radio 1 about the dangers cyclists face on the roads and it reminded me of an almost-incident last night.

As the sun set last night, I was driving down an urban road when a girl on a bike drifted out into the middle of the road in front of me. I wasn’t driving too fast thankfully but still had to press on the brakes hard. When I was only a few feet from her she calmly looked back at us and that’s when I spotted the white buds stuck in her ears and the wire going down to her waist.

Cycling is dangerous enough on our crowded streets but why the hell would someone tempt fate and risk their own life by limiting their awareness of their surroundings?

If I had a “stupid things people do” category..