This blog moved home that is, I’m still tucked up in Blarney!
I moved to a slightly more beefy linode 200 VPS at linode.com and thanks to Michele at Blacknight the dns changeover took place quietly and unobtrusively last night around 1am. Hopefully you’ll see a slight improvement in page download speed which should improve over the next few days as I tweak settings and give MySQL more memory.
It hasn’t been a good time for the organisers of Le Web 3 in Paris, France. First of all their WiFi was down or sketchy and while that’s simply an annoyance and is a terrible reflection on the WiFi provider surely things couldn’t get worse?
They did. In place of the advertised speakers, two French presidential candidates spoke. Wasn’t this conference supposed to be about web technology? I can’t wait to see what they do next! How will they better today’s fiasco? I would certainly be looking for a refund, especially if I had travelled from abroad.
Worse than that, at a conference where the majority of the delegates were not French, the two political candidates addressed the audience in French (and Sarkozy didn’t even take questions).
Two years have passed really quickly and it’s time for my car to be tested again as part of the National Car Test (NCT). Registration was simple through their website and hopefully the test will be as uneventful.
My car has been serviced recently but there’s still that nagging doubt in the back of my head. Conventional wisdom says that it’s easier to have the car fail the test, get the car fixed and then retake the test but I’ve heard stories about people whose cars failed the test for different reasons on the second go! Oh the stress!
Things to watch out for are listed on the NCT inspection checklist and include brakes, exhaust and tyres. They’re fairly thorough.
Do you have any NCT horror stories? I don’t want to hear them until after 3pm today!
Bad news! The front left tire is too worn to pass, but as Mel said in a comment below, the visual retest is free. Must ring the local garage and bring the car down to them tomorrow.
It’s all Mark’s fault. He mentioned Codemasters, then Dizzy, then he posted this movie of Magicland Dizzy completed in super-fast time. I had to search for more.
The following post contains several Youtube videos so click more if you want to see Gyroscope, Ghosts and Goblins, Barbarian and other Commodore 64 classics brought to life again!
It’s hard to believe, but despite the really bad uptake of broadband services, or perhaps because of it, Ireland leads the way in WiFi hotspots!
Last week I had the pleasure of using the free WiFi services in Douglas shopping center to make a post on the Mallow Camera Club site. I had half an hour to kill so I popped into O’Brien’s, bought a coffee and a biscuit and settled down. I wasn’t the only one taking advantage of this generous gift. I spotted three others seated at various points around the library tapping away on their laptops. It’s something I never imagined I’d see! Yes, yes, yes. If you’ve enjoyed the use of free WiFi in your city this won’t be anything new, but this is in the “Celtic Tiger” economy where nothing is free and everything is over-priced.
So, next time your significant other is popping down to the shops, tag along. They might have free WiFi and it’ll do you the world of good to get out from behind that desk! I’m waiting for retailers and restaurant owners in Blarney to realise that free access to the Internet would draw all the self-employed Internet geeks out of their homes and into their establishments. I wonder how hard would it be to drop that hint …
If you’ve never read the cartoons on biffsniff.com then you’re really missing out. They’re mostly drawn by Frank Prendergast and occasionally by guest cartoonists and they’re all extremely funny and clever. Frank’s a school friend I hadn’t seen in years but bumped into at the IT@Cork pre-conference dinner the other week.
Best of all, they’ve just moved to WordPress!
Use Google to search for inurl:/view/index.shtml and spy on people all over the world. I had a bit of fun directing a webcam somewhere in the States that’s watching a building site and busy road. (via)
What’s the most interesting webcam you’ve found?
I was glued to the radio this afternoon like many people in the country listening to the Minister for Finance, Brian Cowen, announce the new budget. Also like many people I’ll be better off next year as a result of some of the changes he made.
The budget was great for pensioners and first time buyers, of which I’m one of the latter. The news isn’t so good if you’re addicted to nicotine. Still, the price of a pint hasn’t gone up. You might also be able to pay for those cigarettes with the 1% that was knocked off the top rate of tax. That extra €10/month in the children’s allowance could come in handy too.
Anyway, the country is glowing with smiles all-around, except for the opposition of course who complain that not enough was done or done in the right place. I wonder if anyone asked if Paul Stokes was going to get some?
If you want to compare how you’ll do in 2007 versus this year, then compare this 2007 budget calculator and the 2006 one. I’m not PAYE any more but if I was I’d be up a few hundred Euro apparently! Not stinking rich, but enough nonetheless.
WP-Cache and spam. Who’d have thought they were related? Unfortunately they are because when your blog is spammed WP-Cache doesn’t check if the comment is legitimate or not and deletes cached files related to the spammed post.
I noticed this happened a lot on In Photos.org after I added thumbnails to the top of the page. The thumbnails change when the page is regenerated but I noticed that they would change much more frequently than expected. After some debugging I realised that comment spam was invalidating the WP-Cache cache.
How do you fix this? Here’s a small patch that can be applied to wp-cache-phase2.php, version 2.0.19 (and probably lower) that checks if the submitted comment was moderated or not. You’ll also find wp-cache-phase2.txt below. Just rename that to .php and copy it into your plugins/wp-cache/ folder for it to work.
Remember to update WP-Cache too. Despite last year’s date on the above post, it was updated as recently as last month!
Download
Patch will be on it’s way to gallir in a few moments but if you’re using WP-Cache this could be a big help to your site. (and if you use Ultimate Tag Warrior I hope you’re using my patch?)
Paul Stokes is at it again! Not content with barging in on a chat show last week he drove a car through a security barrier at RTE in Dublin, headed for the main doors, crashed into those before finally coming to rest a few feet away when his car bounced off the doors with the impact! He was detained by security and is to appear at Dublin District Court this morning.
If his GPS car system is so revolutionary why doesn’t he go through normal channels and develop it and create a business around it, and market the product just a little bit more sensibly? I can just imagine his conversation with a bank manager now if he does try to finance a startup.
Bosco.. where are you? All is forgiven!