April 2008 – Page 2 – Something Odd!

Life Before Death

A series of powerful images, taken before and after the death of each subject. The images are striking, but what I found most moving and upseting were the stories that accompanied them. Some had accepted their fate while others rallied against it.

“Death is nothing,” says Maria. “I embrace death. It is not eternal. Afterwards, when we meet God, we become beautiful.” Maria Hai-Anh Tuyet Cao, 52

“Get me out of here”, she whispered as soon as anyone held her hand. “My heart will stop beating if I stay here. This is an emergency! I don’t want to die!” Elly Genthe, 83

(via Photub.com)

The best way to test new WordPress themes

Download the Theme Tester plugin for WordPress, install and activate it.
Download themes from ~~http://themes.wordpress.net/~~ (or maybe not, see Adam’s comment below!) and try them out without annoying your visitors by changing themes on them.

My new Theme Tester plugin allows you to change themes and view the results without the visitors to your blog seeing any changes.
There is one cavaet. Your visitors may notice some changes if your current theme uses blog options that a new theme overwrites. This could happen if for example you’re testing a newer version of your current theme or testing a theme based on the same engine as your current theme. The K2 theme springs to mind here because it’s the base for several other themes but YMMV.

I used the plugin already when I trawled the themes sites and the archives at Weblog Tools Collection for a new theme for this place. As you can guess if you’re a regular visitor, I haven’t changed theme yet, but I found a couple of very pretty designs that may make an appearance here eventually.

Windows 95 is the best Windows

I used to believe that Windows 95 was the best version of Windows. Compared to previous Microsoft operating systems and software like Windows 3.1, how could I not think that way? DOS was great, it did the job it was supposed to and got out of the way when playing Doom 2 but Windows 95. Damn, that was a whole new ball game. Marvelous.

Now I’ve found something better. It’s a souped up version of Windows XP. Check out the screenshot. I’m getting rid of Linux. Ubuntu? Bah. It’s gone.

You can check out a fully functioning demo too. I know you’ll be as impressed as I was.

Bertie Ahern Jokes

It didn’t take long. Bertie Ahern, the Irish prime minister, announced his resignation yesterday and already the joke emails are pouring in. (Thanks Brian and Louise!)

My own contributions:

Sunday Times, December 23rd 2007.

The Bertie score card above is from Bifsniff.com (but created by Brendan O’Connell), anyone want to claim credit for the others? Unfortunately email forwarders don’t usually give credit ..

Gavin, who has blogged the Mahon Tribunal for so long has given his own reaction as well as a chronology of events leading to the resignation yesterday. It’s scary how long the Teflon Taoiseach managed to survive in politics. Nothing stuck to him.

Edit: Green Ink created Bertie 300. Thanks for commenting!

Slow down trackback spam with Simple Trackback Validation

I used the Simple Trackback Validation plugin for a while until I noticed these errors showing up in php_errors.

PHP Fatal error: Cannot instantiate non-existent class: snoopy in /home/www/wp-content/plugins/simple-trackback-validation/simple-trackback-validation.php on line 158

This morning I decided to fix it as the spammers have been going crazy. I spotted dozens of POST requests to trackbacks as I tailed my log files.

How to fix the plugin:

Open simple-trackback-validation.php in a text editor and go to line 158. It should be this line:

$stbvSnoopy = new Snoopy;
Above that line, add the folloing line:

include_once( ABSPATH . 'wp-includes/class-snoopy.php' );
Save the file and upload to your host again.

It’s no substitute for Akismet but along with Cookies for comments it should help keep your blog spam free!

Or, as I’ve just done because this blog is being inundated with trackback spam right now (over 17,000 in the last 9 hours), I blocked off access completely with this rewrite rule. Any WordPress blog will send a pingback anyway and MT even supports pingback now!