Author Archives: Donncha

Donncha's Tuesday Links

There’s nothing like the laughter of your baby to perk up one’s morning after a bank holiday weekend!

Vim's cursor keys work in Mac OS X again

export TERM=linux

Ever since my Macbook died and was fixed again Vim hasn’t worked properly in iTerm.

I’m a big fan of SSH and Screen. SSH to connect to a remote server, and Screen is like a workspace organiser for your SSH session.

First of all the backspace key worked in Vim even when not in insert mode, but worst of all, the cursor keys refused to work and only succeeded in ringing bells in the terminal. Previous attempts at fixing the problem failed but I must have searched for the right terms this time. This review of Mac OS X led me part of the way. Sébastien recommended setting the TERM to “dtterm” but Screen didn’t recognise that. Setting it to “linux” fixes my SSH sessions, and also fixes Vim locally as well!

I added the snippet of code above to my ~/.bash_profile to make the change permanent and everything is back to normal now! I have a vague memory of fixing this before but I wish now I had blogged it then!

What time is it WordPress?

Daylight Saving Time (DST) kicked in this morning in Ireland, the UK and many other parts of the world when the clocks went back 1 hour. The US is next week from what I remember. If your server is using UTC time, check Options->General, the “Times in the weblog should differ by” textbox in your blog and adjust accordingly!

wordpress-time.png

Here’s a discussion on the WordPress.com forums about the issue from last year and I found this extend idea that has already been implemented in the Time Zone plugin, but it only works on UNIX-like systems and if you’re not using PHP’s safe mode.

PHP5 has the date_default_timezone_set function, but not enough hosts are using PHP5 to make that a universal choice. It would be nice if all this was done automatically, but hopefully with the further adoption of PHP5 that will happen eventually.

And don’t forget to check your other gadgets, especially digital cameras. I doubt many of them know anything about timezones!

Donncha's Saturday Links

A mixed bag, from germs and bugs to splogs and chocolate tasters.

  • Grannymar reminds us germs lurk everywhere. I’m always careful in public toilets, but it never occurred to me how bug-ridden ATMs are!
  • wp-hashcash works pretty well as an anti-comment spam tool. Make sure you have curl installed before installing it. Now, will someone adapt it for use on WordPress MU’s signup form, or maybe even the Write Post form? Might put a dent in the sploggers efforts to ruin our sites.
  • I forgot to mention yesterday, Donal lives here. Well done on the move bro! Great party last night!
  • Amid concerns that WiFi signals cause cancer, threaten the environment or cause nuclear meltdowns, this tshirt should come in useful.
  • An oldie, If architects had to work like programmers… via Barry.
  • The perfect job, taste testing dark chocolate. Conor says it’s to assess it’s value for money! Oh the poor guy.
  • Yahoo comes to Ireland but can they ever beat Google again? Does anyone care?
  • Not Drupal, WordPress MU – using WordPress MU instead of Drupal in a school environment and authenticating against Active Directory. He’s got a few niggling problems still, but it’s looking good. Anyone have other WordPress MU success stories to share?
  • Mark takes me back with this blog post about Wizball including the great soundtrack!

It's all about the L drivers

2007-10-20_img_7378-hs.jpg It’s all about the learner drivers. Yesterday the Road Safety Authority here in Ireland decided to finally enforce and tighten up the rules regarding drivers on provisional licenses and it caused uproar. I have some sympathy for learner drivers because they were only given 4 days notice. The new regime starts on Tuesday.

While it’s true that learner drivers are in the main more nervous and less experienced than drivers who have passed the driving test, the simple act of passing the test doesn’t suddenly bestow on someone skills and responsible behaviour that remain with the driver throughout their lives. We wouldn’t need the anti-drink driving campaigns or speed cameras if that were true. In Blarney yesterday a woman in a small car crept forward in busy traffic looking out her open window at the street signs with a mobile phone glued to her ear and when she trundled past us I saw a quizzical, worried look on her face as she tried to find where she was going to, completely oblivious of the long tailback behind her.

Four days was way too short however. If you’re going to pull the rug from underneath a large minority of the driving and working public give them adequate warning and improve the training and testing facilities. If everyone handed in fake “my employee needs a car for his job” letters the waiting lists for tests would still be just as long. That’s no way to run a driver testing facility.

It is so easy to say, “You had two years to do the test, why didn’t you do it?” Provisional drivers had it easy unfortunately, there was no stick forcing them to take the test. Now there is. Bloody big stick too. All I hope for are safer roads once the dust settles.

The Season 7 24 Trailer

Just how many bad days can Jack Bauer have?

Mark says “24 has ripped off all four Die Hard movies all at once.” with this trailer and it looks like he’s right. Every season gets bigger and bigger. I can’t wait ’til it starts! The Sky one page doesn’t have any start details, and Sky+ shows it’s not on next Sunday. Waiting, waiting, waiting ..

Donncha's Friday Links

Links are back, for now

  • Stumble Crumble displays your Stumbled links in your sidebar.
  • GRAMPS – open source geneology software for Linux and Windows and can be compiled on Mac OS X, FreeBSD and Solaris too. Via an Irish blogger, can’t remember who, comment and I’ll update the post! Via James Galvin, thanks for commenting!
  • Thanks Photub for linking to the GIMP lomo plugin I released a few days ago.
  • Remember LOLcats? Now there’s LOLCode.net. Will someone write a PHP interpreter/compiler? Thanks Alex!
  • Holy Shmoly! is now Gravatar enabled, although I haven’t signed up myself yet. Must see to that this morning. Enabling it on WordPress is really easy. Yes of course, Automattic own Gravatar now.
  • The blogroll update (homepage) plugin opened my eyes. I didn’t know how the “last updated” field in WordPress links was updated, but there’s a file called update-links.php which can be called from Cron to interrogate Pingomatic. Unfortunately api.pingomatic.com is down and Weblogs.com seems crap so I’m going to patch the blogroll update plugin to use Simple Pie to grab my blogroll’s feeds once a day.
  • Why do I have all my best ideas when away from the computer? I need a waterproof pad for the shower…

Update – Ryan says WordPress 2.3.1 will be out soon. Expect the new WordPress MU shortly after. There are enough security and bug fixes in .1 to make waiting worthwhile.
Update 2 – api.pingomatic.com is back up and running thanks to Barry. Must get that plugin working over the weekend and finish adding sites to my blogroll.
Update3 – api.pingomatic.com still seems to be causing problems. It returns “XML-RPC server accepts POST requests only.” when update-links.php queries it, even though the query is a POST request. WordPress 2.3.1 went live a few hours ago! Time to upgrade, there are important bug fixes in there!

Life after Text Link Ads

Hi, my name is Donncha and I used to have text-link-ads on my blog. They’re gone now but only after Google slapped me into submission and reduced my page rank to 4. Initially I felt angry and shocked that this happened but I have no excuse, I heard it from the horses mouth, I knew it was coming. I was one of those evil unscrupulous demons who manipulated the pagerank of other sites for money. My guilty conscience is somewhat alleviated by the fact that I refused to show a text link ad for a Viagra spammer yesterday morning. Oh well.
Google’s own advertising, Adsense, is still running here, as is Kontera, (leave a comment and you’ll never see them, isn’t that nice?) and the competitive ad filter advice I gave out a few days ago really makes a difference to your bottom line. Just ask Justin!

What’s in store for the future? Keep an eye on this blog. WordPress MU 1.3 is coming real soon now. There are going to be lots more free and GPLed WordPress plugins, including a pretty cool digg proof cache that also works in WordPress MU. Think of it as WP-Cache on afterburner! A couple of sites are already testing it with positive results. I’m watching the access_log roll by on a server as a digg is happening now. Load average is hovering around 1 and the page loads quickly. Sweet.

When is an Alfa Romeo really a Maserati?

When it’s the new Alfa Romeo 8C Competizione. This is the first rear wheel drive car from Alfa Romeo since 1992 and there are only going to be 500 made in the first production run, with 500 made in the second in 2009. Don’t bother going to your dealer, they’re all sold out! As you may know I’m a bit of a fan of the Alfa Romeo 147 having owned one a couple of years ago. Such beautiful cars, and just about within the reach of a single, non-mortgage-paying software developer like myself. Times change however, but I wonder if I’ll ever be able to afford the €159,000 asking price of the Competizione.

alphamainorig_222019a.jpg

Jeremy Clarkson has quite a breathless review of the car, although he does finish by saying the steering isn’t up to scratch. Who wants to let me drive theirs to find out for myself? 🙂

Climb aboard the new Alfa 8C and you’re immediately aware that it feels “just right”. It’s a fairly intangible quality, but it means the cabin makes a Porsche’s interior feel almost dowdy by comparison. And as your eyes rove around, they avidly consume acres of leather, plentiful carbon fibre and generous milled aluminium before settling on the slightly swollen front wings that are visible through the little windscreen. It has to be said that the aroma of leather with the 8C truly reeks of promise.

What makes it a Maserati?

The only real question is whether it’s an Alfa Romeo at all. It was designed by Fiat’s in-house styling centre, and uses a Maserati platform as its basis. The engine is a development of one already in use by Maserati, and just to make matters a little more complex, the whole is assembled by Ferrari.

The gearbox and suspension are also derived from systems used on the Maserati Quattroporte and the car is built, not by Alfa Romeo in Turin, but instead by Maserati in Modena. And when those lucky 41 British buyers need their beautiful new vehicles serviced, they will drive them to Maserati dealerships rather than to Alfa garages.

There are a few promo videos on Youtube, and a boring spy camera video too, but this promo seemed to be the best. Just turn down the volume please!

We can have a good world

it@cork Innovate and Connect conference

Watch Hans Rosling’s great talk at TED 2006 where he, “demonstrates how developing countries are pulling themselves out of poverty. He shows us the next generation of his Trendalyzer software — which analyzes and displays data in amazingly accessible ways, allowing people to see patterns previously hidden behind mountains of stats. (Ten days later, he announced a deal with Google to acquire the software.) He also demos Dollar Street, a program that lets you peer in the windows of typical families worldwide living at different income levels. Be sure to watch straight through to the (literally) jaw-dropping finale.”

It’s amazing to see how quickly Chile and other less developed nations have caught up with the “industrialised world”, and are about to surpass them in terms of health care. He’s speaking at the it@Cork conference on November 28th this year and should be very entertaining and insightful.

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