Author Archives: Donncha

Ignore details early on

Oh, this is so true!

We’re crazy about the details. We love the details. The space between objects. The perfect type leading. The perfect color. The perfect words. 4 lines of code instead of 7. The perfect flow. 90% vs 89%. 760px vs 750px. $39/month vs. $49/month. Success and satisfaction is in the details.

However, success isn’t the only thing you’ll find in the details. You’ll also find fixation, stagnation, disagreement, meetings, and delays. These poison projects. These are the things that kill morale (and if morale is low, your chance of success is even lower). You want to avoid these at all costs. If you procrastinate, procrastinate the details.

Hacking the Papal Election

Hacking the Papal Election – great article that examines the Papal Election process. In this day and age I’d hope that the faith of the cardinals would discourage cheating but you never know!
There is one way of hacking the process..

The process is vulnerable to other forms of attack. Like Alexander VI Borgia’s tactic of wholesale bribery and assassination of opponents…

Relationships: Speed up, dear or you'll run out of testosterone

While on the general topic of cars, here’s a laughable Sunday Times article from the Driving section. Do they think their readership is composed of car mad neanderthal, testoserone overflowing males?
I for one would love to be driven around, by anyone.

Passion in a marriage can be killed when a woman gives too many driving instructions to a man. And when women are driving men around all the time you can bet that couple are not having much sex any more – that behaviour doesn’t foster increasing testosterone, which is part of the attraction between a man and a woman.

Rover, here boy! It's not a dog's life at Rover.

Proinnsias has a good replacement logo for the ailing Rover motor company.
By chance, I read this morning an article interviewing Jon Moulton who wanted to buy Rover a few years back.. “If only they’d sold Rover to me …” Love this quote:

Asked whether MG Rover might have had more success if Moulton had taken over the company, Daniel Ward, a spokesman for the car maker, said simply: “He didn’t.”

The paper has more here and here, including the revelation that the Chinese have a claim to the Rover name!

Debian Sarge, PHP4 and Apache2.. why do you persecute me?

Oh FFS! Has anyone had a problem with Apache2 and PHP4 on Debian Sarge/Testing? I have a stock install of it with nothing unusual AFAICT but Firefox keeps trying to download and save php files instead of processing them. All the config files seem to be correctly set up. Files in mods-enabled/ are fine.
Why am I upset? I added the wp-newblog.php to WPMU SVN tonight, imported a chunk of code from install.php so it’s a one-step process, but I can’t test this thing to see if it works! It’s here as a WPMU snapshot but it won’t work out of the box. It needs an entry in .htaccess first, and bug fixing.

I’m off to relax, it’s been a long day.. zzzz

Much Later… I finally got it working again. I tried dpkg-reconfigure phpmyadmin but it didn’t update the config file with this error:

Not replacing deleted config file /etc/apache2/conf.d/phpmyadmin.conf

Following the clues from here I did the following:

apt-get remove –purge libapache2-mod-php4
apt-get remove –purge apache2
apt-get install libapache2-mod-php4 phpmyadmin

PHPMyAdmin now works fine, and hopefully wpmu will too!

Close

Ad-blocker not detected

Consider installing a browser extension that blocks ads and other malicious scripts in your browser to protect your privacy and security. Here are a few options.

  • uBlock Origin is a free, open source, ad blocker for your browser.
  • Use pi-hole if you have a spare Raspberry Pi on your network.
  • Set the private DNS settings on your phone to dns.adguard.com to block adverts and trackers.