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!
Google voyeurism… oooer
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?
After Budget 2007 I'm stinking rich
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.
Caching WordPress with WP-Cache in a spam filled world
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?)
The biggest clown in TV
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!
Do the Bungee Jump
Have you ever looked out on a sheer drop and asked yourself, “What would it be like to fall all the way down?” Have you ever stood on the edge, looked forward towards the distant hills and leapt off into space?
I have. In 2002 I jumped although not particularly willingly as it’s a crazy thing to do! Reading over my post from that time I still remember the fear that numbed me, how I looked straight ahead when the crane had raised me up to it’s fullest height of 50m and then the surprise when time stopped still as I dived off the platform.
For a few moments Matt Munday shared that experience as he dived off the Verzasca dam in Switzerland to recreate the jump scene from Golden Eye!
Look over the other side, however, and you’ll find it’s 721ft straight down onto a cold, hard knuckle of jagged rocks — the frightening equivalent of jumping from a 70-storey building.
Doing a bungee jump is the craziest and most stupid thing I’ve ever done but don’t worry Life Assurance people, I have no intention of doing it again!
Would you like to see what my bungee jump at Star Beach in Crete was like? Here’s a movie made by a girl who brought a video camera with her. Look at those distant hills over the resort. That’s the last sight I saw before I jumped! (do not ajust your volume, there is no sound unfortunately)
This BASE jumper does some crazy jumps. Be prepared to suffer vertigo watching this!
AIDS – Don’t Die of Ignorance
Today is a very important day in world health. December 1st is World Aids Day and each year is dedicated to a different theme. This year’s theme is “Stop AIDS; Keep the Promise – Accountability” and you can find out more about how the theme is chosen and who chooses it on avert.org
Irish television viewers will see a “high-profile television campaign warning about the rise of the Aids pandemic in Ireland” over the next few months and that may hopefully encourage people to get tested and improve awareness of the disease according to breakingnews.ie.
Some charities would prefer a softly-softly approach because the viewing public has become immune to distressing scenes but I can’t bear to hear the opening score of the following drink driving advert because of how it ends.
If you’re wondering, bloggers all over the world are talking about AIDS. Get into the conversation and make a difference.
It’s also my birthday today, and in a selfish sort of way, I wish they’d picked another day to raise awareness of AIDS! It’s a bit of a downer hearing about the AIDS epidemic in the media on my birthday, each and every year on this day. I guess the message is getting through, somewhere, hopefully.
The IT@Cork 2006 Conference
I attended the 2006 it@cork National Technology & Business Conference yesterday and took many photos of the speakers. As to be expected with a line-up that included Eddie Hobbs it was very business orientated but Tony Kenny spoke at length about the challenges that faced him when he introduced Linux into Beaumont Hospital and Marc Canter proved to be a very passionate speaker about APIs and openness. Knock down those walled gardens! I could go on and on about the speakers but I wouldn’t do them justice. Watch out for the podcasts on the IT@Cork website.
I enjoyed the day very much, and thank you to Tom Raftery and everyone at IT@Cork for organising a well run and professional event.
Update – Michele loved Tony’s approach to using open source – mix it with proprietary software if you have to. Tom Raftery thought, “yesterday’s event was a tremendous success” and I agree, while Tom Corcoran has a short but thorough review of the day. He did forget to mention the delicious dessert after lunch. Oh wow! Yum!
Haydn was at the conference too and blogged about Marc Canter and Jeff Nolan. Read his post because he has something interesting to say about the cost of blogging. I remember him scribbling furiously throughout while I grappled with iPhoto and uploaded images to my blog! (Nice to meet you finally Haydn!)
Check the voting register before December 9th
The deadline to check if you’re on the voting register has been extended to December 9th so if you haven’t checked, you have a few more days to do so. Type your name and address into the form on Checktheregister.ie to find out if you’re one of the 300,000 voters knocked off the list! This is especially important if nobody has called to your house with a voting form. Even though you may have been on the register for years, some councils have been overly enthusiastic about deleting voters.
It’s a little fiddly doing the check, but not too painful. When you visit the site above you’ll have to click through to the council managing your area. I checked the Cork County Council site and had to click another link which opens a new maximized window with the form. On a large wide screen that looks really silly! All it needs is 600 pixels.
Ray & Jenny, Pat, and Pamela – thanks!
Yesterday’s announcement, the fiasco on the Late Late Show on Friday night and now Pamela Anderson’s divorce drove a lot of traffic yesterday. (People started looking for her video again!) As you can see from the Google Analytics graph, soon after 8am in the morning the flood started after Ian Dempsey mentioned the birth.
I took the opportunity to move In Photos to a new Xen server on Xen Planet for a short test period. If you see posts there without the comments form you’re looking at the old site and your DNS hasn’t updated yet. It should be complete in a few hours. The new site is a 64MB xen server and it’s holding up well. I’m toying with the idea of using Lighttpd, especially as a lot of thumbnails will be served from that host but I won’t have time to work on that until the weekend. Every night this week is already booked up with one thing or another.
In other news, moving a WordPress site to a new host is fairly painless!