More snakes than you can shake a stick at

Has anyone actually gone to see that Snakes on the plane film? The first I heard of it was woz-is-name reviewing it on Ian Dempsey’s show on Today FM a few days ago, although I remember Damien Mulley saying something about snakes a few times. I just thought he had a new hobby! Internet Hype? I must be on some alternate ‘net!

Anyway, it’s supposed to be crap, so I’m not going!

What’s my name?

Gather around, let’s all say it together.. it’s Donncha, not Donna, never have been a Donna, never will be. It’s weird how people reply to my mails or comment on something privately, saying, “Hi Donna” when there’s no mention of such a person on this site or any other I run, well, apart from this post of course.

How do you pronounce Donncha? If you’re an English speaker, it sounds like “dunaka”, not dunka, or donsha or bert or ernie. Err. Not sure how that will sound in other languages but there ya go. Best I can do for the time being.

For future reference, here’s a pic of me with Podz and Andy taken in San Francisco a few weeks back. I’m in front holding the camera with the insanely wide lens. If you see me on the street with my 20D just say hi. I won’t bite (much).

Automattic at the Bridge

More Linux eye candy: CGWD Themes

If you’ve seen my desktop machine at home you’ll realise I’m a big fan of the Xgl and compiz stuff and now thanks to a Linux Journal article I’ve discovered the CGWD Themer.

Installing it in Ubuntu is as easy as adding a new site to your apt-get repository list and firing up apt-get in the usual way and grabbing the binaries from their repository. Then either launch it from the command line using the command “gcompizthemer” or go to System->Preferences where a new menu item called “CGWD Themer” can be found. The themer does nice things to the borders of and bars of your windows. I love the glow of the min/max/close buttons that spills over the side of the window!
Oh, and just because I bought a Mac laptop doesn’t mean I’m abandoning Linux. I fell in love with my Gnome+Xgl desktop once again when I came home from San Francisco!

Later – two articles features on digg and delicious which might be of interest:

  1. An Overview of modern fancy Unix desktops – good summary of the competing technologies that make the 3d and special visual effects possible
  2. The Linux Desktop Myth – a long essay on one man’s experience with switching to Linux and GPLed software.
  3. Suse Compiz page – has lots more info and lists all the options and configurable bits! (via)

Rice Crispy Cakes or Buns?

Let’s ask Google:

  1. Rice Crispy Cake – 75 results
  2. Rice Crispy Bun – 17 results

That’s what the Internet says and I agree. ‘nuf said!

For completeness, it should be noted that

  1. It’s Kelloggs Rice Krispies but that name is trademarked as Andy just reminded me so people are more likely to spell it with a C in their cookery books and sites lest the lawyers descend on them!
  2. Kelloggs avoid the bun and cake controversy completely by calling them Rice Krispies Treats. Cowards!

Conversation on #linux leads to some confusion. I wonder if I should quote some of it. The Rice Krispies cakes and buns Irish people refer to are simply made of Rice Krispies and melted chocolate. No yucky marshallow, or whatever else. Chocolate all the way. Yum!

Happy Birthday WordPress.com!

One year on and still going strong! Lorelle was the first to notice but shortly afterwards Matt posted a nice message saying that yes we had forgotten to celebrate the birthday but it was great that one of our own bloggers had remembered. Nice list of trivia too!

Reading through that list, it’s true that Matt and I hadn’t met when I started working for him. In fact it was several months later in December before we met.

Stopping the spam after moving house

A few weeks ago I moved this blog to this new location but left a 301 redirect on all URLs on the old site. That has worked great to direct traffic here but unfortunately it has also redirected all the spam attempts on my old site to here too. Thankfully they’re not much of an issue because the POST information is lost but it’s annoying seeing them appear in the logs.

Thanks to the wonders of mod_rewrite it’s possible to stop those guys before they hit any PHP script. My blog was originally at http://blogs.linux.ie/xeer/ and of course, the new site is http://ocaoimh.ie/. There are two way of stopping those requests:

  • On the new server, add the following lines to the .htaccess of the virtual host:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://blogs\.linux\.ie/ [NC]
RewriteRule ^wp-comments-post.php – [F]

  • Or, on the old server add this to the .htaccess there:

RewriteRule ^xeer/wp-comments-post.php – [F]

The latter rule is the preferred method and I haven’t seen any request come through since I added it in!

If you’re interested, here are the simple rules I use to redirect every url of my old blog to this site:

RewriteRule ^xeer/images/(.*) http://ocaoimh.ie/xeer/images/$1 [R=301,L]
RewriteRule ^xeer/(.*) http://ocaoimh.ie/$1 [R=301,L]

Adapt to suit your own environment.