EdgeSaver – Longer Lasting Razor Blades

Someone left a comment here asking if I’d used EdgeSaver and if it worked. I don’t know, but Google does and review after review after review have been positive so I guess there’s something to this product. ‘Course, it could well have been a comment spam but this actually looks useful if it works. Does it?
Update… I asked a chemist friend and his opinion is, “don’t waste your money” as it’s just, “a fancy WD40 – an oil that expels water and essentially air contact (necessary for corrosion of metal) from the surface of the metal so that it cannot corrode through oxidative chemical reaction.”
Any sort of oil-based lubricant can be used but of course it has to be safe, don’t go spreading 3-in-1 or WD40 on your face! It’ll seriously hurt you!
A “food grade oil” is ok, and the ones that immediately spring to mind is sunflower or olive oil. Still not quite comfortable with those either. They’re fine in the frying pan, but in the bathroom?
I must look into essential oils, why not use lavender, rose, or another fragrant oil instead? Lavender oil will relax you too!
Thanks Justin for the above!
Later still… Someone left a comment on the previously commented post saying they, “have been using edgesaver for about a year now and have no regrets of the purchase.” Unfortunately it comes from a very similar IP and the same ISP as the comment that sparked all this off so it’s likely to be a spam attempt. Stick with the olive oil folks!
Ah ha! I’ve confirmed in my own head that this is comment spam, although clever and manual – Follow the links from this search to find the same comments on this post and here too.
Still an interesting idea that the lifetime of blades can be extended by immersing them in oil.
Much later.. Edge Saver have rebranded as RazorMax. I only mention this in case someone doesn’t find this blog entry when they look for the new name!

PEAR Output Cache and WPMU

One of those things PHP doesn’t do well is load large libraries of scripts into memory and parse them quickly. WordPress and Smarty fall firmly into this category and the caching I’ve done so far has only addressed half of this problem: cached pages don’t load any WordPress code, but the heavy Smarty library was still loaded.

I’ve now modified my code to use the PEAR Output Cache and that avoids loading the Smarty templating system. On a heavily loaded server this should make quite a difference to visitors. Things still need tweaking, I may need to introduce a “time” aspect to the cache key as pages could be cached indefinitely but for now it seems to be working really well!
Note to self, please remember that gzip compression upsets PHP’s output buffer. Note to everyone else, don’t set “gzip compression” in the backend or your blog will be foobarred! (Thanks Mel for testing his blog and reporting problems with it!)

Digital Darkroom Forum – Imaging Techniques>Emulating (B&W, IR, filters, etc.) threads

Here’s a forum on photo.net I’m going to keep an eye on. Looks like it’s updated and posted to on a regular basis so hopefully there’ll be a few nice nuggets of info there!
Canon have a great site dedicated to the “The Art of Photography”. It has general photography information beyond Canon blurb so I’ll be reading it!

WPMU Registration Page – alpha quality

Open this file in your browser, download and copy into your wp-inst/ folder as “wp-newblog.php”
Create the following entry in your root .htaccess file too (modify to suit your site):
RewriteRule ^([_0-9a-z-]+)/wp-newblog.php(.*) /wp-inst/wp-newblog.php [L]
Call it by going to http:// example.com/main/wp-newblog.php
It’s a very simplistic script, there’s no error checking, it creates a new directory before handing over control to the WordPress install.php
Give it a whirl but when you’re finished be sure to delete it or move it out of the way!

Tsunami Victims Benefit Night

Tsunami Victims Benefit Night
Friday, January 21, 2005
Main Room: Frank & Walters, Stanley Super 800, Fred.
Acoustic Room: Freddy White, John Spillane.
Compere John Creedon. Tickets €20.
Doors 9.30pm. All proceeds go to Tsunami Victims
Cork Musicians Gig for Irish Red Cross Asia Disaster Appeal

The cream of Cork based and native musicians will gather to perform at the Savoy Theatre, on Friday January 21st in aid of the Irish Red Cross Asia Disaster Appeal. The stellar line-up of confirmed artists comprises: The Frank and Walters John Spillane Freddie White Ger Wolfe Fred Niall Connolly Band Gavin Moore The Waiting Room Ian Whitty.
Staged in two rooms at the Savoy, the show will commence at 9.30pm(doors @ 9pm) with tickets available on the door. The ticket price has been set at a minimum donation of EUR20. RTE Radio 1 presenter John Creedon will compere the event. The Savoy Theatre is providing the venue free of charge; so all funds raised on the night will go directly to the Irish Red Cross. Deloitte and Touche, Cork will oversee fundraising and dissemination of all funds raised, on the night.
For further media information, please contact: Margaret O’Brien 086 8055307 or email: mobrien11@eircom.net
Via CorkGigs.com

Li-ion Batteries, care and maintenance

I have a number of batteries including Li-ion batteries for my Sony F717. The Sony batteries have been in continuous use since the summer of 2003 so their lifespan isn’t quite what it used to be. This page suggests that Li-ion batteries, “should be continually topped up! Unlike NiCads you should not let Li-ions run flat as this will effect the life of the battery. Always top them up whenever possible.”
I’m charging mine now just in case!

WordPress Multiuser Snapshot

I decided to release a new snapshot of WPMU today because of a problem posting comments. There’s also a few more changes, they’re listed below. Go download it and play!

  • The referer plugin now uses PEAR Cache. This should speed up pages significantly as MySQL won’t have to lock so many reads when the table is updated!
  • Kitten’s Spaminator has been upgraded to the latest version. This version has a very nice admin page to configure it without editing the plugin file itself.
  • A bug in comment posting stopped them getting through, fixed.
  • To speed things up, template compile checks have been turned off. If a template changes make sure you do it from the backend.
  • Misc bug fixes and WP upgrades.

Later I looked into the sql errors people were having during the install and thanks to Chuck I think I figured out what happened: If you’re getting SQL errors about table names with “wp-inst” in them make sure you’re not calling setup-config.php or install.php using the urls http://example.com/wp-inst/wp-admin/setup-config.php and http://example.com/wp-inst/wp-admin/install.php
The correct urls should be http://example.com/main/wp-admin/setup-config.php and http://example.com/main/wp-admin/install.php
The “main” part of the url is handled by mod_rewrite. Follow the links in the installer and you’ll be fine!
I’m going to update the installer so it knows to replace “wp-inst” with “main” when people call the installer incorrectly.

Here are the URLs you’ll be calling when you install WPMU, the first page is a WPMU page, but the rest is bog-standard WordPress installer stuff:

Here are the links I go to on my local machine:
http://localhost/ – creates directories, page starts with text, “Welcome to WordPress MU, the Multi User Weblog System built on WordPress.
You’re probably seeing this message because you’re installing WPMU!”

The link at the bottom of that page points at this page:
http://localhost/main/wp-admin/setup-config.php
This is almost the same file that exists in WordPress itself.

Hit “let’s go!” at the bottom of that page to go to:
http://localhost/main/wp-admin/setup-config.php?step=1
Fill in the form there and go to:
http://localhost/main/wp-admin/setup-config.php?step=2
where you’re asked to “run the install!”

That goes to
http://localhost/main/wp-admin/install.php
and clicking on “First Step” goes to
http://donncha.homelinux.net/main/wp-admin/install.php?step=1
to fill in weblog title and email address.

After submitting that form I get a login link and username/password to use when logging in at http://localhost/main/wp-login.php

I also fixed the table prefix bug too, but that’s not in this release. It’ll be in the next one!