Bye Bye Digg, Hello Stephen Fry!

Last week The Hibbs Lupus Trust posted a tweet thanking various people after their site was mentioned in a tweet by Stephen Fry. Lupus is a horrible condition and the Trust aims to help raise awareness of it, support sufferers and help GPs diagnose it.

Lupus causes the body’s immune system to go into overdrive and starts to attack itself. It is believed that over 50,000 people throughout the UK suffer with Lupus of whom 90% are female. The symptoms are many and varied, and the condition often seems to mimic other diseases. This gives rise to difficulty in diagnosis and the condition can be overlooked for years, unless the GP or consultant is alert to the possibility of lupus.

The Trust’s website must have experienced a torrent of traffic because Mr Fry is followed by gazillions of people and the tweet was retweeted by over 100 of his followers. The website stayed up and I’m glad that WP Super Cache played a part in helping them.

I wanted to mark the occasion of a website getting a Frying and surviving so I changed the “Digg proof” message in the plugin to “Stephen Fry Proof”. Download the development version from this page if you want a look. The link in the admin page goes to the Trust’s tweet so I hope I can play a small part in spreading the word.

Of course, just because you’re using this plugin is no guarantee that your site will survive a mention by Mr Fry or any other celebrity on Twitter (especially if your hosting is simply too limited) but With WP Super Cache at least it has a fighting chance!

BONUS: In case you didn’t see it, here’s Stephen Fry ag caint as Gaeilge (talking in Irish) as he appeared on an Irish language tv programme a while back:

What is radiation?

Here’s the first part of an excellent talk given by Professor John McInerney, of the UCC Physics Department on what exactly radiation is, the different types, the effects they have on the human body and what creates it. Do you know where most radiation comes from? You might be surprised.

Early in the talk, John dispelled with the idea of non-ionising radiation being responsible for detrimental health effects. ”Microwaves in general are not harmful, including the ones in cell-phones and radars. Unless you cook yourself. If you stood in front of a 10KW radio antenna it would be bad for you. It would serve you right. That’s Darwin’s principle at work”.

The video was filmed at a Cork Skeptics session in Blackrock Castle last May. The second part of the talk goes into nuclear power and you can watch it above.

Battlefield 3 stats for your own site?

Battlelog is very useful but sometimes you want to have stats for your own site.

With that in mind I’ve come across 2 APIs that can be used to talk to EA’s servers:

  • bf2s.com have an API for Battlefield 2 that is the same as the one for bfs3.com.
  • The bf3stats.com api is explained here and looks fairly easy to work with.
  • There’s also a WordPress plugin that uses the bf3stats.com api to power a widget.

I haven’t tried any of the above but I will be downloading the WordPress plugin, hopefully I can submit a few patches to the author if I can as we’ll need shortcode support if it’s to work on the B2C site.

BF3: Helicopters and AA on Noshahr Canals

Two very differing commentaries on Noshahr Canals (rush) in Battlefield 3. One gives tips on flying a helicopter, the other shows how overpowered a good driver on the AA gun on that level is!

Meanwhile I started playing the game on Xbox 360 last night and it was the exact same as on PS3. Until you unlock some of the better weapons it’s really tough. It didn’t help that I was dumped into losing teams, even getting spawn trapped on one map.

Ubuntu: ALT TAB between browser windows?

I’m still using Ubuntu’s Unity desktop, which is saying a lot as I switched back to Gnome within a week or so of the previous release of Ubuntu.

One of the remaining bugbears I had with Unity was the window or task switcher. It was impossible to switch between Chrome browser windows. I had to click on the Chrome icon in the Unity sidebar and select the window I wanted. It felt like Ubuntu had tried to emulate what Windows 7 did with their taskbar, but Windows did it better because the window previews are close to the taskbar.

I’m not the only one to have this problem. You can either change window switcher in CCSM (oh oh, watch out when using CCSM!) or use ALT-`. That character is the tick character which normally sits above the TAB key on UK/English/US keyboards but may be elsewhere on other locales. I now need to get used to it like I did with Mac OS X.