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Random stuff, randomly updated.

Archive for March, 2006

One Week

Friday, March 31st, 2006

And so the end of my first week off work! Let me see what I’ve done… um… not a lot actually. I’ve mostly been watching DVDs and things I recorded on Sky+ ages ago. It was a little odd to be watching a film (Little Shop of Horrors) and the channel idents featuring Santa Clause. I’ve got a recording on there from October last year too. I should probably watch that soon too.

I suppose I’ll accomplish more next week, but I think this week whizzed by quite fast. I just hope next week doesn’t whirr past so fast I don’t really notice it. Better than it dragging though I suppose.

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Change is good

Sunday, March 26th, 2006

I’ve been tinkering a little, and I’ve cleaned up the site a little bit. Nothing major, just some little bits of CSS I wanted to fix, and a few other tid bits. A major one I’d like to point out is that the Google Ads are now inserted in such a way as to be valid in the markup – the default way Google provide them, they aren’t. It’s not exactly hard to do these things correctly, so I don’t see why Google can’t. Still, this guide from CSSPlay was very useful.

I’ve also added my del.icio.us tags. Unlike Google, these are valid from the get go, so they just slipped in nicely with the minimum of fuss. My little fix to make wide images fit only works properly in real browsers – IE still renders the main content DIV too wide, and the end result is it pushes everything down off the bottom. I could re-order the divs to make them overlap, but I’m not that fussed. I daresay IE7 will make just as big a hash of it!

Posted in Intarweb | Comments Off

Tune-O-Matic

Thursday, March 23rd, 2006

I saw this thing today on digg.com. It’s quite a natty idea – one of those “why didn’t somebody think of it before” things. I find myself constantly re-tuning my guitar, mostly due to me either playing quite hard, or changes in the temperature/humidity of the room affecting the guitar. Something like this would be quite nice to just hit a button and it’s back. I can see a few custom guitar models sprouting these units. Some guitar-purists will probably sneer at it, but then again I bet some people did when the trem first came along, or locking tuners. According to the guy in this video, the unit will sell for about $800USD. I don’t think I’ll be getting one just yet!

Posted in Music | Comments Off

Easier with a Mac… sometimes

Tuesday, March 21st, 2006

So I’ve had my new Mac Mini about a week now, and I’ve slowly been tweaking odd things, and playing with this and that as I go along. I’ve got PHP working (albeit PHP 4), and MySQL is running. I’ve yet to join the two up though as it’s not playing nice, but that’s next on my list of things to

thing that has been causing me consternation has been the Samba server. Mac OS X has had this excellent suite of software for some time (since the first version I believe) and it allows Macs and PCs to interact with file and print. My usual method of getting files onto a web server is to just have a share on the server mounted on my PC, so I can use my local software to hack pages and load them in a browser.

So far, I’ve not had much luck. I enabled file sharing, and enabled my account to connect, but I can’t get the damn thing to log in. There seems to be something weird going on with the back end authorisation. It doesn’t use the standard smbpassword back end, instead connecting to opendirectory internally. Obviously the subtle link between samba and opendirectory has broken somewhere in the Intel build of OS X Tiger, as there’s quite a few people on the Apple forums with the same sort of problem. The trouble is, the people trying to help are providing answers that would probably get most average users going. I provide log traces and other info and basically get ignored. Still, I suppose I’ll get to the bottom of it sometime. Just takes a bit more digging!

Posted in Computers | Comments Off

Mini. Mac Mini

Saturday, March 18th, 2006

Mac Mini I always like new toys. I also like playing with various different things with computers. I’m a bad coder, but I do enjoy playing with PHP. I’ve found trying to do this via an ISP’s servers is long-winded, and not much fun, so it’s better to have a local development ‘box’ to do it on. Until recently I’ve used a Linux machine to do it, but I decided to get one of the new Intel-based Mac Minis. It can serve many purposes:

  1. A little webserver
  2. Garageband for music stuff
  3. Image work
  4. Just look cool!

So I thought I’d get one. The model I have is a Core Duo 1.66, 1GB Ram, 100GB Hard disk, wireless, Bluetooth, and a dual-layer superdrive. Plus it’s all in a tiny, tiny box! Pretty cool in my mind.

So far, I’ve been quite impressed. Front Row is nice, but not something I’m likely to do much with. The great thing is that it’s a well-supported OS, but it sits atop a UNIX core, so I can still do the uber-geeky things I occasionally do. I’m slowly getting various bits and bobs set as I like them, mostly as I think of things. I’m quite pleased with it though! I’ve always threatened to use a Mac in a serious way but never have. They’ve either been too slow (a Beige G3 I had) or too big (like an eMac I recently sold). The Mac Mini hides nicely at the back of the desk and just does it’s thing. Plus it’s very quiet. Considering there’s a dual-core CPU (an Intel dual-core CPU no less – we all know how hot Intel’s stuff gets) hiding in there it does quite well.

Colour me impressed!

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It’s supposed to look like that

Monday, March 13th, 2006

Well, you may (assuming anybody actually reads this!) have noticed that the Dilbert cartoon I posted the other day has gone a little bit… odd. The previous style I was using would squeeze images to fit, which I know is a slight sin, but at least I could link to other images safely without it messing up my layouts. Apparently, this very nice style I now use doesn’t have that particular bit of code, so I’m going to have to look through the old stylesheets, and move the bit of code across which performed that particular magic.

I noticed it after I first posted it, but applied the ‘oh, it’ll go away’ methodology of fixing to it. Of course, it won’t go away, but I thought it might anyway.

Posted in General, Intarweb | Comments Off

Cheater!

Sunday, March 12th, 2006

I’m not the world’s greatest PHP/CSS/MySQL coder, and I tend to forget stuff as I don’t do them all that often. I was shown a site with a few very nice cheat sheets for various things, including PHP, MySQL and CSS, Ruby On Rails, and a few others. They are nice enough to print out, and have quite a lot of useful little bits and bobs that will be useful for when I am next butchering some code about. I’ve printed them out on card in glorious technicolour.

Shame I don’t have a laminator.

Posted in Computers, General | Comments Off

Arranged Love?

Friday, March 10th, 2006

Dilbert

I saw this one and it made me laugh. A good one I feel!

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The Great Upgrade

Tuesday, March 7th, 2006

My ISP, Zen, have recently announced that they are offering a free migration to their new ADSL Max-based service, Home 8000 Active. The 8000 meaning it’s an 8Mbit service. The 8Mbit is actually the theoretical maximum and for the most part only actually attainable if you live about 10 feet away from the telephone exchange. Most people should be able to get in the region of four to six megabit connectivity. My line seems a little noisy according to the router diagnostics, so I wouldn’t mind betting I might end up slower still, on 2mb. I’m currently paying £30 a month for 1Mbit, whilst this new 8Mbit service is £25 a month. The main caveat of it being that the service is capped at 20gb of data downloaded per month. Whilst I’m not a fan of caps, according to Zen’s data, I’m using below that anyway, so it shouldn’t even bother me. I rarely hit 50% of that, so I should be fine.

My local telephone exchange hasn’t yet been upgraded to ADSL Max – BT are planning on doing this at the end of the month. I decided this isn’t such a bad thing, as it gives me time to think about it properly and decide if I do want to upgrade to the new service. To just be paying less would be nice!

As part of this upgrade process, it got me thinking about upgrading the software on my router, a Zyxel Prestige 661H HW-61. It’s a great little router, very powerful, and quite fast. I wanted to do some wierd-and-wonderful routing with it, which it is quite capable of. I went and downloaded the latest firmware, but couldn’t apply it, as the software would error. A quick email to the excellent Zyxel support and they informed me I’d got the wrong firmware – I’d downloaded firmware for a European version of the router, so they supplied me with the correct file to download. A quick upgrade, and all is well.

It’s nice when a plan comes together!

Posted in Computers, Intarweb | Comments Off

Link-B-Gone!

Friday, March 3rd, 2006

I just noticed that my site is missing the list of links WordPress is capable of squirting out. The previous version (on the original template) did include a little list of random links, but this one doesn’t. Luckily it’s a templating thing, so I just need to add the relevant code snippet and it’ll come back.

I’m hoping to eventually add some worthwhile content, rather than my usual random drivel some people would call a blog. I’m hoping to do something computer-related. It is, after all, what I know best!

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