Owls Count

WordPress 2.6.1 has been released. Upgrade went smoothly and everything seems fine - if you do notice a problem with the site then let me know.
I got back from nine days in Chicago on Wednesday. While there there was an impressive thunderstorm. I’ll post more about my Chicago trip at some stage.

WordPress 2.6 has been released. I have upgraded this blog - a rather quick and easy process.
Also, I have moved server recently. Hopefully everything is up and working correctly. If not let me know. The move was fairly painless - just a little while spent working out where all the setting were kept.

The new version of WordPress adds additional protection for cookies. It is very much worth adding the config option mentioned, since it helps protect against problems where a database have already been compromised.
Hot on the heels of WordPress 2.5.0 is the security update - WP 2.5.1.
Rumours that I have as many draft posts as SKG [...]

I saw this meme going around the blog world and decided to join in.
history | awk ‘{a[$2]++ } END{for(i in a){print a[i] ” ” i}}’ | sort -rn | head
Work
73 ls
63 svn
62 cd
56 make
48 vi
24 sudo
24 grep
17 acroread
15 ispell
9 ./repos-update.sh
Home
57 vi
54 cd
52 rm
50 ls
25 svn
25 sudo
23 make
23 git
15 mv
14 irb

Geir mentions that GitHub is live and that ‘Git is conquering the world‘.
At this point I feel rather smug. I keep a repository of my own files on one of my machines. When I set up this repository, several years ago, I picked Subversion. However, recently the repository server has been offline and, so, I [...]

The new version (2.5) of WordPress came out recently. Upgrading this blog went smoothly.
The most noticeable change is the redesign to the admin section. It is certainly a big improvement on the old.

Photos: 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5
My Route
From waking up on Saturday morning I was never feeling too great and this was reflected in my run. While my navigation and route choice was ok, I never managed to get a decent pace going.
For the first couple of controls my navigation was off. [...]

I have been using Flickr to host my orienteering photos for a couple of years. Every now and then the Flickr team rolls out a new feature - collections and maps being two past examples. This month they have added two great features: stats and photo editing.
You need to be a pro member to be [...]

I have been using Minefield for a while. This will be released as Firefox 3 at some stage next year and there have been some good improvements. Recently I switched to using this runscript to solve the problems of using the non-default Firefox. Through the -no-remote switch I can also use Firefox 2 at the [...]

I noted in the tech press last week that Automattic had acquired Gravatar. Matt has posted the code to enable gravatars on his blog. I rather like the idea behind gravatars and have enabled them on this blog.

A while back I posted about the Web Trend Map 2007 Version 2.0. Since then I have seen a few more interesting web/internet maps:
e.maps - This site has a selection of web maps. I particularly like the World Web Map, which is a world map based but with the countries replaced with internet sites.
Map of [...]

I have been helping to finalise a map, for an upcoming orienteering event, and this morning I fired up OCAD (for the first time in quite a while, to add some logos to the map. It took me a couple of hours to add a handful of logos to the map. For reasons I do [...]

I order regularly from a number of online shops. Today I decided to order some items from Lush, as I will not be going near one of their stores for a while. I’ve ordered from Lush online before, but it seems that they have a new online store. This new store required me to register [...]

Earlier this week saw the launch of a new website for British Orienteering. For reasons concerned with membership renewal the site has gone live before it is finished, which means that some features are missing or not fully working. First comment is that this is a big improvement on the old site - it looks [...]

Tip #6 : Enhancing WordPress administration: Whenever I update a WordPress blog I think how overly complicated the ‘Write Post’ page is. There are lots of different pieces that you could use - most of which I have never had cause to touch. The post linked to suggests using Clutter Free to improve matters and, [...]

The new version of WordPress, the software used for this blog, was released yesterday. I took the plunge and updated straight away. Everything seems to be up and fine, but if any of you notice a problem then let me know.
However, on upgrade I noticed a jump in database queries on page load - nearly [...]

Recently I decided that it would be useful to use a task manager. Several of my colleagues are using Remember the Milk and I decided to join them, since then we can share tasks when needed.
I was really impressed with the signup process. It makes sensible use of technology to tell the user whether the [...]

As with many people, my computer rarely gets turned off. It was with interest that I noted the following coming through the blog world in the last week.
Less Watts
This site, from Intel, describes methods available to reduce power consumption on all types of machines running Linux. Available is software and tips that work to keep [...]

Google announced this week that Google Reader now has search functionality. I have yet to fully try out the new feature, but the few quick searches I did yesterday worked well.
Also in the announcement was that the unread feed count will now go up to 1000, rather than the old value of 100. Before, if [...]

For several years now I have been keeping an orienteering/training log. This is something I programmed myself, as a project to learn php/mysql. I keep thinking about moving to a different system - Attackpoint or Nopesport for instance - but then remember how much info I have already and decide not to.
Over the last few [...]

It seems that my laptop is 15 years old. Or rather the family of laptops it is from. I am fairly impressed with the IBM Thinkpad range.
Caught on camera – and found on Facebook: It seems that the University of Oxford is using Facebook photos to catch people breaking the exam celebration rules. That they [...]

While browsing the blog world I saw some links to the Web Trend Map 2007 Version 2.0. This is a rather cool tube-system like map of the ‘200 most successful websites on the web, ordered by category, proximity, success, popularity and perspective.‘
I did a quick check through the map and found only a few sites [...]

The Wall Street Journal reminds us that ‘It’s been 10 years since the blog was born.‘ I have been blogging for just over half of that time - my LiveJournal is five years old.
Recently I have been reading more about OpenID. While doing so I found OpenID Delegate WordPress Plugin, which allows me to delegate [...]

I, like a lot of people, use Akismet to help block spam on my blog. Yesterday they announced that they had blocked two billion spam comments. While the work the people at Akismet do is fantastic there is something depressing in realising that 94% of the comments made to Akismet protected blogged are spam.

The latest Top 500 list came out today. Our new machine is number 36. It is the largest UK academic machine and one of four systems in Berkshire in the top fifty. I’ll post some pictures of it when I manage to get them off my colleagues.

The plan, mentioned in my last post, was to update from New Orleans. However, a combination of poor hotel internet and lack of time meant that I completely failed to do this.
My main reason for going to New Orleans was to attend Phoenix Rising, though meeting lots of friends came a close second. During the [...]

Recently the importance of making regular backups of important data was brought home to me. My desktop machine has two, old 40GB drives in it and one of them failed. It seems to have died completely - certainly I have not been able to get it to mount using any of the commonly available tools. [...]

Last week the new version, Feisty Fawn, of Kubuntu was released. For this new version there had been the release of an upgrade tool. The aim of this tool was to make the Edgy -> Feisty upgrade easy. For me the upgrade process was not quite as smooth as they seem to suggest.

When designing and creating websites it is important to consider ease of use for those visiting the site. For the average person this is fine, but trying to imagine how a website looks to a colourblind individual is not easy. Now, however, there is a web tool which applies filters to your site, so you [...]

The main struggle I had when I first started coding in Ruby on Rails was working out how to use tests. Ruby, and Rails, have a great testing framework, but I had no background in knowing how, and what, to test. As I have progressed with the language I have become more confident in writing [...]

I cannot remember where I got the first of these tips from, but I really am grateful for learning of it. I spend a fair amount of time ssh-ing into various machine I use. Having to type out the full command ’ssh [machine name]‘ is quite annoying - especially as some of the full machine [...]

For my day to day internet browsing I use Firefox. One of the great features of Firefox is the ability to extend the browser using Add Ons (or extensions as they used to be known).
Last week I cam across FaviconizeTab. This extension allows you to reduce certain tabs so that all that is displayed is [...]

The BBC is consulting over its’ proposed on-demand services. You can give your feedback here (not sure if that is UK only or not).
Of particular note are questions:
3) This concerns how long users will be able to store the content on their machine. I do not see how this suggestion can be feasibly implemented.
5) This [...]

How to mount a remote ssh filesystem using sshfs
I stumbled across this a few days ago and set it up on my work machine today. Seems to work very well and cuts out the need for using scp to transfer files back and forward between the machines I use. Mainly posting this here so that [...]

Not a great news day for either.
In the US the leading certifier for electronic voting systems was unable to document how it supposedly tested the machines for accuracy and security. It really does not encourage my confidence in having such certified systems used for elections, nor in the results of elections using such systems.
A team [...]

Software patents keep cropping up, as various governments pass laws concerning them and as various others comments on them. If you are after information then a quick search for ’software patents’ gives a reasonable selection of the media articles on and arguments for and against software patents. If you are British and anti software patents, [...]

Last week I was in Florida for SC06. The locals were saying it had recently got colder, which translated to only 25ish daytime temperatures. Of course the warm weather did not agree with me and I went down with flu and spent most of the week stuck in the hotel.
My colleagues assure me that it [...]

Microsoft released IE7 last week and it seems likely that Firefox 2 will be released tomorrow. I have been running the Firefox 2 development branch nightly builds for a while now and on Friday I fired up a virtual machine, running WinXP, and installed IE7 to give it a try.
The first thing noticed is that [...]

I have been making web sites (again). Each time I end up doing this I remember why finding a good designer is important. I can chuck a pile of data/information back at a user, but making it look good really does require someone who knows what they are doing.
For one of the sites I have [...]