No More Snow!

Aw!

Thursday night there was a few centimetres of snow, but this morning its all melted.
One day we’ll get a white Christmas, this year it is only four days late!

Though on Wednesday we had a light dusting of snow that looked like very thick frost, but it was all melted in a couple of hours

Lets just hope we get more!

Linux Rulez…

Cool, its boxing day, and I have managed to make a Christmas present work on Linux with no frustration, and I have setup two other things that I have been putting off for a while.

First to the Christmas present, its a USB 2 8 in 1 card reader/writer with a slot for SD cards, just what I wanted!
Reading the pdf manual on the CD tells me that on Mac OS 10.3 and higher just needs plugging in. One deep breath and its plugged in, check dmesg and it has been recognised.
Plug in the SD card, its put in upside-down (weird!) and a new icon appears on my desktop.
It has been automatically mounted under /mnt/removable
All my files are there. Whoohoo 🙂

The second success is finally getting DVD playback.
I was Stumbling around the web when I came across xinehq.de I’ve already got the player installed, it just didn’t want to play DVDs!
A quick google for libdvdcss, a download of the rpm and its installed
I have now watched the first five minutes of both “The Italian Job” (original) and “Johnny English”

The third and final success is the installation of the Belkin bluetooth adapter that I brought when I brought my PDA, 3 years ago!
I plugged it in, the little blue light stared to flash, and I downloaded BlueZ and managed to scan and make a short, but successful connaction with my PDA.
I also managed to find the computer with the PDA

Phew!
All that and I still managed to cook dinner!

Still Here…Just!

Christmas is only a few days away now, Ive only just finished Christmas shopping

As I’m typing this up there is the sound of sellotape being unwound from the roll and wrapped two or three times around some ones or others present(s).

The lack of updates has been partly due to the fact that I am spending so much time at work and other projects, like the infamous new project, and IMfriends which is still in alpha testing, and probably won’t ever see the light of day.

Today/tomorrow/Friday (depending on your view of things) will be rammed at work as it is payday, and there is still two days of Christmas shopping days left.

Roll on May… 😉

Disabled Comments

Those spam bots are at it again!
This time they are spamming the Ajax post I posted back in November, so I have had to disable comments for my blog, as currently there is no option to disable comments on a post-by-post basis.

This is one feature I would (now!) like to see implemented *hint*hint* 😉
Plus better support for the smilies!

RIP Tilly

Tilly the rat died sometime during yesterday afternoon/evening, while I was at work.
When I got home that evening I had a quick look in the cage and I saw that she was lying in front of her nest box.
When I went to play with her later on during the night she was still in the same spot, and was cold.

I don’t really feel all that sad for her, as she was probably in some form of discomfort, and she was old.
Wherever she is now, she is at rest

Finally :D

Finally, after a week, my new domain is activated, now all that I need to do is to start copying the old website over to the new domain.

This new domain and hosting is a positive step forward for me, as it means that my site is taken away from the ad ridden beast that is tripod and moved to hosting on – well – tripod!

This should mean that the copying of the website over is easy, I just need to find “webcopier”

woohoo 😀

www.roganty.co.uk

Ajax

My Image Gallery viewing script has been lying stagnant for a couple of weeks now.
But the past two days I have been working on javascript to load the galleries.xml file and then parse it and store the data into arrays.

This is the second U-turn I have done on this project, the first, was that I wouldn’t load the file with javascript and to have the page refresh when the view changes, and know I have the javascript working, which is what I am now keeping it as!

This sudden flurry of activity is still only on the admin panel, but hopefully when I have this finished then I can start work on the actual script.

New Domain

I have finally taken the plunge!
I have ordered a domain name and webhosting from lycos at a cost of £5 a month which is about £70 a year including VAT

I will be able to manage my account within the next 24-48 hours, and the domain registration checks take between 1-5 days.

The domain name that I am using is roganty.co.uk (how’d you guess 😉 )

See ya

2 New Site Styles

The introduction of the new website layout was so that I could get rid of the old table based layout and introduce a more flexible, standards compliant layout that would hopefully work in as many browsers as possible.
But with the influence of NoZen I decided to create several different CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) style sheets

I have created two new styles, but I have yet to incorporate them into the websites structure

The screen shot below shows the first style which has two separate menu bars
One for the main menu, which is located at the top of the page, and the second is the submenu bar which is located below the page heading


The screen shot below shows the second style which moves the main menu, and submenu bar to the left side of the screen.
The page header and the section title have also been switched, so that the page header is below the section title.
The colours of the site is different to the ones that I normally use


This style was inspired by i summon one kim – Kimmo Suominen

Spammed Guestbook

Since March my guest book has been getting a lot of spam entries, but things came to a head during the past two weeks with up to 10 spam enties a day.

I have now dramatically changed the format of the guest book and have added a new “spambook” table in the mysql database.
I have also changed the form so that the guest book details are sent using the POST method instead of GET.
Any new posts that meet a few certain criteria are now put into the spambook table with the IP address and the user agent of the browser that is being used.

The new guest book has now been in operation for two-three day and has already collected 20 spam entries in the new table.
From these “entries” i have learnt that the spammers use a different IP address every time they post a new entry, even if they are within minutes of the last one. They are also using the same browser:

Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1)

They have also set the country that they come from as “Other”, even though i don’t have an option for “Other”

Until the spammers realise that their “entries” are not being submited, my guest book should remain spam free for the time being