Month: November 2010

First Snow

There have been some fantastic sunsets in Leeds, and this is not one of them (waited too long). Apparently it’s been down to -20°C in some parts of the UK.

Aweditorium Hot Toddies

In the iPad ‘top hits’ section of the app store at the moment (in the UK at least) is an app called Aweditorium. It’s a really nice app to explore bands, and you get to swipe and pinch your way through various music, images, and see random popup information ala VH1’s Pop-Up Video. It’s from thesixtyone.com, which is a website that does the same.

I came across a band called the Hot Toddies, singing a song called HTML. You should probably just listen and make up your own mind:

HTML is not hard to spell,
When I’m with you, when I’m with you
Binary code is just ones and ohs
I thought you knew

You are so swell, just like DSL
You touched my modem, you touched my modem.
We went to the bop, my heart gigaflopped

Hot Toddies HTML

Continue reading Aweditorium Hot Toddies

PageView 1.5

So my second plugin update in a week, quite a record this year! This time it’s one of the oldest plugins on this site (the readme.txt file said it worked on WordPress 1.3) – PageView.

Enough people were still writing in, all asking the same question – can I make it borderless. Now you can. The plugin has taken a leap into 3.0 and uses the shortcode API, and strips out the stuff that wasn’t being used, while adding a bunch more flexibility.

Red Dead Redemption

Not sure why, but I couldn’t get into this game.

The graphics are superb, the controls are slightly fiddly, and the story seems like it would kick off, but I found myself getting frustrated and wanting to do something else.

Shame, I was looking forward to it.

Scarborough & Robin Hood’s Bay

The fog has been so thick in Leeds over the past few days that I struggle to see the other side of the road. In an overly proactive mood I found some photos that were taken only a month or so back during summer, and yet seem to be from another world.

These are from Scarborough, a small fishing town in North Yorkshire (and the source of the Simon & Garfunkel song ‘Scarborough Fair‘, although not created by them).

Not far along the coast is the beautiful village of Robin Hood’s Bay, built on a cliff. There was some kind of Morris Dancer dance-off going on.

Further along you have Whitby, which is where Dracula landed in Bram Stoker’s story. Whitby Abbey, on top of the hill overlooking the town, is supposedly part of the inspiration for the story.

Now it’s an English Heritage site (and subsequently overpriced).

Summer seems a long time ago.

Redirection 2.2

I’ve just committed a new version of Redirection to trunk on the WordPress.org plugin repository. This isn’t available for auto-download just yet as I want to make sure any problems are ironed out. If you’re a willing test subject then I’d very much appreciate any feedback. The code is running on this site and hasn’t melted anything (yet).

There is little visible difference between 2.2 and 2.1.29, but internally there has been a big cleanup. Large amounts of compatibility code has been cleared away, some of it going all the way back to WordPress 2.3. I’ve optimized the database where possible, and hopefully fixed the annoying bug that surfaced when WordPress 3.0 came out (automatically redirecting your home page is not so good!)

Anyway, the changelog for this version is as follows:

  • Add Dutch translation
  • WordPress 2.9+ only – cleaned up all the old cruft
  • Better new-install process
  • Upgrades from 1.0 of Redirection no longer supported
  • Optimized DB tables

You can grab the new version from SVN:

http://svn.wp-plugins.org/redirection/trunk

If you have time there’s a short survey in the plugin that asks a few questions about how you use it. My aim is to simplify it and focus on the things people actually use, and the only way to do that is find out. You can also take part in the survey directly.

Change of RSS

I’ve been using FeedBurner to power the RSS feeds on this site for a long time now, and I can’t exactly remember why. They seemed to be causing problems with the ‘read more’ link so I’ve switched FeedBurner off and gone native.

Google Reader should auto-update any subscriptions (at least, it did for me), but if not then consider this my I-really-should-have-mentioned-it-before-clicking-the-button message to update your RSS reader.

Close a frozen SSH session

Just a short one here, but I spend a lot of time using SSH to connect to a remote server and occassionally a session will freeze. Usually my solution is to close the terminal and start again, but there’s a neater way to just cancel the SSH session itself. Enter these keys, one after the other (not together):

[enter]
~
.

That is, the enter key, the tilde, and a period. Your SSH session should close and you can re-open it without starting a new terminal.

Springfield Castle, Ireland

I spent last week with a bunch of Automatticians at Springfield Castle, Co. Limerick, Ireland. It’s a grand old place spreading across several centuries and varying states of repair. The owners were very accommodating and went out of their way to be as nice as possible.

The week was finished with a trip down to Cork and a nice meal with Donncha and family.

Anyway, here’s the obligatory photo gallery (courtesy of WP 3.0).