Wedding Aniversary
September 4, 2007 – 19:16Catherine and I have been married for 3 years now, I have posted a bit more over at I Married You
We had some friends down at the end of last week, and they both have FaceBook accounts (or is that FaceBooks, or Faces, or FaceBook Profile pages. They use FaceBook in other words) so Catherine signed up, then I signed up, then I spent an hour deciding what I wanted my permissions to be. I have finally settled on a partiuar group of settings that I like to call “Totally Paranoid”, everything is set to only be visible to “My Friends” including search, you will have to contact me outside FaceBook unless you are entirely better at Social Networking than I am and can still send me a Friend Request. On a lighter note this post should be published on FaceBook via Flog.
Back to work tomorrow, so both Blogging and FaceBook activity will low, all good fun though!
Desktop Blogging Client
September 1, 2007 – 13:20Thanks to Ian’s Messy Desk and BlogWell this post comes courtesy of w.bloggar. Going to give this a go and see if I get on with it, shame it is not a WYSIWIG tool, but it seems to have some useful features.
Home Networking
September 1, 2007 – 12:46Seeing as Catherine and I finally bought our own house and it looks like we might be staying here for much longer than we have ever stayed anywhere else, we are looking at options for home networking, our current solution involves a 802.11b Wireless Network for laptop connectivity and a cable for my PC, that has to be removed each night to close the living room door.
New Computer
August 31, 2007 – 20:10I never got round to getting the money together for the last computer I wanted to build, so I have started again from scratch, the following is intended to run Windows Vista Ultimate in my current Cooler Master 210.
- 1 x Abit IP-35 Pro (Abit Website)
- 1 x Intel Core 2 Quad-Core Q6600 G0 SLACR (Intel Website)
- 2 x 2GB Corsair TwinX XMS2 PC5400 (Corsair Website)
- 1 x 520W Corsair HX Series Modular PSU (Corsair Website)
- 1 x Optiarc AD-7170A-0S 18x DVD±R (Optarc Website)
- 1 x 640MB EVGA 8800GTS Superclocked (EVGA Website)
- 1 x 320 Gb Seagate Technology ST3320620AS Barracuda 7200.10 (Seagate Website)
- 1 x 22″ Samsung SM-226BW Black Widescreen LCD (Samsung Website)
If anyone reading this has any thoughts please leave a comment, hope to get the whole lot for just over £1000.
Vista is the issue
August 29, 2007 – 14:54I am currently trying to diagnose several Windows XP SP2 computers with severe network problems, the bottleneck is in the network. Whilst deploying a group policy object the Windows Installer Service crashed due to a network time-out, and this was the resultant response from Error Reporting:
So there you go the problem with Windows XP is Windows Vista!
New Server
August 29, 2007 – 11:30Recently purchaced and installed a new HP ProLiant DL320s to run as the site primary file server, had some issues with Windows 2003 R2 32-bit as it repeatedly BSODed before getting into graphical setup, tried the drivers for the SAS controller also tried the disc on a different computer to no avail. After chatting with a few people someone asked why I wasn’t going for 2k3 R2 64-bit, the main reason for not using it was it I had not had a chance to test it out in a test environment and wasn’t overly happy putting it into a live environment, looked at the software that was going on the File Server and all seemed ok, installed the ProLiant Support Pack migrated files, setup file screening and quotas. All was well, server running very fast and very happy.
Came to install BackupExec 10d yesterday, BIG mistake seeminly when I checked to see if BackupExec supported Windows 2003 R2 64-bit on a x64 Architecture I got confused, yes remote agents are supported on that architecture and the media server is supported on IA64 Architectures, however the media server is not supported on Windows 2003 R2 64-bit (x64)… wooops.
Fortunatly it seems that all is not lost as BackupExec 11d looks like it will work and the options from 10d can be upgraded to 11d, now all I have to do is cost it all up. Note to self and other system Administrators read Symantecs compatability lists VERY carefuly.
The Saga Continues
August 28, 2007 – 21:53I have removed ActiveLinks as I decided I don’t like the curly brace linking style, and I can’t quite fathom how to modify it so that it hides the mark-up in my style. It is in part a failing in the style that I have used as it picks some odd places to use templating functions and in part an oversight of the plugin authors (of both WikiLinks and ActiveLink in not adding actions that strip out links in certain circumstances.
I gave WikiLinks a try and it generated a large number of errors, although works on my local test blog I will have a play over the next few days if I get a chance. We have friends coming to stay so updates may be few and far between (as if anyone actually notices I posted twice in one day). I have put a load of the annoyances I have with the blog on the Annoyances page, hopefully I will get a chance to work through them.
Style Change Log:
Current Revision 11
- index.php – Changed from summaries to full text for posts
- single.php - Added Post MetaData bar at base of Single Post
- archive.php - Adjusted spacing on Archive Pages
- style.css - Changed entrys to be justified
- rsidebar.php - Halved the number of recent comments to 5
Wikipedia Plugins for WordPress
August 28, 2007 – 12:53I have great faith that Wikipedia can make a great day to day resource for personal reasearch, and be a starting point for academic research (not that I would recomend using Wikipedia as a reference for anything remotely important). As I tend to like linking to Wikipedia from blog posts I am looking for a plugin that allows me to do so quickly. I have found two plugins that seem to contain the features I want.
ActiveLink – Found this one through the Official WordPress plugins database it seemed to do more than I needed (i.e. Multi-Language) however I seem to of discovered a bug in either my style or in the plugin itself as pages on the front page show the markup rather than the link.
WP-WikiLinks – Again this does more than I need, as it also does Amazon, ISBN numbers and more. It also has the advantage of being more “Wiki-Like” than ActiveLink. Not having tried this one yet I don’t know if there are any pitfalls.
I am going to experement with WP-WikiLinks later in the day to see if it is an improvement or if it suffers the same issues as ActiveLink.
Update
After taking a look at this it appears that neither ActiveLink or WP-WikiLinks process the text output through the_content_rss(), however strangely enough no markup or anchor is output on the RSS pages.
Ooops! I Did It Again
August 27, 2007 – 23:20Yes, it has come to that time of the year again that I remember that I was meant to be blogging more, in fact I made it a New Year’s resolution to blog more often, and that came to absolutely nothing and here we are almost 9 months later.
It has been a busy day, I have installed WordPress 2.2 both on here and on I Married You and removed almost all of the old site for storage space reasons, the only part of my website that is still there is my CS335 – Dissertation which several people link to, so I thought it only fair not to move that one. I will look through my University Stuff and see if any of it is worth bringing across to WordPress.
Work is going well, getting really stuck in to some cool stuff this year, commissioned a couple of new servers over the summer break which whilst mundane to most, to Systems Administrators it marks a progression in your environment, think of it as something akin to building another floor on your house or office block.
Now I remember why I don’t blog, I can’t think of what to say! Well, not at the moment at least hopefully WordPress will make it easier to blog more regularly as I have the tools to do so without having to worry about phpBB and my hacked together blog script… oh and look RSS!