Archive for the 'Housekeeping' Category
Wow, two months since the last update. I had a whole heap of plans of stuff I was going to do with the site but haven’t been able to implement them.
Anyway a few small updates to roll into one.
I quit my job
Yep, somehow I managed to last only 1 and a half years at this current place. It wasn’t so much that I didn’t like the job and the people were OK it just got a little too overwhelming especially when you have to deal with the same bullshit everyday.
So I’m picking up contract work again while looking for work. It’s great not having to work a 9-5er.
I’m finishing my degree
Protip for those who think that finishing a degree part time is a good idea. Take the 3 years, do it full time, work hard at it and get it out of the way. I’ve taken on “summer” units to complete this life goal and should have it done by December. I’ll be graduating in June 2009, 4 years after I started the degree.
Become a photo junkie
Now that I have a heap of free time on my hands, I’ve decided to learn more about how to use my camera and take good photos. I’m a bit short on storage on my hosting account so will most likely reactivate my flickr account and upload them there.
Learning how to write iPhone applications
I was given an opportunity to take on some work and build an iPhone-compatible site for a project. Good thing is the system is web based so I don’t have to learn any new programming skills but on the side I’m learning how to build iPhone applications.
I’ve decided to put some time aside to making some improvements to this site. The main one is the installation of Mint, a commercial site statistics tool which completes ASIO’s takeover of the site.
Keep a lookout for some more tangible improvements over the next week or two.
Today’s my birthday… More to come.
The power has been out in our area since 7:30, I’m using my mobile broadband to get net access.
From what I can tell they’re brining on different parts of the grid back online one at a time. We experienced a brownout which meant a scramble to disconnect the mains supply to prevent any damage to our electrical stuff.
Update: thank the god’s the power is back online. The TV, however, won’t turn on. Ruh-roh.
Forgot to renew the domain name.
Just upgrading Wordpress to 2.5 so sit tight!
Update I:
- Clean install, done
- DB Tidy, done
- Re-load of plugins, almost - stats not working
- Theme, almost, no header graphic
- Arrgh! Undefined function: wp_register_sidebar_widget(). Wordpress what have you done to me?!@
- Done… I think
- Looks like the Undefined function was caused by Wordpress’ own Stats plugin
- Plugins used: Akismet, Statpress, Wphone
- Theme: k2
Wordpress 2.5 is almost ready for release. The new version is supposed to be out by the 24th of March but looking at the bug tracking they would need a minor miracle to pull that off. As part of the new release some significant improvements to the backend have been made notably in the creation of galleries, user, media and page management.
One thing that remains a stickler for me and that’s the Admin console UI. The revised UI seriously looks like someone got an 80’s color palette and a horribly outdated design, mixed the two together and beat the result with an ugly stick (indicated in the above screenshot).
I suppose (one) of the most frustrating things about the internet is when web hosts and servers go down. When I was with MD this was a regular and embarrassing experience (as a contract web developer) so much so that I changed to Jumba last year and have had a decent experience (I’ve used Site 5, Server101 and OzHosting too and Jumba has been the best).
Unfortunately, that feeling of frustration with Jumba, my current web host has come back.
So far over the last few hours at least the hosting has been up and down. And now it looks like a fault was found and they’re migrating accounts to a new server.
I hate to kick them while they’re down - I’m mainly pissed off because I decided to spend all of my Saturday night getting a project ready for go-live - and I appreciate all they do in terms of high level of quality of service however, I can’t help but feel like this:
Brand new, Dell PowerEdge SC1950 servers, featuring the latest Intel Quad Core processors, DDR2 ECC RAM, Dual SAS (Serial Attached SCSI) Hard Drives with onboard hardware RAID1 mirroring and hot-swap capabilities. All hardware is securely housed in the TransACT data centre in Canberra.
Is a bit of BS. If the servers have redundant capabilities, why wasn’t the fault fixed sooner?
Hello and welcome to the new FNT on Wordpress. I decided after sporadic posting to knuckle down and get back into the world of blogging, ranting and the occasional joke (which will remain far and few between). After all this is the 3rd year and there are some readers so I must be doing something right.
My decision to move over to Wordpress was fueled by the fact that I wanted to do some interesting stuff, web-wise* and take a bit more control over the management and operation of my site. Being a cautious sort I did some extensive (5 minutes worth) testing to ensure that everything moved over as expected.
So hold onto your hats folks cause promise to you 2008 is going to be an awesome year.
* I’m an internets developer so it’s my duty (heh heh doody) to do interesting stuff web-wise.