News about me, my family and anything I comment on from the global news fronts.
I don’t have too much time right now.
I’m busy migrating my content from my mac mini to my new iMac, plus dual-booting into Windows XP to get a good dose of the latest graphical games there.
It’s a swweeeet beast… Guess which one I have ?
Ok, ok, for my own benefit (I just realised I use my own blog to find the hardware details of my stuff) :
Imac 24 inch consisting of an Intel Core Duo 2 (2.16 Ghz) , 2GB ram, 500 GB harddisk, Nvidia 7600 GT (256 MB Ram), AppleCare protection for 3 years).
I’ve just noticed yet another flood of spam that is stopped by Akismet. While thinking what a great service this is (and all for free!) I noticed that there is a whole range of addresses that come back every single time.
If I’ve done this right, the range 84.110.240.0 – 84.110.255.255 is now blocked from entering any more spam comments.
Cheerio Bezeq International from Israel ! Good riddance !
Update 14/01/2007 : just added another part of Ukraine to my blacklist. 82.255.188 and 119.
I’ve been writing down the new words that Sam is learning and saying all the time.
Sam has learned to speak the following words :
Nov 6, 2006 : Opla (Hopla), Pipira (Piet Piraat),Umba (Bumba) : all children shows, several of which we have on dvd. His favorite seems to be Opla !
Nov 20, 2006 : Oenen (Schoenen), Jajaja, tutut
Nov 28, 2006 : Klaaaa (Sint-Niklaas), Pakke (Pick him up)
Dec 2, 2006 : auuuto (auto = car)
Just reading over this list he seems to learn a few new words every week or so. Amazing the progress that children can make at an age like that. He understands quite a bit more than he can say.
I just checked my posts : over the last 23 months, I’ve posted 161 times, giving an average of about 7 posts a month.
There are way more bloggers out there posting a lot more, but for me and my time-pressed life I find this not bad at all !
Spam Comments seem to come and go in waves. So far 1066 spam comments blocked since I activated Akismet (the plugin is installed by default into WordPress, but you need to get a free key to activate it). It really is an extremely good solution to combat spam.
I have been trying to implement the “Now Reading” plugin from Roblog as I thought it was a great way to keep track of what books I read and at what date.
But I couldn’t get it to work. It kept crashing with a MySql error whenever I wanted to add a book to the list in the admin interface. Despite several comments in the blog entry by me and others who had the same problem, the author of the plugin did not react to propose a solution.
One enterprising soul who had the same problem, found the answer however, and I’ve since corrected it and activated the plug in (although it won’t show up on my homepage as yet). I’m now documenting the fix here as well.
The problem is that Now Reading re-uses a WordPress variable called “query” without reinitializing it. Normally this does not cause any problems, but if you have a plug in (like for example weathericon) that query variable is already used, and thus contains data.
Solution : in the Now reading plugin, modify the add.php file and add a line all the way in the beginning :
$query=””;
This resets the variable to “empty” and thus the result returned to the browser will be valid.
While everybody seems to be using Deli.cio.us I never really found a valid reason for me to use it. Using the bookmarks system was ‘good enough’ for me.
Recently though I’ve visited so many websites of so many different types that my bookmarks were becoming bloated. On one of my (Firefox) browsers I had the delicious buttons installed, and I’ve started using them to ‘tag’ those websites I wanted to find back later, without actually bookmarking them. This worked so well that I will reserve bookmarking only for those sites I want to find.
Actually, I need a good cleaning of my bookmarks!
But when I wanted to install this on my other Firefox browsers all my bookmarks were sucked into the delicious system and I no longer had any bookmarks, only the delicious tags, which I find a kludge to find anything in it if you don’t know the name and you haven’t given it your own tags). There seemed to be no way to get just the buttons in the top navigation bar.
Turns out that there are two versions of the delicious plugin : one can be found in the add-on for Firefox (Tools, Add-ons) and it installs both the buttons and replaces your bookmarks and one can be found on the delicious website itself, and installs only the buttons.
This week Sam has learned a new thing : at the age of almost 17 months he can now shake his head very clearly to indicate ‘no’. Yes is a word he already can say (ja) and when he says it he nods his head very clearly.
Our life is suddenly much easier again now that we can sorta know whether he likes something or not.
His vocabulary is growing, he understands quite a bit more than you think at his age. For example, when he woke from his nap this afternoon I was playing with him, moving a black sheep toy quickly to and from his head with him laughing. I put in on my head when he sat up and he hadn’t noticed it. But when I saw him looking for it I said that it was on daddy’s head and he immediately looked up and saw it.
He still won’t say his name though, maybe that S-thingie is hard to learn, I suppose it comes later.
For now he has a bit of a fever (vaccinations) and I stayed home today caring for him. Apart from not letting him out of my sight (unless you want a mess everywhere) he is quite a fun boy, we played with the cars and he loves looking through books with pictures of animals in them (Tom did as well).
I’ve just upgraded my site to the latest WP version 2.0.5 – no problem at all to upgrade.
Somebody has collected some cat photos and annoted them.
A very good laugh indeed, highly recommended !!
At last, the forum for the Anaconda theme is up and running.
Even better, one of my pet peeves with this otherwise excellent theme was to put my background image on there.
One of the first things that got a response :
Add the image, which you want to display in the header, to wp-content/themes/anaconda/styles/images directory. For example say your image is named headerImage.gif.
Then change the line at 748 in style.css in anaonda theme directory:
#header {background: #666 url(â€styles/images/sprites.gifâ€) repeat-x 0 100%;margin: 0 0 25px;padding: 0 0 8px}
to
#header {background: #666 url(â€styles/images/headerImage.gifâ€) repeat-x;margin: 0 0 25px;padding: 0 0 8px}Note: Image height should be at least 100px to cover the header area.
As you can see, it sorta works, but it’s not really what I want :
– the image is squashed, or depending if you are changing the repeat-x to no-repeat 0 100% you only see part of it
– the whole line is not filled in
– it’s not centered
– the title of the blog is in the wrong place, for me it should be more to the right.
So I’m going to continue to experiment. I’ve been studying the css code some more, and it seems that most of the things that I want to do are onwards from line 742 in the style.css file.
For example, to change the color/font/size of your sitename, simply adapt the line #header #sitename (the line just below #header). If you want to move your site header name to the right, change the margin from “0 0 0 40px” to “0 0 0 380px”.