An Aussie geek stuck in Texas

Well my first attempt at a plugin (well actually right now it is more of a hack, I still need to look into how to integrate it as a plugin…) for WordPress 1.5 is starting to come along as you can see at the top of this page with the new menu. The menu is the result of calling WordPress’ list_pages() plugin and then styling the result with CSS, my aim is to make it as easy to integrate as possible hopefully through the plugin architecture.

I used quite a lot of sites for inspiration on the CSS Dropdown menu but I think my main source was Suckerfish Dropdowns.

If anyone is interested in this drop me a note and I can share the code so far and let you know once I have something releasable.

UPDATE: Have switched to a different style for generating the menu that is much more Internet Explorer friendly by using a .htc file to add the desired effect so HOVER will work on the list items, most of the code was blatantly ripped from this excellent Tutorial.

Using this method though has at least temporarily required me to change a function in template-functions-post.php that I don’t currently know how to work around but I will work on that as I’d like this to be able to become a plugin.

Back when I first started living in Houston a little over a year ago an ice house named Little Woodrows in Midtown was pretty much my saving grace, before that place I knew nobody in this town and after becoming a regular I got to know a lot of great people and ever since then it has been a popular place for me to visit with my girlfriend but recently the place had somehow lost it’s charm. A lot of the familiar, female faces behind the bar had moved onto real jobs and the regular crowd wasn’t so regular but tonight restored a little bit of that magic.

I’m not sure what it was exactly but with Kelly behind the bar anticipating whenever I needed another beer, my girlfriend (the very lovely Megan :-)), friends Jill & Keith to hang out with along with Booker off in the background, even the presence of Terry who I can never work out if I should be worried about or just be passing friends with added to the effect, then with Vanessa as the cocktail waitress and Armando as the bar back it just seemed like old times and well just put me in the best of moods.

So if you’re ever in Houston and looking for a friendly place to go for a beer or two then I highly recommend Little Woodrow’s Midtown, 2306 Brazos St.

I just caught White Men can’t Jump on cable and damn it sure brought back memories from High School back when I was right into basketball and all that trash talking. I can still remember the very first time I dunked during a game, I was SO proud right up until I walked smack bang into one of the supporting poles!

One of my favourite lines from a movie is from that movie “we goin’ Sizzler, we goin’ Sizzler…”, I don’t know what it is about that line but I use it for gloating ALL the time, Sizzler for those that don’t know was (or still is?) a restaurant whose specialty was a salad bar, in fact I think that was all they had and around the time of the movie my friends and I would all go out for a movie and to pig out at Sizzler as it was so cheap.

Now I’m hoping there is a basketball hoop near where we are moving as I sure would like to pick up a ball again, not sure if I’d want to actually play but it’s fun to fool around and fantacize about playing in the NBA. Oh what could have been if I wasn’t a dumbass and went rollerblading without my wrist protectors just before the High School finals, I don’t even need to tell that story you can guess what happened…

Has anyone else ever noticed how just about every Subway sandwich tastes the same no matter what fillings you have and how all pop tarts taste the same regardless of the flavour?

Well as you can see I have started tinkering with the style, firstly with the new title graphic that is part of a photo I took in 2004 of Coalcliff, a town on the east coast of Australia near where I was born, unfortunately I’m not one of the surfers but we won’t tell anyone that will we?

I also tweaked the weather plugin to fit in a little better so please let me know what you think of that. Plus I had a lot of “fun” getting the Spell checker plugin to work properly, first on Konqueror the button displays right at the bottom of the page & it took me ages to find that out but I haven’t been able to fix that yet, then when trying to configure the plugin it would redirect to one level higher in the directory hierarchy than it needed to and I tracked that one down to get_settings(”wpurl”) not working for some reason so I changed that to get_settings(”siteurl”) and that fixed that, the code including the Javascript had a similar problem but it also had a problem as variable was defined in one function and then tried to use it in another.

I should really look at my fixes and make them more elegant and then submit them back to the plugin’s author but I’ll just stick with my hacks for now and get everything else working how I want it to.

Everyone that was previously scared to try the nightly builds of Wordpress can now celebrate and head on over to get the just released Wordpress 1.5.

I have already upgraded to the stable release after previously using a nightly build from about a week to go, was relatively painless as I haven’t done much hacking on templates or anything yet. I use Quanta on my Linux laptop to do all my web development so all I did was download the 1.5 tar ball, over-ride everything and then tested it locally, it all looked good so an F8 and click of the proceed button SFTP’d it all up to my host.

There are a few little things to sort out though like the spell checker plugin as I currently can’t see that while typing this post and I think the template needs some attention as I don’t think that is using the latest version asthe few hacks I did must have made the file be more recent than the files in 1.5. Other than that though no real breakage so it’s all good.

I’m not going to enter the debates about whether a subscription service is best or not but I found it amusing when browsing Napster’s website to find:

You’re about to have your choice of over 1,000,000 tracks for your PC or compatible MP3 player

On this page.

Huh? Last I looked Napster files were WMA format using Microsoft’s DRM so shouldn’t that read or compatible WMA player?

I just came across this article on Slashdot and must say the methods used in this so called study sure seem a little silly.

From the article:

the idea was to represent what an average system administrator may do, as opposed to a “wizard” who could take extra steps to provide plenty of security on a Linux setup, for instance.

So what exactly are they calling an average system administrator? Did they just install the software and leave everything with their default values? If an average system administrator did that then they deserve to be fired.

Their criteria included the number of reported vulnerabilities and their severity, as well as the number of patches issued and days of risk — the period from when a vulnerability is first reported to when a patch is issued.

There are multiple questions surrounding this criteria, firstly how did they determine whether a vulnerability was reported? Did they refer just to information from RedHat and Microsoft or did they monitor the various security mailing lists? Did they filter the reported vulnerabilities to only include the installed applications seeing how RedHat reports vulnerabilities for a wide range of software?

Also the very nature of Open Source Software leads to more vulnerabilities being reported as people peruse the code and find a lot of theoretically vulnerabilities that somebody could exploit if they knew how so the fact there were more vulnerabilities reported for the Linux system could actually be a good thing as the patches would be making the system even more secure.

It just seems a very odd way of assessing the level of security in an operating system and from it’s description in the article it sounds like it doesn’t really prove anything.

The timing of the study is also quite interesting with the comments made by Microsoft’s Security Chief in this recent article where he claims Windows 2003 is more secure as they have issued less patches then RedHat and Suse have for their products,.

I was annoyed today as just before I was to go out for lunch with some friends for Sushi I had some unexpected work pop up that I needed to work on straight away so I had to cancel lunch, then as compensation about half an hour later I went shopping. Now shopping in downtown Houston is mediocre at best however they do have a Foleys and occasionally they have good specials so…

I ended up buying new dress pants, shirt, jacket (not matching) and a sweater, all at 66% off and all DKNY (well DKNY Jeans not the designer label but still!) and is only cost me a messily $111. Once again I outdo myself in my bargain shopping! Don’t get me wrong I’m not one of those annoying people that hunt and hunt and hunt for a bargain and won’t buy anything unless it is on special but I do always keep my eye out for the good specials and get everything I want then but that doesn’t stop me from buying stuff at full price if I see something I really want or need.

Seeing how I now have an Apache Tomcat server in Production use again I thought it was high time I re-joined the Tomcat-Users mailing list so now I might actually get around to adding some real detail to my Tomcat Tips page.