An Aussie geek stuck in Texas

A Guide For The Un-Initated To Buying Guinness In An Irish Pub

I love it!

A science of rings is developing - the instance that comes to mind is determining a persons nationality by the number of rings (a ring is dependent on a swig of Guinness each swig leaving it’s own ring). An Irishman will have in the region of 5-6 rings (we pace ourselves), an Englishman will have 8-10 rings, an American will have 17-20 (they sip) and an Australian won’t have any at all as they tend to knock it back in one go!

It seems most places around here begin shutting down at 1:00pm and when 1:30pm rolls around you’re going to have a hard time finding somewhere to get a decent lunch, there are only so many burgers one can eat from Otto’s, which is one of the few places that is open late.

What is the deal with that? I often get caught up in some coding or troubleshooting at work in the morning and don’t want to have to force myself to break just so I can get to a place before it closes. Are Texans just early eaters or what? I can remember going to lunch at like 2 or 3pm quite often back in Sydney without any problems, good luck trying to do that in Houston!

Then it is most likely do to your web host implementing mod_security in Apache, which can be configured to scan GET & POST requests made to the server and in more recent times because of things like the phpBB worm the settings have become more locked down disallowing words like curl and wget as they can be used maliciously by hackers with specially crafted requests to download code to your server in order to exploit it.

So to work around it you need to use a non breaking space between the word and the word after it so it gets through the mod_security filter but still displays properly on your blog, for example the code block below:

*/10 * * * * wget -q –spider http://www.yoursite.com/wordpress/phone2blog.php

Would throw a 403 error if I hadn’t used   between wget and -q, so if need be view the source of this page and see how to work around the 403 errors.

Dear Microsoft,

Thank you for making such a nice and secure operating system, it really makes my life easy having to change the extension of just about every file, then add them to a password protected zip file whenever I try to email them to someone running your wonderful MS Windows operating system. I think it is great how you recommend just disallowing people to receive files they need to do their jobs instead of fixing the security hole that makes these such a risk, you should be applauded for such wonderful security practices!

Agan a big thanks and I hope all is well in Redmond.

Best Regards,
Jason

I have finally found something I can channel my technical and creative skills into and am currently working on a new website named Hip in Houston. Hip in Houston is a new online community for promotion and discussion of Houston bars and clubs, it will feature discussion forums, an event calendar, photo galleries, reviews, happy hour schedules and lots of other content that will make Hip in Houston the source for bars and clubs in the area.

I’ll be trying to line up drink specials and do things like arrange special Hip in Houston happy hours and VIP events, plus eventually with any lucvk we will have Hip in Houston merchandise like T-Shirts to give away. It will take me several weeks of development to get the site ready for development but I am using Mambo for the Content Management System and Simple Machines for the forums so a lot of the hard stuff is already done so I just need to develop content and layout.

So stay tuned for the public launch event!

Something that has been bugging me a lot lately is how video and computer gaming is turning more and more into just a fight over what system has the best technical specifications with the latest controversial/mature games, it seems to me the majority of this is originating from pissing contests and wanting to be cool. There are exceptions of course but I just think for the most part people don’t play games any longer just because they are fun and satisfying.

Statements like “I can’t play that, it’s too kiddie looking” really irk me, The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Walker is one that often gets such a comment and apart from all of the sailing involved it really is a great game, it is enjoyable, satisfying & has excellent graphics but it doesn’t have any blood, gore, scantily clad women or a hip hop soundtrack so many people refuse to play it. That is ultimately their choice but I think if most people sat down and thought why they like those games and dislike the “kiddie games” they would be hard pressed to come up with a reason that isn’t based upon the opinion of their peers.

We are such whores for marketing these days and so eagerly eat up the latest and greatest that companies shove down our throats, which is something I’ve seen myself do oh so often so now I sit back and think “now why do I really want this gadget?” before purchasing it and you know what a lot of the times I realize is because “it is cool”, then I think “do I need it?”, now of course all purchases aren’t needs there are wants so if it isn’t a need then I ask “am I going to use it?” and even then I still think long & hard before laying down my cold hard cash on it.

Now that isn’t to say I still don’t suffice to the ocassional impulse purchase *glances over at his PSP*, the PSP doesn’t really have any games released worth playing right now so it is hardly getting used and is probably my last example of a purchase based upon cool factor alone, although it didn’t help that I had a bucket of beer or so from Little Woodrows beforehand (my g/f was driving).

Well here it is my modifications to Phone2WP to have the thumbnail functionality of Keitai Mail with a few other little tweaks.

To download click here.

To install extract the Zip to your root directory of your Wordpress install, edit phone2wp.php with your configuration details, setup an email account with a unique name like moblog_12345_9876 that nobody knows and isn’t likely to guess to prevent people spamming your forums, then setup your Wordpress install under Options / writing to check that email and finally add a new user to your Wordpress install with privileges to post that has the email address to set to the account you are going to send your moblog messages FROM, it doesn’t necessarily have to be the same address.

The only remaiining step is to add a cron job to run the script periodically to check for new emails, for example to do it every 10 minutes:

Actually for some reason I keep getting a 403 when I try to include the text of the cron job so check Phone2WP’s site for details until I work out what is up with the 403.

Soon I hope to modify the script to work more like Keitai Mail so you can setup a forward to pipe emails sent to your secret moblog email account and have them posted straight away.

If you have any questions please let me know, most credit though has to go to Ryan and Dr Dave.

Just testing the script clean up.