Technical stuff

New Site

Well I bit the bullet and updated my blog - I can now be found at warriorwomen.

Not sure if it was such a good idea to change the URL as now all my links and RSS feeds have changed but I'm pleased with the conversion non-the-less.

Technical stuff

Worrying Developments

I am slightly concerned about two new obsessions that seem to be gaining a foothold.

Firstly you may have noticed that a whole load of ultrarunners have suddenly gatecrashed my blogroll and therefore my regular reading list. Yesterday my new book arrived, Ultramarathon Man by Dean Karnazes, and I stayed up til 3am to finish it.

Why would this be? A long run for me is 10k.

Can't help feeling such an admiration for this show of endurance and ridiculous stubborness. When Karnazes finished his first 50-miler he described rather too vividly the terrible spasms and projectile vomiting that ruined his lovely new Lexus. It's trials like this that help define who you actually are and I'm sure most of us hanker to know just how much we could actually deal with.

The second development is rather more impulsive. Last night I suddenly decided that I was going defect from MovableType and head over to wordpress.org. This is clearly going to cause an immense weekend long headache if I go ahead with it. I had to restrain myself from giving it a go last night when the urge first grabbed me.

This is my explanation in advance for any prolonged outage of the blog, and any pattern baldness that I may concurrently develop.

Technical stuff

Psychic Bloglines

What's happened to Technorati lately?
I use it to keep track of recent posts in all my favourite blogs but it is just not playing fair anymore. It's telling me that a lot of my fellow bloggers haven't been active in over 100 days when I know for a fact that they've been at their most prolific over the New Year.

My frustration forced me to skip on over to Bloglines, and so far so good. I don't think I'm going to miss another post again. In fact last night it informed me that Junebug had just posted an entry entitled "Who wants pasta?", and as I did I headed over there to check it out. There was nothing! No post, no pasta, just old entries. This morning, I get up and check it out again, lo and behold the pasta post is up. Three cheers for the psychic bloglines, big improvement over Technorati.

Technical stuff

Down with TramadoL****

At last I have found a plugin to deal with the mountains of spam winging its way to this blog. The latest update of Movable Type helped but spammers like TramadoL1234 kept getting through the spam filter. Repeatedly. Thankfully I was alerted to the cure all by That Canadian Girl. The panacea comes in the form of Akismet. I think it is specifically designed for wordpress but there are plugins developed for MT and most other blogging systems that I can think of, just check out the developer page.

**UPDATE - Jan 13th 2007**
I've disabled Akismet from my blog. I don't reckon it works with MT, I'm sure its a wonder with wordpress but it just doesn't seem to learn from its errors on my system.

After downloading the movable type version of Askimet I was initially very happy indeed - I found it completely wiped out all the spam posts that had been sneaking through my existing barrier.

Problem is, it seems to work by blocking all legitimate comments too - I was beginning to feel quite lonely in my little corner of cyberspace. The only way to avoid missing my comments was to trawl through the 200 and odd spam messages each day. Thats no different to marking all comments for review and is a tedious task.

I am now using a captcha style plugin called comment challenge. So far so good, legitimate commenters have been allowed through and no errors detected in the last 24 hours. I would have gone for the real captcha method but my attempts at installation failed. The comment challenge plugin has been designed as an easy installation module.

Technical stuff

Knowing Your Audience

It's great knowing that folk are actually interested in reading the random scribblings that make up your blog but I find that it comes with a worrying sense of responsibility. All of a sudden I feel like I am writing for an audience and have to consider what it is "they" want to read. All the more concerning when you know that your most regular audience comprises your mum and your dad.

Anyhow, I am pleased to announce that my dad has now started his very own blog, so I can now check up on him on a regular basis too. So far he is writing about the characters he comes across on his allotment and has already educated me on the reason why Pythagoras avoided Fava beans. Check him out at The Nearly Good Life.

Technical stuff

I Tube - Do You?

I couldn't wait any longer, I had to find out what all the hype surrounding YouTube is about. That canadian girl started me off with a link to a haunting film about a giant little girl puppet. While I was there I came across my fave advert - the Tango/Bravia spoof:

I only caught it on the telly once, so I don't know if Sony kicked up a stink about copyright infringements, and had it shifted.

Technical stuff

Stressful upgrade to movable type 3.31

I knew I should not have attempted this upgrade. I made the same mistake last year and it resulted in approximately 27 hours of high anxiety while I desperately scrabbled around every user forum trying to find an answer to "how the hell am I going to get my blog back?!".

Well at least todays upgrade anxiety only lasted for 6 hours - I'm obviously getting better at this.

Technical stuff

Slow Start Up

After a few months of use I find that my computers always start to crawl at startup. I find this really irritating and my sony vaio is particularly problematic as there are hundreds of programs running at any one time.

MSCONFIG is a useful tool for clearing up unnecessary utilities from the startup but it can be difficult to determine which are the essential programs and which are those you can happily get rid of.

I found a couple of useful sites today:
The first one explains how to use MSCONFIG
and the second provides a tremendous searchable database of what all those programs are, and whether they are useful or not.

Technical stuff

Wardriving

I've got a couple of new gadgets recently: a Dell Axim 51v PDA and a sweet dinky Sony Vaio TX.

Both are titchy, all singing all dancing computers and both have wireless LAN functionality. Now I didn't think this was going to be so much use but when I got home I discovered that I live in a veritable wireless hotspot. I have something like 6 open access points to choose from and I can therefore access email and update this blog from every room in the flat. The obvious question then is, why bother paying an exorbitant fee for broadband access when I can get it for free?

What do you think? Is this an ethical question or a no-brainer? Anyway I did a search on google and it seems the practice of scanning an area for available networks is called wardriving and doing this and accessing the networks found has a dubious legality. In fact it is quite possibly illegal. Bummer eh? Interesting article can be found here, entitled Stealing your neighbours bandwidth.

Anyway, although I can access the net I am having trouble sending any mail so thats one reason for keeping my own account.