Author: willc

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Link Goodness

Allrighty, how about a little linkitudinal updatage going on here?

First, for those of you in the Asheville area, I have for you perhaps the best online weather info available. Current NCDC Weather Conditions provides you with current data from atop the Grove Arcade in downtown Asheville. There are also links to regional radar maps (loopable) and lots of other cool weather geek info. I have an inside track on this sort of thing these days, which makes me even geekier. I know you are jealous.

Montage-A-Google is a neat way of creating photo montages by searching with Google Images.

If the news that Microsoft is finally releasing an update to its bug-ridden, non-compliant, piece of doo security threat called Internet Explorer (for XP users only, mind you) isn’t enough to make you crumple over with a hernia from laughing, check out their “A parent’s primer to computer slang” article.

Key points for learning leetspeek

  • Numbers are often used as letters

40w 08|?10U$, M@N.

And about the Internet Explorer thing, it’s not really a new version of the browser, it’s a service pack. Looks like they are feeling a wee bit threatened by someone.

In case you didn’t know, you can opt out of a lot of credit card junk mail. It’s your legal right, so do it.

Lastly, for those of you who need to surf the Internet in style, I give you Pimpzilla the bling-bling Firefox theme.

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Pics and Stuff

I have resurrected the image gallery portion of this site. Woohoo! Lots of pictures for all 4 visitors to look at. Check out Will’s Ye Olde Photo Gallery.

At first I installed Gallery to manage the photos. I tried Gallery out about 3 years ago and wasn’t that impressed. Since then it seems to have made a lot of progress. It installs easily and seems to be rather easy to manage. However, there is one big problem with it that bugged me: it’s not Web Standards compliant. The features offered in Gallery were almost enough to allow me to ignore this, but in the end, my morals took over and I ditched it for something better.

Enter Simple PHP Gallery, which you might have seen used on this site before. This program too has made leaps and bounds of progress since I last used it. It was so easy to install (upload and go), I thought I was launching rubber frogs from a Turkish catapult. No, I don’t know what that means either.

Granted, Simple PHP Gallery doesn’t have quite as many features as Gallery. However, it makes up for that in other ways. Not only does it validate as XHTML Strict, it was pretty easy to integrate into my site’s existing design. This was not true of the program last time I tried it, nor is it true of Gallery.

Additionally, Simple PHP Gallery has a much smaller footprint on the server in both speed and size. Taking advantage of PHP’s GD Library, it creates thumbnails and resizes images on the fly. Oh, did I mention it validates as XHTML Strict???

Anyway, keep an eye on Will’s Ye Olde Photo Gallery for lots of kewl stuff. I just uploaded the first batch of pics from my new Nokia 3620 camera phone, and am impressed with the resolution for a free phone. There are also some new pics from my Olympus C5050 and my Sony Handycam.

Geez, this took forever to say all this stuff. I gotta stop this stream-of-conscience writing thing.

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Flogging the End User

Reported by the AP:

“Last week, Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates (news – web sites) confirmed plans to sell antivirus products to both consumers and big businesses by the end of the year. But the Redmond company is mum on cost and features.

Speaking at a security conference, Gates also said the company would give consumers a free tool for combating spyware, a pesky and growing threat that can monitor users’ activities, hinder computer performance and create other hassles. Microsoft also will sell a more sophisticated antispyware product to businesses.”

It’s nice of them to give the end user a free tool to combat spyware. But turning around and charging people and businesses for antivirus and the professional version of the spyware tool is the most ludicrous thing I have ever heard.

Why are they charging you to fix their unsecure software???

I do not see how they can get away with this. This would be similar to a contractor charging you for the shingles he forgot to put on the roof of your house and pay to repair the furniture damaged by the rain that got in.

Unfortunately, President Bush signed the law that limits class action lawsuits last week, so there is not much hope of doing anything about this.

That Mac Mini is looking better and better every day.

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No Phone, No Phone

For those of you who call us on our land line, you might be interested in knowing we will not have a land line after tomorrow. We have opted to go totally to our cell phones and do away with that which annoys us.

We switched to a new cell service that gave us a great price on a great plan, and it was cost effective to ditch the Bellsouth land line. This means that we will no longer be in the phone book, which is OK with us since they insisted on not correcting their misspelling of our names for 4 years anyway.

So, if you don’t have our cell numbers, let me know and I’ll think about giving them to you 🙂

Edit: Upon reflection, I realized that this site has no clear way of getting in touch with me. So, I added a contact page.

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Crain Stuff

I’ve been in touch with my old pal John Kampschaefer a bunch lately. He has been digging up some of the hundreds, if not thousands, of pictures he took during the Crain era. John was pretty much the 5th member of Crain, acting as roadie, sound man, photojournalist, brother, friend, and accomplice. I knew he had a lot of good stuff in his basement darkroom, and now it is starting to see the light of day.

Check out the Pictures at the www.crainspeed.com site for continuing updates from his amazing collection.

John took pictures of the entire Louisville punk scene during those days, and I’m hoping to talk him into a web site just for that. I think a lot of people would be into it.

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Server Woes

So I just got my web server back in order after about 12 hours of problems. I ran some upgrades early this morning that borked the entire server.

It turns out something got misconfigured in lilo, the Linux boot loader, and it wouldn’t boot up after the upgrades. Once that was resolved, I had some problems with my root directory being full. After that, I learned that there was a PHP file that didn’t get upgraded, which took down all WordPress installations (me, chris, chris, lauren, etc). I finally got that resolved. Lastly, webmail started showing up in Arabic, and that was due to the same PHP problem.

I’m glad I got everything straightened out with no loss of data. Downtime stinks and is stressful when you have a bunch of clients hosted who rely on email and generate money off their sites every day, but it happens to the best of them.

Thanks for the patience of everyone.

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Hil-ariousness

This is just too funny. Microsoft just launched a new Internet Explorer Security Newsgroup. 4 years too late!!!

The comments posted are just too funny. Here are a few choice ones:

“This blog is a great metaphor for how well Microsoft understands the full implications of everything it does. ”

“I found a security flaw where IE accidentally loses massive amounts of market share every time I launch it.”

” Hi, can you make IE as secure as firefox?

Shouldn’t be too hard right, since you guys have like 30 billion dollars? … and mozilla has … 2 … million?

Thanks.”

(link via waxy)

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Crain – Speed

So I got my 25 advanced copies of the new Crain Speed LP on CD the other day. The official release date is April 5, 2005.

I was completely blown away by how good the CD sounds. John Golden took the original 8-track tapes and remastered them. The sound is full, wide, and for lack of a better word…rocking!

I set up a web site at CrainSpeed.com that has all the details. There are a few downloads of the new tracks too! Check it out.

I still have a hard time believing that 13 years after the original record was released, there is still enough interest to make something like this happen. Thanks to Jeremy and Temporary Residence for spearheading this project!

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Le Bien, Le Mal

The bad news is that my Forum got borked during my recent server move. The good news is that I reinstalled it from scratch.

The bad news is Louisville is playing Marquette tonight, who always finds a way to beat them. The good news is, Lousiville is up 13 at the half.

The bad news is I was getting pounded by referrer spam in my visitor logs. The good news is I found a method of using .htaccess to stop the spammers cold and waste their own bandwidth.

clicky