Daily Word Challenge

Posted: Mon 9 March, 2009 | Author: | Filed under: Geeky, Writing | Leave a comment »

You may have noticed over the last week or so that on occasion, some of my posts have had a single word highlighted, and linked off somewhere.

I’ve been testing a silly idea out – the Daily Word Challenge (DWC). The “concept” (if it can be called that) is that every day a word is chosen, and anyone who wants to can use that word in a blogpost (or Twitter feed, or Facebook, or whatever) and then add a link/comment in DWC back to that post.

Yes, I know, it’s utterly ridiculous – but it seemed like a piece of fun.  There’s also a Twitter feed for the site, another channel for finding out the day’s word.

Give it a go, let me know what you think.

Time Zones

Posted: Mon 9 March, 2009 | Author: | Filed under: Geeky, Getting Organised, Own Business, Web Development, Work-related | 1 Comment »

This will come as absolutely no surprise to many of you, but this morning I had a blinding flash of “Jesus I’m a twat”.

I’ve recently been working on a site where the server is based in the US, and I’ve been trying to sort out a regular task (a cron job, for those who know what the hell I’m whittling on about) that would run at midnight every day.

You can see where this is going already, can’t you?  Believe me, I couldn’t until this morning.

I’ve been checking in the morning to see whether the cron job (timed to run at midnight, remember) had run overnight, and each day it hadn’t run. I’ve checked the logs – nothing. I’ve checked the command syntax umpteen times, and checked how it’s running via crontab.  All fine. But the bloody thing’s not running.

However, I got a message at 7.05 this morning telling me it had tried to run.

And right then it occurred why this problem has been happening, why the script hasn’t been running at midnight.

It’s because:

  1. I’m a fuckwit
  2. The server’s in the US. Midnight in the US is (in this case) seven hours behind midnight here.

So come 7am GMT, the server runs the script at Midnight (US Server time). And all’s well.

I’ve changed it now, so that it runs at 5pm (US Server time) which is (of course) Midnight GMT.  It means things will still fuck up come BST, but I’ll change things a bit to rectify that when I get round to it.

In the meantime, well, let’s just leave it that I’m a fuckwit.

Vehicle Checks

Posted: Tue 3 March, 2009 | Author: | Filed under: Driving, Geeky | Leave a comment »

If you’re buying a car, you’re always recommend to do a check on the car, to ensure it’s not recorded as :

  1. Stolen
  2. Still has outstanding HP payments (which could get the car repossessed)
  3. Unregistered (for example, a cut/shut job)

However, getting those checks has always been either expensive, or non-simple to do.

Now, there’s “My Text Check” – for £3 (plus network charge for the text) you can text the car registration to 83600 , and you’ll get back the report, including information on police records, etc.

And about time too…

Analytics

Posted: Wed 18 February, 2009 | Author: | Filed under: D4D™, Geeky, Redesign | Leave a comment »

Damn, knew I’d forgotten something with all the redesign stuff that’s been going on here.  And I’ve just discovered what that something was.

Google Analytics.

So for the last four days, according to Analytics no-one had visited D4D™ at all.  Ooops.

It’s all fixed now – but all the same, a pain in the backside.

1234567890

Posted: Fri 13 February, 2009 | Author: | Filed under: Geeky | 1 Comment »

Supergeeky, but at the time of posting this (21:30:30 on 13th Feb 2009) the Unix timestamp reads 1234567890.

Femtocells

Posted: Thu 12 February, 2009 | Author: | Filed under: Geeky, Getting Organised, House Work, Own Business, Thoughts | Leave a comment »

Is it really geeky to be interested in getting one of these as and when they’re released in the UK?

Basically, it’s an extension of the cellular (mobile) network, connected through broadband, and allowing improved mobile access in phone blackspots. Like – well – our entire house/street.

Yes, geeky as all hell, but still I can see plenty of use for it just where we live…

To Upgrade, or Not

Posted: Wed 11 February, 2009 | Author: | Filed under: D4D™, Five Year Plan (now Ten), Geeky, Redesign, Thoughts | 4 Comments »

One of the current questions I keep coming back to with D4D™ is whether I should bother upgrading my WordPress install to get me back up to date.

As it is, D4D™ still runs on WP 2.1 , and the current version is 2.7 . It’s so behind the times that I know I should go through the pain of a multi-version upgrade, but I honestly don’t know if I can actually be bothered.

I’m very aware that when I moved over to WP, it was a pain – although I wouldn’t go back now, believe me – and I know that the D4D™ template has been corrupted by me to within an inch of its life.

Of course, I could do the upgrade, and put D4D™ into a WP template for a while. That’d be quite a shock to the system, wouldn’t it? If I were to go that route, I’d also be putting into place at least the basics of a re-plan of how things go on D4D™ including taking out a lot of the old sections that really aren’t looked at any more, and just a bit of a tidy up.

Oh, and a move to a new/different host. After all, why make things simple and do just one thing at a time? That’s no bloody fun at all…

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