I find this quite unbelievable, considering all the palava we went through for the Y2K cavalcade, but it seems that many systems around the world have been crashing or doing bizarre things once the first of January 2010 came around. […]
READ MOREColor me stupid, but then again I was under some emotional pressure at the time. The open source version of GraffitiCMS has some changes in it compared to the final official commercial release. Well, duh, I suppose; and of course I'd mentioned some of them in my previous blog post on the subject. […]
READ MOREFor some reason, I'm getting comment spam from essay and thesis mills, that is, those sites that promise to write an essay or thesis for you for cash. Given that the spam is barely legible English already -- the words are English but the syntax is dubious -- it's (a) not a great advert for the quality of the end-product should you partake of the service, and (b) frigging annoying to me. One of them was posted to my "Bye, Dad" post, not something that would endear me to the comment or commenter anyway. […]
READ MOREI write a monthly column for PCPlus, a computer news-views-n-reviews magazine in the UK (actually there are 13 issues a year — there's an Xmas issue as well — so it's a bit more than monthly). The column is called Theory Workshop and appears in the back of every issue. When I signed up, my editor and the magazine were gracious enough to allow me to reprint the articles here after say a year or so. After all, the PDFs do appear on each issue's DVD after a few months. When I buy the current issue, I'll publish the article from the issue a year ago. I popped over to B&N this lunchtime and bought the Christmas issue, so here's Christmas 2008's article. […]
READ MOREThose of you who follow me may have noticed a that I've been somewhat offline for the past week. The reason is that my father had a cardiac arrest overnight on Saturday/Sunday, 12/13 December, just over a week ago. Since then he's been in the Cardiac Care Unit at the James Cook University Hospital in Middlesbrough. I flew out from Colorado the next day, arriving the Tuesday, to see him. For the past week, I and my sister have been taking turns at looking after my mother and driving her to and from the hospital (it's over 90 minutes away). There's not been much time for being online, besides which I have to borrow a neighbor's broadband with which to do it. […]
READ MOREOnce GraffitiCMS had been posted as open source, I downloaded it with the intent of upgrading this site to it. There wasn't much news on the Graffiti CodePlex page about what had changed since the latest official release (1.2). In particular, no news whether any of the proposed plans from the beginning of the year had been implemented, partially or not. […]
READ MOREThis has got to be seen to be believed. When you email a multi-paragraph post to Posterous, it formats it, shall we say, differently than anything else I've seen. […]
READ MOREBack a couple of months ago I set up a Posterous account as an experiment to see whether I could get anything between micro-blogging (Twitter) and macro-blogging (my main blog, using Windows Live Writer). Posterous was interesting because you compose a blog post as an email sent to a special email address, so it would work from my iPhone as well as from Outlook and Gmail. Worked pretty well, except for one thing: I could not cross-post my Posterous posts to my personal blog. They were arriving, but GraffitiCMS was rejecting them due to no category being present. So I shelved the experiment. […]
READ MOREIt's finally happened. After almost a year of no progress on GraffitiCMS, the blogging engine I use for this site, it's now available as open source on CodePlex, using a Microsoft Reciprocal License (Ms-RL). Go get it! […]
READ MORENearly two weeks ago, I converted this site to use SQL Server as the database engine. Without a doubt, having the database on another server separate from the main web server has helped the speed of this site dramatically, so much so that I've added features like the "top five most popular posts" gadget to the first sidebar and "other similar posts" to each blog post (when they're displayed on their own). […]
READ MORE