Apple Store Staff and the Heroin trade

I wrote this a few days ago and completely forgot to publish it.

I had some spare time yesterday and so instead of sitting geeking online all day I decided to head out and investigate The World. The shopping centre in town has been expanded and renovated so I went on a tour and to see if I can find pretty clothes for myself. I found some nice jeans I might buy in a couple of weeks but the real reason for going was to pop into the Apple store and have a play. The new Mac books look nice, not that horrid shiney plastic crap they used to be We use the white plastic iMacs at Uni, but the new ones seem to be a nice shiney alu, so might have to nab one of them. I really do think the people at the Apple store have to be on some form of heroin, they’re perpetually happy and bouncy, not once whilst I was cruising amongst the throngs of people in there did I see anything other than beaming smiles and happy thoughts. They’ve had a nice refresh of some of the apple stock as I mentioned above, the Mac Books look nice, iPod nano is quite nice looking too, although I might by a shuffle, they’re kinda neat but I wish they had more space.

G’night readers.

phpBB2 and the futility of package management

So since we moved Hidden Agenda’s website off the old rented website and onto the lovely new colod server there hasn’t been a forum available, mostly through my own laziness. So yesterday after discussing it with Ben I decided to get it installed again and let him get on with it. I’d already had a few problems with apt/aptitude on our home server trying to get transcoding working for fruppes etc (finally given up and returning it to windows/tvaversity so I approached this with some trepidation. After apt-cache searching I found that the only version available was phpBB2 which is approximately 2000-2! I decided sod it and install that version anyway for simplicities sake. Unfortunately the version in the repo for Hardy is somewhat fucked and wont actually install, a quick Google turns up a known bug and a fix, sod that. If I’m not installing from the repo I might as well not bother with Yea Olde version and just nab the source for phpBB3, 5 minutes later and bang, all sorted, it took longer to try and install v2, find the fix and decide not to bother than it did to install v3 from source! I am determined one day just to give up on repository stuff and go straight for building everything from source and on slackware. But eh, I’m far far too lazy todo that, so I’ll stick with broken, out of date repository stuff and enjoy bitching about it.
2 weeks till student loans, I’ve already ear marked most of my money:

• new server and collocation (thinking Dell R200/300 or possibly home grown, I don’t really need advanced RAID on it. I plan on 2 hard drives, non-RAID, 1 as the work horse hosting the vms etc and then using the other as a backup.
• new laptop, I really want a nice thin one, still torn between a Mac Air or a new EEE 1000. I don’t want a giant 17inch monstrosity but maybe a 15 inch Mac Book. I’ve been looking lot at the refurbished Macs they sell on their site, same warrenty as a brand new Mac but discounted and with the possibility of slight cosmetic injury.
• a new PC. Since I blew the last one when it was connected to Dave’s single stage I need a new one, I haven’t really missed gaming that much tbh so I might consider having a Mac for my main PC and triple booting MacOS/Ubuntu/Windows. Of course if I get an expensive Mac laptop I’ll be having to use that as my main pc and just connect it to monitors when using it at home. But we shall see.

Ofcourse I’ll change my mind about this all completely tomorrow, but it’s fun to speculate…

I’m still getting headaches :/

Standards? Me? No thanks!

So after finally getting a fair bit of the mod_rewrite and general hacking of wordpress needed to make it all fit in nice and neat with the rest of the site I started thinking about the rss feed icon. This lil image has been around a while and was quite boring and didn’t really fit in where it was placed: in the iframe below the blog_name text. So I went off on a wander around the webness searching for different and possibly interesting icons to use instead of the b(l)og standard one. Lo and behold I found this neat little chap, one of a pair infact on this here blogwebsitething. A little editing in Gimp later and we have this neat little chap, comment out the code for the rssfeed in the blog itself and add it to the main site and tah dah. Now he looks very cute but the rest of my site didn’t really match, going from the plain black&white of the original to beige/brown/black of the newer one really made me think about the lack of “decent” colour schemes used in most peoples websites. Anywho I wanted my little RSS chap, who I shall name Bob, to feel relaxed and fit in so I thought I’d try and mod the text on the pages to fit in with the colour, unfortunately this didn’t really work and most of the text became unreadable. So I decided what the hey and tried changing the back ground of the site to fit in with, and I think it looks much, much better this way, I may change the colour of the iframe stuff when I get round to it, but I think it looks quite groovey atm. So here it is, 3am and I’m waiting up for my incomings to appear so I can scrape ome def together for them whilst firefox is busy telling me I’ve spelt “colour” incorrectly and me verbalising at it to bog off. I’ve run out of beer but the pepsi stocks remain intact, I’ve got massive attack on the ipod, half a packet of cigerettes and I’m wearing sunglasses. I like my life
Join me tomorrow for the fun and frollocks of installing phpbb3 when ubuntu’s repositry version of phpbb2 is severely fucked in the ass.
Gnight all, stay funky.

P.S. trying to type this on an EEE whilst it’s within the iframe is endless fun

mod_rewrite and the death of my sanity

So I decided temporarily to forgoe finishing the site in order to setup wordpress and attempt my first use of mod_rewrite to integrate the blog with the rest of my site, I had to choose a theme for wordpress that only consisted of one column in order to fit it in nicely with the iframe (I hate iframes but eh). This all seemed to go fine and I managed to get mod_rewrite to integrate internal links into the iframe I use.
Unfortunately trying to abuse mod_rewrite to accept a url as a parameter and put this as the source of the iframe doesn’t seem to work, it strips the http:/ off the front of the url and thus tries to access it as if it was local. I managed todo an ugly hack like this: RewriteRule ^links/http:/(.+)$ index.php?iframe=http://$1 [L] to make it work. I’m guessing something like // escapes the slash and thus only one is found. All seems to be working now, so yay.

Now to get back to coding ircbots to stalk people.