Well it appears that Google has finally let their Jabber server talk to other XMPP messaging systems, meaning that if you use Jabber somewhere then you should be able to now communicate with Google Talk people (including VOIP if your client supports it thanks to Google releasing their Jingle specs openly as well as a sample library) as well as with anyone else on a Jabber server.
Nice one Google!
Monthly Archives: January 2006
Alec completes collection of 1-4 wheel vehicles..
So now Alec‘s nice new trike has arrived to be added to his existing collection of a unicycle, multiple motorbikes and his car.. I look forward to meeting it when we’re next in the UK!
New Horizons on its way to Pluto!
Congratulations to the New Horizon team on the launch of the probe to Pluto! Only nine years to wait to see what it finds. 🙂
The Planetary Society has an update on the launch from John Spencer of the science team (and the Lowell Observatory).
RSS issues
Sorry to those tracking this site via RSS that may have seen odd behaviour recently – an artifact of importing all the old stories from Postnuke into WP2 is that the guid’s for the stories weren’t created properly and that was causing a non-compliant RSS2 feed, so I switched to RSS1.
Then I discovered that I could limit the RSS feed to just the last 5 articles (being the ones authored directly in WP2) and that fixed the validation of the RSS2 feed so now I’m switching back!
Off to Linux.Conf.Au 2006!
Thursday morning Donna and I fly off to New Zealand where I’ll be attending LCA 2006 in Dunedin and Donna will be doing a number of talks in Aukland, Wellington, Christchurch and Dunedin (and I’ll be travelling with her to those).
Updates will be occasional, if at all, to the site until we get back to Australia..
News on GPLv3, Samba4 and poor old Daniel..
Couple of interesting things today, first off is that the first draft of the GPLv3 has been posted for comment on the FSF’s website finally, so we get to see what they’re thinking. Then we have some news on a technology preview for Samba4 and finally why you shouldn’t put off packing to the last moment, like I’m doing..
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The continued adventures in WordPress
The more I find the more I like this – it makes life so much easier compared to Postnuke!
For instance, I’ve now installed this Get Latest Comments plugin which displays both recent comments and trackbacks to the blog. Very easy to setup and a trivial amount of editing of the sidebar PHP script and it’s done..
Shot in the foot by anti-referrer spam measures..
In a word, d’oh!
Spent a while trying to work out why I could install the Google Analyticator plugin but then when I tried to customise it from its option page, or go to any other link on my site from it I got a 403 Forbidden error. Looking at the Apache logs didn’t give much help, it was just whinging about client denied by server configuration and I was completely stumped, so I thought it must be some weird bug and installed Rich’s Analytics plugin, but that had the same problem!
But the fact that two plugins with similar names had the problem, whereas others were finally caused the penny to drop – I had installed a whole bunch of .htaccess to prevent comment spammers from getting too many links in and if they match they return with a 403 error. Turns out that one of them was broken and matching on the “anal” in Analytics!
Sigh.. at least it works now!
Conversion to WordPress complete
Well after many years of running PostNuke I’ve now switched to using WordPress and imported all my Postnuke stories into this (with a bit of hacking). It’s by no means finished, there’s a few more modules to install but mainly for backend stuff rather than frontend.
Still, I’m quite impressed by what I’ve seen of it so far!
Masters of Applied Physics & Dynamics
Now these guys really have grokked the application of the dynamics of complex systems and gravitational physics (from video.google.com – thanks Rich!).