Yeah, I know, I've been a bit lax in posting over the past week. I tried to keep up with answering questions and comments but it was a low priority...
In any case, last Saturday I proposed to Dot, my girlfriend of 7 years, and she said yes! No plans for a wedding date or honeymoon destination as of yet, although since both of us want a small wedding (neither of us know/like many people) we're pretty set on deciding on a honeymoon destination first and then planning the wedding around the best time of the year for that location.
For anyone wondering, yes, I'm still here. I'm in the final stretch of finishing up my Master's Degree and between that and work (big things going on there as well) I just haven't had much time to post anything. Stay tuned though, I'm bound to find something interesting to say, and time to say it, soon. 
It's been a long time coming (I believe the first time I mentioned creating packages for Enterprise Linux 5 was back in April), but yes, that's right, the packages from my EL4 repository have finally been recompiled for use under RHEL and CentOS 5!
Continue Reading 'Announcing the Utter Ramblings EL5 Repository' »
Yes, that's right, today I turn 25 years old. For those curious about the grand old year of 1982, the following are just a few of the notable things that happened:
- January 8 - AT&T agreed to break up its monopoly over the local phone exchanges (creating the "Baby Bells").
- January 17 - Temperatures drop to record lows on "Cold Sunday", including a drop to -27 °F in Chicago, Illinois (very near where I was born).
- May 2 - The Weather Channel airs on cable for the first time (threw this one in for my girlfriend, she was a Meteorology major in college).
- June 5 - The first Rubik's Cube World Championship is held in Budapest, Hungary.
- July2 - Lawn Chair Larry makes his maiden voyage at 16,000ft on a lawn chair tied to 45 weather balloons.
- August 17 - The first commercial Compact Disc (CD) is produced for release in Germany (it was ABBA's "The Visitors", if you're wondering)
- September 26 - Knight Rider, starring David Hasselhoff, first airs on NBC.
- October 1 - Sony launches the first consumer CD player (model CDP-101).
- December 26 - Time Magazine's "Man of the Year" award is given to the Computer.
Source: Wikipedia page on "1982"
I had a bit of a mishap involving a comment-related plugin and lost about an hour's worth of comments when I restored from a backup. I believe that I only actually lost only one or two non-spam messages, but still... If you posted a comment on this site in the last 24 hours but no longer see it, please post it again. Thanks.
Update: Fixed! All comments have been recovered.
About an hour ago this site rolled past 5,000 spam comments caught by Akismet. As far as I can remember there have only been a couple that snuck past and had to be manually classified as "spam". I wish my email filter worked this well. If anyone has any suggestions as to a client-based spam filter that integrates well with Outlook other than SpamBayes let me know.
Up until now I've been doing all of my package builds on physical systems. Given that electricity is expensive, that space is at a premium, and that I haven't turned on my air conditioning yet and it's getting pretty hot, I've decided to start building the repo packages in virtual machines inside of VMWare Server The bad news is that I'll probably take me most of the weekend to download and install 4 VMs. The good news is that I just said 4 VMs instead of 2 VMs. That's right, I'm going to start building EL5 packages.
P.S. - Oh, and yeah, I know that MySQL 5.0.40 has been released. I've got binaries for 32-bit systems already built but I'm not going to update the repo until I get the 64-bit binaries for EL4 created.
As was mentioned in my "To the jerk stealing my content" rant, I've recently developed a WordPress plugin that can be used to block certain countries from accessing a blog. After a few days of tweaking, I believe that it's finally ready for a public release. I give you... "Block Countries"!
I'm actually surprised at how quickly this plugin was completed. I started with ZERO idea as to how to build a plugin for WordPress but within a couple hours I had a bare-bones plugin that accomplished what I needed it to do. Of course, it then took most of the weekend to clean it up to the point where I would feel comfortable telling someone, "Why don't you try this out on your blog?".
Continue Reading 'WordPress Plugin: “Block Countries”' »
You! Yeah, You! You know who you are... Cut it out!
Not only are you the biggest tool on the planet for stealing other people's content, but you don't even seem to have the decency to NOT hotlink files from my server. Bandwidth isn't free you know! If you'd only asked if you could use some of my content on your site I would have gladly said yes, provided that you gave credit where credit is due and provided a link back to the real article.
In any case, your lack of consideration has caused me to spend my lunch break today writing a plugin for Wordpress that allows me to block users from certain countries. It's a little rough around the edges right now but I'm going to polish it up over the next couple days and I'll probably release it to the public so that others can block your thieving-self...
I've rebuilt the MySQL 5.0.38 binaries in my yum repository to take care of a small bug that I introduced for new installs.
It seems that the database initialization script that runs on the first launch of mysqld (part of the 'mysql-server' package) has changed a bit between 5.0.37 & 5.0.38. Unfortunately, not noticing that, I tossed a couple of new .sql scripts in the wrong package. This, as it turns out, only affected users who were trying to do a clean installation of mysql. If you were upgrading from the stock EL4 version, from the 'centosplus' repo, or from one of my earlier releases then you weren't affected.