Archive for the ‘Technology’ Category

A new plugin that I made for myself but you may feel free to use for own uses. PXS Analytics is a small plugin that will insert the Google Analytics code into the head of your WP blog. It’s main feature at the moment is the ability to ensure that google does not log users of a set admin level. For example, if you have level 10 as as an admin, you may not want your activities to cloud the analysis of your website. You would tell the plugin to ignore all users of that level and above. This means that if you have registered users that had level 9 and were logged in, their activities would be recorded but yours at level 10 would not. Likewise, if the limit is set to 5, all users with level 6-10 would be ignored and all others would be logged.

Goto the plugin download page here.

Yet another stormer of excellence in Googles attempt to rule the world!! Having signed up to the Analytics program, I am looking forward to seeing the detail in the reports available. So far… I am VERY impressed!! If anyone is interested… I have created a small and reliable plugin to easily put the code into the pages. The benefit of this method is that you can easily disable the tracking just by turning off the plugin. Please leave a comment if you are interested and I will be happy to supply the code. If there are a few requests… I will create a page for it!!!

Having spent the last few years trying to get you lot of Spammers to pee off.. I would really appreciate it if you could send a few to me please! I have just installed and activated the Akismet plugin and want to know if it works. If you are unable to complete the challenge then I know it is working… if I get spammed out… I will switch on Spam Karma again!!!

UPDATE: Thanks Spammers… it seems that your attempts are indeed being stopped! Thanks Akismet team aswell… this is excellent work!

Apple are at it again! It seems that as soon as I let my impulses cool… a few weeks later I want to spend money on their website again. After the recent announcements of new iPods and an amazing new iMac, there are now new Powerbooks and PowerMacs.

As soon as I saw the new iMac G5 last week, it was very tempting to actually go ahead and buy one, after all, it does everything and a lot more. For a regular use computer, there would be no additional accessories required (well… maybe a TV tuner!). The specs and features are way above anything that the usual programming and web browsing might throw at it. The all in one design and new software make it very desirable. The built in iSight and remote control are just extra bonuses on top of an already well presented bit of kit. It seemed that it would be the ideal stop-gap before the Intel PowerMacs were released…. until today! I mean… who wouldn’t want a PowerMac with 4 processor cores running? The processing power of the new PowerMacs is nearly pornographic in it’s appeal. For the rest of the year, I will have to walk around telling myself to believe myself about not wanting one just yet… but I do! I cant imagine how the Intel based Macs could top the performance of these beasts. It can only be described as REAL power.

The new Powerbooks have seen some nice enhancements aswell such as new displays and longer lasting batteries. Perhaps this is to make them better suited for working with Apple’s new software aimed at photographers. Aperture is a completely RAW based workflow, editing and printing tool. Is this software alone enough justification for a new PowerMac quad? Maybe… the recommended system specs are a Dual 2GHz Power Mac G5 or faster, 2GB of RAM, a powerful graphics card and 5GB of disk space just for the application, templates, and tutorial. I am thinking that it must be good!

Having conversed via comments, it seemed that a slightly more aggressive exploit protection was required and so the plugin now has 2 strong mechanisms that also cross check with each other before a mail is created. I hope that this will help completely stop any exploits but of course, the spammers are getting wise so please let me know if you have any ideas or evidence of vulnerabilities. As I cannot easily check the exploits on the code myself, your information is valuable to all of the other users! The comments on the plugin page have been archived as the list was getting very long but there is a link for anyone that wishes to read through them. Please read the instructions carefully as things have changed and it should run out of the box as usual! PXSmail page can be found here.

Update:
If you are running version 1.3 please ensure that you get the latest update (1.4) to fix a bug that was preventing emails from being sent out.

The PXSmail contact form plugin has been updated to fix a couple of niggles and improve security. As it was highlighted that spammers have found ways to exploit mail scripts such as this, it was time to make a few changes. As well as being more secure, you also now have the option of disabling the CSS injection and it is easier to implement using a more standard tag format.

See the main plugin page to get further details and try it out.

My broadband has now been upgraded so I should be able to do twice as much as previously. This is a most welcome upgrade and I am very pleased with the performance so far. The below test was run on adslguide and was done in the evening with other users on the network so there should be no problems in the badwidth department for a time!! I’ll be monitoring it for a while so I may report back if there are any substantial changes for better or worse!

And here it is… Google Talk!! Does anyone want to join me for a chat to try this thing out?

The below quote from the programs about page on Google website makes it sound useful already and it does a lot more! It seems that the rumours are true… Google will take over everything… and I am sure they will do it with a clean, neat and user friendly interface! I think that the 900kb download is quite impressive to, MSN Messenger is 8.71MB so is it 1/10th the product or is it just quality coding?!?

Your Gmail contacts are pre-loaded and the people you communicate with most often will show up in your Google Talk Friends list. You can go to your Gmail Inbox from the Google Talk interface, and you can even email your contacts directly using your Gmail account. Google Talk also does everything the Gmail Notifier used to do, and can show notifications for new messages in your Gmail account, as well as for incoming calls or chats.

Sunday this week was very successful on the web-development front as it involved the very successful completion of a long running project and the chance to drink some nice coffee with my friend! Although not quite polished to absolute perfection yet, my ATP (Adventure, Travel and Photography) theme/plugin for wordpress is pretty much complete. The area that needed my attention was the photo display part. To give you some background, here was my own design brief;

1. Front page to show a dynamic map of some sort that plots the positions of the articles.
2. Small excerpts with a thumbnail image of each entry.
3. A self generating menu that cross references location and activities.
4. A random image of only my travel photos.
5. Each article was to have an album of photos displayed within it that would create a neat pop-up viewer, rather than link to my gallery.
6. The design had to be ‘compatible’ with my existing website.

After about 3 months of coding and tweaking, I had everything working. The only aspect I was not 100% happy with was the implementation of the photos. I was using an application that involved loading the photos into the post itself and from there, would create a pop-up viewer and could even generate the random image I was after. What concerned me was that if I wanted the photos in my main gallery, they would be duplicated there. What I needed was a way of pulling in my gallery photos and a new way of viewing them. This was solved by actually writing a plugin that would pull the images from the gallery album and display them. A new seperate pop-up viewer was needed so that a clean-popup window could show the images with a navigation system to browse through the pictures.

I had spent all of Sunday morning creating these parts and was working on the viewer when Gringod showed up. Fueled by proper Italian coffee, we polished off the pop-up viewer and even found the time to include some Javascript that would dynamically resize the window to the photo contained within. Now the system is complete, I have added one story about when I went shark diving in South Africa. To see how the system works, browse over to http://adventure.phrixus.co.uk. As I am leaving for my holiday on Saturday, expect it to start growing soon. For major updates I will post on this part of the site but the main stories will be found there.

I have recently either been deep in development mode on a new project or taking short breaks living a second life. My second life is in the game/environment of Second Life. This is essentially a massive online world where you can meet and interact with other people… or their avatars at least and explore an entire world of homes, shops and arcades. One of the most amazing things about the game is that you have a complete arsenal of tools to customise the environment, inside the environment. There are 3d modelling tools and even a scripting language which is loosely based on Java and C. The possibilities seem endless and both Gringod and myself are keen to learn and push some boundaries. We have come to an arrangement whereby I will learn as much as possible about the building and design tools and he will push the limits of the scripting engine. If all goes to plan after the trial period, we will get some land and build our dream home. I will make some nice structures, he will come in and program the ‘entertainment system’! It will be the cutting edge batchelor pad we have always discussed except we will be able to fly around! To see Gringods experiences to date, have a look at his second life posts.

What should I do about computers? I am now somewhat unsure of which way I need to move. At the moment I have a Mac mini, a Windows PC, 2 Linux Servers and a laptop (that has been commandeered by my mother who has been eaten by the eBay bug). I need a new laptop as a priority but my main computer could do with an extensive upgrade aswell. Two weeks ago I was set to buy a Powerbook initially to cover the laptop side of things. This would let me retire the Linux servers into other homes and use the Mac mini as my main server. The plan was to then get all of the software I would need on the Mac platform before shutting down my PC and investing in a Power Mac. Unfortunately, things change… including the architecture of Apple’s computers! At this stage, I am not sure I can move to Mac’s completely until the new machines are released. Apple has claimed that they will support PPC for a long time, but in computers that could be just a few months. My instincts tell me to keep my current PC for as long as possible (It’s not really that bad, I just like to have the latest and greatest!) and buy a new PC laptop to use for the next couple of years. Is that the right way to go? I am not sure but if you have any thoughts, please feel free to offer advice!

For anyone that is interested, Gringod and I have finally uploaded the new Aquasail.net homepage. This will allow you to see each of the loactions that the yacht Spinalonga has been to and will link to the relevant article. Have a look and see what you think. The map system is also being heavily used in a project that I am working on at the moment to ducument location photography and travel articles.

Dave will very soon have a presence online as we are building him a photoblog. Links and details to follow over the next few days. If anyone has any ideas for sub-domain names for him… let me know! We hope this will make him use his camera little more and get used to posting online!

Having just finished a 2 day MS Access Course my mind is full of the potential application that I could create to make my life much easier! Being that I barely have time to eat sometimes I am trying to put these out of my mind and focus on the real project that I am going to be attempting with my new knowledge. Because corporations value their data and security so highly, I am unable to directly access the DB where the data I need to manpulate for my daily work is held but I can get hold of all the data in a CSV file. I am not able to access my works SQL servers directly or run my own servers so I am left with one option, use the best (only) tool available… Access!! Now that I have learnt just how the query builder works, I feel that my chances of success have been greatly increased. Either way, I now think I should go on the advanced course so that I can the VB code needed to allow prompted queries and the like. Tomorrow will be update, append and split day me thinks!!

I really like the World66 website and now that it is growing they are adding some nifty new features. Below is the result of a test I took to see what kind of traveller I am. It has to be said that the result was very accurate!

	Your travel type: Travel Yup The Travel Yup likes exotic and adventurous travel, but prefers big cities with fast paced life. He has a keen interest in other cultures and always brings home a few souvenirs. Shopping in Bangkok, getting a tailor made suite in Kuala Lumpur, that’s the kind of thing the Travel Yup is into. Even though he likes to get away, he prefers his travels to be comfortable.
	top destinations: Paris New York Beirut	stay away from: North Korea Ciudad Perdida Darien Gap

get your own travel profile

Just to make my php plotting software look rubbish, Google Maps can show you some pretty impressive sattelite imagery of your home. If you are interested in seeing where I live have a look here. Guernsey is the small island in the upper right in the centre of the screen. It would be good if they continue to add imagery for the European area that I live in. You can see to street level in some areas of the US that I checked!!