Wow, that was a long time away from blogging (not). Forgive me if I’m brief – I’ve been typing almost all day, mostly PHP code. My eyes are almost bleeding after getting a nice solution to a nasty problem. I love finding solutions to problems, it’s awesome.

Development is coming along nicely, taking up almost all of my time. Thanks to the 25th of December, I now actually have the ability to purchase a MacBook now – but I’m not going to yet, because I am waiting very patiently for Leopard. In the long run, waiting will be a better thing to do. Believe me, it will.

Anyway, I think it’s photo time, don’t you?

» Read the rest of this post…

Just a quick post to wish all my loyal readers, everyone who’s just arrived, and everyone in general a very merry and peaceful Christmas tomorrow. Please note the festive openclipart.org picture in the top right (feed reader people might have to click through to the site to see that!)

In fact, whatever you’re doing tomorrow, have a good one.

I’ll be back blogging probably either on Boxing Day (26th) or the 27th, depending on what happens and how quickly I decide to return to my busy development schedule – and after that how much time I have left to blog. Anyway, enjoy the holiday!

I didn’t post about this while he was missing anywhere I blog – partly because it was covered so many other places.

Basically, CNET editor and geek personality James Kim went missing with his family in the Oregon wilderness a while back. His family were found, but until today, he was still missing.

I got the news via Engadget that he’d unfortunately been found dead by rescuers today.

This is so sad.

While I have to admit that I hadn’t actually heard of James Kim before this story first broke, it’s still quite shocking to know that this happened to someone so high profile. You just don’t expect something like this to happen. The sad fact remains – it does.

My thoughts and prayers are with Kim’s family as well as anyone else affected by this. I know this isn’t directly related to me and as I said I hadn’t actually heard of him before I initially heard of them going missing, but I felt compelled to publicly offer my condolences to anyone affected by this.

Megaphone is now officially a project.

Why?

It has its own special page on my site.

Get visiting!

Sorry for the lack of postings here for a couple of days, I’ve been busy with lots of stuff.

First of all, I’ve implemented a new download system on this site. Any stuff you download through /files goes through this new system. The new system helps me track and monitor downloads and make sure everything is going just great in regards to bandwidth/downloads.

The consequence of this new system means that every time you download a file from /files, the following information will be recorded:

• Your IP address
• Your browser’s identification
• The time you made the download request
• Which file you downloaded

Note that this is no more information than my server logs would tell me anyway, so it’s not really a privacy issue. However, if you do feel uneasy about that, don’t download files from this site. The purpose of storing this information, as I said, is for me to easily track what’s being downloaded so I can optimise the site and to make sure one person doesn’t abuse the download service for everyone else.

There are a couple of issues still unresolved with the new download engine, mainly concerning the WPGet old archives, but I’m addressing them and the archives will be back up pretty soon.

Second up, it’s Megaphone news. I’ve been working on it again, and we’re making good progress. I can’t give another source dump as there’s some ported stuff from other projects that is too messy and useless to open, so once I’ve been through and optimised that and of course, done a bit more, there’ll be a new release.

Also, I’ve been busy blogging at Gizbuzz and FOSSwire (both part of the Oratos Media network). I do hope you’re subscribed to them and of course all the other Oratos blogs and podcasts!

According to Ars Technica, the first crack for Vista and Office 2007 has surfaced.

Unlike a normal crack, however, this one just replaces some of the key Windows and Office files (presumably the activation and ‘revenue protection’ DLLs) with their contemporaries from the earlier releases. That means you can use Beta or Release Candidate activation keys on the final release and use the final versions.

Unfortunately the article doesn’t mention whether the cracked versions have the expiry date that the pre-release versions had (software with an expiry date? Now that sucks).

No doubt they’ll just block the beta keys very soon via Windows Update or Windows Genuine-we’re-going-to-make-you-run-some-stupid-software Validation.

Strange title, you reckon?

No.

Not really.

Something really big is happening. I’m a founding member of Oratos Media, a blog and podcast network.

Joining the already founded Gizbuzz, YouMakeMedia and PodDev in the network is FOSSwire, a free and open source software blog. Don’t worry, the tutorials will still keep coming here too, but they’ll be more (and not always written by me) at FOSSwire. Subscribe to it now!

Anyway, you can read more about the network at Gizbuzz (or any other Oratos blog actually).

This is so exciting…

Apple just upgraded the MacBook to Core 2 Duo. And I didn’t even realise the Core 2 did 64-bit either!

I want one.

But I also want Leopard, so I’ll see you in the spring, MacBook Core 2 Duo… with 64-bit Leopard and all my KDE apps running on top of OS X.

In completely unrelated news, I now officially consider myself a Linux geek as I successfully compiled my own kernel and got it to run on my spare machine under Ubuntu.

Beat that kernel name! Hosted on Zooomr

The fact that the code is exactly the same as the vanilla 2.6.18.2 release is completely irrelevant and coincidental! 😛

The tutorial I used to build the kernel is here.

To try and make my tutorials easier for the really really new Linux user, I think I have just about finished getting an Ubuntu install on my second machine installed, set up (to my fussy requirements) and with all the cool stuff on it.

The purpose of this is to allow me to more easily tailor my tutorials to Ubuntu users. The reason is that Ubuntu remains the #1 distro according to distrowatch.com. And from what I can tell, it’s the distribution that a lot of newbies are using.

So it’s just about on its feet and I’ll hopefully be providing more detailed help specifically for Ubuntu users (not forgetting us Fedora faithfuls as well on my main box).

Get ready for more tutorials…

Just a quick post to congratulate Ernest Wojciuk, whose class PHP Email to DB won the September 2006 PHP Classes innovation award.

I’m still amazed that I got nominated, though. Thanks again and I still love the nomination badge!

In other WPGet news, there’s a slightly new version (download here or at PHP Classes) which includes a minor fix to the image and embed stripping code – now it will remove images and embeds from posts even if the image/embed isn’t at the start of the post. The cause was a slightly wrong regex.

UPDATE: Also it seems the WordPress Italy blog [translated] have featured WPGet. Thanks!