boakes.org » Tech

The Nintendo Wii has now enjoyed it’s first week of sales and stories are floating around the net that the wireless controller (mentioned previously) has been finding itself airborne due to players getting sweaty hands. Videos of the problem are already surfacing. More…

I count myself lucky that I discovered Xara’s drawing tools many years ago.

When Xara Studio was released it caused real consternation among the businesses that were producing vector art packages because it was years ahead of the competition in both features and (most importantly) speed. The main competition (Corel) was so worried, that it licensed the product and released it alongside it’s flagship “Corel DRAW!” product.

It beats me how they’re going to keep paying the bills though… More…

The plugin system on BBPress is still rather rudimentary (you create a folder called “my-plugins”) and any php that exists therein is considered to be an activated plugin. The good news here is, that (a) it works and (b) it’s so similar to the WordPress that many plugins will magically work without modification. My Google Analytics Plugin for Wordpress is (almost) one such example. More…

BBPress has been released today (try it). For quite some time now I’ve been quietly using BBPress for managing thoughts and discussions on another website. This has been possible for two reasons: firstly, the pre-release version of BBPress has been quite stable and secondly, I’ve been using it in a password protected area so it’s not been open to public use and abuse. More…

Some folks may have noticed a lack of service for the last few days. This was due to a simultaneous disk failure on the old server*. Happily, a new shrink wrapped server has been installed and most of the content is now back, with a few updates over the forthcoming days. More…

The possibly-too-quick-for-it’s-own-good rise of Google has set them up squarely as the new arch rival to Microsoft, and their latest advertising angle suggests more than a mild concern over the pre-installed applications in Microsoft’s looming Windows Vista, which is now in Beta testing. More…

This was a hard-work weekend. On Thursday, it seemed like I had lots of code starting to work. It appeared that the imaginary brackets that surround each work package and sub package were closing themselves off, so that the virtual equation that describes my work might seem a little smaller and more tractable. That’s when I pressed the wrong button. More…

My spam counter in Akismet has been steadily rising of late, and it’s been approaching 10,000 caught spams very quickly. Yesterday it went through 9,950 and with my average of over 100 spams per day it should have gone through the 10,000 barrier by now. But instead I’ve had about 3 spams today. Did I just find an off button for spam? More…

This last few weeks the site has been very heavily hit by comment spammers hawking their usual reprobate websites and wasting internet bandwidth. Akismet has been doing a sterling job of catching this spam and not one message has made it onto the site (I wrote about Akismet’s effectiveness in the pre-launch testing previously). In the bad old days before Akismet I’d have to go through the “unmoderated comments list” in order to find the occasional real comment amidst all the spam, this is no longer necessary, which is wonderful. Comment-Spam-Nirvana has not been reached yet, however. More…

There’s a lot of fact-free Sony vs Nintendo articles getting in the way of computing and technology news at the moment. For example, the folks at Nintendo UK are are currently wibbling about Sony supposedly “stealing Nintendo’s idea for a motion sensing controller“. More…