These are my links for August 25th through September 1st: The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity First essay of the late Prof Carlo Cipolla.<br /> Law1: Everyone underestimates the stupid population. <br /> Law2: Stupidity is independent of other characteristics.<br /> Law3: A stupid person causes loss to others while deriving no gain or incurring [...]

The very good news on the grapevine is that the first WordCamp UK has, already broken even (through sponsorship and ticket sales) with a full 10 days of ticket sales still to go. This is particularly good news since it pretty much guarantees the success of this years event, and future events. If you’ve been [...]

WordCamp is coming to the UK.  WordCamp is a weekend event where the users and developers of WordPress (i.e. members of the general public) can get together for a series of formal presentations, less formal discussions and informal refreshments. I’ve run this site on WordPress since 2003.  I’ve also written a couple of plugins for [...]

Something’s broken on the database that runs this site, specifically there’s b0rkage in the comment table, and the ssh daemon is not reachable. Perhaps it’s to do with the larger than normal amount of spam that’s been arriving today (for “larger than normal” read: one metric truckload). More info later after I’ve had a poke [...]

I’m in the process of rewriting the Worst Offenders plugin for the soon-to-be-released WordPress 2.5. Before I make a tested and polished version of the code globally available, I’d be interested to hear from anyone who’d like to alpha test it. As before Worst Offenders works cooperatively with other anti-spam plugins: its primary purpose is [...]

It’s only 15 months since I mentioned the rocket-like acceleration of Akismet which went from a standing start to the point where it had fended off a million spam messages for its users in just 4 months. If things had continued at that pace it would have squashed a cool 5 million spams by now.

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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 [...]

In a market where BB software is two-a-penny (or cheaper, given the open-source nature of most good software) what’s BBPress got that made me use it?

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.

The site’s going to be up and down like a yoyo over the next few days (until Sunday 23rd April) due to some major network restructuring in the server building.

For some reason, ever since I upgraded to WordPress 2.0, the categories on this site haven’t been working. I’ve now upgraded to 2.0.1 and they’re still not happy. I had hoped that the upgrade would help… but alas…

Would you Adam and Eve it, we’re at number 2 in the BritBlog top 50. Cor blimey! Love a duck!

Reallocation of network services will result in some downtime between Thursday 9th and Sunday 12th February 2006 (4 weeks from today). I don’t expect a total black hole of nothingness, but some disruption and/or curious behaviour may be unavoidable.

It’s a windy night in Portsmouth and I can’t sleep, so I’ll be updating the blog to WordPress 2.0 during the next few hours. If the theme changes, or if things break, that’s expected during the upgrade process.

This is the first beta release of a WordPress plugin that can add Google Analytics to your website without you needing to code one single set of <>’s.

How can I tell my Apache server that MSIE prefers JPEG files over PNG?

A special trans-global thanks to Murky who pinged me from NZ a few moments ago after noticing that this site was spitting out SQL errors (instead of gracefully presenting pages full of useful content). The outage was caused by a large file that was taking up the temporary space that our content management database needs [...]

If you’re using Internet Explorer (IE), you may notice that the images on this site are “disappearing”. Please do not adjust your set. Better-than-normal service will be resumed as soon as possible.

The server that runs this site experienced a memory problem last night at around 8pm GMT.

Last night at approximately 9pm GMT, one of the disks on our server took umbrage with it’s life of servitude and chose to self destruct in protest.

The server that runs this site has endured a minor injury to it’s long term storage (one of the disks, or the RAID card that the disks connect to, are kaput) – fortunately we have backups and a fairly resilient machine, so it’s serving the pages from it’s RAM cache at the moment. The bottom [...]

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