Earlier this week, this site was linked to from digg.com. Apologies to the couple of hundred thousand people who tried to visit after my host decided to take the site offline. I have signed up to a new hosting package that should be a bit more robust, and will be switching everything over throughout the next few days. Apologies for any problems - there are bound to be a few!

Update: All should be more or less sorted now - DNS is almost finished switching, and comments for most people should be working. That was a relatively painless move, as they go!

Another Update: It looks like the site has completely moved, and I'm happy to report no loss of data. Email is working, as are all the automated bits and bobs. I now have much more bandwidth to play with, too.

Now, at last, I can get back to working on the new design.

 

On Saturday 22nd April, Mrs ILoveJackDaniels, previously girlfriend, and I, were married at Barnsgate Manor Vineyard in Sussex. I have thousands of photos to sort through but here are the best we have so far (click to see the complete set).
 

For now, I'll leave you with the briefest of recaps: the day went perfectly, we were lucky with the weather, and Mrs ILJD looked stunning.

 

Top 10 lists appear to be going through something of a resurgence. Here are the 10 best Top 10 lists I've seen.

Sorry.

1. Top 10 Reasons Why Sex at the Speed of Light is not an Advisable Form of Procreation
2. Top 10 Reasons Why Nobody Reads Your Blog (they seem to be missing one reason ... 11. You keep posting Top 10 lists.)
3. Top 10 Strangest iPod Accessories
4. Top 10 Worst Movies of the 90s
5. Top 10 Celebrity Mistakes
6. Top 10 April Fool's Gadgets
7. Top 10 Worst Album Covers
8. Top 10 Urban Legends of 2004
9. Top 10 Bizarre Names Celebrities Gave Their Kids (it's missing Moses, sadly, but I think we can safely assume that would have made the list)
10. Top 10 Signs you Drank Too Much (missing: 11. You own an alcohol-related domain name.)

 

It occurred to me while chatting to a couple of other developers this week that an awful lot of PHP developers work on Windows. While this may not be a startling revelation, it did make me wonder how much trouble someone who's never dabbled in Linux would have getting a standard LAMP setup going by themselves (for a development environment). Personally, I found Linux software installation to be quite tricky, when I started using Linux more, and were I just using it to get LAMP going I might have given up on it. Which in turn made me wonder - is there a Linux distro that is nice and easy to install, and comes with LAMP all set up?

 

I've been having a bit of a play recently with Sudoku (generators, solvers and puzzles). It's all the rage, after all. While I was at it I came up with what I believe is a new type of Sudoku puzzle - colour sudoku. There's an example below, and I'll be releasing a Colour Sudoku site in the near future (once I get hosting figured out) I've released a Colour Sudoku site! Feedback is very welcome - enjoy!

To play, you must fill all columns and rows with the digits 1-9. Each digit can only appear once in each column and row. Additionally, you must fill each set of nine identically-coloured squares with the digits 1-9. Good luck!

			3	6		7	8
			7					5
				9			1
							2
	5	6	8	2			7	1
		1
				7	6	5
					3	2	6
	6	2		4	5		3

 

John Scott, infamous courter of controversy, has decided to put a fairly hefty sum of his own money on the line to see if we can't address a little of the imbalance in the blogosphere (oh, how I hate that word). He's offering $10,000 to be split between bloggers who link out to the lesser known blogs out there - those outside the various Top 100 lists and those who never seem to be named in one of those meme things that go around from time to time.

Read the rest of We Are The Unknown

 

My thanks go out to Binny for naming one of my posts in his Best of 2005 roundup. I'm honoured!

 

The comments area has been improved (hopefully!) today. The form has been moved to below the comments (people have emailed me to mention it is inconvenient to move back to the top of a page in order to reply), and a live preview feature has been added, including live previewing of favatars.

I don't know why, yet, but the site appears to be flaking out a little in Firefox. I am working on ironing out these glitches though, so don't worry, normal service (such as it is) will resume soon. (Update - Firefox bug fixed).

 

You may or may not have noticed a new design here. It's a "live" redesign, which is to say that I've had it in the works for a while and putting it live with a few bugs will motivate me to get it finished properly a bit quicker! I know the comment posting form is a little funky looking, and IE has a problem with the rounded corners, but if you spot anything else wrong, please let me know.

A proper write-up of the redesign is on the way, but wanted to let you know of a small new feature added in this redesign - the favatars. Have a look at a comments section, and you will see them next to each post. Once the live comment preview is added, there will be live favatar previewing as well.

 

Just a quick note - the "Remember Me" option for comments was broken temporarily. One of the fixes I added to prevent comment spam (and it's getting silly now - 3000 spam comments in the last 10 days) caused the problem, but that's now fixed.

 

You may or may not have noticed that the volume of comment spam here has rocketed over the last few days. Starting Christmas Eve this site has been hit hard by the scum of the Earth. I've been working to prevent this being a problem and now have it under control. If all goes well for the next few weeks, I'll turn the systems in use here into a publically available system for comment spam prevention. In the meantime, however, please let me know if anything is behaving strangely!

 

I'm looking for something that by all accounts shouldn't be too hard to find. I've failed to find it, though, which leads me to believe that it might not exist. Therefore, I turn to the good people of the web for help.

I'm looking for a plugin or macro for Outlook that can invisibly (without prompts or notices) create an iCal (.ics?) file that is then sent via FTP to a remote server. The idea is to be able to subscribe to this with a Mac (or phpiCalender etc) elsewhere. I would like the plugin to update the file whenever the local calendar is updated. And to keep track of categories. I'd also like it to support both appointments and to-do lists, if possible.

Does anyone have a bit of spare time to put something like this together? From what I've seen so far trying to find something like this, it would be very very popular indeed.

Maybe this is one for the LazyWeb ...