Blag

*yawn*

Yet another post with no discernible topic – perhaps it’s like a mini twitter? Ginormic pile of random comments, tid bits and news…

Begin early morning 1:37AM ramble:

(Actually, am testing something at the moment, but decided I may as well make an effort to fill this post with something remotely amusing… better than all the RSS readers getting a bunch of white space).

I hate being throttled. -.-

Especially midway through working on a website update, and the back end is so packed with AJAX and PHP it’s not funny.  I think he who pays the internet bill would be very annoyed if I purchased a 2GB data block (2GB being the lowest denomination available for $5) at 1AM, given the rollover time is 2AM…

I must say, I am disgusted yet curiously attracted to the movie Bruno… can’t wait for the DVD to come out. Did I say DVD? I meant torrent. Not that I would do something as dastardly as pirate a movie.

And yes, I’ll finish off the finding the perfect browser series soon. Opera and Google seem to be pushing out updates for their browsers on a bi-weekly basis now. That’s a good thing I suppose, but annoying as I constantly have to re-evaluate each browser in light of the updates.

End ramble.

Random news:

The International Mozarteum Foundation in Salzburg has announced that they’ve discovered two previously unknown compositions by Mozart. Yay! I can’t wait to hear more classical music… http://www.news.com.au/story/0,27574,25827706-401,00.html

MSN Messenger turns 10! Now in its latest re-incarnation as Windows Live Messenger, latest stats have active users at 330 million, and 10 billion messages sent per day. 10 years on, and MSN still has 80% market share, followed by Skype and Yahoo! (NB: Stats are buoyed up somewhat, as MSN and Yahoo signed an agreement back in 2005 to consolidate their chat networks).

Windows 7 is RTM. Can’t wait for the official launch on October 22nd – no more crappy 32-bit limitations of XP (namely max 4GB of RAM, and 2GB RAM allocated max to each application). Anyone wanna buy 4GB of DDR2 4-4-4-12 overclocking ram incidentally?

Aside: WOO! Unthrottled right at this very moment, as I’m typing this now

Queensland cops plan to go war driving around the state, looking for people with unsecured wireless networks, handing out informational leaflets and holding demonstrations to teach people how to secure their home networks. Props to them I suppose…

Yet another aside: Why do I keep running out of hard disk capacity? I’ve already got 3x 250GB, 1x 750GB and 2x 1TB in my main computer.

Bleurgh. Bored and hungry. Would be asleep now, if I wasn’t staying awake to take a final dose of meds.

Hmm, so I overhauled the main website, fixed the 101 bugs and it’s now reasonably professional looking. Now to integrate this blog into the main website, instead of having it as a separate mini-site. Don’t want to think of the damage it would to to my existing SEO efforts or Google Page Rank.

*yawn #2*

Off to play flash games.

Ta.

Hmmm… that’s mildly annoying. A back end upgrade had unexpected side effects, breaking the custom modified theme I was using for the man website (Blog excluded) due to the way it parses get_categories(), so now it looks mingered.

Well more mingered than it was previously anyway. A patch will be out in a few days, so I hear.

Eh, what do you know – some how, this site gets enough visits per month to use over 1.25GB+ bandwidth per month.Yay for search engines!

Well.

Finally got around to actually constructing my website and banished all the lorem ipsum and stock placeholder images. 95% of pages have actual content on them too

It looks quite similar to the old ‘under construction’ site, but with a few artifacts as a result of its conversion to PHP and the use of a CMS.

There’s a few rough corners left – 3 pages missing content, and bugs in the LHS pane and horizontal navigation bar but otherwise all is good. The blog and wiki will also slowly start to be tied into the main website, instead of being separate entities, but due to the major design differences I doubt they will eve be completely unified.

Still can’t think of something appropriate to put on the home page though -.-

Anyone who suggests porn will be shot…

Now that that’s over, the blog updates should resume as normal. Well not one every 3 weeks anyway.

Welcome to blag’s new home at www.theparanoidtroll.com/blog

Accessing blag via the old Oz Techeducate adress will redirect to this new location. Pleas update all bookmarks or RSS feeds – they should redirect automatically, but one or two links may be broken.

Now to wait for Google to re-index the site

Blag is moving home!

From the 2nd of February 2009, it will be hosted at www.theparanoidtroll.com

Access blag using the navigational pane at the top of the site, or go directly to www.theparanoidtroll.com/blog

All search engine requests, page vists and RSS feeds should automatically redirect to the new website from tomorrow onwards.

Nero Burning ROM/Nero AG’s website is useless – there are news articles and mention of a Nero SDK on many the websites, but nowhere on the internet can you actually find information about it, or download it. Nero AG’s FAQ, support and corporate info are all useless waffle. All the links that ARE on Google no longer work since Nero AG took to restructuring their website every few months. Great way for attracting developers there.

…are their web designers that bored? Or are they struggling to lift their image after 3 successive bloatware releases?

At least Roxio tells you upfront that an API is not available, Gear sells their API to developers, and CDBurnerXP redirects you to their corporate website/online store. InfraRecorder and CDRTFE are the only decent open source “burners” for Windows, but are purely front ends (they are based on cdrtools) which has severe limitations and most other free burning applications have no scripting support/APIs available, without contacting corporate sales and ponying up anyway.

Edit: Decent apps with scripting support – CDRTFE, CDBurnerXP, Nero. Still waiting for a reply from Nero about their SDK, and CDBurnerXP has an known bug with the command line that keeps cropping up in tests