Bluetrait

Yes that is right everyone. Go to classes now!

I've just spend the last few hours playing with Classes in php; and wow what a difference.
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http://www.matthom.com/archive/2004/09/29/01/

This is what I said at the beginning of the month

This would be the first month ever that outgoing traffic has equaled in coming traffic. Scary stuff! 2GB is a massive jump since last month (about double).

Again bandwidth has increased. This months totals have just hit 3GB upload (while still only 2GB down).

Impressive :)
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Over the last week I have seen a large increase in random users signing up to my forums. They are random bots who are tracking down sites and sending an automated signup. The problem with my forums is that they are powered by phpbb, which is one of the most common scripts out there. This means that it is more prone to such an attack.
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Some of you will remember my old website. It was my first "real" news script and all that stuff. Anyway I've just inputted all the old content in this site. Anything from news id 72 and less is from my old site (this includes all of July and half of Aug).

Check it out!

http://blog.dalegroup.net/archive/

Okay, So you've just read this large post on some blog site and you're about to reply. But wait, there are comments from other people too! Now should what these people have written effect your response?
You've pretty much made up your mind about what you're going to say before hand.

But what if what you're about to say has already been said? Should you be silenced!? Comments are good for feedback on a topic, but are they there for discussion? I don't know.

Should my comments link go to the first comment or straight to the comment post field? Should people read the other comments first?

A good example is here: http://mezzoblue.com/ The comments are very muchly separated from the post. You must click to read the comments. Good or Bad?

I got pissed off with the message on their website yesterday (http://blog.dalegroup.net/archive/blog/newsid/137) so I sent them an email. I've just got a reply
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http://www.matthom.com/archive/2004/09/26/01/

Enough Said.

Time to catch up on some blogging ;) There are a few things I want to talk about; it is a far bit so I’ll see how we go.

This blog covers the following:
Do IT Admin Staff get too much crap?
IPv6.
Dynamic Websites
Website Formatting and Presentation.
You NEED Netscape or Internet Explorer.
New "read more" system.
Filter system.

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It is about time I followed everyone else on this. Contact forms are good! Spam is bad. So therefore I've removed my email address from every page. If you wish to contact me simply click on the Contact link (or use your funky email client).

http://blog.dalegroup.net/contact/

Not that I think anyone would be interested. I may find it useful to have my HSC timetable here for some reason. http://blog.dalegroup.net/documents/personal-hsc-timetable-2004.pdf

I was going to write something on the topic of Website Formatting and Presentation but I'll leave that one for a bit. Maybe tomorrow. Anyway I've fixed up the comments system a little bit. There is now a Permalink for each comment (if you click on the time of that post). The size and placement of who posted and when has also changed. I think it looks a bit better.
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Anyone who runs a small website probably wants to increase the number of visitors to their site. There are so many websites that cover any and every topic possible. On the internet there really isn't all that much room for innovation. Everything has already been done by at least 7,000 other people.
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I dislike web crawlers (well any crawler other than googlebot). Today for the first time http://forums.dalegroup.net has received over 1gb of data traffic JUST on msnbot+jeteye.com (for this month). Jeteye is a bigger pain as is doesn't identify itself as a bot. Grrr. About 30 minutes ago I added
User-agent: * Disallow: / into my robots file for the forums. The following is a reading of the bots currently:
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Well what an end to the last 6 years of my live! Today was our last day of school (although we have a service tomorrow) and it was great! I wish everyday was like today. I got to school to be greeted by about 6 worried teachers all looking out for kids who were going to trash the school. I got the "okay" and was let into the bunker. The day went down without too many problems. I successfully (to an extent) completed my two pranks.

At about 11am a group of us decided that it was time for an extended lunch. So we headed off to yum cha. A few hours later we came back. By that time everyone had left (was like 1pm or something). So we went back to my place to "chill" ;)

It was thoroughly enjoyable! So yes the last week has been very busy but also very cool. I'm sure I'll be sad tomorrow with the service, but hey!

See Ya later SACS!!! (You'll be getting another dale next year :p).

*twitch* I wish my computer would shut up! It is complaining about the heat.

Internet connection dropped about 1 hour ago and has just come back online. Services should be up and running. Mail queues will be processed in the next 1-3 hours. Sorry for any inconveniences.

UPDATE 16:57:46 EST: Connection has been disconnected again. Services are currently offline. (yeah I know it isn't all that useful when you cannot access the site ;))

UPDATE 18:36:29 EST: Connection is still causing issues. An update will be provided within the next hour.

UPDATE 19:17:02 EST: Connection is still not stable. No current ETA at this stage. A full log report will be provided after the connection has come back online.

UPDATE 20:13:40: Connection is still unstable. We're getting connection times of 1-10minutes every half hour.
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And so we talked all night about the rest of our lives
Where we're gonna be when we turn 25
I keep thinking times will never change
Keep on thinking things will always be the same
But when we leave this year we won't be coming back
No more hanging out cause we're on a different track
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I've done a bit of an upgrade of this site over the weekend. First off I've changed the encoding of this site over to UTF-8, sometime later I will make more use of this but currently you won't notice any changes.

This site now validates as XHTML 1.0 Strict although the heading is still set to XHTML 1.0 Transitional. Some tests will be done and then move it over.
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The nature of the internet means that it has always meant to be viewed on the computer. But there are many times when you need to quickly print something to read while you're on your way out, or in my case want to go to bed but MUST read some 23 page article on something first. Most sites often screw up when you try and print them. The content and layout is combined into some mess.
Now the separation of content is much more important that most people think. On a computer you're going to want the "full experience" where as if you're on your mobile phone or pda you really just want to see the content. It is the same for printing, you only want the content.
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Yesterday night the base10solutions team http://www.base10solutions.com (this is where I need a proper html name/title thing) went to the Web Standards Group http://webstandardsgroup.org/ meeting at the Australian Museum. We were lucky enough to hear two great talks about web standards and implementation.
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The mozilla foundation has released the first public preview of Firefox 1.0. http://spreadfirefox.com/community/ has been released to spread the word about the browser and aiming for 1 Million downloads in 10 days.

New features in this version can be found here:
http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/releases/#new

Download firefox now! Tell your friend, cat, dog, mother.....

Some people at school have got together to organise a class of 2004 SACS year book. Everyone needs to fill out a sheet that will be included in the book.

Now I've been told that we're meant to put photos (of friends and stuff) around the boarder of this page. So yeah. I really don't know what to put on it. So I need help from people! :p

If you have any photos/pictures that you think look cool (don't need to be of anything in particular) then email them to me: email@dalegroup.net You could even send a picture of yourself *shock* ;)

Most (read almost all) blog sites that I've visited are all written by a single person. Now I know a blog (web log) is meant to be like an online dairy but I think that a web site where more than one person typed an entry on regular basis would be cool (not too many people like 5 max or something). They might response to what the others had blogged about, but have the option not too.
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Just typed out a few things that I'd like to be features for this site when I get time to recode it. Some things may not make sense to you. But here is the basic list:

*Core (installation, mod_rewrite on/off, upgradeable)
*Admin (change password, news reads user details from central table, add users, multi user, editing, deletion, ip address logging)
*Comments (delete, ip block, disable, disable adding more, editing, contact user, website, ip address logging).
*Adding news (XHTML 1.0, trackback, draft, public, different delete thing, link scheme changed)
*Archive (month, day, year, id)
*style (css, which style)
*distribution (RSS (news and comments)), email.
*basic CMS for about/and other pages.
*basic image system (better than current)

If there is a feature that you use in your blogging system that you find useful that isn't here please post it and let me know. Thanks ;)

I've just changed the style of this page. Still working on it.

Please do comment ;)

If you don't see any changes click here:
http://blog.dalegroup.net/?setstyle=5

Still working on the sidebar.

When I develop a website, layout is one of the most thought about things. How can I effectively add navigation to a website without making it feel cluttered? Currently on this site there are very few navigation links, it wouldn't really cope with many more. The top bar could have a few extra but if I decided to add links to the side bar (which I'd like to) then it would take up too much space. Some sites have a great layout. What I'd like is that all links would be visible without the need to scroll down.
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Just recently http://www.domainsite.com were giving away free .info domains. Up do 25 domain names per person. The big draw card was that no credit card was required (unlike most domain resellers) to signup and this allowed many people under the age of 18 to sign up a free domain for a year.
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RSS traffic has been one of great discussion.
What is RSS?
RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is an XML-based format for distributing and aggregating Web content (such as news headlines).
Using RSS, Web content providers can easily create and disseminate feeds of data that include, for example, news links, headlines, and summaries.
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404 errors are the errors you receive when the url you entered could not be found.

Apache's default error message is as follows:

Not Found

The requested URL /someurl was not found on this server.

Additionally, a 404 Not Found error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.
Apache Server at servername Port 80
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So far for this month:

Incoming: 334M
Outgoing: 767M

Maybe I should get 512k/up and 128k/down :S

On another topic, stuart get trackback working on your site and update it ;)

Just some images I found. Look pretty cool:

http://blog.dalegroup.net/archive/blog/images/hack-poster.png
http://blog.dalegroup.net/archive/blog/images/hack-poster2.png

"sure, right over there next to our Frame Relay circuit and Air Conditioner, plug it into the UPS!"

I need a UPS.

Check out when you're going to die!! Cool.

http://www.deathclock.com/index.cfm

You can convert your weight and height on google for example "x kg in pounds".

I'm one for gloating, so I thought I'd try and raise ye old ego a bit more (as you do ;)). Anyway as you may (or probably may not) know I hacked apart wordpress to leach some of its sending trackback function and found a very small bug. The bug being if you ran wordpress on a non standard port (i.e anything other than 80) then people would be unable to send a trackback to that site. Wordpress ignored the fact that someone may have enter a port number into the trackback url. Only a small bug. read more

Some crazy power problems again here is rozelle. Unsure of the problem, shall find out when it is going to be fixed. All systems did infact come back online but the central switch crashed meaning that nothing could talk to anything.

http://extranet.gotdns.com:81/ would have worked as it does not connect directly to that switch.

Anyway everything is working again.

Kubrick v1.2.5 is out. Kubrick is an add on to wordpress.

From http://binarybonsai.com/

I've felt for quite some time now, that WordPress - the blogging solution powering Binary Bonsai - despite all its many merits, 'shipped' with a subpar design.

A very nice style I must say. Great job, will be looking forward to more sites running with this style, much better/different to the standard wordpress one.

I was reading over at http://photomatt.net/2004/09/04/six-apart-musings/ and this topic reminded me of my thoughts towards custom made and 3rd party software. My blog was written by myself from the ground up so that it supports the features that I want.

Now it has been a great learning process and anyone who is thinking of playing around with php/mysql should think about coding their own news/commenting system, it is lots of fun!
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http://www.overclockers.com.au/image.php?pic=images/nette_Kollegen_5.jpg
http://www.overclockers.com.au/image.php?pic=images/nette_Kollegen_2.jpg
http://www.overclockers.com.au/image.php?pic=images/nette_Kollegen_1.jpg
http://www.overclockers.com.au/image.php?pic=images/nette_Kollegen_3.jpg
http://www.overclockers.com.au/image.php?pic=images/nette_Kollegen_4.jpg

http://pcdb.overclockers.com.au/view.php?name=Demonica&page=pics

Ermm!

Hail!

Huge amounts of hail! Scary stuff. Pictures will be uploaded soon.

Now for some images (there was video but it is too large):
http://blog.dalegroup.net/archive/blog/images/hail1.jpg
http://blog.dalegroup.net/archive/blog/images/hail2.jpg

And to think I was out swimming only 30 minutes before ;)

http://www.abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzabcdefghijk.com/
(wow what a cool email address domain)

http://www.whitehouse.gov/robots.txt
(looks like they have bandwidth problems with robots too)

Another weekend, another uni. Today I went to UNSW. I liked the campus, much nicer than Sydney and better than UTS too.

First lecture that I went to was industrial chemistry. Quite an interesting course, although not for me ;) We then headed to the square building (the place where you'll computers markets every few months) and saw Sony Aibo (robot dogs) playing soccer, very funky/cool. UNSW and UTS enter a competition every year where they enter these dogs into a soccer tournament. The cool thing is that the dogs cannot be controlled by Humans, they're all AI. The software is developed by each team. After the competition the software is made open source so that everyone can improve on their design. How cool!
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Arghhh. I'm all physicsed out! Physics period 3, physics excursion to Sydney UNI period 4 - 5 and just then I finished doing physics with my physics tutor (have this tutor as of today).

So since 11am-5.30pm I've been doing physics (didn't have time for lunch either). Fun Fun!
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I've just done a rework of my "Short Archive". It now does things much more nicely.

Have a look:
http://blog.dalegroup.net/archive/
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A new month brings me much happiness. All logs are switched over to the new month, we get to restart fresh. Cool.

So last month's statistics:
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