Bluetrait

Yes it's not even the first day yet (I need to head back in tonight), but I have some time off to write about it.
My first lecture (2 hours) was Database Fundamentals. No work done yet, just a basic introduction into the course. This looks to be quite a useful subject. We'll be learning database structure, development and queries.

The database software that we will be developing on is PostgreSQL, which is interesting. MySQL and PostgreSQL are the two most popular open source database systems. PostgreSQL is known for its stability while MySQL is known for speed.

It will be very interesting learning PostgreSQL as I've mainly used MySQL for all my development stuff. There has always been a large debate over which is better. Hopefully I'll be able to write something comparing them. I would also be interested to see how easy it is to add support for PostgreSQL into my blog script. I currently run a basic MySQL class that sits between the queries and the database, we'll have to see if the queries are compatible with each other.

Anyway, the lecture was a good introduction into what I should expect from the course. The reason I have time to write this entry is that there are no tutorials on this week. So that lecture finished at 11am and my next one is at 8pm! This won't be the case from next week onwards, I'll be in at UNI all day.

So yeah the course looks good, we're even allowed to do some web based development for one of the assignments. Cool, should be good.

In recent years there has been a shift from table based layout to using CSS. Finally people are realising that tables are not meant for layout.

The concept of using CSS is to separate content from formatting. This allows for a greater audience. Such as people who use screen readers or those browsing via a mobile phone. CSS has a nice way of "falling back" if the device doesn't support it.

With html you are also given the meta tag "media" for use within the style tag. This allows you to define what CSS style will be use for a certain device, i.e screen, print or handheld.

The World Wide Web Consortium states that

Tables should not be used purely as a means to layout document content as this may present problems when rendering to non-visual media.

Now although we are moving away from tables they still have a use. Tabular data. Tables should really only be used for this. An example is in this post.

So by all means use tables, but please use them for their intended purpose.

Let us see if this comes out correctly, I think I'll need to hack at my filter thing...

Apple have upgraded their ipod range.

We now have the 30gb and 60gb ipod photo (which are now cheaper). But the bigger upgrade is the ipod mini. Now with 6gb storage and 18 hour battery life. Pretty cool. I would be quite happy to have one of these. They're so small and funky!

Also new firmware has been released for the older 3G ipods. This firmware adds some new features that the 4G has and makes the screen look better (also has newer menu images). Highly recommended for all 3G users.

The updated can be found here.

Link 1
Link 2

more incriminating photos

standardtm make cool bags.

I got something similar to this on my UTS camp, while I was recommended to buy this for my laptop.

Both are well made and very useful. Although I don't think they're cheap.

Highly recommended.

A few days ago ucosty moved over to his new custom written blogging tool, netBlog. One of the driving forces for this move was the excessive amount of spam his was receiving. Although wordpress has some spam filtering it isn't enough. The fact that people are now getting hundreds of spam messages each day, people don't want to spend the time deleting them.

Spam also degrades the web site. Some of the language used in these spams messages is enough to turn anyone off a website. The author also losses credibility because of these comments. It isn't their fault that the spam is there, but it is their website. Filtering systems in businesses that track key words will often block these sites too. No one wants to go to a website advertising illegal underaged sex.

So anyway, matthew (aka ucosty) is now running his custom script which should be free from this junk. He is also planing to release his script too. Great work.

Wordpress 1.5 has been released and can be downloaded here

Hey everyone,

Back from the geek camp! Which might I add wasn’t too geeky and was extremely fun.

The first thing about this camp that should be noted was it wasn’t your average crappy school camp. You could do pretty much what ever you liked, everything was optional. For example staying up until 2.30 playing poker, with our camp cash!

Camp cash was pretty cool, the lectures and 2nd year students handed out “Camp Cash” which was used for an auction on the last day (today). I ended up with a really nice Compaq carry bag for my laptop and a cool large blow up Compaq ball. Also they were auctioning off things like x-box games, office XP plus many other things.

Yesterday we spent most of the day canoeing and capsizing people.

Some societies they have at UTS are very funky, for example ProgSoc. For $10 a year we get free web hosting (Dual Opteron 2GHz), and if the storage space isn’t enough for you go and install another hard drive. So cool.

One of the more interesting activities at ProgSoc is the long range wireless project. You see UTS have this tall ugly building with a communications tower on top of it. Perfect for long range wireless. We’re in the planning (I’ve just setup a UTS ProgSoc wireless mailing list) of getting this up and running. So far the equipment for UTS has been purchased and will be installed shortly (after we work out authentication for users). So we’re going to have a massive wireless network for UTS students.

And I have line of sight to the building! Excellent.

I have some photos online, not great as I didn’t really carry my camera around all that much. I’m going to try and get pictures of the fashion parade later, which was very funny.

So yeah it was a great time.

geo.position is a META tag that some sites contain (wordpress makes use of it for example). Now on its own it isn't all that useful, really. Until you use this site.

Lots of people have been receiving some form of spam on their web logs. So far I haven't had that problem, until 2 days ago. Over the last few days I have been getting referrer spam. You may have not noticed it (that's good!) but it making its way into my log files.

There are a few users who are constantly hitting my site with different referrer urls. None of these people are actually coming from these sites. The referrer url is just placed in the script so that these address may appear on my website.

The only place these addresses are showing is on my awstats page.

I've since then added a rule to the robots.txt file to stop google etc from crawling it.

You will get no page rank for me here spammers!

The spam is coming from the following addresses [updated]:
_{195.95.230.20
82.80.252.170
82.80.252.229
65.75.178.80
194.67-19-187.reverse.theplanet.com
205.209.135.160
205.209.130.110
pluto.windowsforumhosting.com
ns1.viperwireless.com
205.209.148.30
jessie.hostbud.com
205.209.148.50
205.209.148.80
205.209.149.10
205.209.149.100}

Feel free to try your hacking skills on them, idiots.

Take note any other spammers, I will not tolerate your crap on my website. I will not allow your urls to appear on my site.

I've always been a fan of a hot lunch, sandwiches are just boring. So today I'll show you how you make a funky lunch!

The first thing we need to do is to prepare the food. This is one of the more time consuming tasks.

1. Find your closest food outlet (in this case the freezer works well)
2. Proceed to search for something that looks tasty, often this can be a hard task as the food is frozen and you cannot sample each item. Also be wary of certain food products, these may either be 6 months out of date or maybe left overs from that dinner which really didn't work.
3. Once you've found a suitable item the next step is to cook it. Often the food you find in a freezer is frozen and a high powered heating device is needed. We'll use my imac microwave for this task.
   
4. 2-3 minutes should be enough for anything that you find, but if you find that the centre is still cold, put it back in for another minute. Remember the food you're heating should have already been cooked at least once, you shouldn't need to worry about dying of some illness because you didn't cook it enough.
5. Now everyone should be eating a balanced diet. So to offset the food from the freezer make yourself a chocolate milkshake, don't skimp on the chocolate as it contains most of the nutrition.
   
6. Beware of other living animals (take my cat for an example), they may try to steal your freshly cooked food. Be alert at all times.
7. Enjoy!
   

Yay! We all like features. Anyway I've got around to adding another feature to this website. It is in the form of a, er contact form! Yes!

I know, I know. I had one of these BEFORE. But this one is different! Really it is!

If you post a comment below and leave ticked "Allow contact form email" people can send you email via the contact form. This could be useful for blogs where someone wants to get in contact with someone else who has posted but doesn't know them.

Please note your email address is NEVER shown (everything is done via the contact form) and if you wish not to have this feature just untick the box when you comment.

The comment form also goes through my spam block system that stops mass email floods and almost all bots. You don't need to worry about that.

Anyway the option is there from now on.

I've just added support so that your user details are remembered in the comment field (name, email and www). This was working on my old blog site but I've recoded the way it works here.

I'm using a different way of storing cookies on the site; this should make things easier when I start using cookies for more information.

Anyway feel free to test in this post.

I was looking a purchasing Office 2004 for Mac as I would like Word and Entourage (email client). I mainly need Entourage 2004 as it can connect to Exchange servers (the older versions can't).

Anyway today I work I was handed a copy of Entourage 2004, they have a site license for it here. Cool!

So I'm going to install it and see how I like it. Hopefully it's good. I'm looking forward to it!

Pity it didn't come with Word :p

[ADDED]

Now here is a screen shot of the program

http://www.bluetrait.com/images/Entourage.jpg

Cat-man's blog site is now open for business. That's right only 5cents per post, funky! No not really but anyway....

check it out here

_{I'd trackback but I cannot as I haven't written it yet :p}

FCKeditor (which really stands for Fred CK Editor) is a javascript based html editor. It doesn't look dissimilar to Microsoft Word built into a website. It allows you to nicely format text that you can insert into your database.

I've been testing it to see if I can make use of it in my yet to be started admin panel. So far I've been very happy with it. There are only two problems with it:

1. It doesn't do br tags correctly. Although this can be easily fixed with a string_replace before I enter it into the database
2. It doesn't work in Safari, which is a bit of a pain. But it works in Firefox which runs on everything so that is okay.

There is also a Source button that you can click to view the source code of the text you are writing, which can be useful. Also it is very easy to integrate into php web sites.

There is a demo here if you're interested.

I've got the RSS comments feed working, it can be found here. Just thought I'd mention that this site is still very much in development, so please do not be surprised if you find stuff that is broken (even if is was working before).

No there is nothing wrong with me. But I am very happy. Roll your own software is so cool. But you know what is even better? When you find a sexy script that is fast, funky and written by the cat man himself. Ben gave me a beta copy of his image script yesterday, after having a small issue global variables, everything works really nicely. My old image script was photostack which sucked. It was slow and only worked on my unix system. Crappy. But cat-scan is fast! Upload the images to a folder let the server churn out some thumbnails (much much quicker than photostack ever was) and you have a complete photo album. No screwing around with file listings or crap like that. This program does it ALL.

So in the near future I will have cat-scan working live here. Thanks again ben. You've done a GREAT job.

Today I was off to UTS to enroll. What fun. There were far less people than I expected. This was because it was only IT students signing up today (YAY, a day full of geeks *rolls eyes*). The whole process took about 3 hours, and I would have only been in a line for about 30 minutes. So I was pretty happy. I've got my student card and diary thingy, plus a few more CDs (they like their cds).

AND I have a geek camp in a week or so. Far out! Crazy :p

Yesterday was a bit rushed and really I shouldn't have released
my new site. But it will force me to work on it further.



Currently you probably think the old site had more features and was
overall better. But don't worry, once I've worked on this site a bit more you
should start to see the underlying improvements. The backend of the code has
been completely rewritten (although the commenting system is still the old code
which I put in place yesterday to ready the site) and it gives me much more flexibility
to do cool things.



Not only is the code a blog script but it will also be a CMS. This will allow
me to integrate other things into the site easier while keeping the same
template.



Other features that have yet to be finished include (omg here goes a list):

• Contact form function for
  each post (if the poster is happy, a reader can email a message to them
  via a contact form).
• Mail function (this should
  tie in closely to the above).
• CMS
• Multiple blogs
• Better user management
• two styles of admin panel
  (one for slow connections/wap and a full blown DHTML version)

At the moment the site isn't ready to be released to the
public, but I plan on doing so. When I reach version 1.0.0 (see bottom for
current version number) I hope to let people download it.



Anyway that is all for now. I'm posting this from a DHTML editor that after
testing hopefully will be included in the admin panel.

Welcome to bluetrait. My new blog site.

The code is far from finished and there are some speed issues, I just needed to put something online so I'd work on it.

Please do comment!!

EDIT: RSS comments is not working at the moment. I'll try and fix tomorrow.

New plans

http://ii.net/broadband/

Too much cool stuff to post here, go look for yourself.

The powerbooks have finally been upgraded. It isn't a huge upgrade but it was needed.

The 12" powerbook now has:
1.5GHz G4 (up from 1.33)
512mb ram standard (up from 256)
Faster HDD
And it's cheaper $2,399.00 (down from 2,599.00)

The 15 and 17" have also been upgraded too.

More details can be found here: http://www.apple.com.au/store