I’ve spent a couple of minutes (yep, very in-depth :)) playing with Rollyo, a way to run searches over multiple sites. The site’s pretty slick (and looks quite Basecamp/37signals inspired) but I can’t help but think I’ve been here before… Mozilla, and FireFox with a plugin, have something called the search sidebar. This little piece of magic allows you to run a search over multiple sites at the same time and integrates the results; each site search is implemented using a mycroft search plugin. Read on →

In what is just another in a long line of things that have been sent to test me over the last couple of weeks, today one of my sites got hit by a group of machines trying to do not nice things. The result? A load of 56 and a very slow machine. I stopped apache for a while, put some “measures” in place and we’re back up running. I’ve never bothered to make blosxom cache or anything to keep the load low, not having that much traffic always achieved the same goal, but I’ll try and pencil some time in to take a look. Read on →

One of the little bits of trivia I learned while setting up PlanetGLLUG was how the planet software deals with RSS 0.9 feeds. The original “specification” for this version didn’t require each entry/post to have a date associated with it; although a lot of feeds work around this by either using the later revisions or including the Dublin Core name-space and dates. This causes the planet software to add every item in the RSS feed to the planet with the same date, the one on which it first pulls in the entries. Read on →

A busy Thursday night began with the UKUUG AGM. With just over twenty people present Ray Miller, council chairman, went through the details for the last year. While the full information will be available in the minutes (which should be in the next UKUUG news letter) there are a couple of points that I feel warrant a mention. Firstly was some great news. Alasdair Kergon, who pretty much singlehandedly organises the Linux conference each year, was made an honourary UKUUG member. Read on →

One of the great things about sites like PledgeBank is that they provide a single service and they they do it well enough that it can be bent slightly to serve another purpose. I organise the occasional meeting for techies and one of the few major worries is “what happens if no one turns up?”. It’s not a complex fear but it can result in some sleepless nights. It’s not even just a case of “will I look like an idiot if this goes wrong? Read on →

Back in April of 2001 GLLUG had a meeting, in the CFC preview cinema, which featured a talk by Richard Moore of IBM. Now the speaker obviously knew his stuff, he was a little dry but obviously passionate and enthusiastic about his material. The topic was a new way of debugging the Linux Kernel; it was called DProbes. Now while I understood most of the talk, I’m not a kernel guy so bits were over my head, the idea seemed like a good, if quite ambitious one. Read on →

Well Planet GLLUG has been running for a couple of days without any glitches, except for some, er, interesting, HTML running from one persons postings to another. I’ve also replaced some of the images with much better versions contributed from Simon Morris. Now some (maybe) interesting tidbits: 43.8% of the visitors to PlanetGLLUG are using Linux vs the 42.1% that are running Windows; it’s always nice to see people dogfooding. Even more surprising is that the most popular web browser used by the Windows viewers is… FireFox! Read on →

I’ve got the first version of the IIS-Resources Printer Friendly Articles GreaseMonkey script written and uploaded. It takes you to the correct print page, minus the adverts, but it’s currently got a problem in that the onload handler kicks up a print dialogue (on Windows at least). If anyone has any ideas how to stop it doing this please let me know.

I noticed a bug in my TheRegister Printer Friendly Articles Greasemonkey plugin a couple of days ago. The odd thing was the bug was a major one that I never saw based upon my browsing habits. I no longer read TheReg, I’m subscribed to its RSS feed instead. I only bother opening the stories I’m interested in. While this saves me time it also means I never go to its front page. Read on →

Over at IT Conversations is a recording of Kim Polese’s OSCON 2005 keynote. Better known to many people as the public face of Marimba, the push technology that was shoved away, her new employers seem a lot more interesting. The basic idea is to test and certify stacks of software, seemingly from the kernel up, and then presumably get paid to add desired items to the testing. It might just be me but this sounds fascinating. Read on →