I’ve always had an interest in the weather, it’s the one thing in Ireland that can make or break your day. As the say goes, “You don’t go to Ireland for the weather”! Anyway, I decided to go out and buy myself a weather station. I didn’t fancy spending €600 or €700 on something like a Davis Vantage Pro as I wasn’t even sure I had a suitable location for the station itself. I decided to try out a La Crosse WS-2308.

I setup Open2300 on my Sun Blade running Ubuntu and connected the console of the 2308 via serial. After a bit of messing about with the positioning of the sensors, the main unit and temperature sensor was receiving direct sunlight in the late afternoon and the wind sensor seemed and still is a bit too sheltered, everything was working pretty well.

I’m using mysql2300 to upload the values to a database and I wrote a few PHP scripts to generated some graphs using JpGraph. You can see the results of my efforts here.

Just one day after it’s release, there are already exploits circulating for Safari for Windows. Thor Larholm has discovered a remote command execution vulnerability and some other researchers have reportedly discovered more vulnerabilities too.

The hole can be used to execute arbitrary code simply by making a user view a malicious web page in Safari. So much for “Why you’ll love Safari for Windows” reason #12: “Apple engineers designed Safari to be secure from day one”. Secure indeed!

Apple’s Safari browser has just been made available for Windows, although it’s still in beta. This caught me totally by surprise, but it seems there have been rumours going around for a bit now. Even if I had of seen the rumors I wouldn’t have believed it! Here’s some screenshots of it in action:

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I’ve decided to move my blog and the Urlmarkr site away from Dreamhost and to a VPS hosted with Bitfolk. The main reason for the move is that now my exams are finished I hope to be able to spend some time working on urlmarkr and a few other projects and Dreamhost’s Ruby setup just didn’t cut it.

The Urlmarkr site is now running on Mongrel with Lighttpd 1.5 at the frontend. So far everything seems pretty stable. The new VPS is also a lot closer to home than Dreamhost, only 4 hops away with a response time of less than 20ms compared to the 18 hops and 200ms response from Dreamhost.

I just received a Joost invite from Pallab and I may aswell jump on the bandwagon and give away some Joost invites just like everyone else.

If anyone would like a free Joost invite, simply leave a comment here and I’ll fire one off to you! Don’t leave your email in the post itself, just simply enter the correct address in the email field and I’ll get one through to you.

I promise your email address will be safe and I will delete it as soon as the invite is sent, so you don’t have to worry about any spam!

Update: I’ve given out over 80 invites, keep those requests coming! Everyone who’s commented as of 21:30 IST should have received theirs by now, if not, use the contact form to let me know!

It appears that the 2.1.1 version of Wordpress available for download over the past few days ago contains malicious code. It seems that the one of the Wordpress servers was compromised and the download modified to include the malicious code. You can read more details on the issue over at wordpress.org but the best advice is to upgrade now.

I sat down earlier to have a play around with SimpleXML, the new PHP5 feature that allows easy access to data structures within an XML document. I had also been looking at the ma.gnolia API earlier to implement support for importing bookmarks from ma.gnolia to my bookmarking application urlmarkr. So I decided to write a sidebar widget to display bookmarks from ma.gnolia in the Wordpress sidebar.

Thanks to the power of SimpleXML, what would have taken possibly 10-20 lines of code before, simply took 4 or 5! I used the Snoopy PHP class to fetch the request from ma.gnolia. It’s then just a simple case of calling simplexml_load_string. It’s then just a case of iterating through the XML data using a simple foreach statement just like it was a collection of arrays.

The end result is the ma.gnolia sidebar widget. More time was spent in writing this post than in writing the widget such is the power of SimpleXML. You can grab the download if your interested from here.

A few months back, Google bought the office complex that become.com, the shopping search engine leases space in. Today they finally started to move in to the complex so become.com thought they’d throw up a sign to welcome Google to the building.

 

 It looks like Google didn’t see the funny side and removed the poster with 30 minutes!

This is the third release of my Social Bookmark Widget for Wordpress. This release sees a major re-write of the code and the addition of BlogMemes, Blue Dot, BuddyMarks, Bumpzee, Diigo, DotNetKicks, DZone, Earthlink, givealink.org, igooi, kick.ie, Lilisto, LookLater, Mr Wong, Netscape, Onlywire, PlugIM, PopCurrent, PPNow, Recruiting.com, Rojo, Scoopeo, Slashdot, SphereIt, Squidoo, StumbleUpon, Taggly, Tagtooga, TalkDigger, ThisNext, Webride and Wists bringing the number of supported sites to 59.

To install the widget, simply download the widget from below, and upload the contents (bookmark-widget.php and the bookmark directory containing the images and the bookmark-sites.php configuration file) of the archive to <your wordpress install>/wp-content/plugins/widgets/ folder. Next you need to activate the “Social Bookmark Widget” under your plugin settings. You should then be able to drag and drop the widget to your sidebar and select which bookmarking sites you wish to display from the “Sidebar Widgets” menu under “Presentation”.

You can see the plugin in action on my own sidebar to the left and you can download either the .zip or the .tar.gz archive.

I’ve just finished upgrading darxr.net to Wordpress 2.1. Everything went very smoothly, all my existing plugins and my own Social Bookmarks Widget are working fine with 2.1.

Some new features in 2.1 include the ability to save pages as drafts, up till now only posts could be saved as drafts along with the ability to set a page as the front page of the site rather than the actual blog itself. There is also a new “Visual” WYSIWYG editor, which is enabled by default, but the older “Code” editor is still available at the click of a mouse.

Another much welcomed feature of the new editor is the Autosave feature. There’s nothing worse than spending hours on a post and then losing everything when your browser crashes or the power cuts out.

There is improved Import/Export functionality making it easier to move to Wordpress, or away from it as the case may be, but with all these new features, who’d want to?

Here’s a small update to my Social Bookmarks sidebar widget for WordPress. It fixes the problem some people had with images not displaying due to an incorrect path.

The widget allows you to select a number of social bookmark sites which are displayed in the sidebar. This allows your readers to bookmark your blog or article, depending on the context, directly to the social bookmarking sites you have enabled.

To install the widget, simply download the widget from below, and upload the contents of the archive to your wp-content/plugins/widgets folder and activate the “Bookmark Widget” under your plugin settings. You should then be able to drag and drop the widget to your sidebar and select which bookmarking sites you wish to display.

To upgrade from the previous version, just simply extract the archive on top of your existing installation.

You can see the plugin in action in my own sidebar on this site and you can download either a .zip or a .tar.gz version.

Please let me know of any bugs or suggestions you have.

Update: Latest version available here

This is the first relase of my Social Bookmarks sidebar widget for WordPress. It is inspired by Pascal Belloncle’s Bookmarkit plugin for Typo and based upon Kaf Under’s excellent example WordPress widget.

The widget allows you to select a number of social bookmark sites which are displayed in the sidebar. This allows your readers to bookmark your blog or article, depending on the context, directly to the social bookmarking sites you have enabled.

To install the widget, simply download the widget from below, and upload the contents of the archive to your wp-content/plugins/widgets folder and activate the “Bookmark Widget” under your plugin settings. You should then be able to drag and drop the widget to your sidebar and select which bookmarking sites you wish to display.

You can see the plugin in action in my own sidebar on this site and you can download either a .zip or a .tar.gz version.

Please let me know of any bugs or suggestions you have.

I came across this story, and a few others like it over the last day or so banging on about how forking Firefox and removing it from distributions such as Debian and Ubuntu is such a “Bad Thing” along with comments like “Doesn’t the GNU organization have better things to do?”

First off, the reason Firefox is being removed from Debian is that Mike Conner from the Mozilla Corporation posted a bug report to the Debian project stating that shipping a browser called “Firefox” was a trademark violation:

“Firefox (the name) is equally protected and controlled by the same trademark policy and legal requirements as the Firefox logo. You’re free to use any other name for the browser bits, but calling the browser Firefox requires the same approvals as are required for using the logo and other artwork.”

And it’s not just the Debian Project who have expressed frustration with the Mozilla Corporation regarding Firefox, both Fedora and Ubuntu have also been having issues with regard to patching and security issues.

The main advantage of Gnuzilla and IceWeasel is simply an ethical one, they are entirely free software. IceWeasel will continue to synchronize with upstream Firefox releases in the future, so on a functional level, there should be very little difference.

The Mozilla Corporation seem to be loosing touch with the very open source community it grew from. I can understand that they want to protect their image and trademark, if they didn’t, there would be nothing to stop someone taking Firefox, bundling it with a ton of spyware and malware, and still being legally able to distribute it as “Firefox”. However, I think some compromise could have been reached, the likes of Debian, Fedora and Ubuntu hardly fall into that category.

I’ve created a plugin to display your Jabber presence in the Typo sidebar. This plugin is based on the AIM presence plugin and uses status bot at njs.netlab.cz.

To install simply extract the archive to your sidebar directory and go in the sidebar section of Typo admin and you will be able to drag and drop the Jabber Presence item onto your active items. You will also need to allow jabstatus@njs.netlab.cz to see your status in your jabber client.

You can download the plugin below, please leave a comment if you come across any issues.

jabberpresence.tar.gz - 634 bytes

As of today I’ve started moving my sites over to Dreamhost! I had been running everything on a Sun Blade 100 using Ubuntu for SPARC, hosted on my cable connection but the uplink was crippled to 512 kbit/s. My blog is first to move, and also moves to a new domain, darxr.net. All old links should redirect fine. I’ve also upgraded my blog to Typo 4 . Everything went pretty smoothly except for a few MySQL problems which were solved by using a fresh database schema and importing the old articles from the command line.

I’ll be moving over the urlmarkr site and also migrating the SVN repository to Dreamhost in the next few days. I have already moved the site to Drupal and again all seems fine. urlmarkr also moves to it’s own domain, urlmarkr.org.

The main reason I’ve choose Dreamhost is their Ruby on Rails support seems pretty good and the control panel is NOT CPanel. I can’t stand using CPanel, its UI is terrible. I am a command line user most of the time, but when I have to use a web based interface, CPanel is one that I’d just rather avoid.

If you interested in signing up for Dreamhost, you can signup for either the L1 (20GB disk, 1TB bw), L2 (40GB disk, 1.2TB bw) or L3 (60GB disk, 1.6TB bw) packages for only $9.90 for the first month with all setup fee’s waived and a free domain name! Simply enter the code DARXR in the “Promo Code” box on the signup page to take advantage of the discount.