darxr.net

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:

The download weighs in at just over 8Mb. It seems to run a little sluggishly for me, and I’ve a Intel Core 2 Duo 7600 with 4Gb of RAM. Some of the usual plug-ins are available including Java and Flash.

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 simplexmlloadstring. 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 Widgetâ€Â? 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 Widgetsâ€Â? menu under “Presentationâ€Â?.

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?