Time to catch up

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While I was really busy this week there was much going on around the “blogosphere”.

  • 1. Ensight’s Jeremy Wright is selling himself on ebay. Unbelievable? No, his idea to sell himself for a period of time as a blogger for a company is really groovy. I’m wondering how much will be the final price. You can checkout the auction here (current price: 112.73$).
  • 2. Jeremy is still looking out for bloggers who would like to join his effort to get 50 bloggers together to start an advertising network. Jeremy will negotiate based on the basis of 50 bloggers as soon as this number is met and, I think, it’ll be beneficial for all participants. More infos can be found here
  • 3. Google’s newest edition to the “beta-family” is Google Scholar which can be used for literature research (scholar.google.com). Found via Technosailor.com

Closure (update)

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Update: All went relatively good…now it’s finally over…time to idle a lot ;-)

Almost all done. Now I just need to finish the presentation and then at 2pm it’s showtime :-)

Wish me luck ;-)

Closure

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Well, well, well. It has been more than a year now since I started my second uni project (Service Engineering Support System: S.E.S.S.). Now we’re on the “final meters” or the home lap as one might put it. After all this time it’s hard to get yourself together and close out. I’m currently writing the documentation of one of my parts (database) and it’s really annoying. Nontheless it needs to be done as I’ve got more stuff to do (official final meeting and project presentation will be this thursday afternoon) and I need to prepare the following stuff until then:

  • Do own documentation of all stuff I did…done
  • Preprare groovy presentation so that the “outsiders” will understand the essence of our work in progress
  • Get all documents together and print them out…scheduled for November 24th done
  • Write project retrospective…done
  • Get all code and burn it scheduled for November 24th in progress done
  • etc etc

That’s the main reason why I wasn’t posting to much here or on SPF! So I’m really looking forward to this thursday at it’ll finally be over and I’ll have some free room to breath again (although other stuff has already piled up so there’s no real “idle-period” right away :-( ), but hey I don’t complain, after all christmas holidays aren’t all that far away anymore ;-)

Comment Spam Plugin added

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Alright. Enough is enough.

I’m really tired of getting comment spam after comment spam. Okay, most of it is already caught due to a good list of spam words, but it’s nontheless annoying having to moderate them. So now I’ve added a plugin which autocloses comments after 30 days (see here) – it’s kind of a bummer as there might be some people who would make decent comments on older posts, but you can’t please anyone I guess :-(

Header

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Update: Not perfect yet and something still missing, but enough for today – need to get some uni work done.

As you may have noticed I’m playing around with the header atm. I want to incorporate a pic and add some navigation, so don’t wonder if it’s looking a little awkward atm. “Work in progress” ;-)

Age of Mythology

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You might have heard about Age of Mythology (the computer game), but did you know that there’s a board game version of it?

It’s pretty new over here in germany and a mate of mine bought it on the recent south german game convention. More infos about the english version of the game can be found here.

Tonight we played it for the third time and I won for the second time in a row :-)
Last time I had played the “Vikings” and won due to the fact that I had the most buildings. This time it was a little bit different: I was playing with the egypts and was able to win some battles early on. That made it possible for me to built some major army and to advance to the next ages quite quickly. In the end I won because I built “the wonder” in the last round and was able to claim the 12 winning points sitting on it. This gave me a grand total of 18 winning points (out of 30 total).

  • 1. Ingoal – 18pts, race: egypts
  • 2. Nico – 11pts, race: egypts
  • 3. Ines – 1point, race: vikings
  • 4. Ralf – 0 points, race: greeks

What a good evening :-)

Gravatar support added (update)

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Update: To quote Homer Jay Simpson “D’oh” (or “Nein” like he says in the german version)! This whole error message thing was just caused by some blanks after the closing statement. Everything fixed now :-)
(1:30am) – time to catch some sleep now

Now I’m getting some nasty errors everytime I post a comment or submit a post. This isn’t looking all that good.

Example:

nasty php error due to the fact that I added gravatar support?!

So, if you encounter that error or similiar please just ignore it and go back to ingoal.info your comment was submitted and will appear (right away if it doesn’t need to be moderated). I’ll try to fix this asap!

Note to self: not always a good idea to start upgrades in the middle of the night :-(

Gravatar support added

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After reading about it all around the web, especially on Chu Yeow’s blog I thought maybe I should support this, too. So I downloaded the WordPress plugin and followed the instructions. It was up and running in no time. Nontheless I still had some problems due to the fact that as soon as you enter one no-default parameter it starts to mess up the validation of your document (or at least of my document).

So I went on and hacked a little:

Original version:

[php]
…
if($rating && $rating != ”)
$out .= “&rating=”.$rating;
if($size && $size != ”)
$out .=”&size=”.$size;
if($default && $default != ”)
$out .= “&default=”.urlencode($default);
if($border && $border != ”)
$out .= “&border=”.$border;
…
[/php]

Version with correction:

[php] …
if($rating && $rating != ”)
$out .= “&rating=”.$rating;
if($size && $size != ”)
$out .=”&size=”.$size;
if($default && $default != ”)
$out .= “&default=”.urlencode($default);
if($border && $border != ”)
$out .= “&border=”.$border;
…
[/php]

As those arguments weren’t escaped properly I had 20 errors – now 0

So, check out the comment of any post now and you will find the gravatar of the comment author if (s)he has got one or the standard gravatar I created (will maybe be replaced later on with something “cooler”).
standard gravatar I created

If you don’t know what a Gravatar is yet check out gravatar.com and get yours ;-)

Dersim Ludwigsburg reclaims the top

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With us being free from play back to back, Dersim took it’s chances today and took over first place again with a 4-0 win over KSV Besigheim. Now the standings read:

  • 1. Dersim Ludwigsburg 23:3 goals 9 games played 25 points
  • 2. FC Marbach II 35:8 goals 9 games played 23 points
  • 3. KSV Besigheim 26:16 goals 9 games played 19 points

With three games remaining till the winter break we should try everything to get our 9 points which would be a sure 2nd place.

Plextor S-ATA DVD-Burner

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Plextor is about to released it’s newest DVD burner PX-716SA which has got the same features as the PX-716A but is a serial-ata (s-ata) device – so no free ide-port needed. Groovy…now if I only had a S-ATA port ;-)

Anyway, I’m more than set with 2 dvd-burners in place, so I guess this one (or a even newer generation one) will certainly be an option for my next computer.

dmoz.org

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Now this is slowly starting to get on my nerves. I submitted my site to be added to the open directory dmoz.org (category Top: Computers: Internet: On the Web: Weblogs: Personal: I) some weeks ago and I didn’t hear a thing back. I guess it’s at the discretion of the editor if a site is:

  • added right away
  • added later
  • added at all

This is fine with me, but what I really dislike is being uninformed. If the site was to be added or not or later or not or right away or not, I would like to be informed. A little mail like: “Yo, your site is in the queue, we’ll get to it as soon as we got some time to have a look…” or whatever would really be appreciated. Ah well, I guess I will just have to wait and see…

MSN Search solving your algebra?

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As I browse through the “blogosphere” (weird, the first time that I used this term) I came across something really interesting. MSN search (beta) can solve your algebra problems, at least some of them:

Goto MSN search (beta) and enter something like x^2+x^3=36 and see the result:

result set

Groovy! It seems though that more complex problems are not solved via this search engine – I guess no problem as you wouldn’t expect that your search engine can solve any mathematical problems in the first place.

Found via Neil’s World and Chu Yeow’s blog

Tuning

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Well, it was about time that I bought something bargain style again. So I won an auction on ebay for an additional paper-feeder for my color laser printer (Apple Laser Writer Color 12/600PS – old school but still running very good and cheap with page prices of under 6 cents). What did I pay? 2.50 Euro :-)
It was sort of backbreaking to get the printer on that thing, but now it’s up and running and my “beast” is now fully equipped (maximum stage of expansion: 40MB Ram, 2×250 paper-feeder, etc).

As I was on a roll, so to speak, I decided to put my spare dvd-burner Sony DRU700a to good use by inserting it into my second pc (AMD Athlon XP 1800+ machine). Now I can burn “stereo style” – not that I really need it or something, but this way I can be sure to get almost everything burned regardless of the medium used (my LG had written everything I had thrown at it so far, but today it rejected some grade B media branded “Gate 24” – now I’m happy that I’ve got the second burner, because the Sony likes them).