Comments (0) Sydney Dowse, who died on Thursday aged 89, was one of the principal constructors of the tunnel used in the Great Escape; he was among those who got away, and was at large for 14 days before being recaptured and sent to the “death camp” at Sachsenhausen, where he dug another tunnel to gain a few more days of freedom.
Quite a remarkable man who lead one hell of a charmed life!
Been a day of going in circles. Started out with chasing a self playing file that wasn’t π and went downhill from there. Have been having database trouble and after finally getting signed up and logged into the forums at my hosting service it looks like it may be a malformed htaccess file or a bad php.ini file instead. But then I get to the point of backing up some databases and the file manager program tells me the database is not working correctly and to tell the hosting company. Talk about circles.
Then I get an email telling me that one of our clients sites that has two parked domains on it is down. Turns out that the main site is still okay but the two parked domains are pointing to never-never land on someone else’s server. By now it’s dark and I still haven’t gotten past the looking at the e-commerce programs but I stop and spend another couple of hours trying to find where they are pointing and why. Remove them and reinstall from two different control panels and still no joy. So I submit a trouble ticket to the hosting company (another one than the one my sites are on). Get an email back in a little while that says it all looks fine on their end and just wait a few hours for things to propagate across the DNS system. I check and it all looks the same which I tell them and point out that we had not changed anything and why were they pointing elsewhere in the first place. Haven’t checked my mail since so ??? who knows where that is.
Then start on getting problems straightened out with our sales domain. Had two different ones and lost one but kept the other. Trouble was the one we lost was the one the databases were pointed to. So spent a while with phpMyAdmin poking and prodding data and getting all the i’s dotted and t’s crossed. Finally got the blog back up. Now to install the updates… π Got Cat a ftp account on the site and made a redirect to the blog. Still haven’t gotten the database backed up. Or submitted a trouble ticket on it. Or started on installing the e-commerce program. Or working on the van. But I did manage to pinch a nerve in my back by turning around while walking across the living room this morning. Still feels real good… π Will check the sites one more time for DNS propagation and then am gonna call it a night and start chasing my tail again in the morning… Till tomorrow… π
Curious Expeditions ΓΒ» Blog Archive ΓΒ» The Geyser Riders
If you were walking along the shore of the east river on March 27th 1905, you would have seen an entirely singular spectacle. A geyser some forty feet tall shot from the east river, and atop that geyser, like a cowboy on a bucking bull, rode Dick Creedon.
Now THAT would have one hell of a ride!
A new reason to hate Comcast (Scripting News)
Intimidation, the better business model, NOT. In the last few years it seems that this type of corporate behavior is becoming the standard. Could it have something to do with the way the government has gone from being “by the people, of the people, for the people”, (or however that goes) to “we is teh government and we will do whatever we wants to”. Don’t know, just a thought that flitted across the minds eye. What I do know is that I vote with my money and a business that gave me the attitude that Comcast has given Dave on this wouldn’t get another cent out of me. Here he is paying $180.00 a month to have them as a backup, tries them out as his main connection as he hears good things about them and they talk to him really bad for using their bandwidth. Not a good way of doing business in my book. Give them hell, Dave!
Got the last of the covers scanned and posts cleaned up early tonight and have been installing the new theme and getting it configured since then. Built a new header graphic and put up new wallpaper too. As I said over there I’ve got most of the cobwebs cleaned out and am polishing the last of the door knobs now. π However you look at it the basic upgrade work is DONE! Now I get to start on the pile of additional Nero Wolfe books that I have gotten in the last couple of years and not scanned and put up yet.
However have got another little project that I’m gonna get on first. Been putting off getting our E-commerce site set up till I got to where I could wrap my head around it again and after the last few days working on this stuff I seem to be back in shape to do it, so am gonna start on it tomorrow. Then I get to start putting all the other books in it that we have been collecting. At a guess I’d say we have between 12,000 and 16,000 that we need to get online. Cat has got somewhere over 4000 already in a database that I need to figure out how to import, which has been one of my holdups in doing the site. None of the programs I have looked at make it real easy to get data into them except by their own web based interface, which is fine if you are keying the data in one piece at a time. But if you have an existing inventory tis not quite so easy. Oh well, will worry about that tomorrow, look at them all again and make the final decision on which one to go with and start modifying for our purposes.
And on that note, boys and girls, I am gonna call it a night. It’s a night… π π Till tomorrow… π
Had high hopes of getting the Wolfe site update finished today but kept getting bogged down in the details. Still got right at 40 more posts to update and I don’t think I am gonna do much if any more on i today/night. Figure I will start again in the morning and do what I can as long as I can. Think I am gonna call it an early night. Till tomorrow…
If you have a carriage return in one of your terms database Name fields it can cause “Suggested Tags From” as well as “Display Click Tags” to quit working. Just spent several hours trying to find why it quit working and ended up looking at the database since removing and reinstalling didn’t do anything. Updating to a later version did nothing. Finally went into the database and found where WordPress stored the tags data (in what they call the terms field) and started looking for something that didn’t look right. Found a couple of things that looked weird but then found one field that was twice the size of any other and noted it looked like a carriage return was in the middle of the field. Edited the field and removed the return then refreshed the page I was working on and everything worked correctly again. You have to go in and edit the database fields with phpMyAdmin or something along those lines directly to fix this problem but it does the trick. Now to make sure it doesn’t happen again…
And as it is tomorrow and have solved that really irritating problem and can now sleep, I am going to bed… π
But not quite there yet. Got about 60 more posts to go so I’ve managed to update nearly a hundred a day in the last two days. Of course at least a fair number of that last batch are gonna be the ones that have to have the books rescanned but I’ve got that down to around 10 minutes a book for scanning resizing and other assorted text cleanup on the post so not too bad.
Once I get the last ones done then I can change the theme and start working on customizing it to look and work the way I want it. π
Simple Tags went weird on the Wolfe site while ago and I haven’t gotten it back working right yet. Not sure what happened other than it’s eaten up an hour or so of my evening. π Guess I will do the uninstall bit and see if it will work when I reinstall it. Have already removed it and reuploaded it from the computer but from things on the site it leaves stuff in the database so guess I will have to remove those bits too with the uninstaller. Still working on this site fine. Damn software… πΏ
Found a site that still linked to an old domain name I had lost years ago and clicked on it to see who now had it and it went nowhere. Checked it in the whois and was not taken! So went to GoDaddy and bought it for a couple of years and pointed it to the nero-wolfe.us site for now. New one is http://www.nero-wolfe.org so now those old links out there have come home again. π Now if the folks that got my .net will just let it lapse… π
Gonna go and try one more time to get the simple tabs working and then hit the sack for the night. Till tomorrow… π
Been rebuilding ALL of the posts over there. I had hard coded database code in the template to get the scans to show up in the posts a LONG time ago before WordPress was built to handle pictures the way it does now. So now that it will and does and makes it easy I am having to remove the links from the database and upload the pictures and put them in the proper places in the text. And clean up a lot of old hard formatting that I left in when I moved the site from hard coded to WordPress in the first place. And add tags to each and every post. And rescan a lot of the covers that I never got around to way back when I started the migration. Am almost a quarter of the way through, I think. But I may not be due to I haven’t gotten to the section where I am gonna have to rescan the covers. Have done 60+ posts today so far and am about done in. It’s taking a LONG time to get it all done and make sure I haven’t forgotten something in each and every one of the blasted things. One of those things I have been meaning to do for years now and would work on for a bit and then get off on other things and not get back to till something broke and… So am gonna try to get this sucker finished and to the point that I can move on to other things on that site that I have been meaning to get done also and putting off till I got this done. I think I am procrastinating with this ramble so I don’t have to do any more of that mind numbing stuff over there. π
But I need to get back and do at least a bit more before the night is over. So will close for the nonce and see how far I can get before the siren call of sleep gets too alluring. Till tomorrow… π
*** Natural wood glaze, esprit cabane, eco-friendly DIY and decorative arts
Interesting article on making your own wood stain with pigment and beer. Cool stuff! π
Been one of those days. Got a bit done on the computer but nothing else accomplished. Haven’t even finished going through the pile of books from yesterday and getting the rest of the stickers off and books sorted. Oh, well tomorrow is another day. Till then…
Whining, White Smoke & the Mechanics of Getting Unstuck | 43 Folders
Hack your way out of writerΓ’β¬β’s block – Γ’β¬ΕLiterally. Put five completley random words on a piece of paper. Write five more words. Try a sentence. Could be about anything. A block ends when you start making words on a page.Γ’β¬Β
Several good ideas here. Well worth the read. Going to have to spend some time at the site and see what there is to see.
Bob’s Red Mill – V2 – Whole Grain and Gluten Free Products and Recipes
Nice range of products and from what I have looked at the prices are good too. Suppose to be carried at Rainbow Food Marts in the Gadsden area as well as several other places within a reasonable distance. Had planned on checking the Rainbow Food Marts out yesterday but things happened, so will see what they carry next trip that way.
EU forced to release list of objects you’re not allowed to take on planes – Boing Boing
The European Court of Justice is forcing the EU into publishing its top-s33kr1t list of things you’re not allowed to take on airplanes. Oh noes! Now the terrists will have the complete, exhaustive list of all the devices it is possible to crash an airplane with. We are doomed.
Now if the US courts would do the same to TSA, though I’m not sure they have a list from the way they change the rules from airport to airport.
solecist.net
The differences between Las Vegas slot machines and voting machines.
Yea, the slots are a much safer way to gamble. Pity that… π― πΏ
Steampunk Unboxing: Difference Engine Arrives in Silicon Valley
I can’t help but wonder just how different the world today would be if this had been built back then. Amazing bit of work!
Brass Goggles ΓΒ» Blog Archive ΓΒ» Steampunk Magazine Issue #4 and the Gaslamp Bazaar
And now the rest of the day is just gonna have to wait. Later, y’all… π
Slashdot | Robot Rebellion Quelled in Iraq
And who didn’t expect this to happen? Too much, too soon, too little independent testing…
Take Your Music Open-Source With Ogg Vorbis – Wired How-To Wiki
Now with iTunes support, kinda. Going to have to look at Ogg again. Looks like it has grown up a bit since the last time I tried it out.
London teen orders ‘cab, innit’ | The Register
Too funny! π π π Thanks to Steve for the link.
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