Yet Another Blog

Samba Server can be a real bastard to get working sometimes.

If you ever get the error ‘getpeername failed. Error was Transport endpoint is not connected’ try:
smbpasswd -a nobody
then hit Enter twice (for a blank password). It just worked for me, after about an hour’s reinstallation and Google searching. Why can’t error messages be less unfriendly :'(

Argh. 382 emails last night alone. Somebody is spamming the entire continent of South America using sales@1do3.com as the From adress, which has the rather undesirable consequence of hundreds of ‘Mail Delivery Failure’ notices arriving in my inbox. I daren’t just filter them out, in case something genuine that I need to be alerted to comes in, but it’s very tempting….

I bit the bullet and got a Canon Powershot A80, as I promised. It’s a very nice camera with superb quality. As its my first real foray into the world of photography I’m finding the camera simple enough to understand without reading (all) the manual, yet complicated enough for me to continue to be suprised by it.

For the first couple of weeks, I’ve been playing. Unfortunately didn’t get any shots of the total lunar eclipse last Saturday (bloody cloudy, wasn’t it) but I did get some interesting long exposure shots on the way home.

I must install Gallery at some point. However much I dislike the complexity of it, it’s still the best one I can find that doesn’t require me to manually create all sorts of thumbnails myself. Unless any of you wise surfers have come across a better one?

Until now, I’d used Google Toolbar + Dictionary.com to look up definitions of words rapidly (I type the word in Google Toolbar, click Search, then click the word itself in the results page which loads up dictionary.com).

Looking around on the Internet for more detailed meanings of words, I stumbled upon WordNet, a project that has a very useful approach to word searches. You can type a word to find a meaning as one would expect, but the clever part is with what you can do next: a dropdown menu presents a list of futher searches based on your word, to show Synonyms, Hypernyms and Hyponyms, and a number of other searches. Hypernyms and Hyponyms are particularly interesting alternatives to Thesauri.

Blogwise is one today. The past year has gone quickly. Admittedly development of the site has gone a lot slower than I expected, but it IS a hobby so it’s gotten the time that I have to spare, rather than the time I’d like to give it. Anyway, the best news is that I hit 10,000 blogs today – a great achievement imho.

Unfortunately I didn’t get as many hits as I’d hoped for this month (was hoping for 100,000 – got 95,000!) but it’s still up on last month, and every month before, so it’s growing! That said, I did tip 20,000 visitors for the first time this month and have transferred over 5 gigabytes of data (mostly images). I know this is nowhere near the size of the larger sites, Technorati, Eatonweb, etc. but it still makes me very happy inside.

I have been very proud of how well Blogwise has climbed up the ladder though, it’s 15th on the Popdex all-time popular links, eighth on the Technorati Top 100, and is doing quite well on Blogshares (which is down atm 🙁 – it’s also fourth if you search for ‘blog directory’ on Google – which quite a lot of people seem to do.

What’s next? Well, I am definitely committed to developing a more autonomous site, although I still intend to have all sites checked by hand for now. Metadata is going to be playing a very much more important role in the listings (and is already starting to creep in now). I’m also very keen to get logins done asap now – it’s top of my list of priorities, since many other features I expect to roll out will depend on it.

Finally, thanks to everybody who has shown their support for Blogwise – it’s been a great first year and I’m very much looking forward to the second, the third and beyond being even more successful.

I get really sick of computers sometimes – and it’s certainly unhealthy to sit in front of a screen all day, so I’ve decided to expand my horizons and find a new hobby.

Since getting a Pocket DV cam and a camera phone, I’ve developed a liking for photography, so I thought I’d take the plunge and get some "proper" equipment.

Come Monday, this should be mine 🙂

The Regex Coach is an excellent desktop tool for Windows and Linux that helps debug and analyse your regular expressions.

After a chat with others about web browsing the other day, I suddenly realised that I don’t use bookmarks at all. Ever. It’s completely empty.

I’m a creature of habit – I only check a few pages daily and these are all listed here (for convenience only; I can remember the URLs) – this page is my home page all the time!

I think I’ve reached a point where memory and weblog combined have made bookmarks completely redundant for me. Any unusual websites of note I list here – any oft-visited sites I can usually remember. It also helps that I’m getting pretty skilled at using Google to find results quickly and accurately.

Is this common? Are any of you guys finding bookmarks completely redundant now?

Blaine and box comments aside, CNN seem to have a rather one-sided view of the whole event.

If you view the QUICKVOTE results on this page, apparantly 100% think that the event was “A heroic act of strength” and precisely 0 voted for “A stupid publicity stunt”.

I find that very difficult to believe! In fact, I voted for the latter, and my vote hasn’t been recorded – yet in the last five minutes or so another 60 or so people have voted Yes.

Screenshot available here

Since the beginning of June I’ve been running a little Winamp program, Personal Hit List (sadly deceased now), and I’ve just looked at my top ten played songs:

#	Artist	Track	Count
1	Christina Aguilera	Beautiful	9
2	Christina Aguilera	Makeover	9
3	Blu Cantrell f. Sean Paul	Breathe	9
4	Avril Lavigne	Sk8ter Boi	8
5	Pink	Feel Good Time	8
6	Christina Aguilera	Dirrty	7
7	No Doubt	Hella Good	7
8	Gary Jules	Mad World	7
9	Stuart	Free (Let it Be)	6
10	Goldfrapp	Train	6

I’m just a little pop bitch really 😐