OK, another Friday fun post - shorter this time as it’s a rush to put it together.
Less
More
Archive for October, 2007
As I said last week I decided to do a fun post each Friday, so here we go 
(If you’re easily offended, you might want to skip some of the jokes, although you’ll still like the video!)
This is Snowball the “Rockin’ Cockatoo” dancing to the Backstreet Boys (found via Donncha’s post). It’s best with the sound on!
If you use Arch Linux I’d strongly suggest using the snippet of code below to use rankmirrors to sort your pacman repository mirrors into an optimal order, to use the fastest servers first.
cd /etc/pacman.d
for repo in *; do
echo "Processing $repo..."
mv $repo $repo.b4.rankmirrors
rankmirrors -v $repo.b4.rankmirrors > $repo
done
I was getting an average of about 300-400K/sec; after doing this, I was reaching 10M/sec!
Yesterday a business contact of mine spoke of badgering someone (meaning to pester them). I remarked that it’s a great word, and he raised the interesting observation: “what’s it called when a badger does it?”.
I’ve just added the Gravatar plugin to my WordPress install, allowing Gravatars to be displayed for comments.
Gravatars are “globally gecognized avatars” associated with an email address. The idea is that you can upload a small avatar (picture), and any site on which you post which supports them will be able to show that picture.
I found out about them from search.cpan.org which now supports them, and Andy Hexten produced a page showing gravatars of CPAN contributors (I’ve only just created one for my @cpan.org address, so I’m not on there yet).
Apparently the family of a 13-year old boy who choked to death on a plastic pen lid are campaigning to ban them.
Now of course I have sympathy for the loss of their son, but I do think campaigning to ban pen lids is ridiculous. What next, shall we start a campaign to ban kitchen knives, because sometimes people cut themselves on them?
I’ve been meaning to whack up a post about this - I launched a new song lyrics search website the other day called LyricsBadger.
It uses my Lyrics::Fetcher Perl module to fetch song lyrics from a variety of sites, and remembers what it’s been asked for before so that it can present lists of artists/songs which it’s already been asked for.
I built it as a testbed for Lyrics::Fetcher and to get some experience with Template Toolkit for Perl (which absolutely rocks!). The entire site is powered by one Perl script and a handful of templates, and uses a ScriptAlias directive to pass all requests to the one script so that it can provide nice clean URLs like /lyrics/Artist/Title.
Why not go and give LyricsBadger a try?
I’ve decided it might be a nice idea to do a fun post each Friday. So, as from today, I’ll be putting up a “fun” post each Friday, with jokes/pictures/videos/whatever to celebrate Friday. This is just a starter, next week’s one ought to be better (as I’ll have more time to put it together, and use my new-found ability to schedule WordPress posts for later publishing to get them ready in advance
Ten funny stories submitted by doctors. Taken from a old post on Visordown. Continue reading ‘Is there a doctor in the house?’
This is as much for my own reference as for anyone else, but hey. I use Firefox, and have become accustomed to typing “google whatever” into the address bar to Google for “whatever”. Unfortunately with the fresh install of FF on my new (well, not so new any more) laptop, that stopped working, as Firefox had automatic keyword search enabled, so typing anything in the address bar that wasn’t an address would be turned into a Google search. This meant that “google whatever” would result in a Google search for “google whatever” rather than a search for “whatever”.
The fix: go to the advanced config by typing about:config in the address bar, find the setting keyword.enabled and toggle it to false.
Now, set up bookmarks with keywords - I haven’t time to type that up, so read the recent post on Lifehacker - Fiften Firefox Quick Searches - it’s easy stuff.
Now, things are as they should be. If I want to Google for something, I’ll type “google whatever”. If I want to go to a web address, I’ll type a web address. If I want to look something up in a dictionary I’ll type “dict whatever”. If whatever I type isn’t an address and isn’t one of the keywords I’ve set up, Firefox will tell me that I’m being a muppet - exactly as it should do IMO, rather than just automatically going to Google.
Recent Comments