Google Moon

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On July 20, 1969, man first landed on the Moon… Those clever folks over at Google have just launched Google Moon in honour of that day. Google have added lunar images to their Google Maps interface and added in some significant locations.

In honor of the first manned Moon landing, which took place on July 20, 1969, we’ve added some NASA imagery to the Google Maps interface to help you pay your own visit to our celestial neighbor. Happy lunar surfing.

Oh, and don’t forget to zoom in all the way to get the really close detail!

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

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Jamie with her copy of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (Harry Potter 6) [Children's Edition] Jamie and I went to our local Borders tonight to wait for the release of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince at midnight. We got to the store around 9:45 pm. There were quite a few people already in the place, but not as many as the last time we did this.

All the staff were very much in to the spirit of the event with lots of costumes and hats. They put on a little entertainment including a Harry Potter quiz. At eleven we had a reading of the last chapter of the fifth book, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix so we could remember our place in the saga. Has it happens, Jan, Jamie, and I have all re-read the fifth book in the last couple of weeks.

Around 11:30 the queue had started forming and I decided to stake my place so as to not be too far down. Jamie joined me about 15 minutes later. I must say, standing in a queue for 30 minutes without moving is rather dull! We did get talking to a nice chap and his daughter who were just in front of us.

The Borders staff had been announcing regularly the time left before the ‘arrival’ of the book. At five minutes to go they started announcing every minute, then 30 seconds to go, 15 seconds, then a count down from 10. There was a round of applause and two head high palettes, encased in black plastic wrap, were brought from the back of the store to the front of the queue. Without any more ceremony, the wrap was removed, the boxes inside opened, and the staff started handing out books at a frantic pace.

We got our two copies quite quickly and we were out of the store and on our way back home by a quarter past midnight. Now Jamie and Jan are both in bed feverishly reading the book; I have to wait for the first one to finish — again. If Jan finishes as quickly as she did two years ago, I should be able to start it by the end of Sunday!

Update 16/07/2005 17:00 Jamie finished the book a short time ago!

Further Update 16/07/2005 11:00 Jan finished her copy around 10:30. I start reading it tomorrow.

Too many 404’s

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I use a custom 404 page on this site which emails me a notification whenever a bad request for a page is made. Over the last five days I’ve received in excess of 15,000 of these 404 emails. Oh dear!

This system has been pretty useful for spotting mistakes, mine and other peoples. If I include a wrong link in a post, I soon start getting 404 emails. I can quickly correct the issue. If someone else has a bad link to me, the email includes the referer (sic) field, so I can quickly trace the problem. Great stuff! It’s been working fine for ages.

Then, a few days ago, I notice a lot (a few hundred) of 404 emails in the Gmail folder they are automatically shunted to. I glanced through them and noticed that they looked like permanent links to my old blog url .../b2/archives/p/1234... that had been somehow corrupted into .../journalized//p/1234/.... I also noticed that it was Yahoo’s search engine web crawler. I moved one back to my Gmail inbox and popped a star on there to remind me to look into it.

So here I am today looking into it. I still hadn’t realized there were more than a few hundred! It was only when I fired up Thunderbird to clear out my POP3 mailboxes, that I saw some 20,000 emails waiting to download!

A fairly quick investigation revealed that my old b2 redirect script was still in place. But when I changed some code around and added some debug to it, I got nothing. Ah ha! I vaguely remembered fiddling with redirects in my .htaccess file the other day. I quickly spotted the culprit and commented out the line. Yay! instantly fixed.

I’d been trying to short circuit the PHP redirect code with the quicker apache redirect for the simplest case with the following line: Redirect Permanent /b2/archives https://journalized.zed1.com/ There are so many regular expression RedirectMatch lines in there that I forgot that that line would retain the rest of the URL when redirecting. You can even see where the extra slash came from!

Lesson learned: When making a change like this don’t just check it works, check that the other stuff isn’t broken!

WordPress 1.5.1.3 Released

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WordPress 1.5.1.3 was released this morning. This release contains a security fix that is well worth having. Whilst the particular vulnerability hasn’t been officially announced, it’s not too hard to figure it out.

I’ve just upgraded the dozen or so blogs I manage and it was quite painless. There are some other fixes along with the security fix so don’t hesitate to get it.

Stop! Thief!

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Who the heck is this cheeky so-and-so? Someone going by the name of ‘refekt’ has thrown up a WordPress blog with half-a-dozen or so of my blog postings under their own name! They even gone so far as to reproduce the markup I used as well as the blog being one of my themes.

The blog is at podzice.com. The domain is owned by Chi-Tak Chow of whitewater, WI.
I’ve contacted the hosting service and cc-ed the Administrative Contact for the domain. Alas the latter bounced immediately.

update 1:20am: Here’s another one. www.golig.com/wp This time just taking the headlines and first few words, presumably to have some content to experiment with.

Update 26/06/2005: I’ve had no response from either the owner or the hosting company and there are a couple of new stories on there now (neither are mine). So I went ahead and registered on his blog (you have to register in order to comment). I’ve left a polite comment on each of the 8 or 9 posts which have been stolen from me. They are flagged for moderation, I await a response.

Resolved! 26/06/2005: Chris Parkerson at his hosting company has removed the posts with my content! Great. Thanks Chris!
I also got a separate email from the owner of the site explaining he had given posting privileges to the guy who was responsible and won’t be doing that again.

Journalized Blue

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Update 7 Dec 2008: This theme is superseded by Journalized Theme version 2.7. Please use that version from now on.

Update 12 Nov 2008 There is a new Beta version 2.7 available to try, see the theme page for details. Please download it and give it a try.

This version is now defunct and will no longer be maintained.

On this page you can find the latest version of my blog layout and colour scheme as a WordPress theme.
Clicking the thumbnail below will show you a full size screen shot of the theme in action.
screenshot of journalized theme

This release incorporates many of the fixes and changes suggested by people trying the theme.

You can download the files from here: journalized-blue-theme-1.0.3.tar.gz (tar ball for unix or similar users) or journalized-blue-theme-1.0.3.zip (zip file for Windows users).

To install simply expand the archive on your local machine. You should have a directory called ‘journalized-blue’. Upload the directory and the files within it to your wp-content/themes folder on your server. Login to your blog’s administration pages and go to the Presentation page. The new theme should be listed there ready for you to select. If not check the permissions on your uploaded files.

Enjoy! The theme is licensed under the GPL. So you may modify it and distribute it. Please let me know if you use it, modify it, etc. If you have any questions leave a comment on this post with your question. Comments are moderated so you won’t see your comment immediately.

What’s Changed?

The main changes in the themes are these:

I’ve added missing tags to the main section of the theme. That is, the ‘Previous Entries’ and ‘Next Entries’ links after the main content. I’ve also added in the Next and previous story links above the post when you are looking at an individual post.
In the side bar I’ve removed all the get_links() and get_linksbyname() calls and substituted a single call to get_links_list().

I’ve adjusted the CSS to display the nested unordered lists from the call to display like the h4/rightsidesection combination we had before.

I’ve added a page template for pages like this one with slightly different layout for the content. There are some minor bug fixes on the pages and I’ve added the the fix for aligned or floated images not displaying in Internet Explorer.

Update: 27/06/2005
Because the side bars are narrower on Journalized blue than Sand or Winter, the calendar on the right hand side doesn’t quite fit.
A quick cure is to change the padding in the cells. You need to edit the table#wp-calendar td rule in style.css
Go to line 307 and change the 3 pixel padding to 2 pixels. It should end up like this:

table#wp-calendar td {
    padding: 0px 2px;
    color: #000000;
    text-align:center;
}

I’ll issue a new version as soon as I’ve incorporated another fix and some recent changes.