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Has anyone else noticed that the volume dial on the BBC embedded iPlayer goes to 11?
It made me chuckle, at least.

When the sky is bright and the weather is warm, not necessarily dry but warm, I walk around barefoot. Not just the house, but the garden and the town too. I go for groceries, plod round sainsburys, wander to the butchers and so forth with my pinkies out proud. Admittedly this all started because there was a period where I had no workably comfortable shoes, but thankfully someone with some publishing power has added creedence to my cause.

Check out this article on why I am right and why you are wrong about footwear: Shoes are Bad For You.

More after the jump…

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I had some out of memory errors recently, which is naturally absurd for a machine with 4gb RAM (Yes I know XP doesn’t support it, but it’s future proofing in case Vista ever works out or Adobe release their products on Linux…(And yes I know Vista can’t boot with 4gb of RAM either properly without hacking yet, but by the time I get around to it I’m lazily hoping they’ll have fixed the issue…)) Anyway, back on track, I came across a post regarding a potential fix to some common out of memory errors over at Kevin Dente’s blog. I’ve implemented it, the world has yet to implode and I haven’t come across an error message yet. Fingers crossed.

Cor blimey. The almost rabid pace of new posting is almost enough to make my webhost break a small cyber sweat! Three in one month is surely more than the machine can handle, perhaps they need to upgrade it to Vista… It’s fast better stronger, right? 😉

Anyway the point of this post is to bounce people towards the Second Life Scam, which may or may not be true, but if an economist is prepared to sink ten thousand dollars into testing a theory, I’m more inclined to think there’s a little meat on it. Afterall, if there was real money to be made doing it you can bet your arse they’d be staying mum and pouring millions in. The oulook is that Second Life is essentially a cleverly designed pyramid scheme, where only a few participants at the top of the stack are able to extract any reasnoble sums of money in $USD, wheras everyone else is restricted by a withdrawal scheme more squeezing than Paypal’s, which is saying something.

They could, of course, be spreading disinformation to prevent other investors from diluting a rich profit market, but the arguements put forward do seem to make sense.

Damn clever scheme, though.

It never occurred to me before now, but something tipped me off somewhere out there on the big wide web to the fact that you can sterilise things in a microwave. Why this blatantly obvious fact had until this point eluded me makes me feel somewhat ignorant, but I digress. Kitchen cloths and sponges are microbe hotels. They LOVE it in there with the old food, old fat, moisture… Quite delightful really. It doesn’t take long for a sponge or blue cloth to start to smell a “little off” and this delightful scent will gladly spread itself around on dishes and surfaces washed with it.

The solution? Whack it in the microwave for 2-3 minutes on full. Cloths might take a little less but the sponges (If wet) 2-3 minutes. Needless to say after a quick (And somewhat steamy) blast my previously significantly stinky sponge is reduced to a slightly worn-out but sterile state.

Joy.

Typo3 is an amazing creation. It’s a fantastically powerful CMS, based on PHP and available for free. However, it’s so powerful that when things go wrong there are many places to look…

I have no idea if this has been resolved in the latest codebase for Typo3, but in the version I was using for a recent project I was being driven crazy by google claiming it couldn’t see my site due to a 503 server response.

Turns out wGet on Ubuntu couldn’t either.

Turns out, that if you have a dynamic content extension like tt_news set to not cache, and happen to insert that via TypoScript into your page, Typo3 will constantly issue temporary 503 headers as it believes the page isn’t cached and is busily being cached, which of course it isn’t because you told it not to.

This causes some irritation when your main page is issuing invisible 503’s (As hey, your site loads in the browser…) but oddly doesn’t feature on Google because their poor robot brain doesn’t know what’s happening.

The fix? Well I trawled the net and found a few bug reports on the issue but the resolution wasn’t visible in the code I had on-server, so I applied a few of them manually. One worked, and he is as follows:

Look for the file class.tslib\_fe.php in path-to-source/typo3/sysext/cms/tslib/ and open her up. Somewhere around line 2574 (Whoever thought 4000 lines in a PHP class was a good thing was clearly smoking something very interesting…) you should see the following code:

// Storing for cache:
if (!$this->no_cache) {
$this->realPageCacheContent();
} elseif ($this->tempContent) { // If there happens to be temporary content in the cache and the cache was not cleared due to new content put in it... ($this->no_cache=0)
$this->clearPageCacheContent();
}

Simply add a line in the 2nd clause, to make it look like so:

// Storing for cache:
if (!$this->no_cache) {
$this->realPageCacheContent();
} elseif ($this->tempContent) { // If there happens to be temporary content in the cache and the cache was not cleared due to new content put in it... ($this->no_cache=0)
$this->clearPageCacheContent();
$this->tempContent = false;
}

And you’re all set. No more mysterious 503’s on genuinely dynamic content.

I sincerely wish I had enough passion or interest in anything that would motivate me to attain a greater-than-mediocre level in said subject. I also wish that I’d know how appalling mediocrity is when I was a kid, so I could have taken the approach of this fellow… I give you, Canon in D, Rock Style.

I just suffered a hard-drive failure on my photo backup drive. Dead. No detecty. Stone cold. Fortunately I only move files to that drive after I’ve copied them to a DVD… usually. I think. As I’ve got no way to read the drive at all now I’ve similarly got no way of knowing what I’ve just lost. **Joy** .

It also means I’ll have lost every photo I’ve processed for the last 12 months or so, which is bad. See my backup strategy doesn’t really pan out for RAW files that I’ve extracted and played around with ready for printing, something that I have been meaning to sort out for a while now and this even has catalysed.

Dontations for a replacement SATA backup drive gratefully accepted.