denyerec.co.uk

A brief stutter out of inactivity to bring two lovely links to you. The word for today (And most likely a long time to come and for a long time past…) is Hypocrisy.

First off we have : America weaponising space in an attempt to “Deny adverdaries access to orbit”. I didn’t think anyone owned that, but there you go, obviously the USA thinks it does and has the budget to make that a reality.

Anyhow, skirting around the implications of that article (Which would probably make for a good post in isolation) we get to the second post that highlights the word of the Era… Chinese Anti-Satellite Test.

If you’re a little slow I’m just trying to point out that the media and government would like you to believe that only white men should have spaceships and/or the right to poke their nose, in glorious high res detail, into the lives of people in other countries and/or guide their expensive missiles into hospitals and daycare centres with pinpoint accuracy.

What they’re missing here is that there has been and arms race running all along, it’s just that because “Their Team was winning (Think white, wealthy and wealthy) it didn’t occur to them. The hare has been out in the lead for so long he’s forgotten why that tortoise is following him, or why the tortoise is riding a Segway. A hopped up, supercharged, submersible Segway with offroad wheels, nuclear arms and anti-satellite missiles.

I have no doubt every nation on earth wants to feel safe, and it’s down (unfortunately) to the people in power to ensure that this safety is reached together and in co-operation, rather than in animosity. M.A.D. only keeps you safe so long as no-one pushes the button.

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.

Quick one today, linking through to a cute cartoon with a pertinent message to anyone who’s ever weilded a camera in anger. What the Duck on Photography.

A little peice on (Woe betide me, I hope I am forgiven…) Fox News (See?) was brought to my attention today, regarding the segregation of men and children on aeroplanes.

So, I have an X and a Y chromosome and I’m immediately a kiddie-fiddling paeodophile “Risk Candidate” ? Holy smokes, that makes me want to feed certain board members of certain airlines into the turbine intakes of their precious jets. If I walk up to someone in the street and shout “RAPIST!” they can have me for defamation of character. If I make suggestions about an illigitimate heritage to someone of prominence I’ll be whisked away and no doubt locked up for several years on trumped up and utterly despicable “terror charges”

However, if I’m an airline then it’s perfectly ok to suggest that I’d roger the Cabin Boy or delight in giving Jane a hand down the well whilst Jack lays unconscious at the foot of the hill. Come on, what’s this all about and why, in today’s litigious society, isn’t someone sueing someone else about it? You could get yourself sued for calling a member of cabinet a wanker (Which is an almost certainly not fallacious…) but you can get away scot free supposing that any adult male is a closet paedophile (Which is almost certainly wrong, and exponentially a more serious, demeaning and damaging claim).

Oh boy, angry Den.

On the upside, I’ve acquired a new lens and a new chair, which means my arse no longer hurts and I can finally take photographs of large things without having to move out of the county to do so.

I did say “month”, I’m not actually missing a moth. Though I did discover that hawkmoths are actually the size of small birds, which is alarming. Especially when you consider that they’ve been trying to take over the world since the Sydney olympics. Moths in general, that is, not just hawkmoths.

Did anyone actually see October happen? Does anyone have any evidence? I seem to recall promising myself I’d take a month off to work on some personal projects to further my coding and photography (Yeah, that Gallery nemesis is still happening, whoda thunkit?) but nooooo, someone had to go and get sick, then ill, then loaded up with work contracts.

Goshdarnit.

To top it off, Fuji are tempting me with a new camera they’re not really saying anything about, Tokina still haven’t released the 16-50 f2.8 they’re teasing the world with and I’m still not yet a millionaire. Though that’s not to rule out the fact that Fuji and Tokina are conspiring against me on this issue.

Yes, I’ve got lots and lots of new photos. Plenty of old ones too.

No, you’re not going to see them unless I pull a finger out, restore my decrepit backup HDD to my new shiney 200gb SATA drive and recatalog everything prior to sending the old HDD to Holland (Don’t ask) and finally start processing some of the 2,000 odd photos I’ve taken over the last month or so. And THAT isn’t gonna happen if people don’t get off my back about stupid print jobs that aren’t worth the money they’re paying for them. Saving that for another day.

You can see more of the devastation in this post. Bumblebee is some kind of crappy American muscle car, not a beetle, and none of the robots appear to bear any relation to their other forms, not like the old days when you could see the parts of the Porsche sticking out of Jazz, or the nose cone down the front of Starscream.

It’s taken 20 years for this movie to come to the fore, is it going to be another 20 before we see it done right? *Sigh*. One more chance to relive the childhood dream, dashed.

It’s been quiet. Don’t sue me.

I am a child of the 80’s. I played with transformers. Things that turn into robots, for the uninitiated. You can’t get cooler than that.

However I stumbled on what is, allegedly, a preview of what Optimus Prime will look like in the upcoming 3D Movie. Click for Optimus Concept Art. Errm. Excuse me? What is that steaming pile of $#&* ?

Please viewer, acquaint yourself with the *ACTUAL* Optimus Prime.

What in the name of all things holy were they injecting when they decided to make one of the most iconic toy and cartoon characters ever into some anonymous, unidentifiable mish-mash of non-correlating, disorganised, hopelessly overstyled trash?

Moons ago I stumbled on a transformers render test by an independent artist that I was fooled into thinking was a rendertest from the movie. It shows a white Ultra Magnus cab transforming and, in my opinion, looks outstanding. It also shows a “feasible” transformation from a truck cab onto a properly proportioned and good looking Optimus-style robot.

I say fire the graphics crew on the movie and hire this guy, as his work is miles ahead.

Hopefully the “leaked” artwork is a hoax, and the movie characters will actually look like, you know, their characters. If the new ultra-spikey nonsense junk artwork is for real, then I’m of course going to do nothing constructive, I’ll just whine for a bit. Just sucks, though, as the movie production is making it look like they’re targetting the audeince that would actually rember Transformers “G1″, then spitting in their eyes by producing robots that look like scrapheap challenge accidents. Ahh well.

Right, I’ve had it. Just recently my contact form (Powered using the wp-contact form plugin) has come under pretty heavy fire from spammers. They’re not hi-jacking it, simply sending me lots of emails.

Until I can figure a way to route the wp-contactform data through Spam Karma, or add a Captcha to the form, I’m taking it offline.

If you’d like to contact me, you can do so by commenting on the “Contact Me” page, or any post for that matter.

Hopefully it won’t be offline for long.