There and Back Again

I went to the Reading Music Festival this weekend, it was great fun. Lots of music (some of it even good) and a good time had by all.

I slept for 13 hours last night so im recovered pretty well. Now its time to get lots of work done, since yesterday in half asleep mode I wasn’t to productive.

Well I helped setup Gallery at Eichorn.org so my Dad could put up photos. I started playing with it a bit and its pretty nice, especially the XP integrated uploads and the java program to upload with.

Not sure if i’ll put everything in it or not, but i guess I should move the stuff over at my old website there.

Anyhow check out some new photos from London.

Today we got our emergency preperation book from the government. If you want to see its great suggestions like: “GO IN, STAY IN, TUNE IN” you can download a copy in like 10 different languages from the preparing for emergencies website.

Also you can no longer throw away trash in any of the train or tube stations. And they remind you that you can help keep things clean by taking your litter how with you :-).

So I live at 32 Ingleby Road, Here is a picture of the front for all of you that were wondering what it looked like.

and just because I can, here is a picture that shows you the brits obsession with public toliets.

Yesterday I took 81 pictures walking around Central London. Its going to take me awhile to get them all uploaded but I’m uploading a couple panorama’s from the Monument for you to enjoy.

The walk up to the top is a painful 311 steps and then there are bars in the way so its hard to take good photos. I thought I had enough for a full 360, but It didn’t quite work out. But I do have some nice sized panorama’s in each direction.

I think this one turned out best.

Have a look at all of them, in my View from the Monument collection.

Ok I started naming and uploading pictures from my site seeing around London. I’m slowing getting them organized but I don’t have then in a gallery or anything like that.

If anyone knows of some nice software for making a web based scrapbook instead of just throwing up some images let me know.

First here is my desktop background these days.

Finally the photos that are there are organized, but you need to be patient or have high speed to browse them since they are all around a meg each and I didn’t bother with thumbnails.

• Intro Photos - random photos that Im going to use at the start of my scrapbook if I ever make it
• Tour of Central London - pictures I took wandering around Central London
• Trafalgar Square - pictures of Trafalgar Square
• Tower of London - pictures from the tour I took at the tower

Ok the nice thing about this phrase is to Frank it means, lets go drink at a bar until they kick you out. Then go back to the house and have 2 or 3 more. My stomach just can’t handle this rate. On less liver destroying news (or maybe more) im attempting to get tickets to the reading music festival next weekend to go with Frank, Selene, and Nicole. Hopefully it works out, a weekend of drunken music would really round thing out.

So every time my co-worker Charles would drive to California he would tell me about the cell towers hiding as trees. I always missed them, but now we can all enjoy it.

FraudFrond is a website dedicated to Fake Trees, Bogus Botanicals and Counterfeit Conifers.

Ok so im more or less done with the new layout, im not sure that I actually like it at all. But it has a chance of being readable so will just go with it for a few days.

Here is image I’m using for the blog redesign.

Going with this theme I might grab something from this image as well.

Btw I used a new plugin to do this, its called ImageManager, it has a nice js editor and everything, doing the work right on the server. I think i’ll use it and some sort of auto thumbnail making program for uploads. 1×1 image upload and tweak is to slow when i take lots of stuff.

Which brings up a good point, what do people use for managing images on Windows XP, I got the gimp 2.0 for tweaking them, but unless its got some macros I don’t think it does batch stuff.

Ok so the site has progressed a bit, I do wonder if any of the layout im using works outside of mozilla. (Its actually decent, i’ll have to play around with it a little bit tomorrow) So far its based off a photo i took of a speed limit sign here in Ilford. Once I get the theme updated i’ll start posting the rest of the Photos i’ve taken.

I was thinking about making a web based scrapbook of them but that seems like to much work so i’ll just toss them up on the blog.

My little sister had her babythis morning.

Thomas Randell born at 8:32 Eastern Standard Time.

I always seem to miss the births, I won’t see Thomas until he is about 5 months old. Good thing they borrowed my Dad’s digital camera.

I don’t have a new theme yet, but I have a PHP Syntax Highlighter.

It could use some more features, but i’m sure i’ll get to those if I ever start using it.

And Now some PHP Code just for fun.

[php]
// Hello World in PHP5 DOM
$src = ‘
World
‘;
$xml = DomDocument::loadXml($src);

echo $xml->firstChild->nodeName.” “.$xml->firstChild->textContent;
[/php]
I Can’t seem to get a whack-n in the code though, quite annoying but that seems to be a wordpress problem.

I upgraded to Worldpress 1.2 today, I don’t think anything broke but if you notice a bad link let me know and i’ll symlink/redirect things back into working order.

I’m also working on a new template so you’ll just have to put up with things being ugly for a bit.

Ok I also setup nice permalinks for stuff, the mod_rewrite stuff was kinda odd, I copied the rules into my .htaccess from the admin screen and nothing.

I ended up adding a ForceType rule for archives feeds and comments like you would to then symlink index to those files, but just adding the ForceType rules made the rewrite work. Very odd, maybe it has something to do with my having AcceptPathInfo on for the entire server.

Ok so it ended up being that I had a file called block.conf in my apache2 conf.d directory which used rewrite rules to kill annoying spiders that don’t follow robots.txt and such. And even though I though I had it turned off earlier i really hadn’t since I use graceful to restart the server and someone must have been downloading or something.

I spent most of the weekend doing a whole lot of nothing, it was fun. I did go out on Saturday night with some roommates old and new (Isabella is leaving and is replaced by a guy from France).

Oh yea and I think I watched about 20 hours of olympics, including 3 hours of he opening ceremony, including watching the entire parade of nations. I need help, I know.

Oh and the BBC olympic coverage is fantastic, uses interactive tv so you always have 5 stations of coverage. Only thing that would make it better would be more athelete bios, and some good British altheletes in sports besides Sailing or Badminton.

There has been a bit of talk lately on the Savant mailing list. Then the same thing up on the PhpLondon mailing list so I figured i’d stop talking about the solution and start implementing it.

The big claim is that a compiled template engine like Smarty is safter because you can’t use all of the PHP functions but I think this is just a straw man argument. Since php 4.3 we’ve had a working tokeniezer extension and with that you can sit down in an afternoon and write some code to tell you what functions etc your using in your template code.

Then from there its just a matter of using Savants compiler to check the status of your script, or if you want it more generic just make a php stream.

Anyhow the first part of the effort is done you can download PHPCodeAnalyzer, or just read the docs to see what it does. Or if your really in a hurry view the live demo.

I’ve been seeing brute force attempts on the phpdoc.org server for about 2 weeks now.

Stuff like:
sshd:
Invalid Users:
Unknown Account: 16 Time(s)
Authentication Failures:
unknown (colob166074.serverpark.com ): 4 Time(s)
unknown (cmcc203.cm.nctu.edu.tw ): 12 Time(s)
root (cmcc203.cm.nctu.edu.tw ): 6 Time(s)

Illegal user test from 140.113.236.203
Illegal user test from 140.113.236.203
Illegal user guest from 140.113.236.203
Illegal user guest from 140.113.236.203
Illegal user admin from 140.113.236.203
Illegal user admin from 140.113.236.203
Illegal user admin from 140.113.236.203
Illegal user admin from 140.113.236.203
Illegal user user from 140.113.236.203
Illegal user user from 140.113.236.203
Illegal user test from 140.113.236.203
Illegal user test from 140.113.236.203
Illegal user test from 69.67.166.74
Illegal user test from 69.67.166.74
Illegal user guest from 69.67.166.74
Illegal user guest from 69.67.166.74

Not that i know anyone who has a guest,test,user, or admin account, but if you have one i would suggest, renaming it, and making sure it has a good password.

Also i would interested to know if someone else is seeing this same pattern or has some more info about it.

I played some Tennis this afternoon with Peter. I was surprised that I was still decent, of course the racket, balls, and court all sucked. Oh and I managed to hurt my ankle. Minus that it would have been enjoyable.

I had a pretty good weekend. Saturday I saw the Phantom of the Opera at Her Majesty’s Theater. The seats were amazing, it was quite the spectacle. I could have done with out the whole 3 people singing at once thing, but on the whole I really enjoyed it.

Sunday I went with my roommate Isabella and her friend Peter to a Shakespeare festival in Haxton. It was an enjoyable time, but it was put on by the National Youth Theater so it was all hip (that means they changed stuff) and was kinda in a weird location so it was hard to follow what was going on. But it was enjoyable, after a couple hours of that we went an got a drink played a bit of poll and then went on an adventure of a lifetime.

It was the Quest for the Chocolate Cake and it had us looking in 10 or 15 different pubs and restaurants in the area looking for chocolate cake for Isabella. We found puddings, ice cream, even tarts but the cake was nowhere to be found. Finally at the last place we checked (of course we would have been quite foolish to keep looking after we found the cake :-P), a Pizza Express we found the Cake. Oh and we had some pizza too.

Regretablly the cake was only scored a 4.5 by our Olympic judges.

Oh and it turns out there was a store called “A Piece of Cake” in the train station, I wonder what the cake there would have scored.