Life in the Bus Lane

Wordpress 2.5 is out. It installed cleanly on my development site, but the flickr manager plugin seemed to hang. Eventually I worked out that there was an update available for it which hadn’t been announced and that seemed to solve the problem, so a quick svn sw http://svn.automattic.com/wordpress/tags/2.5/ later and everything was upgraded cleanly.

The newly redesigned admin pages take a bit of getting used to, everything isn’t quite where I expect it to be, but I assume I’ll get used to it fairly quickly. The new dashboard view is better now that it includes a stats widget.

Not only does our new web filter have a problem with Scunthorpe, it also dislikes Clitheroe and Middlesborough.

A couple of weeks ago I enabled SPF checking on my mail server to see if it actually did any good or not, and the answer is a resounding "no". In the time I was running it it only blocked a couple of mails, which almost certainly would have been dropped via other methods anyway, and actually blocked at least one legitimate email. I’ll stick to using a combination of the zen.spamhaus.org DNSBL and greylisting which works perfectly well.

I could watch it for hours.

BBC Clock

From the new look www.bbc.co.uk

A new toy arrived today.

I’ve calibrated both my desktop PC and the laptop already. Currently things look a bit odd, but I suspect that’s because I’d got used to the previous calibrated-by-eye look that was almost, but not entirely, correct.

HD DVD is dead, Blu-Ray is king. It’s a bit of a shame HD DVD lost as its region-free nature meant you could buy disks from anywhere and they’d play on any machine. Blu-Ray takes a step back to the early days of DVD when disks were region-coded and region-free hacks were less common.

I nearly bought a PS3 today to join the Blu-Ray gang, but looked at my credit card balance and decided I didn’t really need one after all, and shall stick with my standard DVD player which did an admirable job today of showing 5 episodes of The West Wing, Michael Clayton, and Vulgar.

WordPress 2.3.3 was released today, so I thought I’d fiddle about a bit and make installing upgrades easier. A quick read of Updating WordPress with Subversion, along with a sudo aptitude install subversion and everything is up and running.

There’s no real point to this post, other than to try out a new plugin, which it turns out isn’t really doing what it’s meant to be doing. Odd.

Update: It’s now all been fixed.

The worst bit about the forthcoming Firefox 3 is the new functionality of the address bar. The new richlist format gives far too much preference to the title of the page rather than the URL, and just looks ugly.

Fear not, help is at hand.

Type "about:config" into the address bar, find the browser.urlbar.richResults boolean entry, and set it to "false". Restart Firefox and all is back to normal.