A Mind @ Play

WordPress 2.7 Update

On 12th December 2008

True to form, the WordPress team have brought out another much-improved version of their popular blogging software. Having just updated the blog, it’s clear to see the amount of work which has gone into this release, and how many feature enhancements and bug fixes have been rolled out over the course of last year. Whilst it’s normally difficult from an end-user perspective to see how much work has been done on the backend, this release provides such a clean, intuitive and flexible interface that it’s easy to see how WordPress can now move forward with other things. All of the project members and contributors should be rightly proud of their achievement.

To coincide with the update, as promised in a previous post, there’s a new theme compatible with the various comment improvements in WordPress 2.7, and I hope to do a bit more tidying and rearranging before the New Year, including posting a few of those unpolished drafts that are starting to gather dust.

Daily Links

By Fips

On 21st November 2008

In Daily Links

Top 10 IT disasters of all time – Starting with an early warning system on the blink in September, 1983 (just a couple of months before the Able Archer incident), and running through such classics mix ups as the Millennium Bug and the Dell laptop battery inferno, this site lists some of biggest disasters in IT history (though omitting those which caused loss of life).

Auction Bloopers – Find some ebay bargains by looking for common misspellings of items.

Sensible Units – Afraid of the onslaught of metric? Then measure length in albatross wingspans or weigh in terms of female lions or CRT monitors with this fun little website.

Enigma – If you’ve an interest in cryptography, this little website allows you to use your very own Enigma cipher, and provides an inkling into just how complicated the mechanism can really be.

The Future of File-Sharing

By Fips

On 5th November 2008

In Politics

Moses and the Eleventh Commandment

The war against file-sharing that currently rages primarily over the Internet will ultimately be lost. That’s my prediction. I can’t support this argument with any authority, being no expert in the fields of law, politics or technology, but instead make my statement on the basis of many years’ observation from the wilderness. But the trends all point to this being the case. File-sharing has become a mainstay of this new generation, a fact which has forced most corporations and organisations to rethink their strategies and come up with ways to stem the tide. We have already seen many changes in this direction, such as the explosion of digital content that is now available online from legitimate sources. But in addition to this carrot, the war is also being waged with a stick, as organisations set out to have legislation passed to clamp down on file-sharing activities, and new technologies are created to lock down digital content and prevent its spread. So what will the future bring?

New Domain Name

By Fips

On 4th November 2008

In General

After more than two years at a temporary location, and in part to celebrate breaking the hundred post barrier (albeit almost unnoticed), this blog has ‘moved’ to a new location. Whilst the hosting remains the same, the blog can now be found under the new domain name amindatplay.eu. There may be a few broken links around the place, but everything seems to be working well so far. With the amount of work being done to release WordPress 2.7 in November, it might also be time for a bit of a clean before winter hibernation, so perhaps expect a few tweaks and perhaps an experimental new layout or two in the next few of weeks.

Support for Renewables

By Fips

On 31st October 2008

In General, Transport

We’ve had a pellet boiler installed at these premises for a number of years, and whilst generally pretty efficient and reliable, recently there were some problems which couldn’t be solved with the usual panache of just hitting it and telling it to work. The boiler, a 15 kW Künzel PL15, had got stuck in a de-ashing cycle and would only intermittently fire up before returning to this cycle. Unfortunately, the firm which installed the boiler had in the meantime gone out of business, and our only option was to send for an engineer from a neighbouring county, which took several days, before the unit could be looked at. It turned out to be a problem with the microprocessor controller, the piece of kit which maintains the boiler’s high efficiency, though obviously beyond our capabilities to solve without sufficient technical knowledge (even the engineer who appeared on site had to call back to base for instructions that weren’t included in his handbook).

Unfortunately there appears to be precious little information out there on the web. I spent some moments trying to find descriptions of problems similar to ours, or find a support forum for users of equipment such as ours where we could perhaps get some feedback, without success. That could of course come more as a result of my Googling skills than anything else. Do you know of any sites, forums or otherwise which deals with pellet boilers and their ilk? If not, is there enough call for one to be set up?