stuart test blog

This video by itself is quite funny, but even funnier is that you can get to it via a link from Microsoft: http://go.microsoft.com/?linkid=7200131 Not sure how long this link will stay active for.

I’ve been creating a bunch of WordPress plugins recently. They are really easy to make and the documentation is great. I don’t really know much about PHP but it has the same structure as the way I write VBscript, i.e. write a bunch of functions, then call them with parameters.

Most of the plugins I’ve made have been for the Blogtown NZ site, but I’ve made a couple for standard WordPress installs too. I’m also working on a bigger one at the moment which started out as a time tracking plugin, but is now turning into a full service desk application.

This is my latest one, and I love it because of its simplicity and raw power: “Amanzi Text Control”. All it does is remove the filters that process posts and pages when rendering the output. What this means is that you can put anything in a post, including JavaScripts, CSS, HTML tags without worrying about them being stripped or modified.

<?php
/*
Plugin Name: Amanzi Text Control
Plugin URI: http://stuart.amanzi.co.nz/tag/amanzi-text-control
Description: Inspired by Jeff Minard's Text Control plugin. This plugin does one thing - removes WordPress's fomatting filters from the posts and pages.
Author: Stuart Maxwell
Version: 1.0
Author URI: http://stuart.amanzi.co.nz
*/
remove_filter('the_content', 'wpautop');
remove_filter('the_content', 'wptexturize');
remove_filter('the_excerpt', 'wpautop');
remove_filter('the_excerpt', 'wptexturize');
?>

From the Geekzone forums, I found out about TelstraClear’s speed increases on their cable network – FOR FREE! (Official press release here: More broadband speed for free)

More broadband speed for free

TelstraClear has doubled the speed of two of its most popular InHome broadband plans. 
The free speed increase raises downstream speeds on the 5 GB plan from up to 2 Mbps to up to 4 Mbps, and the 20 GB plan from up to 4 Mbps to up to 10 Mbps.  The plans are available to homes on TelstraClear’s InHome network in Wellington, Kapiti and Christchurch.
TelstraClear Head of Consumer Steve Jackson says customers on the 5 GB and 20 GB plans will be automatically upgraded to the new speeds.
“This is great for our customers and they don’t need to do anything. They’ll notice everything gets a lot faster – for free.  On our 5 GB plan alone, more than 12,000 customers will reap the benefits of an increase in speed. Who wouldn’t want at least twice the speed for no increase in price?”
Mr Jackson says the company was noticing a change in customer behaviour, with customers wanting to optimise their broadband experience for things such as streaming video.
“We’re staying ahead of the game, offering customers plans to suit their needs.  An increase in speed makes surfing the Internet, downloading music and videos and playing online games easier than ever before.”
“Customers on our 5 GB and 20 GB plans will be able to download their favourite television programme such as Shortland Street from sites like TVNZ ondemand in half the time.”
The 20 GB plan is now in line with the company’s top-of-the-range LightSpeed plans by offering downstream speeds of up to 10 Mbps.
Existing customers will receive the new speeds by 1 August 2007.
TelstraClear’s InHome six broadband plans include:
HighSpeed 1G – 1G of monthly traffic  – 2Mbps downstream / 2 Mbps upstream *
HighSpeed 5G – 5G of monthly traffic –  4 Mbps downstream / 2 Mbps upstream *
HighSpeed 10G – 10G of monthly traffic – 4 Mbps downstream / 2 Mbps upstream  $49.95 per month
LightSpeed 20G – 20G of monthly traffic  – 10 Mbps downstream / 2 Mbps upstream $69.95 per month
LightSpeed 40G – 40G of monthly traffic – 10 Mbps downstream / 2 Mbps upstream $99.95 per month
LightSpeed 80G – 80G of monthly traffic  – 10 Mbps downstream/2 Mbps upstream $139.95 per month
* TelstraClear HighSpeed Internet is only available as part of a package including a phone line on the HighSpeed 1G ($62.90 per month including phone) and 5G ($72.90 per month including phone) plans. 

I signed up for Pownce today to see what it’s all about. Signup was nice and easy and updated my profile (http://pownce.com/amanzi/) with the same photo from Facebook.

But now what…? I went to add some friends and my only option is to add someone who’s already on Pownce. The thing is, I don’t know who’s on Pownce already and even then, I don’t want to have add everyone individually.

To me, the best feature of Facebook is how easy it is to find and add friends. I begrudgingly signed up to Facebook just to see what the hype was all about, and was then hooked from day one when it scanned my address book and told me that almost 50 of my contacts were already using Facebook.

Now I know that Pownce isn’t the same thing as Facebook, but both services are really only useful when you have lots of friends using them too. Pownce needs a better system of finding and adding friends I know.

Via: Nigel’s Blog

Like Richard MacManus’s “Read/Write Web” blog, my site was down tonight for a couple of hours. Quite frustrating as I was inspired to write some better blog posts after creating my first Facebook group – “Wellington Bloggers”.

Here’s the MediaTemple response. 

Richard’s disappointing write-up: Grid Server Crushes Shared Hosting? Not Tonight It Didn’t…

I’ve been meaning to sign up with the Skype-in service for a while now. Skype-in is a landline phone number that transfers to my Skype account when called. The cool thing about a Skype-in number is that you can get it in one of 18 countries around the world. This is useful for me as I can tell my family and friends in the UK to call me on a London phone number, and this will get connected to Skype on my computer.

The only problem with this is that if your computer isn’t turned on at the time then you wouldn’t receive the call. The solution to this has been to also purchase the voicemail service from Skype. But now Skype have also introduced call-forwarding, so that if you don’t answer your Skype call, or your computer is turned off, you can nominate another phone number that the call should transfer to. As with most call-forwarding services, you pay the costs to the forwarded number, but as the Skype rates are so low anyway, this is minimal.

Skype Pro…

The encouragement for finally signing up to the Skype-in service came from the fact that Skype have now released a new service called Skype Pro. This service gives you free national calls to landlines from Skype, free voicemail service, call transfers, and a €30 discount on the Skype-in number. This brings down the cost of Skype-in from €50 (NZD$87) to €20 (NZD$35) for 12 months. So it’s a great deal and it opens up the Skype service to give you all sorts of options for managing your calls.

Confused?

If that all sounds confusing, here’s how it all adds up:

• My Mum can call me on my own London number.
• If I’m logged in to Skype, I can choose to answer the call on the computer or transfer it to the home phone.
• If the computer is turned off, the call automatically transfers to my home number.
• And if we don’t answer the home phone, the call diverts to our answer machine.

How much does it cost?

• The Skype Pro account is $3 per month and this gives you free national calls, and free voicemail.
• The Skype-in phone number is €20 for 12 months after the Skype Pro discount.
• Transferring a Skype call to my home phone is 3c per minute.

Problems!

One of the problems that I’m worried about is if our London number starts getting called by telemarketers in the middle of our night. The alternative then would be to not use the call forwarding feature, but to just send the call straight to voice mail. I would still be able to transfer the calls to our home number from Skype if I was logged in, but if Skype wasn’t running then I wouldn’t know about the missed call until I logged back into Skype.

Ideally, I would want to only transfer to the home number during certain times, but that functionality doesn’t exist in Skype yet. I think I’ll see how it works out for now – it all gets a bit confusing!

Side note:

Miramar Mike is also trialing the new Skype Pro package. He’s opted for a local (Wellington) Skype-in number and is even considering ditching his Telstra home number and going pure-Skype! Follow his experiment here.

Cartoonist, Hugh McLeod of gapingvoid nicely sums up the history of most blogs (including mine) in the following cartoon:

Now that the whole ‘Web 2.0’ fad is dying down a bit now, I find sites like TechCrunch much less interesting. I’m bored of hearing about all the new startups/mashups/acquisitions/Google-killers/YouTube-killers/<insert well known site name here>-killers.

 I’m actually rather impressed that TVNZ have started using YouTube to distribute some of their TVNZ ondemand videos. They have a customised URL to provide their start page: http://www.youtube.com/tvnz

Artur Bergman, over at O’Reilly Radar, has started an interesting discussion about Amazon’s S3 service and how start-ups/companies are relying on the service without having any guarantees to its availability or uptime.

So, if your company is based on AWS: What does your disaster recovery plan look like? How do you react if Amazon goes down or if Amazon decides to shut down AWS? What happens next December when a busy holiday season makes Amazon divert bandwidth from S3 to their main business, Amazon.com?

From Amazon’s site, their definition of Simple Storage Service:

Amazon S3 is storage for the Internet. It is designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers.

Amazon S3 provides a simple web services interface that can be used to store and retrieve any amount of data, at any time, from anywhere on the web. It gives any developer access to the same highly scalable, reliable, fast, inexpensive data storage infrastructure that Amazon uses to run its own global network of web sites. The service aims to maximize benefits of scale and to pass those benefits on to developers.

I’ve been brewing an idea in my head for a new business that, if it went ahead, would heavily utilise Amazon’s S3 service as it would require lots of highly available storage without the huge startup costs usually associated with implementing redundant, distributed storage arrays and networks.

But the idea of relying solely on Amazon’s service for critical data does scare me, as they provide no SLAs, contracts, or other guarantees that the service will be available for any set length of time. On the other hand, if the business is successful then there should be funds available to implement a secondary, backup copy once the money starts rolling in.

I like Artur’s suggestions to Amazon about implementing optional SLAs that customers can pay a premium for:

• Change the T&C to at least promise to give paying customers a notice of a certain amount of days if they choose to shut the service down.
• Publish their current uptime and availability to their customers.
• Show you how many copies of a file exists, and how quickly a file uploaded to them becomes redundant.

O’Reilly Radar > Amazon Web Services and the lack of a SLA