Jun 19 2006
Several sites are reporting that a Microsoft France site was hacked and defaced. The site is currently down so it appears as though Microsoft have taken it offline to firefight.
A mirror of the defaced site can be found here: zone-h.org.
Jun 12 2006
Big news around the internet at the moment is that Robert Scoble is leaving Microsoft to work for a startup company called PodTech.net. As you can probably tell from the name, PodTech.net are a podcasting or vlogging company. This is a big loss to Microsoft as Scoble put a human face to the massive corporation. I’ve linked to several of his posts before as he was never afraid to say what he was thinking whether it was for or against Microsoft.
Links:
Jun 10 2006
The Fifa World Cup 2006 has just started and it meant an early morning for us down in New Zealand. I was up at 3am to watch the opening ceremony, the highlight of which was seeing the all-time greats all together in one place.
Germany and Costa Rica have just started playing the opening game and six minutes into the game, Philipp Lahm from Germany scored a cracker to open the scoring!
12th minute: Costa Rica have just scored the equalizer. Germany were calling for an offside, but replays show that Paulo Wanchope was onside before making the break and scoring the goal.
17th minute: Germany have just taken the lead back with another great goal, this time from Miroslav Klose who finished off a flat, square cross in front of the goal.
This is turning into one of the classics – back to watching the game now!
Jun 08 2006
Google have just released a Firefox only extension that automatically synchronises your bookmarks, cookies and passwords between browsers on different machines. Sorry for the continued Google love, but this is awesome!
Jun 08 2006
Windows Vista Beta 2 is now available for download to the public. Microsoft are encouraging users to download the file using an Akamai plugin – I couldn’t get the ActiveX plugin to work in IE, but luckily there’s a Java plugin for Firefox
Jun 07 2006
Today I passed the 70-292 exam. It’s one of the two exams needed to upgrade from MCSE 2000 to MCSE 2003. I studied quite hard for it and even managed to find some time on the fishing trip to learn about stub zones! I found it quite easy in the end and got 850 so I was pretty pleased overall.
Jun 07 2006
The beta @ amanzi site investigates the new Google Spreadsheets and puts it through it’s paces. Overall opinion is good but read on for more – as usual there’s lots of screenshots!
Jun 01 2006
My latest blogging venture is to create a site listing all of the blogs that are based in New Zealand.
I’ve created the NZ Blogs site on Blogtown NZ which is the free, blogging service that I’ve set up to make it easy for New Zealanders to start their own, local blog.
I can’t track down all the blogs myself, so there’s a submission form on the site which allows you to submit your own blog, or the blog of someone else you know in NZ.
I’m going to try to make a WordPress Widget at some point that will allow you to easily link to it, but for the time being you can find all the blogs and a nice OPML file on the home page over on the NZ Blogs site.
UPDATE! Check out the Recent Posts page which lists the 20 most recent posts from all blogs – you may find something interesting there.
May 31 2006
I stumbled across this site recently via Tim Haines’s blog – fivepointsix.co.nz is a new photo sharing site based in New Zealand. I’m always interested in local offerings of services that are usually only available overseas – Zoomin is another good example of a great NZ site.
I’m not too sure about the fivepointsix site though, it doesn’t seem to have any advantages over any of the other free, photo sharing sites. You’re only allowed to store 50 photos and they can’t be over 2MB each. I was most interested in the storage facilities because any locally based site will suffer from the economies of scale and probably won’t be able to offer unlimited storage like most other international sites.
But there are some cool features, and from reading the News section, it appears as though more and more features are being added every day. One of the nice features is the ability to have open galleries where several people can contribute to one album – good idea for parties and functions where there are lots of people with digital cameras.
I didn’t like the fact that nowhere on the site is there an email address or contact details of the owner or webmaster. I was keen to pose some questions to the creators but could find no way to contact them. There’s no advertising on the site, which is nice, but it makes you wonder what their business model is, or whether the site is just someone’s part-time hobby?
Links:
May 30 2006
I recently realised that this blog had become a bit of a virtual dumping ground, filled with junk I had been collecting from around the internet. It's always tempting to stick a new blog button, or affiliates advertising logo, or some other 'cool' service that requires a bit of javascript on your site. So I've gone back to basics and have implemented the Simpla theme which can be described using any of these words: cool, calm, relaxing, tranquil, minimalistic, modest, etc…
I also took the opportunity to implement the (relatively) new widgets plugin from Automattic. This allows you to modify the sidebar in a WordPress site without having to jump into the code. Achieving this in the Simpla theme was relatively easy, all that was needed to was modify the sidebar.php and create a new functions.php file. This is how I did it following the instructions on the Automattic site.
I changed the sidebar.php file to look like this:
<div id="sidebar">
<ul>
<?php if ( !function_exists('dynamic_sidebar') || !dynamic_sidebar() ) : ?>
<li id="pages">
<h2>Pages</h2>
<ul>
<li><a href="<?php echo get_settings('home'); ?>/">Home</a></li>
<?php wp_list_pages('title_li='); ?>
</ul>
</li>
<li id="categories">
<h2>Categories</h2>
<ul>
<?php wp_list_cats('sort_column=name&optioncount=1&hierarchical=0'); ?>
</ul>
</li>
<li id="links">
<ul>
<?php get_links_list(); ?>
</ul>
</li>
<?php endif; ?>
</ul>
</div>
And then created a new file called functions.php which looked like this:
<?php
if ( function_exists('register_sidebar') )
register_sidebar();
?>
So once I had activated the Widgets plugin, I was presented with the sidebar options in the presentation section of the admin interface. The only small issue was a slight CSS formatting problem where I would get two bottom-borders between sections on the left. This was because there was now an extra nested <ul> so a small modification to the style.css file as follows fixed that.
#sidebar ul li{
margin-bottom:0.3em;
padding:0.3em;
}
#sidebar ul ul li{
border-bottom:1px dotted #ddd;
}
I think the padding is still a little bit out, but because of the minimalistic layout of the theme, a few extra pixels here and there aren't really noticed. Overall I'm quite happy with the end result – hopefully this will prevent me from adding too much, apart from the addition of the Google Adsense, and the StatCounter code.
Links:
UPDATE: I’ve created a new post with the details on how I got the 3 columns working here: 3 Column Simpla Theme with Widgets