TMINE

Weekend upgrade

23 September 2007 Rob Buckley 3 Comments

The observant will have noticed that I’ve been tinkering again. Just can’t help it with the tinkering, these days.

This, however, was the big tinker – I’ve finally upgraded my blog’s software to Movable Type 4. At the moment, that doesn’t affect things at your end, gentle reader, an awful lot, although you can now sign in with your Vox account, if you have one, or you can even create your own account on this blog if you really want. However, shiny things will percolate through the system over the next few weeks as a result, which should hopefully make it all worth it. Hoozah!

Anyway, I’ve had to fiddle around with the templates so not all things might be working as they should. If they aren’t, email me using the link down the side to let me know and I’ll try to sort out your problems – and thank you for your patience. Ironically, about the only thing that might not be working properly is the email subscriptions to comments (which no one appears to use anyway).

Thanks in particular to Toby OB for letting me know about what I hope is the only bug in the system!

UPDATE: You might have to log out and back in again, if you signed it with TypeKey or LiveJournal previously, or you might come up as ‘anonymous’. Sorry, Stu_n!

Get yourself an avatar – if you want

13 September 2007 Rob Buckley 6 Comments

The keenly observant, frequent visitor here will notice I’ve been doing a little redecorating of late. This has been greeted with an almost universal non-reaction, with just a few dissenting voices of opprobrium. Not bad, I reckon. I probably won’t be doing much more re-decorating, since MT4 seems a bit of a bastard to upgrade to, so things should stabilise as they are for a while, at least.

Biggest change for yous guys as part of the gradual Vox-ification of the site is you can now have ‘avatars’ by your comments – that’s piccies of yourself. You may recognise the idea from Blogger, if you use Blogger or visit Blogger sites, that is.

Initially, I tried out Gravatars, for the general reasons that

  1. they’re global – you can use them on any gravatar-enabled site
  2. they’re easy for me to implement, since nice people have already written Gravatar plug-ins for Movable Type.

However, they’re slow little bastards, these Gravatars, and no one seems to want to use them, since all you get out of them is a piccie.

So I’ve now made the switch to MyBlogLog avatars. MyBlogLog is owned by Yahoo! so

  1. is practically instantaneous, since Yahoo! has more servers than most countries
  2. offers you lots of other things, too, if you own a blog, such as visitor tracking, a widget that shows visitors who’s been reading the blog and a display of your blog’s most popular links.

Marvellous, hey? All you have to do is sign up for a MyBlogLog account, upload a pic and stake out your blog, then use the URL of your blog here. All very simple really.

‘Course, it was a pain in the bottie for me, since I had to write two plug-ins, one in PHP, one in Perl, to get the bloody thing to work. But I think it’s worth it.

Holiday reading

21 August 2007 Rob Buckley 3 Comments

Just in case you’re curious, here are some mini-reviews of the books I managed to make my way through during my holidays

First Among Sequels

The first of probably many new Thursday Next books, it’s endlessly inventive but feels very much like the set-up for the rest of the series.

The Pig That Wants To Be Eaten

Probably the most rubbish book on philosophy I’ve ever read. Maybe I’m ‘too highly trained’ or something, but it seemed blindingly obvious with its dilemmas, less than watertight with its arguments and too airy-fairy to be of use to anyone.

Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows

A bit tat really, but some nice pay-offs.

The Surgeon’s Mate/The Ionian Mission/Treason’s Harbour

I was on a quest of sorts, you see, in Waterstone’s, looking for Aubrey-Maturin books. But there was nothing to be seen. But then my companion called to me. “Honey! Look!” he says. “The Dear knows you was partial to naval fiction and there is an entire bookcase for all of them.” I looked and – ho! – it was true – he wasn’t playing the Merry Andrew nor was he as drunk as Davey’s Sow. And on their covers, glittering like all the jewels in Araby, was written “3 for 2”. I need to buy the next ones.

Status Syndrome

Interesting, but a bit like reading an epidemiological study, rather than a book.

The Moneypenny Diaries: Guardian Angel

Sort of the Rosencrantz and Guildenstern of Bond novels. Surprisingly good and faithful to the originals, it just manages to steer clear of being fan fiction.

Hmm. Did I read anything else? Let me think…

TMINE

The weeks ahead

20 August 2007 Rob Buckley Post a comment

Alan Partridge

I’m back. Aha!

I’ve had a glorious two weeks of sun, sea, pools, etc in lovely old Greece. If you’re desperate for information about what I’ve been up to, I’ll probably blog about it some time this week on my poorly read, poorly maintained personal blog, although that has a certain slideshow quality to it that I might not want to veer towards (“And this is me getting on the plane. And this is the left armrest of my seat. And this is the right armrest…”). By some miracle, I managed to acquire a tan, although it seemed to leach away the minute I set foot on British soil again. I guess, judging from the sky outside, I’m going to have to maintain it by reverting to using an unshielded TV screen as before.

By some even greater miracle, the blog’s still here. Fingers crossed, I really did solve those irritating technical issues. Given that stability seems to have been achieved, I’ve a few things in mind for extra features for the blog that should materialise over the next week or so (assuming I don’t re-classify them as ‘bad holiday ideas’), and that Movable Type 4 upgrade will yield some extra shiny techno features for the blog as well at some point soon – the upgrade path’s a bit steep though, so that’ll have to hold off for a while.

My minor morsel that I throw to you today, however, is an RSS feed entirely dedicated to my daily news updates: you can get it via FeedBurner, Bloglines, or if you’re a Mac user, Safari.

Many thanks for all your good wishes and I hope that those of you who were away had nice holidays, too. In answer to your questions/requests, I did indeed send your love to your homeland, Poly (I was in Παργα, up on the west coast, if that’s of any help), and Bubble doesn’t appear to wear hats any more, Kev, although he does gurn a lot. Thanks also to Scott for fielding questions, but Granada does suck, too, so nur!

Seeing as I’ve not been watching any television for the last fortnight – not even Greek digital TV – I’ve got a fair old backlog of programmes to get through and that’s going to take me a little time. So the real fun and festivities will start tomorrow (probably) and continue through the rest of the week with – in no particular order – fifth-episode verdicts on Damages (now picked up by BBC1, I notice) and Mad Men, as well as a review of the first episode of Flash Gordon. I might even cast Masters of Science Fiction a glance, as well as the new Big Finish Doctor Who releases The Wishing Beast and The Vanity Box.

Then there are those extra features, I mentioned.

That’s assuming I can even remember how to watch television of course: you sit facing a monitor and push buttons on a keypad thing, don’t you? Or is that an XBox?

TMINE

Holiday time

4 August 2007 Rob Buckley 8 Comments

Gods Behaving Badly by not so struggling author Marie PhillipsWell, the countdown says it all: it’s day zero and I’m off on holiday. It’s an astonishing 14 days – two weeks’ holiday! Inconceivable! – but I should be back to regale you all with news, memes, paper-thin reviews and sarcasm towards David Caruso’s acting talents on the 20th.

Since it’s silly season anyway, what news that does emerge in the next two weeks is liable to be dull/completely made up anyway (current odds-on favourite as biggest news item in the next fortnight: David Tennant is to be replaced by the CGI version of himself from The Last of The Time Lords), so hopefully you won’t be missing anything, assuming you don’t all just go somewhere else for news. Hopefully, my third-episode verdicts on things like Mad Men can wait (or I’ll just claim I need to stick out until the fifth episode before delivering judgement).

In the meantime, I leave you in the hands of my rubbish web host, Dataflame. Seeing as everything’s been stable for the last 24 hours, which apparently is as good as I can hope for these days, I’m going to keep my fingers crossed and hope that I’ve finally managed to track down and stamp out the bizarreness that caused their server to have a touch of the vapours* and that the blog will still be here when I get back. It’ll probably still be belting out HG Wells and Orson Welles, as those irritating buggers backslap each other. Sorry about that.

As an aside, I spent the day in Maidstone for a wedding. Made a quick trip to Waterstone’s (Doctor Who annuals in the window and a somewhat presumptuous but entirely plausible invitation to “get to know my favourite new author**” Marie Phillips, whoever she might be, on the inside) before visiting the Pizza Express across from the theatre.

I mention this purely because despite the fact there were pictures of him plastered all over the theatre, I completely failed to notice the fact that the loud man on the table next to ours, gassing on about having to perform on stage three times a day***, was Bubble from Big Brother 2. That, my friends, is how observant I am.

Trust me. Trust my reviews. Hope my holiday makes me more observant.

Ευτυχείς διακοπές!

* For those who are interested, an interest collision between Movable Type’s dynamic publishing functions, FastCGI, .htaccess and hotlink protection; for everyone else, I’m really sorry for boring you rigid like that. I’ll be more interesting when I get back, I promise

** It might have said ‘my new favourite author’. Equally presumptuous, but equally plausible

*** When did panto season start kicking off in August? Is this like Christmas trees in Marks & Spencers?