Category: internet

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Moving…

So I’ve decided that I want to keep my personal site and my professional site more separate, as well as give everyone in the family a matching email address and allow for growth within the family website, so I’ve created welkerfam.net.

Anything that is of a personal nature will be found over there, and all of my more professional/programming things will remain here at the iohelix.

Feel free to head on over and check it out. It’s pretty fresh, and I’m still getting things moved over properly, so I’ll keep a copy here as well for about a month or so until everything has been ported over properly, but it’s up and running.

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“i told you so” just doesn’t sound strong enough…

Microsoft Internet Explorer is about to ruin your day.  Read the story for more info:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7784908.stm

Done reading?

Now, do yourself a favor and grab one of these:

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Linking to specific moments in a YouTube video

A co-worker of mine pointed me towards this entry in a blog.

It talks about linking to a specific time in a YouTube video. I’ll repeat here in case you don’t want to link offsite.

Have you ever recieved links to videos that say something like “It gets really good around 1:47”, or something similar?

Now you can link to a specific moment in that video by putting the time as follows in your link: #t=1m47s

What this does, is when somebody goes to that link, it not only starts at the given time, but it doesn’t buffer all the stuff that comes before it, so you don’t have to wait for the part you’re interested in.

For instance, try the following link:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OP1-5uxZffE#t=5m45s (SFW)

That’s just awesome.

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site backups

Since my wife and I started using a blog again, I was thinking it would be cool to go back in my archives and grab the old posts I had on here years ago, and try to find a way to import them back into the blog.

So I started looking in my backups folder for a database dump that would have the blog posts in it, and I searched and searched, but could not find the most recent version of it.  I have a coupe older ones, and some really old ones, but not any that were from right before I deleted the blogs.

I don’t know why I didn’t make a backup of them, or if I did, I don’t know why I didn’t keep it in a safe place, but I didn’t.

So I jumped on the wayback machine, and found one more post that I didn’t have in my backup.  I imported the backup into my database at home, installed the version of WordPress I had when the posts were made (also via the wayback machine), and posted that last one that was missing.  Then I installed the latest version of WordPress, made an export file, and imported them into this incarnation.

So now I have posts that go back about 5 years (albeit very sporadically), with the possibility of a few missing that are probably gone for good, unless I happen to find an old dump somewhere that I didn’t know about, but I doubt it…   oh well.

I’m off to make a backup of my site right now, and I’ll label it ‘Keep’, because obviously, the method I have now doesn’t work.

Maybe I should start putting my site backups in Subversion…

Anywho… enjoy the old posts.

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broken site

so my webhosting company was recently bought out and decided in all thier wisdom to follow the old adage of “if it’s not broke, break it, then don’t fix it”.  ok, maybe it’s not an old adage, but it sure does fit the situation.

the new company decided to move all the websites to new servers and in the process broke just about every one of the thousands of sites hosted on those servers, mine included.  and it doesn’t stop there.  in the past couple of weeks, my site has been off and on more than a newbie dj mixing with cassette tapes.

it seems like every couple of hours the site goes down, only to be back up again (but with limited functionality) the next time i see it.  it’s getting really annoying.  and the support people are not really helping, but it’s not entirely thier fault, because it seems that the errors are not happening everywhere in the country.
anywho…  the whole point of the post is to let everybody know why the site has been being stupid lately.

…and don’t host your site with WebHostPlus.

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rss feeds update

since writing ‘rss feeds in your inbox‘, the post letting people know how to get my blog in their inbox, i have upgraded the blogging software.
this has changed the rss feed url.  the new rss feed url is:

http://www.iohelix.com/wordpress/?feed=rss2
http:/iohelix.net/blog/feed

so there ya go, all fixed.

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anonymity is hard to keep

so i’m sitting here, at work, playing on the interent, and come across a page that has really cool stuff to download for “free”. and because there is no such thing as “free”, they make you register for their site (for what reason, i have no idea) and give out your precious information, just to download this “free” app that they are offering.

well, i say poo to that. and apparently, others have, too.

that’s when i stumbled upon a couple of sites that help people keep thier anonymity while browsing sites that require a login or registration.

the first is bugmenot.com. this site is awesome. when you come accross a site that requires you to log in, go to bugmenot.com and enter the base url into the field and click ‘Show Logins’ and it will give you a list of logins for the site. that way, you never have to register for another site again.

but if you really must register for a site and it’s one of the sites that will be sending you a confirmation e-mail so that they know it’s really you, just use mintemail.com.
what this site does is pretty cool as well. when you go to sign up for that annoying site that is forcing you to register, just go to mintemail.com, it will automatically store a fresh email address in your clipboard, then enter that email address into the site you are visiting. the mail will be automatically updated and kept for 24 hours, then deleted. you never have to give out your address again, but you still get those important first few emails to the site you’re trying to access.

and for the sites where you may want to come back and be recognized as yourself, but don’t want to use that same password you’ve been using forever, check out the Secure Password Generator. just set your specs and hit the button and a crytographically strong password is generated at random for you.

so there ya go, no more worries.

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comment spam

i stated in a post back when i switched over to this blogging software that one of the best things about it was that it automagically blocks all incoming spam.

well…  it’s still doing it and rocking it like nobody’s buisiness. last night i got about 15 emails letting me know there were comments waiting to be approved and not a single one of them was legitimate.

if i hadn’t switched to wordpress, i would have been sifting through my blog searching for all of the comment spam right now.

now all we need is a way to really piss them off when they try to spam us. by maybe freezing thier comp for a while everytime they try to send spam, so that if they hit the wrong place thier comp freezes for the rest of the day…  yeah, that would be cool.

stupid spammers. it’s not even like they’re trying to get you to buy something cool either. i mean, really, who gets a spam and think, “ya know, i’ve been meaning to have my penis enlarged, i should give these people in that third-world country a call, i bet they could do it really well.”

nope, doesn’t happen.

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moonshine skin finished

now you have no excuses for not using my skin on your desktop.

the skin has a clock with the background of the clock being the current phase of the moon. the skin works on both light and dark backgrounds, and is super easy (no editing required) to install. so there ya go, no excuses.

you can still download rainmeter from rainy’s site: download
and you can get my new skin from here: download

here is a preview image of the clock

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blog theme

well… wordpress 1.5 came out not too long ago, and i’ve upgraded the blog software as you may be noticing right now. the only thing that sucks is they changed the whole skinning process and started to use themes. i’m sure it’s a step in a positive direction, but now i’ve got to figure out how to skin the darn thing and get my old skin back (which was based on Human Condition by Ian Main)
so i’ll probably be working on that soon, and i hope that this new version is everything they say it is…

but it should be, the people over at wordpress are super cool and probably the best developers anywhere… keepin it real, just like it should be.

*UPDATE*:
as you can see, the theme is coming along nicely, i’m learning some cool things about wordpress and have implemented a few upgrades and plugins to make the iohelix blog experience even better.