denyerec.co.uk

Has the rot set in?
Am I tired of blogging?
Am I regretting not taking out that life insurance?

No.

I’m just busy, thankfully, with work. My website uploader is broken and I don’t have chance to fix it and as I’m re-writing a gallery system anyway I don’t have the motivation to sort mine out as I’ll simply replace it with the new version when it’s done…

Speaking of things that need to be done, here’s a quick list of things I want to do and WILL be doing at some point. I promise. I need to make a Rob like attempt to fill my day with motivation and get things done.

• Come up with a brand new funky site design
• Install and style WordPress 1.5
• Style my gallery to match
• This is of course after I’ve got the new gallery working
• And re-uploaded all my photos…
• Re-write the AMM WordPress hack from scratch for WP1.5 using Amazon SOAP
• Upload the photos I have and have been meaning to upload forever
• Take more photos

So, there you have it. I swear I’ll get around to them all, no, really. And soon too, if I can motivate myself…

You’ll like this.
Today, as a comment on my weblog, I received this:

YOU ARE ALL GAY AND I WILL KILL YOU WHILE YOU SLEEP

Sent from a user calling themselves “YOUR MOTHER”.

Firstly, I know it wouldn’t be my mum, as she knows how to both type in normal case, and punctuate. Nor do I think she’s out to kill us all, she’s a lovely huggable person who will, and I’m serious about this, hug anyone who gets close enough.

The IP associated with this heinous crime was 195.144.131.12 and here’s the corresponding Whois Lookup

I wonder what you’re supposed to do if you receive a serious death threat via email or the internet? Some people have told me you’re supposed to report it to the police and the host it originated from but I can’t help imagining that the police, especially in the UK, would just laugh in your face and go back to not arresting criminals. (Not that it’s all their fault, bloody bureaucracy.) Oh, why don’t I consider it a serious threat? This little RvB video might explain it. For all I know whoever it was might have taken a “How are you?” the wrong way…

After some fiddling and a few shotgun blasts to my registry, the magically re-appearing and somewhat disturbing iMedia shortcut has been laid to rest.

For anyone else suffering the wonders of “shortcuts that won’t go away”, or an application that keeps trying to repair or re-install itself when you haven’t asked it to, you may want to check out \HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Installer\Products\ in the windows registry, then browse through all the crazy-looking entries in there until you find the one for the offending application.

Now, me being a luddite brute and not understanding what these entries really do, I simply deleted the one containing a reference to iMatch. So far, so good, but I can’t promise you that I haven’t, for example, totally broken the uninstall feature.

Follow my lead at your own risk. I take no responsibility for anything that happens if you read this and decide to have a go yourself.

Now, I can relax and shuffle my iMatch shortcuts to my heart’s content.

My Auntie J recently celebrated her birthday for 2005, just like to say “Many Happy Returns” and all that!

(No, she’s not 2005 years old, I meant this year’s birthday!!)

Grrr.
Recently I’ve been using iMatch by www.photools.com and it’s a marvellous peice of software. Still on the 30-day trial here but my initial impression is it’s well worth the $49 asking price.

However…

When you install it, it does something suspicious. If you move the origial installation shortcuts when you run ANY program on your PC *WHAM*, the iMatch installer runs. I’m in the process of trying to stop it happening but if anyone out there knows where to look PLEASE help me, it’s driving me insane.

Thanks to a kind fellow called Justin Baeder, the Amazon Media Manager has received a bit of an update. It should now work on WordPress 1.2 and upward, with a revised readme.txt to indicate the installation procedure. There are also now some CSS classes on the amazon items to let you style them as desired, but these won’t affect anything if you choose not to use them.

Both versions are available for download here.

Due to personal time constraints and working on another project, I will not be making and revisions to the script for a little while but do intend to revise it as soon as I get the opportunity.

Join me in lament, the world as we know it will soon be over.

The time of the machines has come.

Well I can’t say I’ve really been trying to fix the file uploader, but put it this way, it’s still not working. However I did get some passport photo’s done yesterday. By me. I then did a bit of photoshop magic to get them to the exact right dimensions and DPI, then sent them off via a wonderfully easy to use website to Photobox. They arrived at 8am this morning. 8 UK sized passport photos, 99p, pin-sharp.

Not only that, but compared to the ones you normally get from those dreaded booths, I’m not looking the wrong way or being startled by a chocolate eclair.