mysiteonline™

Careful! There's a virus going around emails with the subject of "Stinky Cheese"! The virus does more than I have ever seen any other virus do before. It's amazing. Check out the documentary video that comes with a complementary musical:



Man I love "Weird Al" Yankovic.

Posted by Brendon Kozlowski

I've just realized that the feeds for this blog are broken, and probably have been since I started using it. I'll probably first just upgrade my blog version and see if that fixes things, if not I'll have to take a closer look at it. Sorry!

Update: It appears that Firefox v1.5.0.8 reports that there is a problem with the RSS feeds. However, Firefox v2.0.0 reports no errors and displays the RSS just fine. I'm confused over this and since upgrading this blog system takes some time (without shell access to my host server; only because I'm too lazy to request it) I think I'll let this go until I figure out just what the problem is.

Update #2: Even the new version of Serendipity still has errors, according to FeedValidator.org. I guess I'll have something else I'll get to look at and try to fix up with Serendipity. It's obviously the parser; unfortunately I'm now going to have to learn the DTD specifications for the feeds to know what's allowed and what's not to fix the parser. ...maybe I'll ask in their forum before I start to hack away at it, perhaps there's someone there that would know more.

Posted by Brendon Kozlowski

Just a note to all those people using Grisoft's AVG Free (a free anti-virus software): they'll be discontinuing the 7.1.x version sometime (slated) in January 2007. Version 7.5.x will be taking its place, and will still offer a free version. I'm updating my father's right now and figured I'd just make a topic about it for the heck of it.

Grisoft's Free Website Section

Avast: a popular alternative to Grisoft

Posted by Brendon Kozlowski

So there's a lot of emphasis right now on websites that are somewhat engaging and interactive, but can also highly interact with RSS/XML for purposes of other services. I'm currently in the process of creating a sub-site section of the Library's website, and have decided that this section will be graced with a forum script. Since interaction is a big thing now (and I've already mentioned it in this post), I wanted a forum that acted somewhat differently from linear, or even topic-based ones.

In steps the digg.com lookalikes. Digg may not be a forum, but why can't it be?! There are topics, there are replies, and there are categories. There are users, and best of all, there is popularity voting (for users and topics) and RSS! Well...unfortunately, all of the forums that work like this (glorum, onelobby, blogoforum, tagifieds.com -- now owned by Google because it was too good) are hosted solutions, not self-installed. There is no source code, so you either build it yourself from what you can see (and I'm not going to use Ruby, even though it would be the right tool I don't know it), or get it hosted. I really don't want an off-site forum; I like having things integrated.

There's a rather cool looking project called "Blinkk" that is hosted on SourceForge, but it's currently in a closed beta stage and no source code has been committed to the repository just yet. Okay, so I can't wait for that. What now?

Wordpress (authors) come to save the day! bbPress, a forum board created from scratch, with a simple design and purpose in mind, was created. Although there's no voting, there is a plugin ability, so I could easily add it in later, and then contribute back to the bbPress community. Neat. Customizing this "small" beast doesn't look too fun though...I have a lot of customization to do. Oh well.

bbPress Website

Posted by Brendon Kozlowski

It's a nice feeling to work on a plugin to a system that will end up helping out hundreds of other users; even if they don't know it yet, or haven't even tried out the software! I've gotten in touch with Garvin Hicking, the current lead developer of Serendipity (if you haven't read much here yet, it's the blog system I use) and told him about the changes I had made to the standard nl2br plugin. I also asked for some help in working with the plugin to get some configurable fields added to it, of which he obliged (gotta love him). I get to use the first working (revision) version of it! Cool...

Hopefully the "work" I've done on this plugin will eventually get committed to the repository. Yay! I hope it helps out others as it'll surely help me out. A programming being unable to properly paste code snippets...how horrible! Well, those days are no more!

Posted by Brendon Kozlowski