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Stunning Creation -- Before I start to associate every other great mouse with brands like Razer and Logitech, it would be prudent to hand some major credit over to Microsoft for its latest addition to its line of mice. It's hard to pass off the 8000's fine aluminum finish, ice-cool touch and ultra-tactile button presses and it looks very much like an IntelliMouse Explorer 3 with the rough edges rubbed off. Filling out the core of the beige-lined and chrome buttons, the 2.4Ghz Bluetooth wireless mouse boasts a tracking speed of 6000 fps and a resolution of 1000 dpi, which translates into smooth, uninterrupted feedback and control that's only matched by other top-of-the-line mice like the Logitech G7 and Razer solutions, its hand grip also matches its build, and is comfortable to use for hours end. Like the G7, the 8000 also has a battery-life indicator that accurately tells you how much juice is left. Its tilt wheel features a 4-way scroll control, which rolls nicely though maybe a tad rough when compared to the Logitech MX Revolution. It's ambidextrous, however, so I'll give it a plus there, and if I were to really get cocky I'd even say that it might even have a slight advantage over the Revolution, although its function don't show the same flair. It's hard to spot anything wrong with this work-of-art, but we have to point out that premium quality comes at a premium price, and if you're willing to fork out a hefty price, $459 will get you the whole Wireless Entertainment Desktop 8000 with a matching keyboard. I'm not reviewing the keyboard, but I'm confident to say that I trust the quality, although I'm not going to recommend it.
If you think you enjoy playing around with API of different online
services, have you tried out Flickr's API? I'm looking for a particular Flickr hack, to display slideshow on a website.
This is a wordpress plugin, it's purpose is to create pages navigation using the wp_list_pages() function that includes dynamic menu highlighting of all parent pages. By simply adding "current_parent" into the css of all parent pages, it is hence possible to highlight the parent of the current page. While on current pages, a css tag of "current_page_item" will be added.
 Click here for a simple example.
To install this plugin: - Download this plugin.
- Upload this plugin to "wp-content/plugins" folder.
- Go to "Plugin Management" and activate it.
To uninstall this plugin: - Go to "Plugin Management" and deactivate it.
Compatible with Wordpress 2.0 and above. To run the plugin, insert the following code into "sidebar.php" or "header.php": <ul>
<?php if ( function_exists(wp_list_pages_seigey) ) wp_list_pages_seigey('sort_column=menu_order' ); ?>
</ul> Please note that all queries are the same as those in wp_list_pages(). For example: sort_column, exclude, depth, title_li,
What does it do?
Changing the ID column into Page Order (menu_order) column in Page Management. Note: this is not a wordpress plugin although there are plans to make it so.
Why is this made?
The Wordpress Page Management list each page along with its ID, Title, Owner, Updated details and editing buttons. However more often that not I find there's a need to see the Page Order when sorting pages out and I feel that instead of listing the Page ID, the Page Order will be more useful.
How to change it?
There are three parts to change in two different pages:
- wp-admin/edit-pages.php
Find this on line 34:
<th scope="col"><?php _e('ID') ?></th> Replace with this:
<th scope="col"><!-- 061114 Seige --><?php _e('Order') ?></th>
Find this on line 47:
<th scope="col"><?php echo $post->ID; ?></th> Replace with this:
<th scope="col"><!-- 061114 Seige --><?php echo $post->menu_order; ?></th> - wp-admin/admin-functions.php
Find this on line 638:
<th scope="col"><?php echo $post->ID; ></th> Replace with this:
<th scope="col"><!-- 061114 Seige --><?php
if ($post->post_status == 'static') {
echo $post->menu_order;
} else {
echo $post->ID;
}
?><!-- 061114 Seige --></th>
And now you can easily make changes to page order whenever you want to add new pages.
I don't think that moving forum topics to the Romper Room is doing the members any justice. Although they are a little hot on fire but they are still serious topics talking about real issues that concerns the welfare of Blogdrive members. They don't deserve to be in the Romper Room because they are not ill-mannered or arguing for the sake of arguing.
Moving these topics away from the main branch (in this case Helpee's on Fire) is like China's media control policy. I think forum moderators should re-evaluate what they move away from the main branch. It feels like censorship to me. Please reconsider this and move them back to where they really belong.
On the issue of Blogdrive's downtime, that's what I've been saying to myself for the past god knows how long. Maybe it'll get better tomorrow, maybe it'll get better tomorrow, I should just leave this work until tomorrow, it'll get better tomorrow and so on...
And now I wonder how much patience can you give to something that doesn't give you any results at all.
And worst of all having to be insulted by another one of Blogdrive's pacifier, sigh such is the world in US of America.
Everything is officially back to normal, no not normal, I mean up and running. Since normal would mean its down or still under maintenance or unavailable in Blogdrive terms.
This is yet another major disaster. Seeing that more people participate in the forum doing the "complaining" dance. And as usual, the Blogdrive defenders (as in Sinja, JfZ and others) would step in to "defend" Blogdrive.
These people are the saviours of Blogdrive, although they are very much unappreciated both by Blogdrive and people who are angry with the service. The defenders would stand up for Blogdrive no matter what it takes, including snapping pirate's neck, being insulted for masturbating in the server room, or having sexual intercourse with one of the server wire host. (eww...)
I, in my opinion, to be honest, in my honest opinion don't like the attitude of these defenders one bit. Here are the stereotypes:
1) they lie, that the service is running smoothly when it isn't.
2) they make fun of angry Blogdrive users posters, a big NO to customer services and professionalism. Though I must admit, they don't have one single bit of reason to provide professional customer service to these people, they are VOLUNTEERS.
3) they think, it's just blogging, it's just a blog, it's just a blog host, it's just a downtime. They fail to understand the importance and economic value of service downtime. OR they knew but they are just doing what they do best, defending Blogdrive.
4) they think, it's a free service, don't complain. And if you pay, just be patient.
What I really hope for them, at the very least is to be honest with the users, do not insult their problems, and do not ever, EVER say that blogging is just another piece of toilet paper.
Sigh. Will they ever understand? Guess not.
From a topic in the forums, in responce to Klubbkidd's frustration and many other fellow bloggers: http://www.blogdrive.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=25338#25338
--
I paid (for three years), I get kicked in the ass too.
Klubbkidd, I've been following your blog every now and then. I also know the volume of visitors you attract, I believe it's in the thousands per day category making it one of the most popular blogs on Blogdrive.
However, seeing that you are doing a serious business you should have left Blogdrive a long time ago. There are better service out there not to mention they are free too.
When BD announced that they are moving data centers, I crossed my fingers and hoped that this'll be the last time we'll be having any problems or discomfort. Till now, one month later it's just as it is before. Pointless.
I guess the only thing you'll lose when you switch, which would also be the most crucial part of it all, is your current blog address. That alone bring many other big disadvantages: Your permalinks and status that you've gathered up until today will all be lost, losing out in search engine rankings. And the complication with what your visitors are familiar with.
My advice to you is this: give BD one more chance, say two weeks. If this big moving of data center doesn't get better in two weeks, by all means, MOVE. Get outta Blogdrive, don't let your potential be hold back by some Californian startup. Flap your wings and fly.
For many times now, Blogdrive have chosen to insert an additional text into all blogs and pages "informing" users they are upgrading servers. Sure, we should actually be grateful that they are in fact "informing" us, which under normal circumstances, they don't.
Blogdrive automatically inserts this line of code into the end of all files stored on Blogdrive. Including CSS and JS files.
<p align=center>Upgrading servers.
We'll be back up in a few of minutes.
We are currently storing submitted entries
for later processing.</p> Now, let's not let the issue of "informing" users of downtime. The issue I'm facing now, has to do with Blogdrive, automatically inserting additional text into my .js files, making them obsolete and not working. I use lotsa external javascript files which are hosted on Blogdrive. But whenever they insert this tags, all my blogs would fail to execute. So the solution to this problem, without informing Blogdrive of the problem (as they are always too "busy" to pay any attention to a Magnum (plan 4) subscriber such as myself), I simple insert a double slash at the very end of all my js documents. It does the trick, wonderfully. By inserting a double slash, I basically "comment-out" the auto-inserted code. Oh, how genius of me to stop a war, not get angry fix the small problem.
Job title: Archivist
Description of position:
Using MACs, duties will include: scanning and studying pictures;
providing picture sellers with the images they require; meeting
press and magazine requirements; and updating the website bank of
pictures. The postholder will be working independently and will
be working on a two-week probation period for a fixed fee before
January 2007.
The position is due to commence in February 2007.
Employer: Homes of Football
About the company:
Photographer specialising in images of football.
Location: Ambleside, Cumbria.
Skills they're looking for:
Logical, autonomous and able to cope with computer crashes.
Salary: £17,000
How to apply:
Send CV and CL to Stuart Clarke, The Homes of Football, 100 Lake
Road, Ambleside, Cumbria LA22 0DB
Tel: 01539 434440
E-mail: info@homesoffootball.co.uk
Closing date: 30/11/2006
Website: www.footballphotographyandtheworld.co.uk
Blogdrive is a great *cough* blogging software, however it isn't the most search engine friendly blog platform around.
New entries or blogs tend to get higher ranking than old post because of Blogdrive's way of handling 404 pages. These new content, either entries or blogs receive a large amount of incoming links from Blogdrive main page and 404 pages. (The number of incoming links is porportional to your page rank.)
As a result, if you regularly updates your blog, your blog will naturally have higher page rank due to these incoming links. (Tip 1)
Other methods, will largely depend on the design and internal HTML coding of your blog.
Tip 2: Insert permalink of important post you made to your sidebar. Since your sidebar appears in every single page of your entire blog, it naturally gives a high number of incoming links. It helps a lot.
Associating keywords to your individual post have a tremendous help of relating to relevant searches. This, however is difficult because Blogdrive system doesn't help in this aspect, at all.
A little hack here and there in the HTML makes a difference.
Such as this blog, each permalink pages have it's Blog Title in the title bar. This is done by forcing individual blog post title into the <title> tag. (Tip 3) This method makes your permalink page rank goes up a significant one PR (PageRank)
Another method, is to link to your individual post with the relevant keyword. Either in your blog, or your friend. Let's consider this as Tip 4.
Tip 5: A newly discovered method by myself, is to insert your blog title into your permalink. Currently, all permalink has the format http://seigey.blogdrive.com/archive/360.html with no specific keyword in the URL. If we make it look like this:
http://seigey.blogdrive.com/archive/360.html?Search+Engine+Friendly+BlogDrive
I consider this as another genius idea of mine and I gladly share it with all. Have fun.
Surprice surprice! Blogdrive announced that they will be doing server maintenance from 3/10 till 5/10 (or was it just the 4th and 5th?).
Can you believe it? they actually took the courtesy to let us know! I'm so happy for them. Yay!
This can be found on the left bottom corner the moment you login.
http://www.blogdrive.com/manage/
Update to the update: 10/04/06:
We will be performing some more maintenance tomorrow, 10/05/06 between the hours of 11:00 AM to 8:00 PM PST.
Update 10/03/06:
We will be performing some routine maintenance on 10/04/06 between the hours of 11:00 AM to 8:00 PM PST. Sections of the site may not accessible during this time.
Blogdrive Team
And on the Blogdrive Update site (http://update.blogdrive.com/archive/6.html) is a new entry regarding the server maintenance.
Wow... I'm soo glad! I hoping Blogdrive will continue doing this in the future.
The overly anticipated and over-dued release of Microsoft's new operating system OS Vista hasn't made a good reputation in the public's eye so far.
First of all, there is five version of Vista each for different level of users.
Secondly, it's extremely heavy in processing power and requires very powerful computers to run. I wonder who'd want to spend another few hundred to upgrade an already fully functional computer, not to mention OS.
And now, news just came out that Microsoft will monopolise OS security market (aka free antivirus and firewall for all) built into it's new Vista. No third party antivirus softwares are allowed. period.
http://news.google.com/news?q=microsoft+security
Now, I wonder what will Norton, McAfee, Avast, AVG and every other existing security software corporate giant feel.
"We're dead!"
"That's the end of the tunnel!"
"We'll need to schedule a bankruptcy meeting!"
"Maybe we can start selling padlocks to our consumers!"
"Ramen noodle shops sounds like a good idea!"
This is really cool, Google added tabbing to their personalised homepage project, we can add as many tabs as possible, too. This will help with loading time significantly and it's a good thing, very good and way better than the other module hacks.
Oh by the way, the modules that I wrote are now listed in Google Directorys. Yahoo!
Check them out!
http://www.google.com/ig/directory?q=blogdrive
Have fun
The Sagrada Familia Church by Gaudi is one of the most magnificent church/catedral I've ever visited. It's been under construction since half a century ago, and will not be ready for another half a century.
Just as is Blogdrive.
As everybody already know, Blogdrive has recently moved their data center, promising every blogdriver a better service with less down time. I was very looking forward to this event as this would definitely make Blogdrive a competent blogging platform. (And benefit my fellow readers  )
To me, Blogdrive is a wonderful work of art, programming, business and internet technology. Of course by saying that, I did not take into consideration the frequent downtime, the rude customer service, the slow responce time (in terms of everything: customer service, releasing new upgrades, and server fixes), the defensive sensitive forum regulars, and of course the deadly-inconsiderate-evil-money-minded spammers.
There are a few conspiracies regarding what actually happened behind the scenes. AH hah! I knew you love conspiracies. 
The move started on June 29th, as indicated in this entry. But by July 21st, it still wasn't completed. It was until Auguest 30th where there were signs of "almost done". Till now, I'm not sure if they are completely finished with the move but the red notice that was in the blog management area were now removed. After two months.
Michael has always been very good at telling stories, I loved the way he put things into an easy to understand, emotionally touching story line. But what really happened isn't always what the story claims, usually. It's true that the real Blogdrive crew consists of Michael, Tim, Jeff and Rick. Each specializing in different areas.
What's untrue is... the number of servers claimed. There's only one server, for all I know. And judging from the quality of server responce time, nothing has changed.
It is kept very cold inside to keep the thousands of servers safe from heat damage. It is also very loud in the data center due to the monster ACs and the thousands of server fans running.
Thousands of servers... right! Has Blogdrive improved their service so far? I, still see no difference.
I wonder why no one has requested this until now, Gloria proposed we create a wikipedia page for Blogdrive in the forums. With failed attempt.
So, I'm proposing a different approach. We'll have to show wikimods how important Blogdrive is to be included in the best online encyclopedia. In order to do that, we should do what we does best, blogging!
So people, start blogging for Blogdrive!
Tags: wikipedia, blogdrive,
As always, Michael make up good stories on his expriences working on Blogdrive. I'm afraid it might dissappear one day like the other stories so I decided to post it here too. You can head over to the forum and read them all there. This is also a n update of their progress in moving data centers.
(Short version)
I apologize for the down time we've been experiencing. Things are looking quite good now. After performing a system upgrade to power hardware on 8/26/06 we were faced with an unexpected challenge that caught us off guard. It took a while to identify the cause which is why it was difficult if not impossible to give an ETA to Blogdrive members during this time. We did attempt to place info on the home page; however this was not always viewable. Thank you for your patience. We will do our best to make certain this does not happen again.
(Long version)
The day the world went away
The events of 8/26/06 explained:
It was morning. Another sunny day here in Southern California, filled with magic and wonder. Nothing out of the norm. Little did we know tragedy was just around the corner for Blogdrive.
We were adding some hardware to the Blogdrive array of servers; line conditioners, rebooters, etc. We had to shut down all of Blogdrive to do this, which is not unusual as we shut down servers often to perform repairs and such. Shutting down and starting up servers is done in a specific sequence. We are schooled in this and did not anticipate any difficulties. However, after reboot something went terribly wrong.
Tim is our main server programmer. Besides being a great programmer he is also an awesome drummer (He insisted that I put the word "awesome" in there.) We have the servers setup to send Tim pages via his cell phone when they are in trouble. They were in trouble. Tim's cell phone sounded like an unstoppable mini Star Wars battle in his pocket.
The "data center" is where all the blogdrive servers are housed (there is also an outside backup location.) The data center occupies an entire floor of a very large building in Los Angeles. The security there is very tight. There are guards with monitors, a security desk, an area to place your entire hand for identification and several cards and keys to open doors and elevators. There are rows of racks and cages. It is kept very cold inside to keep the thousands of servers safe from heat damage. It is also very loud in the data center due to the monster ACs and the thousands of server fans running. Tim is often herd yelling "Speak up!" and "Why is everyjuan friggin' whispering on me?!"
Many of the Blogdrive servers are setup in a redundant array, each with multiple drives duplicating data and exchanging load and requests. This way if a drive fails or explodes or moves on to the next life, we can change it out for a new juan, re-sync it to the others and begin replicating data again. This means no data is lost and no down time experienced.
Needless to say when the pages started flooding in we all panicked; in a calm inward maintained programmer-like panic. All of the servers started shutting down and rebooting on there own in a crazy Ghost in the Machine kinda way. Tim with a link via computer tried to intervene and connect a minimum of resources to gain some control of the situation. They would not have it. I along with Jeff and Rick started pulling severs out of the cages and connecting them to other power sources. I held juan of them in my arms as it was convulsing. I looked over at the guys and screamed, "Is this how it ends? Is this how it ends?!" I set the dying server down and placed my hands to my head, slowing stepping back, then started screaming uncontrollably like a little girl. Or so they tell me.
It seemed there was nothing we could do to put an end to this madness. We checked everything; rebooters, switches, routers, etc. There was nothing. We then really started to panic, in a "what do you mean we're out of coffee?!" kinda panic. We pulled all the servers off line. Blogdrive went silent.
We brought many of the servers home with us to repair any damages that occurred to the data base, and or hardware. As I drove down the street I thought about all the servers I was carrying, the Blogdrivers and all their blogs, all their stories. I also thought about my driving skills, the fact that I was almost out of gas and had juan headlight out. Over the period of a few days we repaired damages and were able to put minimum systems online. We continued to work on the servers at my home. We slept when we could; me in my bedroom and Tim on the sofa, no funny business here. We assumed that we had experienced a strange power spike. We posted what we could to Blogdrive members. Although we did not have an eta, after much thought we knew we were close to an answer.
After further inspection of the servers, Tim felt the answer must be in the power source; something fluctuating in power, something undetected by the other equipment. It was juan of the most improbable possibilities. It would mean that the actual power source coming to the Blogdrive cages in the data center was at fault. This is like blaming a wall outlet. Very unlikely.
We brought the servers back to the data center. With new meters we tested the power source to the cages. It was true! There were severe power fluctuations in the line. It apparently caused damage to the equipment used to protect us from such things. Quickly we re-routed the power to a clean source. We mounted the servers and began syncing them. They were very happy. Blogdrive went back online with full functionality in the early hours of 8/30/06. It will take a week or so to get everything completely up to snuff, but this should not show much influence on the system.
I'd like to apologize to anyjuan affected by this challenge. We had never experienced such an outage before. We will do our best to keep such events from ever happening again.
I'd like to thank the following people:
Veronica over at Fry's Electronics - You got it going on baby!
The folks at Dunken Doughnuts – Remember, it's all about the Maple Bars.
Tracy at the security desk – Thanks for locking me out twice!
My girlfriend Erin who said – "Did you know there's a guy sleeping on our sofa"
I'd also like to thank all the Modulators including JFZ, Ang, Anthony and Sinj for their support. You guys rock me!
Btw,
During the wee hours of the morning at the data center I saw ghosts roaming through the various server cages and hallways. I tried to track them down, you know, to speak with them, but they kept disappearing. They seemed to be dancing at times, wearing nice clothing and such. I was tired. Sounds like a Made For TV movie to me.
Michael
Blogdrive
Sad sad news... the famous reptile "tamer" died when he was dealing with something that wasn't a reptile - a Stingray! And quite astonishingly, he was killed by the stingray barb through his heart. How can anyone survive such a horrible death?
Read more here: http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1531446,00.html
By the way, I'm back!
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