www.nickhodge.com

Time to upgrade to the latest Word­Press. Time to remove many old plu­gins that were caus­ing nas­ti­ness. A bet­ter designed theme will return, soon. For those read­ing through RSS, ignore this post.

Some other things are going a bit hay­wire. In the midst of fix­ing this now. I must admit I feel bet­ter on Word­Press 2.1.2.

The RSS feed from this site through Feedjumbler/Feedburner are work­ing OK, links on this site to the Feed­burner needs to be created.

Need to find a wide design where I can cus­tom­ise the header image. Need to re-architect the old data from the old mun­genet web site. Maybe render this to static ele­ments. Not sure of the approach here yet. Re-add Plu­gins that do the cool things (his­tory, archives, search­ing) — oh, and Google Adsense so I can pay for this web site

As a part of the trans­ition of my blog entries from the old PHP-based Mun­gen­eten­gine to PHP-based Word­Press I’ve needed to cat­egor­ize and title my older posts.

It has been inter­est­ing not­ing cer­tain milestones:

• Total blog posts: 371
  Which totals 5.6 posts per month, on aver­age over the last 5.5 years.
• Star­ted Web­log­ging: Janu­ary 2000
  5.5 years of blog­ging, more if you go right back! to 14^th July 1997. That’s over 9 years per­sonal pres­ence on the web. Also, as a point of ref­er­ence, www.nickhodge.com is still not as large at the Fairfax@Atlanta site dynam­ic­ally assembled through 5 intense weeks in the inter­net dark-ages of 1996. The web is 15 years old today, so I’ve been pub­lish­ing for 66% of the “life” of the www.
• Imple­men­ted under self-coded PHP with MySQL backend: Decem­ber 2001
  The decision to put data in a data­base has rewar­ded this site many times, although not in ways ori­gin­ally inten­tioned. A code review shows some lines and func­tions being 5 years old. Oh the hor­ror of some of the PHP.
• Imple­men­ted SOAP for Neil Finn Lyric Server: June 2002
  As web ser­vices star­ted to emerge, I’d decided to see how dif­fi­cult they were to imple­ment. With vari­ous cli­ents on dif­fer­ent lan­guages and plat­forms, and strug­gling with WSDL — this ser­vice is still work­ing today. At as last night, the server had pro­cessed over 100,000 requests.
• Imple­men­ted RSS Feed: July 2002
  Before feed-readers were parts of browsers and oper­at­ing sys­tems, and before I really knew why I was doing this — coded a RSS feed for this site.
• First Mob­log Entry: July 2002
  Imple­men­ted a quick gate­way for SMS-to-Blog entry sys­tem, and tapped out an entry from a remote device.
• First Wiki­pe­dia Ref­er­ence: Octo­ber 2003With the recent world aware­ness of Wiki­pe­dia, my first post­ing and ref­er­ence is way-back. Accord­ing to Wiki­pe­dia, the num­ber of entries was less than 200,000.

The base design of www.nickhodge.com has changed. More work with the changed URLs from last week, plus a new image cour­tesy Mark Szulc taken at Kare Kare, NZ. Worked on the CSS; using a three column liquid lay­out. Any errors, or mis­ren­der­ings. Just email.

Update, 16^th June 2006: fixed issues with CSS when being browsed by Inter­net Explorer 6.0: it needs the z-index: set implicitly.

Thanks to an email from Ola, and some research; I’ve taken the liberty to change the URL format on www.nickhodge.com. Using a post­ing on Mod­re­write For­ums: Com­plic­ated .htac­cess, it was a simple mat­ter and 15 lines of Mod­re­write for Apache, we’re off!

JPEG2000 and JPF Files: What, When, and How (JPEG2000 sup­port in Pho­toshop CS2)

To the right of the front page of www.nickhodge.com is a quick exper­i­ment: the Photo Blog Exper­i­ment. Now that MMS is work­ing from my Sony-Ericsson phone, I can email to a spe­cial pro­cess run­ning on this web server. The photo is de-attached and inser­ted into the data­base. Within 5 minutes of tak­ing a photo, it is pub­lished here. This extends the SMS to blog sys­tem I cre­ated in 2002.

News­gator to Mun­gen­eten­gine via Metaweb­log API

To explain the pre­vi­ous post. As I “live” in Out­look 2003, and find­ing less and less time to browse web sites, I’ve inves­ted in News­gator. Ver­sion 2.0 has this use­ful “blog” post­ing fea­ture that was too good to leave alone. There is a plu­gin mech­an­ism to News­gator; and I’ve installed one that has a Metaweb­log API inter­face. Writ­ing a PHP and XMLRPC stub on the server, I can now eas­ily post from within Out­look 2003.

Thanks Andrew for spot­ting this: For InDes­ign 2.0 and CS: Mul­tiDo: To cel­eb­rate the launch of Easy­Cata­log, we are offer­ing a free plug-in that allows you to per­form mul­tiple undo or redo oper­a­tions in one step using new undo mul­tiple and redo mul­tiple menu options. The menu will dynam­ic­ally update to reflect the 100 most recent operations.

60^th Anniversary of the D-Day Land­ings. You’ve prob­ably seen the deservedly sat­ur­a­tion cov­er­age on the TV news. Sadly, the 60^th is prob­ably the last major anniversary that the vet­er­ans will exper­i­ence. As Stephen Ambrose has said, this gen­er­a­tion was prob­ably the greatest.

To give D-Day an Aus­tralian fla­vour: we did have sail­ors and air­man who served dur­ing the Nor­mandy cam­paign. In Arromaches, there is the Mus�e D�barquement. Inside the museum is a RAAF Hawker Typhoon pilot who died dur­ing the cam­paign (18^th June 1944, flak). 25 year old Pilot Officer Don Mason from Wagga Wagga, NSW. He served in the 198^th Squad­ron, RAF, Man­ston. His remains and plane were recovered in 1942. His ser­vice uni­form was donated to the museum by the family.

Within the short period of 70 days, I visit at least 7 cit­ies in Asia and Europe. This is a spe­cial textlog and imagelog of the experience.