Supp Y'all, it's Gill's birthday this saturday (she's 24) so happy birthday to her. We're going to go to blue mountains next weekend which i am really looking forward to. I forgot to mention that last week we rented (well Alan and Jean [flat mates] did and we crashed the party) a small boat, to drive/sail around Sydney harbour. The weather was smashing when we set off but by about 3pm it started to get cloudy and the seas started to get a little rough. We made it all the way past the Opera house (some really nice views of the city-harbour bridge-opera house) which took us a good 2 1/2 hours despite the lady in the rental office(shed) telling us we could drive the length of the harbour in about an hour (yeah right !!!!.. not with a 6hp engine). We stopped at an unknown beach to have food and a much need pee (due to beers being had while sailing). We then made the long trek back to the rental depot .. but not before, Alan decided to play chicken with a buoy and not turning (hilarious stuff obviously) and nearly getting run over by the biggest tanker I have ever seen in my life (a police boat had to tell us which way to go as I coudn't figure out which direction the thing was going. We finally made it back at 5pm (4 hours sailing in all) just before the rain started. All in all it was a really fun day and well worth doing….. Sailing Sydney harbour….Thats one more thing off my list of things to do in life (imaginary list therefore no link). There are images but Redbrick still haven't installed ImageMagick so I can't upload any new photos yet grrrr!!!!!. On another note, check out Suse 9.0 Pro, this is the OS I will be exclusively using when I get set up at home.

I caught myself ego-surfing (more precisely ego-searching) today andfound that aggreg8 had 2,240result returned by Google, That ispretty impressive seeing as Aggreg8was originally a UNI project. I have cheekily added a PAYPAL Donate linkto the footer of Aggreg8.net. If I get a few donations it might kick meinto doing some more work on it (when ever I can get some time thatis)

Isn't that just brilliant, I spend time learning to write search plugins and then i come across the http://mycroft.mozdev.org site with tons and tons of search plugins. It is really cool, they have everything there.  Since this is only my owrk machine and not my personal one, I have started to keep track of my Bookmarks by Uploading them to redbrick, You can lok at all my bookmarks here,

I hate, dislike, abhor, abominate, allergic to, anathematize, be loath, be reluctant, be sorry, can't stand, contemn, curse, deprecate, deride, despise, detest, disapprove, disdain, disfavor, dislike, disparage, down on, execrate, loathe, nauseate, object to, recoil from, scorn, shudder at, shun, spit upon, spurn …… pop-up windows…If I click on a link, I want to go to that link in the current window… I do not under circumstances ever ever want to have a new window open and the link load in that. It is the one of the few things that makes me want to slam my mouse into my monitor. If you are a developer and you have have links like this "target = 'whatever' ", and you don't have any real reason for it..STOP DOING IT. The only times I see this as forgivable is if the  pop-up serves a purpose that could not/would not be suitable to have in the main window .. pop-up calendar for instance. That's my ranting for today 😉

I got a PHP.net Search Plugin working in Firebird. Simply extract the archive (http://www.redbrick.dcu.ie/~proche/index/MozPlugins/php.zip) to your MozillaFirebird/searchplugins directory and restart. You will then have the choice to search PHP.net as well as Google and DMOZ. UPDATE: I just wrote an Acronym Finder Plugin , (http://www.redbrick.dcu.ie/~proche/index/MozPlugins/af.zip) and also a TEOMA search Plugin (http://www.redbrick.dcu.ie/~proche/index/MozPlugins/teoma.zip).  Enjoy 🙂

Messing about in Paint Shop pro today I came up with this masterpiece. I really want  to learn PhotoShop but I have no time, Thinking about it I might (If I ever get time .. learn Gimp properly as it's Open Source and Cross Platfrom (GTK) and Supposedly as good as PhotoShop). http://gimp-savvy.com/ seems to be a pretty good source for Gimp Information . Also see the Online Gimp User Manual.Another tutorial for Gimp : Gimp.org

I wrote this to search and replace any entries on a text string with another text string. It searches all fileds in all tables of the $dbname specified.
[code lang=”php”]
< ? $dbname = "proche"; $result = mysql_list_tables($dbname); while ($row = mysql_fetch_row($result)) { $table_name= $row[0]; $fields = mysql_list_fields($dbname, $table_name, $link_id); $columns = mysql_num_fields($fields); for ($i = 0; $i < $columns; $i++) { $field_name = mysql_field_name($fields, $i); $sql = "update proche.".$table_name." set ".$field_name; $sql .= " = Replace(".$field_name.", 'http://redbrick.dcu.ie',"; $sql .= "'http://www.redbrick.dcu.ie')"; $sqlresult = mysql_query($sql, $link_id); }//end for }//end while mysql_free_result($result); ?>
[/code]

You can now search Yahoo news (Yahoo & RSS) and receive the results in RSS see blog entry
http://jeremy.zawodny.com/blog/archives/001001.html . I use Aggreg8 more and more now when I get free time to read blogs. I really like it but I do aggree that there is a lot of work to be done (after all it is still in Alpha), Joe Jones (not too sure if he has a website) is doing some work on it and i hope to test this week some time. I really really wish I had time to work on it but with work and no PC/Laptop with me, I don't get a chance. RSS is popping up all over the place and I would love it if Aggreg8 could somehow improve to the standard of other Aggregators. Alas back to work (non- Aggreg8 related 🙁 ).

On another note , I have provisionally decided to return home in June/July next year and try and get some work in the UK (more precisely the North West) so if anybody has any contacts or know of any LAMP, XUL, DEV type jobs going give me a shout. [My CV/Resume]

Since the gallery is down (Uploading part anyway.. waiting for the server admins to re-install ImageMagick) I thought I'd post some images here.

Me in the Submarine in Sydney harbour.	My IHP100 from the front.
My IHP 100 From the Side	My IHP 100 From the Side

I've written a PHP script to Search and replace values in any field in any table of a specified database. I needed this because redbrick removed the * subdomain so you can only use www. This caused havoc in images and onsite links I had in my database. All is fixed and I'll put the code up soon.

In Reply to a Slashdot article about what people view as their essential PC software. I have compiled a list below , more than ten entries though. The list is for software for a windows machine. {[F]= Free [P]=Pay :)}

1. OpenOffice [F] Office Suite
2. Firebird [F] Web browser
3. Thunderbird [F] Email Client
4. Aggreg8 [F] RSS Aggregator
5. Gimp [F] Graphics Suite
6. Java [F] Java Platform
7. SmartFTP [F] FTP Client
8. Putty [F] Telnet/SSH client
9. WINSCP [F] Secure FTP
10. Adobe Acrobat Reader [F] PDF Reader
11. Edit Plus [P] Text Editor
12. Win RAR [P] Compress/DeCompression  tool
13. Zend Studio [P] PHP Development Environment
14. Apache [F] Web Server
15. MySQL [F] Database
16. PHP [F] Scripting Language
17. PHPMyadmin [F] MySQL admin tool
18. AVG Anti Virus [F] Anti virus Software
19. VLC Media Player [F] Media/DVD player
20. CDex [F] Cd -> Mp3 convertor
21. Nero [P] Cd Burning app.

I'm sure I can think of plenty more (In fact I had the list nearly complete when I accidently closed my editor :(  ). There is a really good project called the OpenCD project which has Open Source Software bundled on a CD. I have recently become more and more pissed off that i can't touch type perfectly so I found Tux typing to try and learn, I haveen't used it yet and probably won't 'cos I won't have any time.