£150 is a bit steep for a 2GB SD card, but probably quite reasonable when compared to £9,915.99.

I decided it might be nice to upgrade from Drupal 5 to Drupal 6. Not wanting to totally destroy my website in the process I set up a test site at home. Into the test site I copied my live website and its database, with the idea of making that work and then upgrading it and after some testing, put it on here.

Well I managed to copy my live website onto my test server and it mostly worked. For some reason the CSS was broken along with the theme. Then I tried to “upgrade” Drupal (read that as “delete the old code, replace with new code”) and was met with a white screen of nothing… or the Drupal installer which wouldn’t go past the database config screen.

I can’t be arsed now, I’m done with spending hours fucking around with this stuff it should just work with minimal faff. If I can be bothered, I’ll try again at some point, the current Drupal installation has loads of modules installed that I don’t use so they’re probably buggering it up.

Of 39…

It’s going well so far. I managed to keep a class of year 9s quiet whilst I spoke to them for ten minutes, which is a big improvement on last year when I was fighting the buggers to keep their mouthes shut. Tomorrow I will have looped around all my classes once, so I’m watching now for any of the quiet timid ones to start poking their heads up.

And when they do, I’ll soon make them hide again.

This year’s motto of “take none of their crap” is proceeding well.

While sorting out my diary’s categories I made that strange realisation of just how old this site is. I’ve been pushing words into this since October 2000 - LiveJournal users, this is where you follow the link back onto my real site . The database is growing quite large now, and there’s some fun posts hidden in here. I think I’ll have some self-indulgence and post up a selection of my favourite entries. It can be the blogging equivalent of those “Top 100 ways to watch paint dry” programs that TV is full of.

At the weekend we’re supposedly off to rescue some ZX Spectrums from being thrown in the tip. I have no idea what I’d do with more of them, but the books and assorted addons interests me. I’m a sucker for weird hardware

It’s not quite finished, but I present my updated website. Rather than seeing my blog on the front page, it’s been moved back behind the main site. I’ll be using my main site to write about my hardware and software projects and other technology related things. This blog will become my place to write about everything else, along with some cross-posting of new things on my main site.

This blog will continue to be cross-posted to LiveJournal, but the main site won’t; there’s no Drupal plugin to do that, and it’d clog my LJ up.

So if you like tech, soldering irons, code and watching someone with no formal training in electronics taking stuff apart you can do worse than visit my main website.

Eventually, when I’ve taken the photos, there will be a section for my increasingly large Retro Computing Collection. I have a lot of retro games consoles and computers, so many that I can’t actually remember what I own so a catalogue is next on my list of things to make.

After a slow and dull day at work, where the most interesting thing I did was plan next year, I’ve spent a few hours fiddling with Drupal on my website. I think I can use views and panels to make the front page, and the Content Construction Kit to catalogue my slightly large retro computer collection, hardware hacks and other fun stuff.

Drupal’s quite flexible. The CCK lets me add fields to pages, so that my content can be organised. There’s more to a page than a title and big chunk of text. The database schema behind it must be quite hairy though. Storing database definitions inside databases is a good way to turn your brain to goo

The more astute of you may have noticed that the usual front page of my website has changed. In a small fit of realisation when leaving the house this morning I realised the main thing on my website is this - my diary.

And so my diary is now the main page of my website thanks to a bit of crafty .htaccess magic:

RewriteEngine on                                                                
RewriteCond %{HTTP:Authorization} !^$                                           
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} openid.mode=authorize                               
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} !auth=                                              
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_METHOD} =GET                                              
RewriteRule (.*) %{REQUEST_URI}?%{QUERY_STRING}&auth=%{HTTP:Authorization} [L]  
                                                                                                     
Redirect 301 /index.php http://www.piku.org.uk/diary/

The other stuff is still here, nothing has changed except one line in my htaccess file so you get redirected here. I’m going to do something to my website during the summer holidays. I’ve got some content to add and a few design changes I want to make. For now it’s better if you look at my diary since it gets updated several times a week.

Why am I getting so much spam on my main website? It’s unbelievable. Utter random gibberish, I though Akismet was good?

Off to bed, lots of things to do tomorrow.

Like many people, I read the Dilbert strips. They’re amusing and poke fun at the types of people I have worked for. Having been a long-term subscriber to the Daily Dilbert email, I almost missed the steaming pile of gash that is the “new” Dilbert website.

Really… why? Just… why?

Do I want to share a comic with friends? Yep. Do I want to do this with some Flash-based viewer? NO! The old method of sending URLs around is easy. Do I want to comment on comics? No, not really… look at the quality of comments on YouTube for a good reason why. Do I want to put my own text into the strips? No… and I don’t want to sit and read through other people’s idea of “funny” either.

I hope the daily emails continue to use embedded images, rather than this nasty Flash thing. Wrapping a picture inside a Flash viewer is just so illogical it sounds exactly like the kind of woolly-brained thinking that Dilbert pokes fun at.

YouTube = good use of Flash
Dilbert = bad use of Flash

Just as I suspected, that Pulse thing is a load of poo. I spent a while telling it about all the online services I use and it made something that was half as useful as the main page of my own website.

I’ll file it under ‘U’ for ‘Useless waste of effort if you have webspace of your own and aren’t Emo’.

Comment now, even if you’re not my friend.

Whopee someone has invented yet another “social networking” website. Yeah, this one also has AJAX and DHTML boxes in it.

I don’t normally go for these types of thing, being quite happy to babble on at the world in here. Facebook and Myspace can go and sit in their emo-infested corner with a box of razorblades for all I care, and I only have a LiveJournal because Wordpress can cross-post to it.

This Pulse thing seems a bit different though. It aggregates crap interesting content from all the other websites I use and puts them in one convenient place. And then does the twee social networking guff too.

If I’ve understood it right, I should be able to give potential stalkers one web address and they can see everything. I really can’t work it out though, best go RTFM maybe.