New Plugins and upgrades are going in left right and centre
Fed up with the spam and new users have introduced captcha across the board.
I may trial letting members post comments without having to enter it down the road, but for now i’m not easing up.
Also upgraded ip2nation again, and will be putting in more plugins to spruce the place up

Got round to doing the 2.8.5 update to wordpress last week and what do you know within days there’s a new update.
At least this time i’ve implemented it straight away.
Can’t remember if i’ve said before, but the automated updater within wordpress makes this an absolute doddle to do.
Much easier than when you had to download the files, delete the whole blog and upload it back again.
This method is done in 5 minutes and even walks you through a backup of the sql database.

As aleksandr might say “simples”:

comparethemeerkat

Today is possibly one of the most stupid but funny international days of the year:-
Talk like a Pirate day

The Official Website offers advice and discussion on how to make the most of the event.

The UK version yarr.org.uk has similar offering catering specifically for the UK population.

Not sure if i’ll be doing anything specific but may try and slip the odd “yarr me hearty” at the end of sentences.

It’s been a few months since i last updated anything
Saw a few rogue users signing up – hope this deters them – and upgraded to the latest version of wordpress
I must say it’s so much easier than it used to be – the plugins do it all for you without a hitch

The clock is ticking – less than 10 days to go till the start of the ashes

Adnrew Straus vs Ricky Ponting…

It’s too tough to call, but what we do know is there will be no Michael Vaughan, a chance of England playing 2 spinners, and it all begins on 8th July at 10am at Cardiff.

I’ll keep it short. Read it in the paper and it looks like a hilariously funny blog with the talk about John “Bhooka Naan” Buchanan coach of the Kolkata Knight Riders among others.
Nobody seems to know who the source of the stories is but all will be revealed sooner or later. In the meantime here’s the link:

fakeiplplayer.blogspot.com
and here is a link to the guardian’s article on the blog

As usual i’m being slapdash with upgrading my blog’s software
But hopefully from now on you won’t see these posts because i’ve installed new plugin at the same time as doing the update which is called Wordpress automatic upgrade. With this plugin whenever there’s an upgrade it will do the backup and installation through the wordpress admin pane for me without having to download files, backup and ftp myself which should keep me up to date.

Anyways, am currently with the latest release, haven’t seen anything too radically different other than it’s fixed a bug i had in the admin pane to do with plugins. But do drop me an email if you spot anything.

I got tagged in this game – i’m useless at guessing and was far too slow off the mark.
But thought i’d give it a go from my collection and see how well others fair with the results i get.

If you want to have a go yourself here’s the steps/rules:

Step 1: Put your music player on shuffle.
Step 2: Post the first line from the first 25 songs that play, no matter how embarrassing. See which of your friends can name the most songs.
Step 3: Strike out the songs when someone guesses both artist and track correctly.
Step 4: Looking them up on Google or any other search engine is CHEATING!
Step 5: If you like the game post your own.
Step 6: Tag 20 friends to guess

Here we go – sometimes i’ve been generous and given 2-3 lines if they’re short or for no reason at all. Other times (when i don’t feel like helping) i’ve stuck to just the first line:

1. You can force it but it will not come – Radiohead “Planet Telex”
2. From the coast of gold, across the seven seas – Iron Maiden “Wasted Years”
3. *song title* all in my brain – Jimi Hendrix Experience “Purple Haze”
4. I was driving on the freeway in the fast lane
5. *song title* Be my everything
6. This is a mantra for myself
7. Fall back take a look at me and you’ll see I’m for real
8. You hide behind barricades
9. Bite the bit, scream till you’re blue the face
10. Anytime but now, Anywhere but here
11. In the unlikely event that sarcasm is an unfitting dress
12. There are no monks in my band
13. My name is *song title* and I am here to unlock the secrets of your mind
14. If it’s a bad day you try to suffocate – Placebo “You don’t care about us”
15. Back and forth, I sway with the wind
16. Care not for the men who wonder
17. Take me in your arms…. come on
18. Sometimes I need to remember just to breathe
19. Fall, white, light fell
20. Funny how I find myself in love with you
21. A grand hope a rope
22. Come down to my house, stick a stone in your mouth
23. How can we make you understand
24. You were just a work of sperm
25. Bombers rip across the screen

So there you go – try and guess what they all are and i’ll strike them off as you get them
To give you a pointer, I would say the easiest (in terms of least obscure and/or easiest to guess from the lyric) are:
1,3,4,7,12,13,14,18,20,22,23

and that therefore leaves the following as the harder ones:
2,5,6,8,9,10,11,15,16,17,19,21,24

Though clearly it would depend on whether you know the artists/tracks that came up, i can tell you if i didn’t have the answers in front of me i wouldn’t get any of the harder ones apart from number 5 and possibly number 2.

I would add that it was made so much easier by having downloaded any lyrics i had a while back into itunes as you can see them on your iPod. It meant i only had to grab 4 or 5 CDs off the shelf to double check the lyric and googled 2 or 3 that didn’t have lyrics in the sleeve.

Good luck, and if you are struggling, check out an old version of my music collection. If there are still any outstanding in a few weeks i will probably reveal the answers then (if i remember).

As an addendum – although i’ve got my facebook setup to accept the RSS feed and the post appears as a note here, the updates will only happen here as it won’t update or allow edits once it’s been imported – sorry, didn’t realise that at the time! It’s much nicer here anyway.

It’s been ages since i posted this so thought i’d post the answers in case anyone was wondering

1. Radiohead – Planet Telex
2. Iron Maiden – Wasted Years
3. Jimi Hendrix – Purple Haze
4. Weird Al Yankovic – Everything You Know Is Wrong
5. Type-O-Negative – Be My Druidess
6. My Ruin – Diavolina
7. Avril Lavigne – Nobody’s Fool
8. Trivium – To The Rats
9. Napalm Death – Diatribes
10. Fugazi – Burning Too
11. At The Drive In – 300 MHz
12. Red Hot Chilli Peppers – Funky Monks
13. Goldie Looking Chain – Professor Doppleganger
14. Placebo – Without You I’m Nothing
15. Faith No More – Falling to Pieces
16. Alice in Chains – God Smack
17. Evoke – Arms of Loren
18. Linkin Park – Don’t Stay
19. Obituary – Back from the Dead
20. Talk Talk – It’s My Life
21. Kicks Joy Darkness – American Television
22. Garbage – Supervixen
23. The Libertines – Road to Ruin
24. Slayer – I Hate You
25. Low Fidelity Allstars – Nightmare Story

On one of my many trips around wikipedia I stumbled across a date that has been called the real millennium bug.
Contrary to belief, the computers which run the most important systems including most webservers and database systems run on a variant of Unix/Linux or Unix-like aka *Nix.

All these operating systems operate a time keeping mechanism that starts from 1st January 1970
The measure of this time keeping is that it counts in seconds from this.
Most versions installed are 32bit Operating Systems which means that the largest number in seconds that can be represented would occur at 03:14:07 UTC on Tuesday, 19 January 2038
This is the Year 2038 problem (or Y2K38 bug) and the result is that all these computers unless upgraded to a 64bit OS (or other patches applied) will have their calendar reset to 1st January 00:00 at 03:14:08 on 19th Jan 2038. 64 bit OS’s will last well into the future – 290 billion years. A less radical solution of assigning the size of the time character to unsigned 32 bits would extend the problem till the year 2106 but could cause other problems. Other suggestions are to reset the date that is counted from from 1970 to 2000 which would extend the problem by 30 years.

I’m sure a solution will be found, but given that these operating systems are not found as often in home computers (with the exception of linux and Mac OSX operating systems) it has not become as well known but am sure that it will hit the press at some point in the future.

Yesterday, the first test England vs West Indies ended with a dramatic result in Sabina Park as Jerome Taylor and Sulieman Benn routed England for just 51. Both ended with 8 wickets in the match, but it was Taylor who finished with Man of the Match for his 5 wickets in the second innings and devastating figures of:
9 – 4 – 11- 5

England leave Kingston in tatters, shell-shocked, with new captain Andrew Strauss, and no official coach.
Changes will be in order for the 2nd Test which starts on Friday, but all is not well in the England camp.

Meanwhile things are rosy in Chris Gayle’s West Indian dressing room: