My blog will be moving

My blog here is managed by Google's Blogger and hosted on my own web site on a Rails Playground server. This is done by giving Blogger FTP access to my site that is used to upload the pages when they change. Sadly Google are deprecating this FTP feature and I will either have to run the blog from the Blogger's servers (but I can use my own domain name) or host the my blog myself.

I have always had a plan in place to move my blog from Blogger to WordPress. This will continue to be hosted on my web site and the URLs will not change. You never know when a service will disappear so I tend to plan ahead like this. There is a nice migration path and this is currently my favoured solution.

My main concern about moving to WordPress is the amount of comment spam that friends get despite using recaptcha. I have had to disable the comments on the BarCampNorthEast web site that was receiving a couple of spam comments a day.

So, do you think I am doing the right thing. Should I use WordPress or something else? Should I use another comment service like Disqus to cut down on spam, or should I host the whole thing somewhere else? All comments welcome (unless they are spam :-) ).

USB printing on Ubuntu 9.10

Last year a purchased an Aspire Revo R3600 with a 160GB HDD that I installed Ubuntu on. It has been a great little machine and I am very pleased with it.

Somewhere down the line my old LaserJet printer (from Freegle/Freecycle) that is connected using a cheep USB to Parallel adapter (off ebay) stopped working. It is a problem that many people appear to have had when they upgraded Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala). After a bit (okay, a lot) of debugging I have figured out that you need to treat the USB device as a parallel printer and not the default USB printer. To do this change the URL prefix from "usb:" to "parallel:", or if that is nonsense to you use the following instructions.

• Go to the printing devices by selecting "System", "Administration", and then "Printing".


• Right click on the old printer (if one is there) and select delete.


• Click the "New" button.


• Select "Other" and enter the device URI as"parallel:/dev/usblp0".


• Select your printer as you would normally and it should then work (a reboot may be required).

Remember this is only for if you are using a parallel printer with a USB converter. I hope this helps you, and if it does and you have posted for help elsewhere, please help someone else by going back and posting the answer (or link back to here). Finally, before you smug Windows users start having a go, it took me longer to get the converter running on my XP machine. :-P

If things were a little different

Today I was looking through some fonts for a project and came across some familiar ones. Just for a giggle I wondered what they would look like if things had worked out a little different.

Mr Duck's Amazing Web Site

So, at long last Mr Duck has his web site. I have been taking pictures for Duck 365 for the last year, and stupidly have agreed to continue by popular demand. What I never quite got round to was making a web site for it. Eventually I managed to find some time by using the good old excuse of it being a learning exercise.

The site is a little tong in cheek fitting in with the Mr Duck back story. It is the web site that a small yellow plastic duck would have asked for. :-) It has a lot of new CSS layout in it that I have used as an experiment, but it does degrade gracefully. The thing that most amazed me is that the CSS font-face actually works, although there are bugs that I needed to work around. Also I accidentally I created a new simple templating system using an error document to catch the requests and build the web page. I shall probably build on this for other projects.

I have also found a new way to work on IE computability. It appears that IE6 and IE7 have very close layout problems. The markup for IE6 also fixes the problems for IE7. So what I have done is built the site using Chrome and Firefox, and then fixed the layout in IE6 for IE7 and below in a separate conditional CSS file. Then all I needed to do was work around the PNG transparency issues for IE6 and below in a second conditional CSS file. Everything else just works then, and I only needed one version of IE installed for development.

The best thing about the site from my point of view is that it should be zero maintenance. It automatically pulls the pictures from flickr and even uses flicker to manage the comments. I decided not to display the comments on the site at the tims as there a security implications of allowing users to add content to your site, but I do display a comment count and link back to flickr. I even dynamically generate the site map and RSS feed.

There are a few more things I would like to do. I plan to add some slow cloud animation, improve navigation, and intermittently add a few more random Mr Duck images to the background. For now though I will leave it or I will just not get anything else done.

So please check out "Mr Duck's Amazing Web Site", and you can also follow his antics on Twitter. Also please let me know if it works well or not on your browser and if there is anything else you would like to see.

(dot)goodidea

Last month I came up with the idea of Chocify, a tong in cheek web service taking the community aspect of Spotify and applying it to chocolate. In another of my fits of madness I decided I could come up with an idea every day and put it on the Internet like an advent calender.

Naturally I did not tell anyone because at the time I did not know if I could keep it up or if it would be any good. I also wanted to get a bit of design work done for it. As it turns out it's completely rubbish, but I am still going so you might want to have a read anyway. You can follow these winning ideas on the blog, or on Twitter. Naturally I never got round to designing anything.

Goodbuy Wake up to Wogan

So, that is it, the end of... something. I will not go on about it, but I felt the need to blog something to commemorate it, so this is my last email to the show...

Hi Terry and the posy,

I was trying to find something clever and profound that sums up the moment. Something that brackets everything we are all feeling and summarises our many years together. Something that notes those we have lost along the way with joy, and reminds you that although we write our show, we can only do this through you. Sadly my mind is blank so I will take this opportunity to ask who's stupid idea was this WUTWAC? It's completely useless.

Mad Alistair (No relation)

A WUTWAC is a Wake Up To Wogan Alarm Clock that were given out as prizes many a year ago. My signed photo of Terry is still hanging on the back of the toilet door. :-)

I like Twitters Retweet feature

Can I just put on the record that I like Twitter's Retweet feature.

In March I blogged about how I would like to see a Retweet feature built in to Twitter and we have recently seen such a feature slowly rolled out.

It takes a little getting use to seeing other peoples' icons in your stream, but I have grown to find that useful as well. I was also worried that because it is so much easier to retweet that people might get carried away, but this has not happened, and you can block the retweets from just one user but still see there own tweets. What I love the most is that fact that when several friends retweet something I only get it once instead of several times like in the past. I am back in control.

As with most things the reception has been mixed, but on the whole most of the people I am following are using it, and although some like it and some prefer the old way of doing RSs, I don't think it can be described at "Hated". I only mention this because of the Tech Crunch article who's title annoyed me enough to write this post. I feel that article just a personal view of Mike Butcher and not a valid statement of fact.