With fingers crossed and backups at the ready, I updated to WordPress 2.6 this morning. I’m pleased to report if you were successful applying the unofficial patch to EC3 to make it work with WP 2.5, it should work fine with WP 2.6. Links to the patch are around here somewhere if you need it still.

The handwriting was on the wall. Now it’s a done deal. Teddy’s out of the circus that’s the New York Islanders. Supporting this team is so difficult. Give me a call when they hit rock bottom. I don’t think they’ve been there yet.

HockeyNation

When is an upgrade not an upgrade? When RIM does it. Another summer of DOS-era email! Yippee.

BIS upgraded, but OS 4.5 won’t be until September | BlackBerry Cool

I generally don’t like to spread rumors but this might be worth spreading. H/T to Blackberry Cool.

BIS 2.5 upgrade coming June 28th, with HTML e-mail? | BlackBerry Cool

It’s taken me the better part of a year to teach myself how to code in php and write MySql queries. Now I’m on to javascript and it’s not going well. Actually, I’m not really working that hard at javascript but I am interested in jQuery since it appears to be perfect for someone with a dangerously limited knowledge of javascript.

I haven’t gotten very far with jQuery. Probably because I don’t understand javascript. I wrote a couple of pages which use hide/show and animated transitions but that’s it. Just glitz rather than heavy lifting. I know I can use jQuery’s AJAX functions to call remote scripts via POST but I want to do something with the data that comes back. I just haven’t figured out how and I can’t seem to find a good online tutorial for this. Oh well.

jQuery: The Write Less, Do More, JavaScript Library

My SMF message board saw a spike in harvesting traffic several weeks ago despite my best efforts to prevent that from happening. The CAPTHCA didn’t let any of spam through but the harvesters were eating bandwidth and server resources. Last week, I took action by hacking the index.php file to use the blacklist function of Project Honeypot. Jan developed a nice WordPress plugin but there was nothing available off the shelf for Simple Machines Forum message board. I took the http:bL query from Jan’s code, inserted my key and put the code at the beginning of the index.php file. When I get a hit from the query, I redirect the harvester to the Honeypot I installed. Took a couple of days but harvesters are being redirected to the Honeypot and my message board is seeing much less traffic.

If you are interested in finding out more about Project Honeypot, click the chicklet on the sidebar of this blog.

Fire up the dvr for the next 3 weeks or so.

H/T to The Offside for the espn TV schedule.

My favorite (at least it used to be my favorite) password management software has been updated as a universal binary for the Mac. The good news is that it runs in Leopard (requires Tiger as a minimum) and still syncs with the Palm OS. The bad news is I now use a Blackberry which doesn’t play at all with the Mac desktop.

The Blackberry version of SplashID is horrid but I’m going to pin that on the OS rather than the software. I have no real basis for this claim other than SplashID is/was awesome on the Palm OS and ran superbly on both Windows and Mac OS. There is no way to even export the database from the Blackberry. I figure the only way to keep everything updated is to use SplashID version 4’s ability to sync local files natively so theoretically, since I have a Windows box on my home network, I could sync my Blackberry’s SplashID with it using the Blackberry sync function (Windows only) and then have the two desktop version sync over the network. That should be a good way to waste an afternoon trying to get that to work. I’ll report back if I have any luck or any desire to do this.

Update: May 28, 2008 - Guess what? The Mac’s SplashID database is not compatible with the Windows SplashID database so you can not sync a Mac file with a Windows file. Best you can do is export either one as a vID file and import it into the other application. Essentially having a master and clone but no syncing. About a -100 for this ‘feature.’ Thankfully you only have to by one license and you get all the Operating Systems.

Password Management Software - Password Vault Manager - SplashID

My primary beef with my BB 8830WE is lack of native HTML support in the email application. Well, that and a garbage calendar application. And the inability to work with and save attachments. Perhaps RIM is feeling pressure from Apple but this summer’s planned RIM OS 4.5 release looks promising. We’ll see.

BlackBerry OS Roadmap (and 0S 4.5 features!)

ESPN takes an unholy pounding in the sports blogging world. Much of it is probably deserved but they came through yesterday big time. The Champions League final between Manchester United and Chelsea went to penalties. In the olden days, I used to set my VCR for 3 or so hours but now with DVRs, you choose the programming block and record it. ESPN set a 2 hour and 25 minute programming block for the Final which would have been fine IF extra time wasn’t required. Of course, you can always select the ensuing program on the DVR to make sure you get extra time and penalties but I’m an idiot.

Sure enough, my DVR recording conked out just after the end of the first period of extra time. Lovely. So at 9 PM EDT, I decided to check ESPN classic to see if they would be rebroadcasting the match later that evening. Sure enough, they were so I set my DVR to catch the rebroadcast. Then I switched over to ESPN2 HD just to see if they would rebroadcast in HD. I tuned in just at the beginning of the second period of extra time. I guess they rebroadcast the match immediately afterwards and delayed their scheduled programming. I didn’t miss anything. Thanks ESPN. And I’m sincere about it.

The match was excellent with an agonizing penalty session deciding the cup. I’m not a supporter of either side so it was a fun to watch. What wasn’t too fun was the performance of the Slovakian officiating team. Lubos Michel is supposedly one of the top referees in UEFA. He had plenty to do and lots of decisions to make but I wasn’t too impressed with his match control and discipline decision making. Of course, he may have had specific pre-match instructions from the governing body that I am not privy to but I thought he was uneven. Thank goodness there weren’t too many offside decisions because the assistants were incorrect more often than not on balls simply going into touch. The scene where all three field officials came onto the pitch when Drogba was sent off was almost comical. Clearly, AR1 was more worried about finding something that fell off his flag than he was in observing and assisting the referee during this incident. Next time I am an AR and I feel the need to come all the way across the field for an incident, perhaps I should leave my flag with the 4th. I don’t want to look like that poor fellow on any videotape.