Sad news in Joinee World today

Danny requires citizens! I’m going to have to think carefully about this…

UPDATE @ 23:02: I have emailed Danny with details of how I could contribute…I’ll let you know if I get any kind of response.

I’ve updated the layout of this site significantly. There are now various new links on the right, all of which should update dynamically. The wiki posts and the blogs / journals are all based off an RSS feed and are updated every hour so as not to slow page loads down significantly. The forum posts come straight from the database so should be instantaneous. I’ve also added a quotes bar beneath the title. It selects a random quote from a text file of my creation on each page load. I’ve tried to avoid anything cringeworthy, or that could go onto a poster beneath a photo of a mountain. I’ll try to add more on a regular basis so that they don’t become stale.

As ever, please let me know if you notice any problems.

Important information has been added to the wiki.

Ooooh, exciting!

I really wish I’d watched this, it sounds bloody funny! I didn’t even know you could bring private blasphemy prosecutions. I wonder if you can bring private stupidity prosecutions.

You’ll wish you hadn’t seen it, but here’s the meaning of coprophiliac (I’m on a five minute break from maths btw, not skiving)

I’m so useless when it comes to sleep, these days. It took me two weeks to get over my US jet lag. Two weeks. I was just lying there until 03:00 every night, waiting to get tired. Then I’d get up at 08:00, be knackered and grumpy all day, still not get to sleep until 03:00, then wake up the next morning thinking ’screw this’ and stay in bed until 11:00, which didn’t help at all. My sleep patterns are similarly disrupted at the moment. You know why? New Year’s Eve. I mean, really. I was up until 03:00, and I still haven’t gotten over it. What’s wrong with me? Do I not have any willpower at all? Why can’t I just get up at 07:00 a few days in a row? That’d fix it! Oh well, it’s Badminton tomorrow today (ah, crap). Hopefully that’ll tire me out. Why am I still up now? Because, unfortunately, going to sleep isn’t a matter of willpower. It *just*doesn’t*work*.

Hey, you know what’d fix it? A trip to New York for a few days. That’d work. I think. Buy me that, someone.

Jailhouse Rock by Elvis Presley is number one in the charts. Not even a remix; it’s the original single. I like that
I just watched a documentary about the Beach Boys. Their whole story (all forty years of it) is one massive, powerful, incredibly potent message against taking drugs. Brian Wilson still to this day hears voices in his head telling him he’s going to be murdered. You hear the argument that it’s worth taking drugs to produce new kinds of art, but that program would convince you otherwise. Blimey.

Coronation Street pulled a little scene out of the bag earlier that was quite remarkable. A small subplot involving Roy dealing with a bullying builder suddenly became extremely moving. Roy’s lapse into being aggressive against those around him was very well handled and his confiding in Hayley about his experiences at school was well acted, scripted and perfectly timed. It wasn’t over the top or schmaltzy, and you really felt for him. Maybe it’s because I empathise somewhat with Roy generally - his line about ‘you know I can’t do conversation’ struck home - but I thought there was more to it than just me reacting. It’s nice when programmes surprise you.

Ok, the wiki apparently isn’t quite working yet due to the DNS changes still progagating. You can either add the line:

66.116.175.81 wandwaver.co.uk

to your hosts file (located in Windows/system32/drivers/etc - for xp, anyway) or wait 24hrs or so.

Wow, it’s so hot here I just sneezed and instigated nuclear fusion.

More newness today. I present to you: the wongaWiki.

What’s a wiki? It’s a knowledge bank. An information store. Anybody can edit it, and you don’t need an account to do so. Add whatever you like, edit other people’s work, contribute to discussions, expand categories with things only you know…Basically, share.

Put *anything* in there (within the bounds of decency, obviously). You want to write a treatise on swallow migration? Feel free. Want to mention that you saw a chipmunk once? Go ahead.

You can create an account if you want, and this has various advantages. You can customise the look and layout, have a ‘watchlist’ that alerts you whenever particular articles are updated This is by no means necessary! I tried and tried to find a way to integrate the forum and wiki accounts, but haven’t yet managed it, I’m afraid. If I ever do, I’ll be sure to transfer all the settings, so feel free to create an account now without fear it’ll disappear later. The license stipulates that nothing you write can be used for commercial purposes, and that other people can use and modify it providing they share alike.

The wiki does seem complicated on first inspection, but it’s really extremely intuitive and easy to use once you get used to it. I’m intrigued as to what’ll happen with it, so please do have a play around. I’ve put a basic user guide on the front page.

Right, I’ve had the wandwaver.co.uk DNS entries updated, so with a bit of luck that’ll go through fairly quickly, at least for us in UK. You can as a temporary measure add the IP 66.116.175.81 to your hosts file, but hopefully that won’t be necessary. Don’t email me at my wandwaver address with anything important for a day or so, though!

Welcome to the new and improved wongaBlog!

I’ve made various major changes, moving in the direction of expaning the wonga banner into other areas. The largest by far is the commenting system, which I’ve completely revamped. With the help of the excellent fluffy guide, as well as numerous modifications of my own, I’ve linked the commenting into a phpBB-powered wongaForum.

Clicking the comment links below will take you to a thread regarding this post on the forum. Any comments you make on the forum will still be posted below the article, and it should still link in with any old comments. I’m going to *try* letting anyone post to that particular forum, although creating an account obviously has advantages. If I get spammed, though, I’m making it registered-users only. This should please those of you (Simon) who refused to get a typekey account! I’m totally fed up of playing around with CSS to get it to look neat for today, so there are a couple of extra spaces where there shouldn’t be.

The wongaForum is also a replacement for the old Ballistic Forum, which has bitten the dust. All your favourite old categories are there, as well as a few new ones. I did try to copy over the users from Ballistic Forum, but it just wasn’t do-able I’m afraid. The old system ran off an access database whereas this uses mySQL, and they don’t get on terribly well. Sorry about that.

I have more plans, but this took me six hours so I’m having a rest for a while now! If you find any problems, please post them into the appropriate section on the forum.

EDIT: Some pictures won’t work until the wandwaver.co.uk DNS entries get updated, hopefully that won’t be too long.

Since I now have a new web host, I need to transfer my files to it. You’d think this would be an easy task, but as it turns out I may as well have tried to edit the pope. And it’s all the fault of pants FTP programs from hell that deserve to be deleted, deleted again, the hard drive thrown away and burnt in an incinerator and the ashes put on a spacecraft and shot into the sun. It’s possible than in ten minutes time this won’t seem like such a big deal. Now, however, it does, and I’m typing now, so there.

WS_FTP LE: Old, but good. Works fine, as long as you don’t want to delete directories containing files. However, a bit outdated now, so I went in search of something new…

WS_FTP Home: Updated version of above program. Looks nice. However, there’s no manual option to select ASCII or Binary uploads. It just has a list of file extensions that it’ll use ASCII mode with. I have a load of files of many different types that I know need to be uploaded in ASCII. Can’t be bothered to manually add twenty or so extensions to the list, so went in search of something else (thinking it’d be quicker. Hah). Oh, and on closing the program it crashed. So that helped.

CuteFTP: I know this has been around for years, too. Should work. Again, first impressions are good. An option to switch between ASCII and Binary! Coolness. It connected to swanky new webserver without a problem. So I started navigating to the files I want to upload. I double-clicked on ‘My Documents’. Program paused for 6 seconds. Double-clicked on ‘Andrew’ directory. Program paused for 6 seconds. My website config files are seriously nested, and the pause got more and more annoying each time. So nope. Onto another…

FileZilla: Had problems with this before, but I decided give it one more chance. Open source and all that. The problems were likely caused by my old hosts, anyway. There’s an ASCII / Binary option, although you do have to click about 4 times to get to it. Still, it’s better than before. Navigating to folders works without feeling the need to spend a month thinking about it. Good good good. So, I upload all my files. Takes a while, as you’d expect. I then logged in and attempted to run the setup program to get it all working behind-the-scenes. Setup program dies. Crap. Thankfully, my excellent new web hosts have a utility to let you view the error logs! So I looked, and discovered the problem was with a particular file. On closer inspection, it turned out that this file *had swapped names wih the other file in the directory*. I’ll say that again: the filenames had swapped. Now I have to delete everything and start again. Evil, evil, evil, evil FTP program.

So, I’m going back to WS_FTP LE.

Ok, twenty minutes ago I found a host that seem quite good, and then, completely inexplicably, I bought a package. It’s 00:15. I’m trying to think of big decisions I’ve made at this time of night that have turned out successfully…

No…nope…not coming up with any.

Ok, let’s try to think of decisions that haven’t been so good.

Wooooh had better stop going down that line.

So. I’m nuts. Company looks excellent though! More info tomorrow, if I haven’t spent all night bashing my head into a brick wall.

UPDATE: When I tried to post this I got an HTTP error on the first attempt. I think I’ve made the right decision!

Well, having moved to web-mania a few months back they aren’t really impressing me now. Their support is very fast and they do try to help, but I’ve had no joy with this perl problem, and now I’m starting to get server errors every few page loads, which is annoying. Also things have been slowing down for a few weeks now. I’ve been looking for another host but there are just so damn many! I’m willing to pay a bit more to get away from the extra-cheap-aren’t-we-great style hosts, but I just don’t know where to start. Does anyone know any decent review sites?