I’ve added a few more plugins here. You can now see my Twitter updates on the Sidebar, as well as social site submission links to each post. WordPress is some pretty impressive software, I must say.
More plugins!
Written by Ren West on December 4th, 2008
Last.fm integration.
Written by Ren West on November 21st, 2008There are so many wordpress plugins anymore that it’s hard to choose which ones to include. I was browsing a few themes recently and say this Last.fm Records plugin and remembered “I listen to music…” so I thought I would give it a try. It’s there in the sidebar, but also here in this post.
[lastfmrecords|6|12]
Why to companies still have offices?
Written by Ren West on November 4th, 2008Being curious about what jobs are available in this economy, I always check my favourite sites to see if they are hiring. Surprisingly, most of them are. Sadly, almost all of them are still running in brick and mortar buildings, usually in southern California. I understand the need for groups to work together, but shouldn’t a Web 2.0 company, pushing Web 3.0 where everything is everywhere, not promote a little telecommuting? Do you really need to move to another country in this day and age to work on a website? I suspect most of these companies get you working at home even after the work day is over, so why just start there?
Of course, I work from home on a professional basis now, so perhaps I’ve just had a taste of the good life. 
Developing with VMWare
Written by Ren West on October 31st, 2008I got the itch recently to do some PHP developing for some photo site needs I have. Opted to try my hand with AJAX and jQuery libs while I was at it. I also wanted to use an IDE of some form, and found PHPDesigner to be a nice one. My problem is that I live in Windows these days, even though I have a hosted server running Linux. VIM is fine for quick bug fixes and changes, but this was ground-up work and not my specialty. I could have used WAMP or even cygwin, but each seems like so much work. Having played around in VMWare recently, I decided to just install Ubuntu and see if I could use that. Still had the problem of it being “remote” however. In comes the features of VMWare with it’s shared folders. The HGFS modules compiled fine in Ubuntu. I created my project files and shared them with Ubuntu. Then configured Apache inside the VM to use that share as the docroot. This way, any changes I made to the project, were already in place on the server, which is very similar to that of my hosted server.
I just feel so much more comfortable using Linux for hosted needs and using Windows as desktop needs. Silly that way I guess.
Music Videos
Written by Ren West on October 29th, 2008MTV just posted every Music Video they have online for free. Of course, I’m not allowed to watch them, being from Canada and all. So Much Music? Where is your online archive?
Note to manufacturers.
Written by Ren West on October 20th, 2008Here’s a little note to manufacturers and packagers of products. Stop supplying tools. Especially tools as simple as a bloody Phillips screw driver. Honestly, people should have a screw driver, especially the most popular one in use today (despite the fact that Robertson is far superior!). I can almost understand supplying Allen keys as not everyone is going to have those, but that only brings about the idea that maybe you shouldn’t be using them. We already have crazy amounts of waste from packaging for looks, we shouldn’t add more waste by supplying something everyone already has, just in case they don’t.
PHP and MySQL caching.
Written by Ren West on October 14th, 2008Hoping to squeeze a few more cycles out of my VPS, I recently implementing PHP and MySQL caching. So far, I haven’t noticed much in the way of performance increases, but the Apache Bench test results show there is some improvement.
For PHP I used xcache and followed the guide I found here.
For MySQL I followed this guide. I only need to set the value of query_cache_size to enable it. Running mysql> SHOW STATUS LIKE ‘Qc%’; shows that it’s being used.
TinEye
Written by Ren West on October 4th, 2008I was browsing around some photo sites I used to frequent and stumbled on this site. I had this exact idea a few years ago. Spider the web, finger print all the images you find, then let people post their own images and search for duplicates. It’s a great application with so many possibilities. Should have spent more time on it I guess. They seem to have done a great job though. Super fast too. I have a few feature options that I was going to implement in my version, so maybe I’ll just forward them along.
New notebook.
Written by Ren West on October 3rd, 2008I recently picked up a new notebook. I’ve only ever had work notebooks, so they weren’t really personalized much. Just didn’t feel like “mine” with all work crap on there. Futureshop had a great deal going on an HP TX2524CA tablet PC. I wanted a tablet for those few occasions when one might prove useful. I also wanted to see how one would work with Corel Painter. It doesn’t have the same pressure levels as a normal Wacom tablet nor does it have the angle sensitivities, but it’s still pretty good. Nothing to show for it yet though.
I’m not impressed with the battery life of it though. 2 hours seems pretty generous. Hoping I can pick up an 8 cell or higher sometime.
DNC List is here!
Written by Ren West on October 1st, 2008Finally, Canada gets a Do Not Call list for stop those annoying telephone spammers from calling. Head over to the National Do Not Call website to sign up today. On the first day, the site was basically unusable due to demand, which should tell spammers something. We don’t want you calling us! Go Away!
It remains to be seen if this will actually do anything for us. According to the commercials I’ve heard, some companies don’t have to honour the DNC list, but rather they can keep their own. I’m sure they’re trustworthy…