Ciao Baci
Say hello to the new Biggins family member, Baci!
Baci (meaning 'Kisses' in Italian) is an 8 week old Golden Labrador. She is beautiful and highly destructive. We've already had to buy a new power cable for my wifes Dell Laptop.
I was able to get these rare shots when she was tuckered out after pouncing on Abbey, eating Bec's slippers and slipping over on the wet balcony tiles.
Anyway, welcome Baci.
A Coke marketing campaign gone wrong.
I can't help but link to this post about a Coca Cola marketing campaign that was .. well, just a little wrong on a few fronts.
Interesting Google results
About a year ago I started generating XML sitemaps for Skylines Australia. At the same time I started pushing a bunch of other SEO strategies like friendly URL's, metadata and a search engine friendly 'skin' for my site which is a publically available 'text-only' skin. Its also good for PDA's and mobile phone access.
For a long time, my 'Sitelinks' (displayed under search results where my site comes first) have been made up of members' profiles. This irritates me a lot and I have blocked the links through the Google Webmaster Tools every time I notice them. These are not the pages I want emphasized. So, I added a nofollow to all the links to members' pages that I could find but Google persistently added the members' pages as my Sitelinks. It was becoming desperate. I even asked my friends at SEOmoz (Where I am a pro member). They suggested sculpting my links to move the search engines towards my busier sections.
Anyway, last week there was a breakthrough. I upgraded the SEO software for SAU and decided to rebuild all my sitemaps as I know that Google was finding a lot of errors in the existing ones. I realised that my members' pages were being added to the sitemaps! And, likely, above the other (more important) pages! So, I turned off the adding of members' pages into my sitemaps and already I can see that Google have added my more important pages as Sitelinks (not live yet, but I can see them in the Webmaster Tools). Precisely what I wanted and I can't believe the solution was so easily missed by myself.
Another case of bad sitemaps. Lots of SEO'ers are against their use entirely.
Poverty in Sydney – Blog Action Day 2008
While I always knew that there were homeless people in Sydney, I never really thought of that as poverty. When I was thinking about my topic for this Blog Action Day, I thought I would keep it close to home but I couldn't work out if it was considered poverty. Of course it is. Where there are homeless, there is poverty. Where there are low income earners barely covering their costs, there is poverty.
I know that there are a lot of feaux homeless people in Sydney who like to beg (and make a bloody good living doing it) and I think my distrust of these individuals clouds my judgement. I am the first person to offer anything I can to people who legitimately need my help but when these beggars have a fresh pack of cigarettes and arn't that dirty then I'm pretty sure they don't need my help. Maybe this is why I don't see Sydney as having levels of poverty.
Photo By Kate Geraghty
I was surprised last week to see a story about the death of a homeless man grace the pages of our prestigious Sydney Morning Herald. This man, John O'Connor was barely 45 when he died on a street in Kings Cross. It wasn't his death that surprised me, or the fact that the Herald ran the story. It was that he died not 500 metres from where I share a building with ex Prime Ministers and NSW Premiers, on William St.
How is it, that we can have true homeless individuals dying on the streets of one of the wealthiest cities in the world? We have one of the best welfare systems on the planet and we do a lot for our less fortunate, but why were we unable to step up and actually change something? I understand that if somebody does not want to be helped then there is simply nothing you can do, but there are other cases, I'm sure, of individuals like John, who try to reach out and get nothing back.
The problem is that there is too big a gap between our high income earners and our low income earners. For instance, the ex-CEO of the company I work for, Simon Baker, was paid over $800,000 as a 'termination payout' for leaving REA. That is obscene. If that was his termination payout, any guesses about his salary would probably put you about $500,000 and that's before you consider his shares in REA. Tell me, what does anybody need that amount of money for? Apparently people do need that much money. A house in Sydney sold recently for $47 million dollars. And yet, people like John O'Connor in the same city can die, alone on a street.
If you think this might be an isolated occurrence. Think again. And while these facts exist, charities like Mission Beat have to ask for a new van. In a city that has this much money, they still require more funding.
The kicker in this story is that there were about 70 people at Johns funeral. This guy had friends. He may have even had family. He was well known enough to have at least 4 separate stories about him in the Sydney Morning Herald. The system failed him and it continues to fail for every day that people are paid ridiculous money while others die of hunger and disease. And all this in Australia. I haven't even mentioned Africa, South America, Burma and everywhere else where human life is treated so poorly.
Wake up Australia. Stop living for yourself only.
My new blog: Sustain Myself
I have launched my new blog SustainMyself.com . The blog is about living in the city in volatile environment and doing all I can to live a sustainable lifestyle without giving up on all my creature comforts.
Microsoft Expression Studio Web 2
Through my University, I was able to get a bunch of Microsoft development and design software for nothing. This is obviously a vain attempt by Microsoft to lure me to god-awful .Net development or something similar. But, at the end of the day, I am an open source developer and a big fan of the GPL and GNU etc, so I'll stick with my Java and PHP thanksverymuch.
But, while browsing dzone tonight, I happened to notice an interesting article titled "Expression Web 2 for PHP Developers-Simplifying Your PHP Applications".
Well, my first impressions were that it was like a lightweight Dreamweaver. ick. I am a text-editor user. I like IDE's, but when they are IDE's and not pretending-to-be-tech-savvy-drag-and-drop-designers-come-IDE's.
The fact that Web 2 has drag and drop html components. Ergh. Who in their right mind would choose to scroll down a list of available tags and click-and-drag one instead of simply typing '<p></p>'?
Anyway, for an HTML editor, it might be fine. But you dont need anything other than Notepad++ (for syntax highlighting) for coding HTML.
Anyway, I am looking for a new IDE, so I thought I'd give this Expression Web 2 a go (even though the thought of coding PHP in a Microsoft product made me feel a little queezy).
Well, I got as far as this;
1: <?php
2:
3: ?>
And thats it. Wanna know why? Because it wouldnt let save it as a .lib while keeping it registered as a PHP app. Come on, you expect me to consider this a 'serious' development application when I can't register my own extensions? If I select 'php' in the 'save as type' when saving, it either removes the .lib extension and replaces it with .php or it adds .php to the end (ie form.lib.php). And, heres the best part, if I type the php opening and closing tags in and then try to save, it gives me an error saying that because I have php tags, I need to save it as a php file.. ARRRGH!!!!
Searching and viewing the help files gave me nothing. And I'm not going to start giving my libraries a .php extension, sorry Microsoft.
At least now I can try Netbeans 6.5 Beta with PHP support. I hope they dont still force every file you edit to have its own project. So painful. Maybe it's time I wrote my own IDE.
Christianbiggins.com moved to Wordpress platform
I have been toying with the idea of moving to a self hosted wordpress blog for quite some time and I finally bit the bullet and did it. The main driving force behind this decision was;
- More control. I can edit code, add plugins, modify anything I want,
- Owned posts. With Google owning everything posted to Blogger, I preferred that my posts remained mine, on my servers. Blogger didn't even provide an export service to make it easier to remove your blog.
- Pages. I can post on pages about my work and my projects without needing to follow a blog-style 'post'. This means I can have non blog content.
- Hosting on my server means that I can integrate with other sites and services that I own or host.
- Still works with Windows Live Writer. This was a must. Live Writer is used for all my posts.
- Solid codebase. Wordpress is used extensively throughout the web with a huge community base. There are heaps of available plugins, widgets, themes, tutorials etc and as its PHP based, I can tinker myself.
So, as Wordpress provided an import script from Blogger, it was a no-brainer. Of course the import failed a few times and I got a fair few duplicate comments, its all here now.
So, the site is now Wordpress with the BloggingPro theme and a few other plugins used also. It is very much still a work in progress as I move over all the changes I made on Blogger. I am also going to add more content to the pages and other stuff too. Keep watching this space.
MI6 gets sloppy
Secret files, photos and plans have been found on a camera bought on eBay in the UK for £17. The files included profiles on al-Qaeda members, weapons plans and even Guantanamo Bay detainee’s. My only explanation can be that an MI6 operative put the wrong memory card in their camera before selling it. Obviously they don’t pay MI6 op’s enough or they wouldn’t need to sell the camera.
Now, this was in the news a week ago. I’ve been slack, I know.