My blog has moved!

Over the next few days I’m going to move this blog away from wordpress.com and host it at my own domain, http://www.kerneljack.com.

Please head over there from now on as I am going to stop updating this here.

WordPress finally supports WXR imports!

I’ve been waiting for so long now to import my old WP blog from my old web server to this site. The problem has been that until now, wordpress.com blogs did not have an ‘Import Self-Hosted WordPress Blog’ option so I couldn’t move my older blog across. The only option I had was to spend many days manually adding all of my posts to kerneljack.wordpress.com and correcting all the dates, which would have been a nightmare.

Thankfully I just discovered the wordpress-to-wordpress plugin which allows me to export my old blog as a WXR file which wordpress.com can then import. Now that I am back I will try to keep updating this blog more often.

Always buy RAM from Crucial

I needed some extra RAM in my 512MB laptop to do some Java heavy lifting (Eclipse, Netbeans, JBoss, Profilers, etc). Those things can take up a lot of RAM, not leaving much for Firefox and other apps. Seeing that my laptop does not cover upgrading RAM under the warranty (very strange) unless done by authorised personnel, I went down to the store I bought my laptop from (Micro Anvika) and asked for a quote. 130 pounds is how much they wanted for a 1GB stick; in contrast I could get the same type of RAM from Crucial for 89 pounds!! That’s a saving of just over 40 pounds! I was hoping it would all go smoothly and the RAM would work because if something messed up I would be without a laptop and a warranty

It all went perfectly of course and a month later I’ve had no problems with the RAM. It’s so simple to buy it from crucial too. They have a comprehensive database of products (computers, laptops, motherboards, etc) and the type of RAM these products take. Simply make the right selections and they tell you what to buy, even how many slots you should have free by default. If even that’s too much for you and you happen to be on a Windows PC or laptop they have an ActiveX applet that will download and try to figure out the RAM type for you. This didn’t work for my system though.

Anyway, the moral of this story is: Always buy RAM from Crucial. It is crucial that you do so

I’ve gone weather mad!

Blimey, some people who know me know that I tend to obsess sometimes over things. In the same vein, I’ve positively gotten obsessed with the weather, obtaining latest readings, parsing them, storing them, displaying them, the works.

So yesterday I spent a significant amount of time writing a PHP program to parse the XML feed from InterceptVector. They provide a free weather feed for tons of cities worldwide in XML. They’ve been having problems though, sometimes the server is down, sometimes the data is incorrect (as I found to my surprise this morning!). So I verify their feed first, and if there is a problem I fall back to PHP Weather’s feed, which is more reliable.

Why use InterceptVector at all then? Well, they provide feeds from a lot more locations than just Heathrow and 1 or 2 other airports. Plus, they supply a 5-day forecast, which you can see by clicking on ‘More details’ on the left.

I’m going to add all the files required to this stuff to my Software section, in case anyone else wants to use it

Weather feed

I’ve added an hourly weather feed to the site, using PHP Weather. I had to use the older version 1.x series as it is easier to use at the moment anyway. I wasted too much time struggling with the 2.x series trying to make it display simple temperature information.

Ironically I went running straight after I added the weather feed to the side, and had the worst run ever I should have known, the weather is horrible today, especially the wind. My shins are hurting now, and they never hurt before! Well, I’ll be much more careful next time.

The Slashdot and LinuxToday feeds on the right aren’t working at the moment, hopefully the weather stuff hasn’t messed them up. I’ll have to check.

Wow!

Wow, I can’t believe all the things you can do with stylesheets! The site looks much much better now after I wrote my own stylesheet and tweaked for about 3-4 hours The results are worth it!

I have to add a table for the stuff on the left and do something about the heading. Other than that so far, things are looking good. I thought I wouldn’t be able to do much customization with Personal Weblog, but it’s customization capabilities are pretty good

On another note, the war in Iraq is about to begin in about 18 minutes approx. according to the coundown timer on this website. Will be old news by the time anyway goes there from here, but I wanted to add this note especially for historical reasons.

Website updated

So I spent quite a while yesterday working on my website. It took me quite a while to get the back-end stuff and layout sorted. I opted for a table-based layout which I wanted to avoid because of text-based browsers, but i think it looks quite alright.

I haven’t added much content yet but I do plan on getting to it ASAP. I’m currently working on a PHP/MySQL-based bookmark manager so that I can store my links (with categories) in a DB. I’m doing this because I dislike the fact that whenever I come across an interesting link on the web, I have to bookmark it in the current browser. Since I switch browsers all the time I keep losing my links. Hopefully this way I can quickly add any link to the DB on my website whenever I need it. I’m getting to learn some PHP along the way which is great

One other advantage of this top-left-center table-based layout is that I can add another column to the right-hand side whenever I wish to, possible for RSS feeds from other websites or blogs.

Learning

I need to design my site, but more importantly I need to create or get hold of some images for my site. I’ve decided to design it myself, so I’ve been trying to familiarize myself with Fireworks and GIMP over the past few days. Both are great programs, but they do come with a learning curve. As always, I’m eager to learn…

For an excellent start to learning the GIMP, I highly recommend Grokking the GIMP. It is rare to find such well-written and well thought out books nowadays.