Musings of a psycho #46
Yet another week has flown by and we find ourselves already halfway through November! This post is a day late due to my lack of Internet/computer use over the weekend. For those who are curious as to why it is Musing #46...read on 
Sunday, 8 November 2009
#312 - There is actually a ISO standard (ISO 8601) that covers the "representation of dates and times"
In my attempt to give my weekly musings a bit more structure, I looked up what day and week of the year we were in. The day of the year was simple enough, but the week was actually more complicated that I thought it was! I always assumed that 1st January will be Week 1..but then thinking about it, if 1st January is a Friday, will it still be Week 1? According to ISO 8601, if 1st January is a Friday, Saturday or Sunday it is actually Week 52 or Week 53 of the previous year (ISO 8601 week starts on Monday). To confuse things even further, the system followed by USA is different to ISO 8601 - weeks start Monday, and there are partial weeks at the start/end of the year. If you're wondering, 09/11/2009 is Week 46 and the reason I start on Sundays for these posts is so I can have Sunday to write them up, and it's no fun to come up with the musing for the day and write about it on the same day.
Musings of a psycho
My second instalment of my daily thoughts/random discoveries. If you're wondering, the reason for starting at #305 is because November 1st is the 305th day of the year.
Sunday, 1 November 2009
#305 - It's amazing/interesting to think about what you have learnt during the day and find one thing that you feel is worthy to share.
This obviously comes from the post from last week as it was the first time I really sat down at the end of each day and thought about what to write about. In the past I have probably casually just thought about the day that has just passed, but never in much depth. It definitely takes some time to pick out the thing to write about, but I feel it is worth it - especially at the end of the week when I read through my notes I've jotted down for each day. Admittedly at the end of some days it felt like nothing special enough happened that day to write about - after all I can't expect all days to be exciting - just have to make sure there aren't too many of them
Thought of the day…
It is no secret that I rarely update my blog - so much in fact that I feel a bit guilty myself, and also I've had "complaints" from friends that my blog is dead. On Tuesday one of my friends challenged me to write a weekly post:
i challenge you to write a weekly entry to your blog on 7 new things you learned about this world, 1 new item for each day. not too difficult hey?
There was no reason I could think of to decline this challenge, so I have decided to take the challenge! Though I'm going to cheat a tiny little bit, instead of "7 new things I have learned" it will be things I have learnt, found interesting, would like to share. So here we go - my first weekly post and hopefully the first of many more to come!
Sunday, 25 October 2009
Thought of the day: www.example.com, www.example.org, www.example.net are reserved domains that are not available for registration!
In the past couple of months, I've written and done a fair bit of testing and as expected there are always going to be "dummy" email addresses, web-links etc. The most common being ones like: admin@example.com, www.example.com. One random day I thought to myself "Hey, what if someone registered 'example.com' as their domain name, wouldn't they get a tonne of random traffic?"
Well, to my surprise, the domain names: www.example.com, www.example.net and www.example.org are actually all reserved and not available for registration. If you want to read all the details you can have a look at RFC 2606 (warning: I've found RFCs have the tendency to be sleep inducing).
ps. didn't quite discover this on Sunday, but discovered it relatively recently - and trying to remember something that happened on Sunday when it's Tuesday is surprisingly hard!
More Link Modifier…now in Danish!
It has been about two years ago when I decided to give php a go and write a WordPress plugin. This plugin was what I called "More Link Modifier" and it came about because I didn't like the behaviour of the default 'more' link, which basically was fixed text and jumped to the section where the more link was within that post (usually somewhere in the middle). It seems like many people also don't quite like the default more link since there has been over 1400 downloads as of today!
I must admit that after finishing the initial release of the plugin I never really got back to add more to it (though I do think it has enough 'features' as is, don't want feature creep!). In fact, I don't think I've touched it ever since submitting the first version (shame on me 
).
However, in the past few weeks I was contacted by Georg Adamsen who had very kindly translated the admin settings into Danish - thanks Georg So now armed with the files edited by Georg that enabled the Danish translation, I looked at code that I had written some two years ago (yay for comments) and reviewed the comments on More Link Modifier download page to see if any changes were needed. Surprisingly I didn't make any drastic changes, only a few small cosmetic changes. Having said all that, there are some possibilities of a few small additions to the plugin, in particular use of 'the_content_more_link' filter available from WordPress 2.8 that allows adding extra attributes to the more link.
A very belated post…
It seems like between thesis, holidays and starting workthe previous blog post was more than half a year ago!
So, thesis is all done (yeah!), holiday was awesome (see below) and starting to work full time is definitely a different experience but a good one
Won't go too much into my holiday, but there is one thing I have to point out - Japan has heaps of cool and wonderful things. One which I thought was very cool is in some stations, the platform numbers start at zero! Probably looked like a silly tourist taking a photo of the inside of the station, but definitely worth it - how often do you see Platform 0?
In more 'blog-related' news, I am planning to make some major changes to the blog, the most significant being completely re-skinning it. Due to the changes the blog will most likely look very bare and default-y for a period of time - hoping that it won't be too long! Also, aiming to blog on a slightly more regular basis!
Email Addiction in the Workplace
Earlier this year I had to choose a topic for my honours/thesis. Of the few ideas I had floating around many of them would have been implausible (or maybe even impossible) to do as part of honours, so I settled on one of my more do-able ideas – Email Addiction.
The main reason I chose email addiction was because I felt to a certain degree I was “addicted” to email. The first thing I did when upon getting online was check my email – regardless if I was expecting an email or not. My email was set to refresh every minute and display a message box if any new emails came in so I would be notified when a new email arrived. Anyone else in the same boat as me?
Interestingly enough, there is heaps discussion related to email addiction online – Googling “email addiction” gives you a whole heap of results, all mainly on how to cure/deal with email addiction. However, running the same search in Google Scholar gives you close to nothing; the majority of research focuses on Internet addiction and not email addiction.
So, after many months of reading a lot of literature, changing my topic to "Email Addiction in the Workplace" so it is more focussed, writing up Thesis A, creating a survey and conducting a pilot study I’ve finally reached the next milestone – conducting my actual survey! You may be wondering why I’m telling you this, well it’s because it is an online survey and I would greatly appreciate it if you could help me out and fill out the survey - it should take you no more than 10 minutes. Thanks in advance
Unfortunately, there is no incentive to fill out the survey other than the warm fuzzy feeling that you've helped me in my thesis For those who are interested, I plan on posting up a summary of my results/findings after finishing my thesis which should be around late October/early November.
creating a time capsule
Quite some time ago (about late 2007) I saw this documentary called "21 Up Japan" which is similar to the "Up Series". The idea of the documentary is the follow a group of children from when they were 7 years old, and then every 7 years they go back to them and see how they are going. The interviewers had a set of semi-structured questions which they asked, and it was very interesting to see how everyone's answers changed from when they were 7, 14, and 21.
After seeing this documentary I decided I wanted to do something similar - make my own time capsule However it wasn't until a few months later in early 2008 when I found an old exercise book which had some short stories that I had written in 1995 that really got me started. Reading those stories made me realise how much can change in a few years (and how much we can forget!). My time capsule is bit different to 21 Up Japan - it does have a set of questions which I plan on answering once every year or so, but the majority of entries are more diary-like entries of times when I feel like something important has happened.
upgraded to WordPress 2.5
On March 18th when I saw the sneak peak for WordPress 2.5 I was amazed and couldn't wait till the release date. Not long after, comes March 30th when WordPress 2.5 was finally released Unfortunately, the first week of April was a super busy week, so haven't yet had a chance to upgrade until now.
So here it is - the new and shiny WordPress 2.5 with K2 RC5. This time the upgrade went much smoother than upgrading to 2.3, no more drama with file permissions - FileZilla is wonderful. Though this time, since K2 wasn't quite ready for WordPress 2.5, there have been a few minor bugs (though so far easy to fix).
For those who are still unsure if they should upgrade to 2.5, I strongly recommend you do! The upgrading process is simple (I recommend you use FileZilla), and even though the Dashboard (in admin) looks a bit foreign to begin with it soon becomes very nice and easy to use - especially when writing posts
For those who are also using 2.5 and K2 RC5, here are the two small fixes that I've found so far after the upgrade.
theloop.php (line 12)
original:
require_once( preg_replace( '/wp-content.*/', '', $_SERVER['SCRIPT_FILENAME'] ) . 'wp-config.php' );
change to:
require_once( preg_replace( '/wp-content.*/', '', $_SERVER['SCRIPT_FILENAME'] ) . '/wp-config.php' );
rollingarchive.php (line 10)
original:
require_once( preg_replace( '/wp-content.*/', '', $_SERVER['SCRIPT_FILENAME'] ) . 'wp-config.php' );
change to:
require_once( preg_replace( '/wp-content.*/', '', $_SERVER['SCRIPT_FILENAME'] ) . '/wp-config.php' );
The other bug which I am still looking at is with the plugin dDeviantArt which doesn't seem to quite work with version 2.5, hopefully it'll be a relatively simple fix.
As the adversary is always out there to get us, I'm sure there are more hidden bugs/broken pages etc. So if you do find something that is broken please tell me! Thanks
ps. not a bug, but I'm definitely going to have to find a plugin for formatting code - the above 4 lines look horrible! anyone have good suggestions?
blutack pig
On Sunday I decided to make a small pig out of blutack Probably sounds very random, but it was because earlier in the weekend I had saw similar small pigs at Paddy's Market and they just looked so cute! Here is the result of my procrastination:
The pig itself is actually quite small - about 1cm in diameter, though I think that is what makes it cute. At first I was worried that using blutack would be very hard since blutack sticks to itself (and your fingers!), but in the end it wasn't that bad. A toothpick is a must though - not just to poke the holes for the eyes/nose but also to push and shape the ears.
Since the pig was quite small it was rather hard to take a nice close-up photo, so as usual I took several shots. However, this time while flipping through all the blurred photos I remembered a Stop Motion Video tutorial I had read on Photojojo few months back - so alas, more procrastination...my first stop motion video attempt!
happy chinese new year!
Just wishing everyone a Happy Chinese New Year
Hope the year of the rat is nice to everyone - and as I saw in a powerpoint slide...
Year year got fish,
New year faster happy!
Yes, it is a literal translation from Chinese: 年年有魚(餘), 新年快樂!