Badger  and

Dot!

For the long-lost friends who want an easy way to keep in touch, you can find me on Facebook!

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1. There is no such chuffing word as “instore”. Why do you insist on using it? What does it add to your message, other than illiteracy?
2. Well done for providing soy sauce, wasabi and ginger with your packaged sushi. Now, if only the little bowls in the packaging provided for dipping were actually big enough to dip the sushi into it, we’d be golden.
3. Oh yes - the word “everyday” doesn’t mean what you think it means*. You think it means “every day” and it just doesn’t. So when you put on your packaging “enjoy everyday”, I don’t take it to mean “buy this product every day” but maybe it’s more subtle than that. Perhaps it’s the secret to inner peace and contentment: find a way to enjoy the commonplace and ordinary (which is what “everyday” means) and, just maybe, one will overcome the personal turmoil of being unreasonably annoyed by, for example, bad English.

*Inconceivable!

When I see this in front of me, playing in goal in our weekly five a side game, I get very annoyed. I can’t help it. There’s two of my team marking the bloke with the ball, and so of course one of his team-mates is scot free at the edge of the D. Once the ball gets to him (and it usually does) he’s through on goal. And I shout even more. So please don’t play like a schoolboy and get drawn to the ball all the time, otherwise there will be more expletives and arm-waving.

Thank you.

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In the early hours, I drank a toast to Desdog - he died around midnight. He really didn’t suffer for too long: within an hour or so of becoming ill he was at the emergency vets and on opiates. My only regret was that in my last nuzzle of the fur behind his ears I couldn’t smell him properly because of the cleaning chemicals in the consulting room.

What a good dog. A constant through some troubled times, his unconditionally doting presence was comforting beyond words. “But that’s just what dogs do”, you might say; and you’d be right. But he was my dog, and that makes all the difference.

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On top of that, while I’m at it, please fix your systems. Both your website and your automated phone system, after a lot of faffing about entering consignment details, can’t connect to your SQL server and so fail. It ought to be pretty simple just to get a few printer cartridges into my sweaty mitts, but it appears not.

Parceline may have changed their name to DPD, but they’re still buffoons.

By the way, what made your phone system think I wanted to hear about a new comedy club in Plymouth while I was on hold? Huh?

[later..]

A new error!

Cobblers.

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They provide easy ways to integrate PicLens into your site, including the wp-piclens plugin for WordPress. But there’s a snag. Out of the box, at least for me with my WordPress 2.3.3 installation, it only works properly when pretty permalinks turned off. (That means http://home.toastboy.co.uk/?p=123 style links would work, but not my preferred http://home.toastboy.co.uk/2008/03/09/sample-post/ ones). The way it would fail is that when you click on the “Start Slide Show with PicLens Lite” link which the plugin helpfully inserts into posts which have images in them, PicLens opens up but sits there forever with a “loading” progress bar, not getting anywhere.

Time to break out the debugging chops :->

It turns out that PicLens was actually getting a 404 error when it requested the Media RSS feed from wp-content/plugins/wp-piclens/mrss.php. Weird, since when you request the feed directly, you’d be confused to see that the feed actually appears - but sure enough, look at the headers with Live HTTP Headers, and the response code is a nasty 404 instead of the nice 200 we might expect. This is caused by the way that wp-piclens invokes the wp() function to generate the MediaRSS. To cut a long story short, the WordPress parse_request function assumes that when URI rewriting is turned on, it’s going to generate a 404 error. Then, if and only if it finds a rewrite rule to successfully apply, it resets that error. So, despite the fact that the URI for the MediaRSS feed doesn’t actually need rewriting, you get a 404 error when you request it when URI rewriting is turned on. The fix? Add a hook in the plugin to rewrite the mrss.php URI onto itself, like this:

function feed_dir_rewrite($wp_rewrite)
{
$feed_rules = array( 'wp-content/plugins/wp-piclens/mrss.php' => 'wp-content/plugins/wp-piclens/mrss.php' );
$wp_rewrite->rules = $feed_rules + $wp_rewrite->rules;
}
add_filter('generate_rewrite_rules', 'feed_dir_rewrite');

Then you need to force the rules to be re-generated: go to Options/Permalinks in your WordPress dashboard, select “Default” and hit “Update Permalink Structure”, then re-select your preferred permalink method (mine is “Date and name based”) followed by another “Update Permalink Structure”.

That should be it! Now when you click on the “Start Slide Show with PicLens Lite” link, you should see your photos on the PicLens wall in all their glory.

(Now I can finally get on with adding some content instead of fiddling with infrastructure… maybe…)

Now, here’s a good howto about sshfs on Debian, but for me, it didn’t quite work. When I got to the point of trying a modprobe fuse, I got the error FATAL: Module fuse not found.. So after a bit of thrashing about I realised that the missing link was this: you need to do depmod -a before modprobe fuse will work, and then everything behaves as expected.

That is all.

They’re making a movie of Fraggle Rock! Yay!

Well, we were hardly expecting this. Out last Sunday, walking Des together by the river to avoid the Folk Festival campsite, we bumped into our favourite neighbourhood Collie fostering friends. They only had half their current compliment of 11 (!) dogs, but amongst them was this little charmer, Johnny Badger. He’s a rescue pup who’s mostly Collie plus some other miscellaneous breeds thrown in, and a right character. He comes from a rescue in Ireland via Wiccaweys in Northamptonshire, and he’s had a tough time in his 16 or so weeks of life: he’s been nursed through Parvovirus. We were meant to pick him up yesterday, but had to contain ourselves because Des managed to pick up some infection or other (well, drinking from the Cam and eating cow-crap will do that to anyone) and so we’ve been advised against taking Badger in until Des has finished the antibiotics.

Are we mad to take on a pup that might turn out to be a hooligan? Yep. Can we wait? No.

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