General

I’ve adjusted how I deal with comment spam and the comment system should now be active again…

It’s been a difficult few months for me recently. One of the things that has helped a lot was something that, thankfully, I discovered relatively quickly and have since refined somewhat. The refined version sounds very simple; “appreciate every moment” but it actually takes some practice to get into the habit. Once you do get into the habit you will find that it leads to a positive feedback loop of happy thoughts; which often leave you with a smile on your face which seems to encourage more happiness around you…

I just realised that I hadn’t posted to here in two months. As I said a while back, my head is not really in the right space for me to be as effective, or interested, in my technical stuff at present. I’m finding it very hard to get into “The Zone” and do any decent coding in the evenings; though have had the potential to have had so much time alone to do so.

Given all the publicity that this blog has received recently over my relationship break-up I thought it might be a good idea to give any new visitors a jumping off point into some of the more popular technical pieces. Believe it or not, this blog isn’t all about network snooping and infidelity. More often than not it’s about C++ on Windows, Test Driven Development and my opinions and whinges about software development issues.

I’ve fixed the MT-Blacklist problem and so comments and trackbacks are now working again.

My hosting provider has changed something in their perl instalation which means that MT-Blacklist (the thing that protects this blog from comment and trackback spam) is broken and not doing its job properly. I’ve located a fix but need my hosting provider to help me apply it. Until they do I’ve disabled comments so that I don’t have too much crap to clear up once the problem is over. Sorry for any inconvenience.

As you may have noticed I’m having some hosting problems at present. The server that hosts www.lenholgate.com was hacked and it’s taking my hosting provider longer to fix than they expected… Right now comments and trackbacks don’t work because of incorrect CGI settings on the webserver but even if that were fixed now there’s no database backing up the pages so things would just be broken in a different way.

This is quite nice, a whole list of finely targetted RSS feeds for Knowledge Base articles for various products.

Jacob Nielsen has a list of Top Ten Blog Design Mistakes. Number 5 is “Classic hits are buried” where he suggests that it is useful for readers if you list your most ‘important’ entries prominently as well as regularly back linking to earlier posts. This sounds like sensible stuff; until you have to work out what your classic entries are from the other 486 not so classic postings… Anyway, I’ve had a go at starting a list of some entries that are either a) very popular or b) clearly define my views on software development.

“Desire to know why, and how, curiosity; such as is in no living creature but man: so that man is distinguished, not only by his reason, but also by this singular passion from other animals; in whom the appetite of food, and other pleasures of sense, by predominance, take away the care of knowing causes; which is a lust of the mind, that by a perseverance of delight in the continual and indefatigable generation of knowledge, exceedeth the short vehemence of any carnal pleasure.