After hours of painful searching this evening I managed to decided upon using the Plainscape theme. I may well configure it slightly for this blog, I may even go as far as to add a header image, but let’s not get too adventurous!

So for the foreseeable future this blog will look nice, plain and simple (it’ll probably change when I get bored but it gives me something to blog about!).
- Chris

Just a note to say, if you are ever in need of a virtual machine with very configurable settings or the need to install certain software on it, Bytemark is a good choice – just a little more than I currently need (and more pricey as well).

- Chris

I’ve decided that instead of spreading my photos across the entire site with photo posts in my blog and a separate gallery section that I should really have all the photo related materials together as it probably makes more sense.

Thus I introduce to you… Phoblog and my newly updated Gallery.

This marks the end of the Photoblog category on my blog, not that it really took off in any capacity, however all new photo posts will be made in my new Phoblog. So contain your excitement and have a look.
- Chris

A lot has happened in this time, I’ve finished my exams. Most of which went relatively well, barring of course the Grid Computing exam which was always going to be a wildcard. I’m now officially finished University as well after handing in my research dissertation last Monday. All-in-all it went well, however running out of time towards the end, my personal calling card, did mean that the report tends to tapper off in quality towards the final sections – but at least it’s finished.

Since finishing I’ve been looking after the pub at home as my parents were on holiday and returned yesterday. Other than that I’ve been sitting here at my computer playing World of Warcraft a hell of a lot, watching the majority of the Friends seasons on DVD and over the past two days watching Supernatural season one on DVD as well.

After only a week and a half of freedom from University I’m starting to feel lost as there’s no paticular direction to my life just now. I’m hoping to start a PhD next year but that all depends upon a funding grant from the EPSRC, so I’m currently caught in limbo between either finding a real job or a filler one until I hear for sure about the funding.

Procrastinating isn’t half as fun as it is when you’re meant to be doing something else. Sitting playing WoW doesn’t appeal as much now as it did when I had work which I was supposed to be doing at the time. Doing things you do to “take a break” from something doesn’t appeal when the thing you’re doing is actually the thing you’re taking a break from [some punctuation was harmed in the making of this sentance].

Other than playing world of warcraft and starting to keep a World of Warcraft blog to track your progress in the game (killer of a good few hours that could’ve been used for work), watching DVDs and playing cards I’ve not done anything. It sounds great but not doing anything when there’s nothing to do is pretty damn boring.

Other than doing nothing I’ve also managed to break my new XDA Exec which is currently en-route to O2 who will be replacing it with a new unit. Somehow whilst trying to flash the new WM5 version onto the device it seems to have deleted the original version, as expected, but not written the new version, not as expected. This means that when I did a hard reset on the device to update the OS there was nothing there to install and the device would just hang at an O2 splash screen. After some searching on the web and trying some wierd fixes nothing worked so it was on to O2 who asked me to send the device to them.

There’s nothing much left to add really, suppose I’d best start looking for a job to fill in the time between watching DVDs, playing World of Warcraft and sleeping; but I’ll get around to that later as it’s Friday night and I can hear a game of cards a-calling me from the pub…
- Chris

I’ve just had nothing worth saying… until now!

It’s that time of the year for an obligitory exams-are-coming post, here it is.

I have in total, 8 exams this year, 1 less than the grand total last year although starting 9 days earlier.

Before that starts I’ve got to hand in my proposal for my project, it’s nearly done and has to be handed in on Tuesday 2nd May. Once that’s out of the way it’s onto exams, the line up is as follows:

• Wed 3rd May: Enterprise Computing (M) – Business / Computing type course
• Mon 8th May: Information Retrieval (M) – Search engines, retrieval functions
• Tue 9th May: Professoinal Skills (M) – PI for dummies
• Wed 10th May: Grid Computing (M) – DAS and some
• Fri 12th May: Compilers 4 – Writing machine code
• Thur 18th May: Network Communication Technology 4 – Cables and RFCs
• Tue 23rd May: Advanced Research Readings in Computing Science (Software Engineering) – Readings in the area of Web Engineering
• Thur 25th May: Types and Programming Languages (M) – Functional language implementations

So it looks like a fun month ahead for me then!
- Chris

Where is he nowadays when he’s needed?

Anyway, if this is in fact bonfire night then you’ll be able to see my bonfire night theme for this site.

I thought I’d post the full rhyme that is linked to this day, I can’t ever remember hearing the whole of it before:

Remember, remember the fifth of November,
gunpowder, treason and plot,
I see no reason why gunpowder treason
should ever be forgot.
Guy Fawkes, Guy Fawkes,
’twas his intent
to blow up the King and the Parliament.
Three score barrels of powder below,
Poor old England to overthrow:
By God’s providence he was catch’d
With a dark lantern and burning match.
Holloa boys, holloa boys, make the bells ring.
Holloa boys, holloa boys, God save the King!
Hip hip hoorah!

A penny loaf to feed the Pope.
A farthing o’ cheese to choke him.
A pint of beer to rinse it down.
A faggot of sticks to burn him.
Burn him in a tub of tar.
Burn him like a blazing star.
Burn his body from his head.
Then we’ll say ol’ Pope is dead.
Hip hip hoorah!
Hip hip hoorah!

Have an explosive bonfire night,
- Chris

So rather than having a party, I’ve created a new theme that will be shown from the 29th of October until the 1st of November each year.

In case it isn’t Halloween just now here’s a screenshot of the theme:

Have a good Halloween, I leave you with me, as a zombie!
- Chris

I’ve only been playing with it for a short while, but my initial impressions are that it’s pretty damn sweet.

It allows you to post things straight from flickr, downloading your photo stream and showing it to you, so there’s no need to go to the flickr site and grab the photo url or the code you want to paste into your post, you simply have to drag in the photo!

Anyway, I’m impressed and you should get yourself a copy to try it out.
- Chris

Nothing much has been happening at all, I’ve been sleeping a lot, playing darts and dominos, learning to play a card came called crib, drinking and the odd once and a while, playing World of Warcraft.

Uni’s finished and the graduation ball was excellent, my photos of the event are available as are a copy of Lynsey’s photos. Thanks to all the people who organised the night and all those who were there and made it an enjoyable evening, the most notable memory possibly being Rory climbing over the Sherbrooke castle roof!

So the summer is starting to plod along, I have moved back to the pub in Dumfries and have just gotten everything into my new bedroom. I’m getting settled back in and have started living healthier (after my junk food filled revision), having joined the local gym and gone on a diet (one week down and 7lbs lost, but a fair few still to go!).

Other than this I am just waiting out the remaining 8 days until I start my summer scholarship on the 1st of July, looking forward to getting back into a routine but also dreading the 4-5 hour roundtrip commute I will have to make every day. I’ve been thinking about the scholarship and trying to gather my thoughts on how to approach the problem, but there is nothing substantial as of yet to mention, I will post more when I have started the job.

Anyway, life is going fine and I’m looking forward to seeing anyone who will be around in Glasgow when I’m finally back up regularly.
- Chris

You may have heard on the grapevine that we planned to
reward our dear Flickr members who bought a Pro Account in
the early days. Well, it’s true! And since you’re one of
those lovely people, here’s a little something to say YOU
ROCK!

1. Double what you paid for!
Your original 1 year pro account has been doubled to
2 years, and your new expiry date is Mar 4, 2007.

2. More capacity!
Now you can upload 2 GB per month.

3. 2 free Pro Accounts to give away to your friends!
This won’t be activated for a day or two, but when it
is, you’ll see a note on your home page telling you
what to do.

Thank you so much for putting your money where your mouth
is and supporting us, even while we’re in beta. Your
generosity and cold, hard cash helped us get where we are
today.

They’re right, I do ROCK!
- Chris

Edit: I have given away the first account to Derek.

I thought it was high time to start looking for some funky plugins for my new WordPress install. After a few minutes of looking through the WP site I had found a list of likley candidates for install:

• Smart Archives
• Weighted Categories
• FancyTooltips
• Flickr Gallery 0.4

Smart Archives

This plugin allows you to generate a full archive page which is not available in WP by default. It lists all the archives by year and month, then lists all the posts in each month. The output of the plugin can be seen here.

Weighted Categories

This is a plugin which allows you to have weighted category links much in the same way which flickr does the weighting of tags. The output of this plugin can be seen at the bottom of the archives page.

Fancy Tooltips

This plugin makes the tooltips which appear whilst hovering a link, abbr tag etc., nicer looking. You will be able to see it if you hover a link on this page or in the image below.

Flickr Gallery 0.4

Unfortunately I wasn’t able to install this properly and get errors when trying to run it. I will have to try a few other things to get it working – more news when (or if) I get it working.

There’s a lot of cool plugins available for WordPress,
- Chris

Since updating to WordPress 1.5, I’ve been meaning to recreate the style of the site as a WordPress theme. I decided that rather than doing so (and due to the large differences between WP 1.4 and 1.5) I decided to create a new structure for the blog and the site and also to update the style at the same time.

From this the Simply Blue theme was born.

Because WP 1.5 does things in a different way to 1.4, I decided that rather trying to recreate the same style in 1.5 it would be easier to create a new theme based upon the WP default. Using this new theme I changed the rest of the site to match it.

Hope you all like the new look,
- Chris

Most of you will have heard of flickr as it seems to be booming with new members and loads of bloggers seem to be using flickr to host pictures for their blog.

I signed up for a free account a few weeks ago and had been browsing through the content and trying to assess the usefulness of having an account (having 3Gb of server space and another Gb backup has meant my space needs have always been more than satisfied) and how it differed from the PHP Gallery I had been using.

After just a few hours playing around with flickr I had decided that it was much better than the Gallery I had, so I thought I would use it to upload pics from now on. The only problem with this is you can only upload 10Mb of pictures per month, although this is a fair enough figure, and most of the time I wouldn’t ever generate 10Mb of pictures. However there are some times when I manage to rack up an obscene number of pictures at one (parties, ends of term – which is ever nearing, and so forth) and 10Mb (hell 50Mb) wouldn’t cut it.

So I had a look around the site to see how much a full account was, currently due to flickr still being in its beta stage the sign up fee is only $41.77 (which works out just over £20 at this time) for a year, what the hell, it’s only £20.

So I signed up to flickr pro which offers:

• 1Gb monthly upload (10Mb in free version)
• Unlimited storage capacity (only last 100 photos are user accessible in the free version)
• Unlimited bandwidth (dunno what this is for the free version)
• Unlimited photosets (limited to 3 in the free version)
• Full size images archived (smaller ones are archived in the free version)

I am sitting at the moment uploading aall my photos to flickr and am nearly finished. So far I have been able to use around 20% of the monthly limit. I fully intend to start taking more photos and try to at least put a dent in the limit each month. There has been many times this year when walking around I have thought that something would make a great picture, but have never had my camera with me, hopefully I’ll start carrying it around and taking some oportunist shots to post.

Another thing about flickr is that it seems to tie in quite nicely with both my PowerBook and PC. On my PB I can export photos to flickr using an iPhoto plugin, on WindowsXP I have a desktop uploader. flickr also allows you to post photo blog posts to many types of blog (including WordPress blogs).

Anyway, you should try it out!
- Chris

I have just reacently updated my version of WordPress to 1.5. The way that this version displays it’s content is slightly different than the earlier version I was using.

The style of the blog will remain as it is for at least a while until I recreate the original style in the correct format. After I’ve done that I’ll give a full review of version 1.5 as opposed to the earlier version.

Reborn and reloaded,
- Chris

I have finally pulled my finger out and recreated the dream section. It contains all the original content from the first dream log and will hopefully have some new content soon.

Cheese for supper then,
- Chris

A lot has happened since then: Christmas & New Year (you may have noticed), the end of the first term at uni, my 21st birthday and much more.

As for Christmas and New Year, I had a good, however busy, Christmas and a very drunken New Year. I hope everyone has had a equally good Christmas and New Year and that Santa was good to everyone!

For my birthday I had a party back in Dumfries. Derek, Gary, Matt and Lauren all came down from Glasgow to it, thanks guys for coming down. Matt provided me with the obligatory cakes, flowers and porn, Gary and Derek bringing me alcohol, cheers guys. Thanks also John., Troy, and all my friends and family from home who came to the party.

Many of you will have noticed that for the past month this site has been up and down more than a cheap whore’s knickers in a busy brothel. The problem I was having was that apache seemed to be crashing and requiring me to restart it every day or so. This problem is apparently caused by a Debian package that was installed on my server. This has hopefully been fixed by downgrading the package to an earlier version. If anyone sees any problems feel free to e-mail me about them.

I have finally got my arse in gear and picked up my matric card from uni as well as sorting out my loan and travel expences are well on their way to being claimed. All in all, I’ve got my shit sorted out. Hopefully the server will remain up and there will be no need for further tom foolery on my part. Also I will hopefully not leave it nearly a whole month until I post again.

I have gotten out of the habit of blogging (obviously), hopefully I’ll find something worthwhile to post soon.
- Chris

Ok so maybe this doesn’t merit an actual blog post but why not?

I have been meaning to do this for a while, I have finally added icons for the categories: Blogging, Movies, Personal and Photoblog. Each of these are shown below.

Blogging:

Movies:

Personal:

Photoblog:

I’ve stole some of your life by making you read this!
- Chris

After updating the packages, I checked to see if the server was running properly, it apparently was as I could load pages from the server. I didn’t reallise that these were probably the cached pages from previous visits I had made.

Today, whilst checking the site again and trying to do some database work, I was continually receiving alerts saying:

This document contains no data

Whoops! After restarting apache all seems to be working correctly. If anyone has any problems please mail me to let me know and I will endevour to sort them out.

Damn Debian packages,
- Chris

This post is about, if you haven’t guessed, the new theme of the site.

Since updating the CSS last time I have not been happy about how cluttered the site looked, I intended to change this to look cleaner whenever I got the chance. Since I am meant to be doing DAS it is the perfect time to do such a thing (also with an extra hour in the day today I had best put it to good use!).

So here is is. The initial “clean” looking chris-miller.org, there’s still some work to be done to make me happy but for now this will suffice.

Anyway this is just a quick post for that reason and to say whhhhoooooo (happy halloween).
- Chris

My trip should only last until Friday, whence I will return in order to kill myself with alcohol poisoning!

Keep it real homies
- Chris