AndreasB.Net

The release of Wordpress 2.5 makes managing a blog much easier. There is a much cleaner, slicker UI behind the scenes, as well as support for automatic updating of plugins. I think I am going to like this version, although you probably won’t see much of it, at least not yet.

Check the link out for all the goodies of 2.5.

Its been a while since my last post, been busy with work and reading, have a lot of reviews I should write and put up. But for day, i would like to talk about my new camera.

I don’t take many pictures, but there are times when having a camera is a nice thing, and I have been wanting a digital camera for quite some time now. And today, I bought one

The Canon PowerShot G9 is my new little camera, and I love it. There is a nice big LCD screen, 12 megapixels, picture stabilisation, 6x optic zoom and loads of other stuff. Its a bit beyond a mid-range amatour camera, but I am happy anyhow Who knows, perhaps there will be more pictures on this blog in the future?

While I am still struggling to upgrade the server to Ubuntu 7.10, Gutsy Gibbons, (always fails with some segfaulting after a while), the blog itself has now been upgraded to Wordpress 2.3.1, all plugins updated as well as the Mandigo theme which powers the visual layout of my blog.

Nothing should have changed much, but if you find anything, let me know

My old gaming rig has the first AMD Athlon64 CPU on the market, with the 754 socket, at 3.2 GHz it has for some years now given me a good gaming experience, along with my XFX 7600 GT GPU. However, stability problems have arisen in the last six months, and last night I ordered a new rig.

The specs are as follows:

Case: Cooler Master Centurion 534, Black
PSU: Silver Power PSU, 600W, 120mm fan
Motherboard: Asus P5N-E SLI, nForce-650i SLI, ATX
CPU: Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 2.4GHz
GPU: XFX GeForce 8800GTS 600M 640MB XXX GDDR3
4 GB memory: Corsair TWIN2X 6400 DDR2, 2048MB CL5
HDD: Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 500GB SATA2
DVD burner: LG DVD-brenner GSA-H44N IDE Black OEM
Soundcard: Creative SB X-Fi Gamer, Bulk
Keyboard: Logitech Deluxe 250 Keyboard NO

Speakers: Logitech X-530 Speaker 5.1

Screen: Samsung 22" LCD Syncmaster 225BW TCO03

With Vista Home Premium as its running OS. Expected delivery is the first of October, and I am looking forward to it like a child

Edit:
Fifth of October now. Apparantly Komplett.No is selling to many units atm compared to their logistical abilities.

Edit 2:
Komplett.No has major logistical problems. Now delayed to the 23rd. Increased RAM to 4 GB.

I am a long time customer of Amazon.co.uk as they deliver books to Norway quicker than their Norwegian counterparts for some reason, and a lot cheaper

However, they also have a wide reach of nifty web services, some which I have added to this site, and their text clouds called product clouds is a really interesting piece of technology.

Introduced as a general widget for webpages described here, the widget looks over the site and adapts the text cloud with products relevant to the site and page currently showing. As text clouds are based on a statistical mapping of a page, this offers a different result than say Google AdSense.

If you look at the sidebar of my blog, you can see the product cloud in action, I particularly love the hover effects popping up a small information window.

There are also other interesting Amazon services, and I will be writing about those in the weeks that come.

I am a python programmer personally, so PHP is something I rarely touch, but the blog engine driving my blog Wordpress is PHP based, so when I felt it was kinda slow, I looked for ways to improve it.

It would seem that a standard way to improve it is to combine WP-cache which is becoming a plugin included with Wordpress along with eAccelerator, page loading become a lot swifter at once.

Installing wp-cache is a standard wordpress plugin, while I found this post to be helpfull for getting eAccelerator up and working without issues.

As one of my favourite pasttimes is reading books, I have decided to start adding some book links to my site.

Some will be hard links, generated by me. Others will be using various Amazon.co.uk experimental techniques which I found interesting and want to try out.

(In case anyone wonders anything bought using those links will yield me a small referal fee, but hey, webhosting costs money and I like experimenting with things )