While, it was a busy week (for which I’m a little late in posting), there’s unusually not much to post..

• Wrote a mini sub-module for Epublish sorting options in the Drupal Views Module.
• Finally setup a secure credit card payment system for my business.

On the less work focused front.. after some resistance, I finally created a facebook account (profile here). I’ve actually found it to be a pretty cool web app - heaps of neat AJAX, heaps of social networking features (even an indoors person like myself was able to track down 20+ friends already using it, in a few days) and a development platform - which looks frickin awesome (see these cool apps: IPlayWoW, Movies by Flixster, etc).

Notice a pattern ? I think, rather then posting random stuff every now and then, I’m going to try write one post each week, summarising on things I’ve come across and work I’ve done. /me wonders how long this will last..

For about 15 minutes yesterday, my webserver was down due to this error upon apache restart: “(98)Address already in use: make_sock: could not bind to address 0.0.0.0:443″. So I went and disabled ssl.. only to get the same error on port 80. What was going on.. An nmap on the box, showed port 80 and port 443 in use, but a process list showed no apache!! and this is a production server!

A quick google search, and I came across a thread over on the linuxquestions.org forums - the solution, was using lsof to kill of any processes on the port. I’ve posted a reply there to try find out why in the world bash would be occuping the port.. it is a bit of a worry..

I’ve also been doing a bit of work for a couple of clients, using Codrey.. But I’m starting to think though, that rather then trying to create a fully fledged CMS.. maybe the neat versioning/approval process features could be implemented into a module and used for Drupal. It’s just a thought at this point though.. I might need to read up some more on Drupal module programming first.

The Linksys WRT54BL wireless router I ordered last week, arrived on Tuesday. After some delimma’s I managed to get the DD-WRT firmware installed.. and hoping to use it with Chillispot to run a low cost, low fee Hotspot at the Hotel where my Dad manages. If all goes well I’ll have it running over the weekend.. will post more info then..

In other news, I went to the Linkin Park concert at the Burswood SuperDome with Katrina and her friend, yesterday. I grew out of the rock/punk-electro genre a long time ago.. but found myself thoroughly entertained, bopping to the music throughout the act.. Very good concert.. if there is one bone to pick though, I found it a little short.. they only played for about 1.5 hours..

With my upgraded games machine (mentioned previously), I got stuck into HL2:Episode 2 over the weekend. Wow this game rocks! I didn’t finish the original HL2, or play EP1 (will go back and play it all one day), but EP2 really is an amazing expansion. The storyline, the character development/the physics/the graphics.. its a piece of art. Good job, Valve. If your thinking about getting this, I recommend it - just make sure you have decent hardware to ensure maximum enjoyment.

The latest release of Ubuntu - v7.10 was released yesterday (code named Gutsy Gibbon). There’s a bunch of Australian mirrors to grab the iso’s from.. so get downloading! I’ve already grabbed a copy of the x86 desktop iso.. hoping to install onto my desktop over the weekend.. yay

See you next week..

I recently did some Drupal work for a client, which turned out to be a bit of fun. The Google Custom Search service is a service that can be integrated into websites for a branded/focused version of google’s efficient, accurate search facility. The Drupal module for this service had only been released for 5.x, so I got to work and backported a version for 4.7.x for a client. Was refreshing to do a bit of open source work - if you want to check it out, see this page: Google_cse: I’d love a release for Drupal 4.7.6.

In other news, I took the plunge and decided to indulge in some computer upgrades for my secondary machine i.e. Games and Photoshop (shamefully running Windows XP):

• 2GB Corsair XMS2 DDR2 RAM
• AMD Athlon 64 X2 5600+ Duel Core CPU
• Samsung 20″ Widescreen LCD 206BW (1680 x 1050 resolution goodness)

I hadn’t spent any money on computer components for quite a while, so I guess its not that bad. Before, during and after the upgrades, I conducted some benchmarks to see how it improved my frame rates, check out the results over on the EGN Forums.

Onto other news, I had a bit of a winge over on the Freshbooks Forums for their lack of effort on progress for features that assist non-American’s. It’s frustrating to say the least. I also can’t stand it how companies want to brand everything as much as possible to market things to their advantage.

Heading to RFLan tomorrow, should be abit of fun - haven’t been to a LAN that I haven’t been involved in organising, for at least 4/5 years.