As some of you would know by now, Hillary Clinton has surprised most, and won just about all the primaries and caucuses voted for today in the American states of Ohio, Texas, Rhode Island, and Vermont. It’s a pretty big come back for her, since Obama had won the last 12 or so, states in a row, and he was therefore expected to win these. Overall he’s still ahead slightly, but this still means the Democrat nomination is still up for grabs, and we probably won’t have a nominee for a few more months, until the remainding states vote, and the eventual decision of primaries and their superdelegates, vote. Check out the scorecard over on CNN.

This really sucks, because, while this is happening, McCain (Republican Nomination winner) can prepare and focus his efforts on the presidential election in November. And we all know where another republician president will lead the world.. into a war with Iran, into a more unstable US currency and US economy, and eventually the fall of an empire that has and currently keeps the world pretty stable, as its the only super power.

Update 12/03/08: It looks like Obama has actually ended up winning the state of Texas, as he won more Caucus Delegates - full explanation here.

I can’t believe how fast each week is going.. Before the week actually starts its already over.. I guess that means either I’m getting old, or I’m too busy to notice…

Anyway, last weekend was the Australian 2007 election, which saw Kevin Rudd voted in as the next Prime Minister of Australia.. Already in less then a week Kevin has selected his ministers, visited homeless shelters, investigated wha’ts needed to sign the Kyoto agreement, promised to apologise to indigenous Australians (stolen generation), and more…

A little less serious now.. as some of you would know, I like trance.. specifically, the ASOT radio station by Armin Van Buuren. Anyway, their having their annual poll for the top 5 tracks of the year and so I thought I’d share what I voted for:

• Alex Kinnari - Lifter (Paul Webster Remix)
• Marcel Woods - Lemon Tree
• Perpetuous Dreamer - The Sound Of Goodbye (Nic Chagall’s Drumbeat Re-edit)
• Hybrid - Finished Symphony (Deadmau5 Remix)
• Breakfast - The Horizon

I listen to ASOT just about every week, and pay no attention to the song names.. so selecting this list meant I had to skip through the shows quickly until I recognised one I liked, and then cross reference it with the other songs in the radio playlist… it was a little difficult.. but a bit of fun.. Anyway if you listen and want to vote, visit arminvanbuuren.net. If you don’t listen, and want to, you can download the podcasts (via torrent) from themixingbowl.org - they’re great for all forms of electronic music thats played on radio, etc.

I don’t have much PHP/MySQL/Drupal stuff to talk about, unfortunately.. most of the work I’ve been doing lately is too specific, and hasn’t involved releasing anything.. I did try out the Drupal 6.0 B3 release though, and was pleasantly impressed.. so much AJAX! Can’t wait until its live, and people start porting their modules over.. its going to get interesting I have a few idea’s for a few new modules too.. just got to find the time!

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..