This is the Scariest thing I have seen

In a long time.

This is not a statement about Basil's fitness to carry a weapon, or to serve his country.  No it is a statement that the man I know, the one who wishes to serve Christ's Church is now carrying a weapon that can snuff out life in the blink of an eye.

It is an incredible responsibility, and one that I know Basil does not take lightly.  Let us pray to the Lord of All that Basil is never asked to use that weapon during his service.

It never ends...

I am now listed on Amazon.com for some reason.

I join pretty fair company, inlcuding Michael Heilleman, Matt Mullenwegjinglehiemerscmitt and Simon Willison.

From what I gather the lower your page ranking the better, so I am sitting pretty with the mark of the beast, aka 666 while Matt has 97,368 (but judging from the pic they have this is horribly outdated) and Michael comes in swinging with 398,478.

Yeah eat photons smallheads!

In other news, I am still looking for some site sponsors, and judging from the prices being charged for advertising other places on the net, I think 20 or so bucks for a week is pretty reasonable.  Okay, back to the grindstone.

Some Experimentation...

I just thought I would take a moment to direct your attention to the donate link that now resides in my navigation menu at the top.

I have been watching as some others in the WP community have tried the donation tack, and I have decided that it is not Very Evil (tm) to provide a way for someone to show thier appreciation for your hard work in this way.  Now I go into this in depth on the donation page, but let me state here again, that I will always provide help and code when I can, it just looks like that "when I can" is getting less and less frequent.  I would also like to write a monthly series on WP, and I really can't do that unless the donations come in.

So it is up to you, my friends as to whether or not my code and help is worth a buck or two.

Talk like a Pirate day

This Sunday is International Talk like a Pirate Day, and in honor of this glorious holiday, this post, plus all the comments that are added to it will be automagically converted to Pirate via Dougal's snazzy Text Filter Suite.

Post from me will probably be infrequent for the next week or so as I bear down on various projects that are approaching deadline, hope you all are doing well.  Oh and look for version .7 RC 1 of Mass Delete in the next day or so.

Well anyway here is the hack...

This is a hack for WP 1.3+ only

There is now a version for 1.2+

Go here and get it.

Now that I have found the bug and squashed it, here is a little ditty that will make it easier to delete large amounts of spam in one fail swoop.  Mass Comment Delete.

While it is true that there is mass deleting already built into WP 1.3, I didn't care for it that much, and the amount of time it takes to use it when you get hit by 260+ spams at once.  The most efficient way to deal with that much spam is to issue SQL commands against your database, unfortunately for a lot of our users this is a bit much to ask, so enter my newest hack.  Here is a screenshot:

Mass Spam Delete is a system that allows you to delete all comments in the database by IP, Name, URI or email.  I have tried to make it as easy as possible to use, providing a condensed listing of comments awaiting moderation on the page for you.  I say condensed, because I am grouping the comments by IP, so you will only see one entry for every IP, regardless of the number of comments associated with that IP.  That is all there is too it really, pretty straightforward.

You will find two files within the download, mass_delete.php which is where all the magic happens and mass_delete_ph.php, this is a "plugin" file; all this really does is give you a link to the main file from a central location.  If you can remember the name of the file and don't mind typing it everytime, you don't need the plugin file.  To install this hack, simply drop mass_delete.php in your wp-admin folder and mass_delete_ph.php in your plugins folder.  That's it.

Well that is about it for now, I am off to bed and then off to restore what I can of my comments.  Oh well, maybe I will just start over with my comments instead of restoring from my stale backup.

Note to self...

Note to self, when writing a hack that deletes comments, do not use your live server to test against, because you might wipe out all your comments.

Also don't hack on comment deletion when you have been deprived of sleep.  I will be restoring some of my comments from a backup, but I imagine that I have lot 150 - 200 comments in this fiasco.  Bah.

Thank you Quentin...

For bringing Hero to american theatres.

Last week Heather and I were fortunate enough to catch a viewing of Hero the latest offering from Director Zhang Yimou.

As always this movie was visually stunning, I relished the use of colour throughout and the slow, almost baleful shots that helped to infuse the viewer with a sense of the honor and sadness that shaped the life of each character and drove them to the extraordinary lengths seen throughout the story.  Jet Li once again shines in the role of Nameless the Hero whose sacrifice alowed the Chinese nation to be galvanized producing the first Dynasty.

Unfortunately as with most imports the film was put through the ringer and what came out the otherside was not exactly Yimou's vision.  Many important scenes were cut, and the fight scenes themselves were edited to squeak by with a PG13 rating.  The film weighs in at a light 1 hour 38 minutes because of this.

Read the rest »

Some new photos

I have added a new album and some new photos to the photoblog.

During out little vacation Heather and I visited the Lousiville Zoo.  We were fortunate that they have been blessed with the birth of Sumatrin Tiger Tripplets, Sumatrin Tigers are some of the more rare Tigers on the planet as well as to see any offspring in captivity is becoming rarer and rarer so we were very fortunate.

You can find the albums here: http://light.chrisjdavis.org/albums
The one you want is The Visible World.

Hope you enjoy.

New Toys...

I am writing this from my brand new toy, a 12 inch powerbook!

I have been laptopless for quite awhile now and have found it to be although not very much fun, not that huge of an inconvenience.  Untill now.  The Top-Secret Project that Skippy, LaughingLizard and I are undertaking combined with another top secret plan that I cannot mention yet have neccesitated that I once again join the mobile computing crowd.

I just love technology.  I haven't had the machine long enough to really write up a proper review, but I will say that man it is Shiny.  I luckily decided to go with the top-o-the-line 12 incher so I should have more than enough oomph to get me through for a good long while; once I upgrade the ram that is.

That is one of the things I don't get when it comes to Apple.  I wish they would get thier act together when it comes to the RAM issue.  But I digress, the machine is nice regardless.  When I have lived with it for a bit I will post a proper review.