ThingyMaJig

Thingy Ma Jig is the blog of Nicholas Thompson and contains any useful tips, sites and general blog-stuff which are considered interesting or handy!

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Thingy Ma Jig

Getting the most out of Fedora Core 4

28 September 2007
websites software linux How to geek Drupal

I recently looked into which versions of software I was running and was a little concerned to see how backward Fedora Core 4 was in some areas. I did a little Googling around and found a website (http://remi.collet.free.fr/) which is predominately written in French (but has a few English translations) which provides a new repository for Fedora Core 4's Yum Installer Package which provides far more recent RPM's for the likes of PHP and MySQL... So I installed it!

I got me a Wii

04 September 2007
wii hardware games

Its been a while since a I posted and mostly thats because I've been moving home and without internet... So whats new? Well I bought myself a Nintendo Wii on Sunday as I've been toying with the idea for a while. My initial thoughts on it are: IT'S SO MUCH FUN!

The only downside I have found so far is that it wont play DVD Films... It has a DVD drive - but they just haven't made it play films... Why? I have no idea!

How to weigh terms alphabetically

07 August 2007
programming mysql Drupal cool

Following on from my Numbering Rows in MySQL article, today I needed to populate the weight column of the term_data table for about a hundred terms so that they incremented in alphabetical order. This was, on the face of it, a very tedious task; click edit, select weight from drop-down, submit, 'goto 1'.

As I said in my Numbering Rows in MySQL article, I don't like tedious - but I do like over-complicated methods which actually make my life more interesting and less tedious... Enter a nifty MySQL script!

Force a PDF to download

06 August 2007
software programming linux cool apache

I recently needed to force a PDF to download using Apache. The default behaviour for most browsers is to try to open the PDF inside the browser itself. This is fine for a small PDF or for powerful machines - but a large PDF on even a modest machine can often lock the browser up. This needed fixing!

After 20 minutes of perusing the Apache documents, I happened across the FilesMatch option which takes Regular Expressions. Regular Expressions are cool things which pattern match; you give it a rather complicated (yet logical) pattern and it matches it for you. Initially I used something like this...

Cubalaya integrates with Drupal

28 July 2007
Drupal announcement

Not many people have heard of Cubalaya. I know I hadn't a few months back when they contacted me about potential advertising on my site. Now Cubalaya isn't a shop - its not like Amazon or even eBay. Its more like Kelkoo or Pricerunner - its a Price Comparison Site really. Well now you can easily integrate this PPC (Pay Per Click) advertiser onto your site and provide your own category sensitive products.

Back from Holiday!

11 July 2007
photos miscellaneous Days Out

Well I've been back from holiday for a few days now and am still wishing I was in Scotland. It's SUCH a nice place!

If you need some convincing on whether or not the scenery is worth it, check out our Flickr Scottish Holiday group.

Below are a selection of snaps from the holiday

Muse - Wembley 2007

18 June 2007
photos music Flickr Days Out

A day later than I wanted to but here are some photos I took while at the Saturday Muse concert at Wembley Stadium - the first sell-out show at the new venue in North London. They're also the first "proper band" to play there (George Michael is a solo artist).

Most Farted (Most Haunted Spoof)

18 June 2007
video humour cool

I've only seen Most Haunted a few times on TV and generally thought it was pretty poor. My opinion was based on the grounds that if you place a group of people in a dark and creaky house, tell them there are ghosts, turn the lights out and pay them to scream at a camera then they're bound to... well.. scream at the camera. I'm clearly not the only one who thinks this!

Now this video might not be to everyone's taste - so if you dont like Fart Jokes, it wont be for you!