Various stuff

This morning I was looking through my website error logs and found some wordpress errors. I went on wordpress and found there was a new version and so installed that and also some new versions of plugins I had installed.

After that I had to replace all the places that wordpress uses named entities like » « and   as these entities don't exist by default in xml and so break pages served as XHTML.

Next I updated the subscribe2 plugin that I have customised slightly. But when I tested it, it didn't work. After looking into it I found that part of my customisation didn't make sense. I think I must have just copied it from the filsofo enroll comments plugin that I also customised slightly.

After attempting to fix my code, I tried again, but it still wasn't working. After a while of trying to find what the problem was, I found that, according to the SMTP plugin, I hadn't configured PHP with SSL support. And so because the SMTP plugin wasn't working, the Subscribe2 plugin couldn't send any email.

Re-installing PHP is quite a task, and apparently a new version of PHP will be released soon anyway: PHP 5.3.4 in December. So I'll wait for PHP 5.3.4 to be released, then build it with SSL support.

I went out for a walk and took a few photos around sunset. After the sun had set it was very annoying. The sun would light up the clouds nicely from below the horizon, but as soon as I set up my tripod and camera the light would go from the clouds / sky.

I would take a few photos anyway and wait for a few minutes, but when the light didn't improve at all I'd give up and pack up the tripod and camera. Then about a minute later the light would come back and light up the clouds and sky very nicely again.

This happened three times in a row, very annoying!

In the evening I watched an episode of DS9 with Mauser and Bo, then did a Japanese lesson with Mauser.

After that I spent ages looking for the rubber grip bits that had fallen off my tripod legs quite a while ago. I thought they were all in a bag, but the bag only had one out of nine bits in it. I looked everywhere I could think of that they might be, but couldn't find any more.

I wanted to glue them back onto the tripod as tightening / untightening the legs is quite difficult in the cold without the rubber grips. So it was annoying that I couldn't find them. I was sure they were in the bag, and since I looked just about anywhere else they could be, I've no idea what's happened to them.