What a load of bollox! This seems to be the week I experience maximum crashage.
Hard times/drive
First, my shop pc had a hard drive crash. A massive one. The drive wouldn’t even spin! I tried the usual methods found on a Google like putting it in a plastic bag and putting it the freezer which is supposed to fix a jammed disc.
nope.
Then I tried what this page tried. Basically, swapping the logic board from an identical drive to the faulty one. That actually got the drive spinning and recognized in windows but unfortunately, it was completely trashed. Every sector screwed and no matter what software apps I threw at it, it wouldn’t play. (so I took it apart to see how it works)
Lost code
All my backups of my server where on that disc. All.of.them!
In a great wave of relief, I found that 99% of it had been updated to the live server only the day before. The 1% that didn’t just so happened to be my awesome edit of the pay-to-blog plugin which I was about to put on ComLuv. dammit, that was some good coding I added to the plugin.
It would have allowed me to set a free time limit on new blogs of say 30 days and when that runs out, the next time the blog owner tried to log on, they would be presented with a page where they can pay a piddly 5 USD to have the blog enabled for a year. If they didn’t want to or couldn’t pay then they could request a free blog and that would notify me by email and list the request on my admin page.
I’ll have to rewrite the code and I bet I can’t remember how I did it!
New install, new problems
I managed to grab another hard drive and put it in the box to replace the poop one. Installed Ubuntu 9.10 and vwmare and got all the shop POS software working with the ancient equipment we have. Sweet! until… only 24 hours of nice working, it went pooooop. Something to do with i810 video drivers missing. Cue 5 hours pissing about with sudo apt-get and other linux bollox until at last, it is working again.
And then Vmware decided to stop working with the serial port via USB. Pleh!
More sudo apt-get and 2 hours later, I found an old vwmare image for the win98 system and copied over the contents of the .vmx file and ta-da! it worked again.
No more please!
No more. thanks. done it now.
New Wheels
Even these got delayed by 3 days. Next day delivery bleeeeuuurrgh!
Someone sent me a message saying that the options page doesn’t update on CommentLuv for WP2.7b3 and it’s set off a small chain reaction in my head.

6
Crashing like a mofo and OMG big list of to-do
August12
It’s been almost a week where I haven’t been coding anything for longer than an hour without the computer crashing with weird little squares all over the screen.
I think it has to do with my integrated graphics card (Radeon HD 3300) . I have gone through all the usual steps of updating drivers, bios, firmware and wotnot and I am waiting for the next crash.
It’s been hard because I need to code some major things for the ComLuv site and every time I get deep into it, the bloody pc crashes! It’s doubly hard because I have so many great things to watch and listen to on these awesome monitors and 5.1 speakers and I can’t because a little bit of media is liable to make the screen freeze with little squares corrupting it.
Big mofo list
I’ve got a fair bit of stuff to do for the ComLuv network, it’s kind of like the washing up. The longer you leave it, the less likely you are to do it… imagine a big pile of washing up and then imagine that the kitchen crashes every time you run the water. That’s me that is. boo hoo
If my latest open heart procedures on my hardware can keep the system up without pissing it’s pants when an mp3 gets played, I can move on to what I was doing before all this crashing malarky. Which is..
1st priority: Get the url registration page working with a new look and form validation. (seriously, I don’t know how people keep putting http://http:// in their url field!)
2nd priority: Update the WP commentluv plugin with these new things:
I’m doing this with a plugin framework that takes care of all the settings page bumph so I can easily make it a lot more intuitive to use.
This seems to be an important thing to do. Rather than edit a style sheet or hunt through the code for inline styles, I will add a text input box for the different objects so (advanced) users can completely control the look of the links, badge and info box.
Awesome work from users to add even more languages to the plugin
3rd Priority: Allow more URL’s per account on ComLuv.
This was supposed to be done already but I have spent an awful lot of time on making sure the basics work properly, plus, my personal/business life has it’s own mofo lists to deal with!
4th Priority: Add a “what I’m doing” theme to ComLuv so extra features that are only available to ComLuv blog owners can be opened to all. This will be a friend feed type of affair where you can add widgets to show your stumbleupons, diggs, comments, luvlinks, link clicks etc etc.
I want this in right now but time to do it is a rarity for me these days! Having this theme will allow people who don’t necessarily want a new blog to have the extra features. It might help with links and traffic to have a site where your latest links and other social activities are chronicled and it’ll reduce the amount of empty blogs created on the network.
5th Priority: Tutorials and videos!
Lots of them.
6th Priority: Email courses.
Everything from starting blogging to running your own network to making money with a ComLuv blog (I’m itching to start this one!)
There’s loads more but it’s depressing the hell out of me listing them!
As soon as the crashing like a mofo finishes, I’ll try to get on the coding like a mofo. Stay tuned!
Blog News, Code