I have been watching Burger King commercials and shaking my head for years now as they make some of the dumbest commercials I have ever seen. From the “Coq Rock” chicken commercials, to now the plastic King figure acting like a drunken frat boy in perpetual party mode (“don’t fall asleep before the king”). This is just sad that someone actually thinks these are good commercials. I like the food at BK, but their commercials make me not want to even go there. And to think, they are paying someone to consult with them and design these commercials LOL Wow.
Author Archives: Laz
Simple Machines Forums (SMF) and Deleting Multiple Posts by One User
OK folks, I came up with something helpful and I thought I would pass it on. Recently I had a spam bot (or maybe a real person, who knows) join the forums. Went right through all of the security controls and verifications. Then, said user went about posting almost 500 porn posts all over my site’s forums. Posting topics, posts, pics and embedded videos, it was really bad and I was really mad. First off I banned the user, no problem. I figured I would do that so I could keep relevant info like IP and email addresses rather than just deleting him. Now I had the arduous task of removing all those damn posts and topics.
I do know that you can delete a user and tell SMF to also delete all of those users topics posts as well, but that hasn’t worked in the past so I did it on my own. Here is what I did.
WordPress Template Tip
I just ran into an interesting little ripple in WordPress when trying to create a new page using a template. The problem was that I had no option to choose a template, it just wasn’t there at all. Took some cypherin’ on Google, but I found it. It was my theme. I switched to the default theme and there it was. I picked my template and then switched my theme back. Hope this helps!
Oracle Buys Sun Microsystems
Or, the end of the tech world as we know it. Maybe that’s too harsh, time will tell. I know one thing for sure, Oracle stepped up with an offer that was only $400 million more than IBM was tossing around (I know, “only”, but when you are talking $7+ billion it’s not so much), and I bet IBM is now pretty mad at themselves. Not just because they let Sun get away, but more importantly because Oracle with all of Sun’s technology under their belt, just became a veritable behemoth competitor.
I can’t say that Oracle buying Sun is worse than IBM buying Sun, I think either would have been bad, but I do think that IBM would have made more of the technology that Sun has, especially in the hardware arena. Most people already run Oracle on Sun, but I think Oracle was angling the software more than the hardware. Now they have the whole “stack” sewn up. They have been re-branding Red Hat Linux to provide “their own” operating system, but now they don’t have to because they really do have their own operating system with Solaris. One that lots of people prefer for running Oracle versus Linux and especially Windows. Now Oracle can provide the application, the database, the operating system and the hardware platform to run it all on, all in one nice bundle. I have come to think of it as the “O-Stack”. Now, instead of a LAMP stack, Oracle will be pushing their O-Stack.
I just hope that the folk out there that have a considerable investment in Sun (me included), not only in SPARC, but also their X86 line, didn’t just get screwed. Can Oracle keep the support going? Will they keep the hardware lines going? What will happen to Solaris, MySQL and Java (to name a few)? Only time will tell, but I for one am not pleased with this announcement.
I’ll have more updates as I find information to share.
Free System Administration Tools
It’s not every day that you come across such a fine collection of tools that someone has generously created and put forth for the world. One of my agents in the field sent this my way and so I feel compelled to share with you, my loyal readers. This is a set of system administration tools, written in PERL, and that been offered up for free by the author simply out of the goodness that swells within his and her heart. With tools like ‘turbo’, ‘cdrewind’, and ‘mkzombie’ just to name a few, how can you NOT have this collection in your kit? Check it out, and see the goodness for yourself!
Netflix Over The Net
Netflix Logo
One of the things that I like to do here, aside from how-to articles, scripts, tips and tidbits, etc., is to share things that I have run across that I find useful or fun, a good value, and so on. One such thing recently has been Netflix. Now, unless you have been living in a cave somewhere, I am sure you have heard of Netflix before. Their claim to fame is DVD rental by mail with no late fees. It works, works well, I have used the service in that capacity and been quite happy with it. However, that is not what this post is about. No, in this day and age of instant gratification, this post shows off a new feature that Netflix offered up, which is the ability to watch movies and TV shows instantly, over the ‘net. Bing!
You can do this a couple of different ways, using your computer (this is how I do it) and streaming the content via your web browser, or using a special device that connects to your TV and streams directly to your set. I haven’t used the special TV device, and I don’t know anything about it, I will just be talking about the browser based service.
For a nominal fee, ($8.99/month) you can get both DVD by mail service and unlimited instant service (over the Internet). To me, this is a pretty good deal. That’s a rental or two and you can watch all you want, nice. What’s the catch, you ask? Well, naturally you have to have some type of broadband connection. I haven’t actually tried it on dial-up, but I can’t imagine it would be fun. The other thing is that their instant content selection isn’t near as vast as their physical DVDs, something like 12,000 instant viewing titles versus over 100,000 DVDs that they can send via mail. That being said, I haven’t had any trouble finding something to watch. Yeah, I have found a few things that was only on DVD or what not, but there is still lots of good stuff to choose from and they are adding more all the time.
All in all, I think this is a good deal if you spend a lot of time at your computer (check), and like to watch TV and movies (check), and want the versatility to change it up and watch one thing one day and something else the next without having to buy a truck load of DVDs (also check). For the record, I am not affiliated with Netflix in any way, I get absolutely nothing if you go sign up (although, Netflix, if you want to send me gifts feel free! :]). I simply wanted to share something I found to be good with my audience. Feel free to post your own thoughts and/or experiences in the comments.