Archive for October, 2007

26 Oct 2007

Posted by under Dave's Thoughts

Spyware, bah!!

Well, instead of working on figuring out the vexing problem of how to get a photo gallery attached to this blog, I’ve been fighting malware on my main computer. Brenda was doing research on how various schools approach the issue of background checks for volunteers and, while on the website of one of the two big school boards in Calgary, managed to get a virus. It was one of those unpleasant ransom-ware style “virus scanner” deals, the virus pops up a WinXP style system tray alert box that warns of nasty viruses detected on the computer. Well, Duh!

The hook is that the malware tries to get you to buy a “full featured” version of some product (in this case, something called AntiVirGear) to remove the infection. Of course, if you’re dull enough to fall for it, the likelihood of being rewarded with a clean machine is pretty low. Anyway, it was a bear to get rid of: Norton, Adaware, Spybot and TrendMicro Housecall all were unsuccessful – although each one did find and remove some parts of the infestation. The last remnants of the virus relied on a randomly named and timestamped dll file in the system32 directory which had to be discovered and deleted by hand. Eventually I did clean it all up, but it took about 8 hours of effort.

I still think that I may rebuild things from scratch, just to be sure.

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15 Oct 2007

Posted by under Dave's Thoughts

Autumn

nearDrumhellerI quite enjoy the fine autumn days on the prairies; clear skies, mild temperatures and the endless vista of farmer’s fields. Today was one of those days – really, it was too nice to be stuck in the office. Once the workday shackles were loosened I headed home on my motorbike, the long way home. I headed north out of Calgary and then east to Delacour and past Keoma and north to Irricana. Then I turned around and went south to the Trans-Canada and then home. It was just over 100 km and almost certainly the best commute in recent memory! 15Oct2007-ride home

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08 Oct 2007

Posted by under Family

One of my favourite pictures

One of my favourite pictures

This is one of my favourite pictures of Alyssa, who is about 2½ in this picture. We went up the Calgary Tower on the morning that they opened up the new glass floor that looks straight down 525 feet to the intersection of 9th Ave and Center St. The glass was unblemished and standing on it was a little vertigo inducing – except for Alyssa, she loved it! This was all to the twittering dismay of two elderly tourist ladies who were nearby but who wouldn’t venture close to the glass floor.

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07 Oct 2007

Posted by under Dave's Thoughts,Geekstuff

Photoblogging

Photoblogging

One of my goals for this blog is to see if I can set things up to make it easy to post sets (galleries) of photos. I tried to get Gallery2 up and running because there is a WordPress plugin called WPG2 that allows for “easy” integration with WordPress. Sadly, I never found out if the integration works because Gallery2 wouldn’t even install. It drops its install files outside of the apache document root and if you just copy them over, stuff breaks. So I abandoned that approach.

I am already using a program called webimage which works fairly well, but it is dated and limited ease of use. It is pretty powerful if you spend enough time in the weeds of the php code. I’ve used it for web galleries for www.newpaige.ca as well as for some family photos last Christmas. The trouble with webimage is that it doesn’t integrate seamlessly into the blog and would still require a lot of manual html/php manipulation, which I’d like to avoid.

So what else is there? WordPress recommends yapb in their online docs as “the easiest way to get started with photoblogging on WordPress”. It’s just a simple plugin, no messing around with installs on ubuntu, or configuring another database in mysql (still don’t really know how I got the WordPress database to work!). The only downside that I can see to this is that yapb is not a gallery, it’s philosophy is “One post, one image, one description”, so it doesn’t completely meet my goal of posting photo sets.

There you go – this post is a post with a photo using yapb. The picture is one of me hiking in Steve’s Canyon, near Exshaw, Alberta in September 2006.

Useful links:

Main yapb website and some installation instructions

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