Cormac's Blog

The Deep Sleep

Cormac M — Sat, 30 May 2009 21:27:39 +0000

Hi there,

The purpose of this blog is to provide a historical reference for all the posts that were written by me, Cormac Moylan, on cormacmoylan.com.

Basically, I have decided to move all the blog posts I had written to this location and to start again over here.

There are a total of 380 blog posts with 2,522 comments. A massive thank you to everyone who read and commented on my posts. I really appreciate it

If you want to get in contact with me you can drop me a line through my contact page, follow me on Twitter, or add me on Facebook.

If you liked all my posts about music; you can take a wander over to Album.ie (you won’t be disappointed, I hope!).

Cormac!
PS: I have closed all the comments on the blog posts to be found on this site.

Joaquin Phoenix On David Letterman Show

Cormac M — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 21:11:39 +0000

How mad is this interview?

WordPress 2.7.1 Automatic Upgrade Installation Fail

Cormac M — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 19:13:37 +0000

When WordPress announced an automatic upgrade function to their 2.7 release, I was a tad bit excited. One of the annoyances of WordPress, and many open source applications, are the constant updates required in order to maintain the security of the installation. Having to constantly update multiple installations of WordPress is a time consuming process. The new “upgrade automatically” function would elevate these issues.

This afternoon I noticed an alert asking me to upgrade my WordPress installation. I was presented with two options. I could go down the manual route of downloading the new release, unzipping the zip, uploading the files to the server and then complete the installation by clicking on a few buttons.. Bah! I choose the second option to go automatically instead. (I’m an adventurous bastard!)

I get prompted to enter my FTP details and all the stuff.. and then it goes wrong…

I get presented with a really unhelpful error message. The above message states an issue copying admin-header.php (I also received messages about an inability to copy JS and .gif files during other attempts).

I don’t mind things not working “out of the box” first time. I don’t expect everything to simply “just work”. But when something goes wrong I like to be best equipped to solve that problem. The error message I received from WordPress is pretty useless.

“Installation Failed”

How hard could it be to prescribe possible solutions to resolve the issue? Do I need special permissions in certain folders? Do I need to set an absolute or a relative path to some directory in order to complete the upgrade? Is there an entry on the WordPress Codex providing possible solutions to the issue? (I couldn’t find anything).

What do I do next….?

Obviously I could manually complete the upgrade but that would be counter productive since I’m going to have to resolve this issue eventually if I wish to use the simpler approach of upgrading automatically.

I wonder if the number of support topics on the WordPress forum for issues relating to this upgrade could be aided by WordPress providing better error messages? That’s where I’m off to next to find out if someone else has the same issue as myself..

6 Nations Fantasy Rugby League

Cormac M — Fri, 06 Feb 2009 11:05:02 +0000

The 6 Nations Kick off tomorrow. There will be trys, kicks, tackles, missed tackles, blood, bruised egos and now…. a fantasy rugby league. I have entered a team which I believe capable of inflicting some serious points damage against any opposition. The fantasy league requests you to choose 15 players of which a maximum 4 can be picked from the one team.

My Team:

Castrogiovanni (Italy)
Jenkins (Wales)
Lecouls (France)
O’Connell (Ireland)
Chabal (France)
Bergamasco (Italy)
Wallace (Ireland)
Powell (Wales)
Phillips (Wales)
O’Gara (Ireland)
Williams (Wales)
Fritz (France)
Bergamasco (Italy)
Kearney (Ireland)
Rougerie (France)

I have created a league in which I’m sure I’ll have no trouble in dominating. The league is called Croke Parkers and the PIN to enter the league is 8547. Come and have a go if you want, but be sure to bring your balls..

Twitter Cup

Cormac M — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 20:44:17 +0000

Every wondered what your Twitter followers or friends taste like? Well wonder no more! Walter Higgins from Sxopp has only gone off and created an application which delicately puts the ugly mugs of your twitter buddies on a mug! Pretty cool idea. And at only £10.95 is a bit of a steal to be honest.

You’re limited to 114 avatars so be sure to dump the folk who have a generic Twitter avatar as well as those you don’t know!

€10 .ie domains from Blacknight – One Day Only!

Cormac M — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 00:37:11 +0000

The hosting company I use are obviously smoking crack in fairly large quantities. How else can their crazy one day offer of €10 .ie domains be explained?

I registered a .ie for 2 years at a total of €20 (+€4 for the taxi man). That’s a saving of about €30. Thank you Blacknight!

Microsoft Word Question about Merge Documents

Cormac M — Sun, 04 Jan 2009 22:59:28 +0000

Hello to you. I have a question about using MS Word and I hope that you can help!

I have created five copies of the same .docx document for five different people. Each person is going to contribute to their sections in the document individually and then the content will be collected and put into a single document. Instead of doing some copying and pasting I want to simplify this process by merging the documents together using some form of built in function in Word 2007.

Problem is that I can find what I’m looking for

Do you know if and how you can merge documents together in Office 2007?

What I listened to in ’08

Cormac M — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 01:21:58 +0000

Yup. December. The time when everyone and their aunt is compiling their top picks of 2008 lists. Unfortunately you’re going to have to go to this site to check out what tickled my fancy musically this year. I registered album.ie a few months ago and only recently began posting to it. This evening I posted about my favourite albums of 2008.

Just for the sake of it, this is the kind of malaraky you can expect:

Basically, no more posts about music here. Instead music posts there.

5 Spotify Invites Inside

Cormac M — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 18:21:27 +0000

What is Spotify?

Spotify is a new way to enjoy music. Simply download and install, before you know it you’ll be singing along to the genre, artist or song of your choice. With Spotify you are never far away from the song you want.

More nonsensical marketing drivel like that above can be found on their about page but it doesn’t properly explain how great Spotify is.

Spotify is an in beta Peer 2 Peer (P2P) desktop (Win/Mac) music player with, what seems like, an endless catalogue of music presented for your listening pleasure. Think of it as the iTunes store but instead of only getting a 30 second preview you can listen to the complete mp3 and ‘surf’ entire albums. You can also create and share playlists with your friends.

You can’t download mp3s from Spotify but you don’t really need to if you are on broadband and have every song imaginable a mouse click away…

In a nutshell, Spotify is the doorway to the greatest music library in the World.

The above screenshot is displaying a recent search result for Roísín Murphy while the album work from the Cure’s latest offering 3:14 Dream is in the bottom left hand corner because I’m currently listening to it via Spotify. (great album by the way)

Do you want an invite to test it out for yourself? Drop me a comment and I’ll email you one of my five. One thing to be aware of is that Spotify is restricted to UK IP addresses so you’ll need to use a proxy and a UK postcode (SW18 1TW for example) when signing up for the service.

Congrats to Paul

Cormac M — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 23:11:36 +0000

Yesterday I provisionally muttered that Paul would win the SEO competition, and low and behold; he has.

Congratulations Paul. Hopefully there will be some posts on blackdog in the coming days providing some finer details of the win.

Paul has an interesting few graphs on his winning site illustrating the movement in the search engines of the main websites which took part in the competition over the last 30 days. An interesting thing to note is my jump from 9th to 5th a few hours after the competition had ended for my own geansaí gorm website.

Too little too late it seems..