The developers at Wordpress have been quick to build on the redesign of the Dashboard in version 2.7, with optimised performance in 2.8 and slick features for managing your themes and plugins including theme download/preview/activation directly from the Dashboard. Much work has been done on the automatic upgrade of the core software and plugins, so much so that Automatic Upgrade is the recommended upgrade path from version 2.7.x to 2.8.

Upgrade slows to grinding halt
However when I tried the automatic upgrade of this site (my personal blog), which is hosted with pair Networks, it took several hours to complete with no feedback on progress throughout that time, which didn’t look too promising. I decided to be patient and leave it to do its stuff. At the end of the process the updated Dashboard confirmed that it was now using version 2.8, but it was disappointing to see it flagging a suspicion that the upgrade had not fully completed. Read more…

Following a pleasant exchange of Tweets last night, @kenarmstrong1 pointed me to some lyrics he had written. Not that accustomed to such collaborations, I printed out his lyrics and took up the challenge today. Fortunately the first idea I tried seemed to fit okay….I think. What do you reckon?

It was a pleasure to try out my new Samson USB microphone – worked a treat straight out of the box. The guitar I’m playing is my son’s 3/4 size classical.

One of the saddest stories I learnt about many years ago, when studying my family history, was the tragic death of my great-uncle Patrick MULVENNA. In 1913 he left the family farm in Gowkstown, Glenarm, Co. Antrim to emigrate to Canada. On Wednesday 25 June 1913 the train carrying Patrick and hundreds of other immigrants across Canada derailed near Ottawa. Two of the nine carriages plunged into the Ottawa River – unfortunately Patrick must have been on-board one of these coaches and didn’t survive the accident. Read more…

Ireland is now basking in a new post-Grand Slam glow. The enjoyment of seeing our hopes for Grand Slam victory become reality on Saturday got me thinking about where the moment ranks in our personal histories.

In years to come will we readily be able to answer the question:

Where were you when that final penalty attempt fell short and the Grand Slam was ours?

Read more…

This morning I recalled that the National Archives in Dublin have made their census records for 1911 freely available online for counties Dublin, Kerry, Antrim and Down, so I thought I would seek out the returns made by my Co. Antrim ancestors. My entire paternal side all hail from Co. Antrim – but in terms of direct ancestors this translates into just two households as all my great-great-grandparents on that side are deceased by 1911. Read more…

I’m often disappointed to discover that Unix commands don’t have the options I expect them to have. Of course that is what the pipe is for, so having spent the time digging around to find out how to construct the required syntax using a series of commands, I’m going to document it for myself here. Read more…