Mark Headrick’s Blog

As I had mentioned previously, I’ve purchased some new DVDs and here’s four of them that I’ve added to my DVD/Home Theater page:

• Cloverfield
• Delta Farce
• Flags of Our Fathers
• National Treasure 2: Book of Secrets

I have some additional movies left that I need to add; however, those are currently being borrowed by my folks; thus, I don’t have the DVD covers I can scan in at the moment.  All of these movies have a trailer available for viewing as well. Cloverfield and National Treasure I bought new. Delta Farce and Flags of Our Fathers I bought as part of a 4 for $20 deal of previously viewed movies at Block Buster.

My photo gallery has been upgraded to Gallery2, version 2.2.5 which includes a number of security patches and fixes. The upgrade went smooth and without a hitch!

Well, after many years of wanting to get a widescreen TV, I finally bought myself one! It is a Samsung 52″ 1080p LCD HDTV, model LN52A650. I’ve had it about a month and love it! As it turns out, according to the AVS Forum, it is one of the better models to get. Needless to say I’ve been watching a lot of movies on it lately. I am actually behind on adding movies that I’ve bought to my website. I’ll get around to adding those later.

I currently have my Denon DVD-2200 DVD player and Scientific Atlanta Explorer 8240HDC DVR cable box connected to my Denon AVR-3806 A/V receiver, via component cables which are then connected to the TV via component cables. On the right is an image from my DVD player I took while watch Star Wars Episode III.

I have learned much concerning HDTV since purchasing this and following the AVS Forums and will most likely write another article concerning what I have learned about all this HDTV business.

After a few days of not being able to rent it, I decided on an impulse to buy In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale to add to my DVD collection. There are a number of corny moments and some weak acting in the movie by some, but, still, wasn’t too bad. I also made flash video trailer that you can view on the page. I actually created the page on the 2nd but I’ve been at my folks since then so haven’t been in a position to write this blurb on my blog about it.

WordPress has recently released WordPress 2.5.1 which I have completed upgrading my blog to. It contains one critical security patch as well as a number of bug fixes. Surpass Hosting also upgraded their server over the weekend to use PHP 5.2.5 by default and MySQL 5. In doing so, the server software now reports back as WebServerX again and not Apache. So, I had to edit the /wp-includes/vars.php again to force $is_apache to true. Following is the server detection part of the script:

// Server detection
 
/**
 * Whether the server software is Apache or something else
 * @global bool $is_apache
 */
//$is_apache = ((strpos($_SERVER['SERVER_SOFTWARE'], 'Apache') !== false) || (strpos($_SERVER['SERVER_SOFTWARE'], 'LiteSpeed') !== false)) ? true : false;
$is_apache = true;
 
/**
 * Whether the server software is IIS or something else
 * @global bool $is_IIS
 */
$is_IIS = (strpos($_SERVER['SERVER_SOFTWARE'], 'Microsoft-IIS') !== false) ? true : false;

The only difficulty I had was with the RAZ-Captcha plug-in. I was getting a fatal PHP error which was causing the Login and Registration pages to not appear:

PHP Fatal error: Cannot use object of type WP_Error as array in /(deleted)/public_html/blog/wp-content/plugins/raz-captcha/raz-captcha.php on line 590

I have disabled that plug-in for the meantime. I may look for a new plug-in to do image verifications on the Login and Registration pages. If I get ambitious, I may try and fix it myself but I doubt it, LOL.