Mark Headrick's Blog

I have added the following three movies to my DVD collection:

• Angels & Demons
• Terminator Salvation
• Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen

As usual these days, I’ve scanned in at least the DVD cover and included a trailer.  These along with Star Trek (2009) were all Christmas presents. Thanks to everyone that gave me these.

Oh yeah, Happy New Year!! Here’s hoping 2010 is a great one!

I’ve added Star Trek to my DVD Collection!

This movie was AWESOME! They did a fantastic job re-introducing the Star Trek franchise with this film and handled the concerns I had going into it. By creating a new timeline (parallel universe) with Spock and the Romulan’s interactions, they are freed from having to match what the first crew did and experienced. It will also help explain why the technology of this particular crew will be so much more advanced than the original due to the input and advances introduced by the original Spock This, in turn, lets them get away with using better special effects than what the original series and movies had at their disposal.

What’s even better than all the effects is the character interaction, story, and acting (something which Star Wars I suffered from). Zachary Quinto as the new Spock was perfect. It’s amazing how much he looks like the original. It was good to see Leonard Nimoy playing Spock again as well. I’m not one to go on and on about movies, so I’ll just say this one more time: It was AWESOME!

I’ve included the outer cover image that the case slides into as well as the front and back images of the case itself. 3 Trailers and 1 TV spot are also included in a combination video that I found on YouTube.

Just wanting to wish everyone a Merry Christmas! Oh, and a safe one too!

After upgrading Winamp to its latest version (5.57), the Now Playing v2.1.2 plug-in I was using would cause Winamp to crash every time I closed Winamp which caused none of its settings to be saved. After some googling around I came across Brandon Fuller’s Now Playing: A Winamp Plugin which seemed to do what I needed. It would allow me to FTP a XML file containing information about the last X number of songs I played and would also let me send a HTTP post request to run a PHP script with the current song’s information contained within the $_POST variable. It calls this HTTP request a “ping”.

When this “ping” is sent, my PHP script parses the newly uploaded XML file to create the now playing images and song history (as seen on my Entertainment page), as well as a prepared Twitter message in a separate file should I choose to send a tweet out.

You can also send Twitter and Facebook updates using this plug-in. I’ve only tested it with Twitter and it seems to work; however, I use a separate PHP script to manually Tweet the song I’m currently listening to so I don’t fill my Twitter stream with song spam. I may enable it to send tweets out using my @mrheadrick_np account.

This plug-in does lack a couple things that the older one would do:

1. Send an album cover image along with the rest of the song’s information in a $_POST variable such as a folder.jpg located in the same directory as the song; however, it will send a link to an Amazon album image if the information matches (sometimes it doesn’t match correctly or just can’t find one). I am working on a mechanism to get around some of these pitfalls by uploading album images and having my script check for the existence of the local album image first.
2. Work with Shoutcast streams to extract out song information.

Even so, I will continue to use this plug-in for its compatibility and continuing support by the developer. It also seems to be a bit more reliable and stable than what I was using. Yes, I did purchase a license key.

I have updated my blog to WordPress v2.9 which was just released. I did the auto upgrade option again which seems to have worked well. Even so, once again I had to edit the /wp-includes/vars.php file to force $is_apache to true (see below) since the SERVER_SOFTWARE variable comes back as WebServerX instead of Apache.

// 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;

I also had to edit the /wp-login.php file and add session_start(); at the beginning for the Register Plus plug-in to work properly as PHP sessions are not automatically started:

session_start();
/**
 * WordPress User Page

Other than the modifications above, which I have always had to do, the upgrade went smoothly.

Of course, I did perform a complete database and file backup before upgrading!