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The LambCutlet Disorganisation

Internet Explorer 7 Beta 3 released!

For those of you that insist on using that train-wreck of a web browser called Internet Explorer 6, which has changed little since Internet Explorer 4 which was released back in 1997, do yourself a favour and get Internet Explorer 7 Beta 3. Microsoft finally get to the right millennium with this new browser having parity to Phoenix (Firefox of yore) of 2002 vintage in terms of web standards compliance. Those wanting a 2006 web browsing experience, just grab Firefox 1.5.0.x or Opera 9.0.x! ;)

Full circle, three times…

Posted by Jonathan at 23:28:21 UTC on the 18th of June, 2006

Father’s Day has had a hint of melancholy about it ever since the passing away of mother, as to date the day of celebration of Fatherhood had closely followed the day where the seven month long fight with terminal cancer by my mother, also my father’s wife and parter for nearly three decades, came to an end.

This year however, the two dates coincided and it is only now, with today’s grey skies and the smell of burning joss sticks at the family altar hanging the air that the fact she really is no longer here, has sunk in.

Right now, I’m eager to start afresh though am needing to bide my time before I think I am able to head for 香港 (Hong Kong). Northampton, where I am now, will probably remain home for some time yet as come since I am the only close family member my father has and for however much filial piety my mother managed to instil in me, I do feel duty bound to keep my father company.

Looking forward, there is still another half of 2006 to go yet… and given the ups-and-downs of the last three years, I do suppose literally anything is possible, hopefully of an auspicious kind.

Filed under: Meta, Personal

Conquering Olympus… phpBB 3.0 Beta1 released!

Posted by Jonathan at 23:08:15 UTC on the 17th of June, 2006

The naysayers kept saying we’d never even get this far… though today, on the 6th birthday of phpBB, we are proud to release the first public beta of the next-generation, phpBB 3.0Beta1! As Meik “Acyd Burn” Sievertsen, phpBB’s Development Team Leader, formally announced:

We are pleased to announce the availability of the phpBB3 Beta1 package. With this first beta release we are officially starting the beta testing phase.

Obviously this release is not final and anyone wanting a stable release, should look at our 2.0.x line. For advanced users wanting to help us finish creating the best Opensource Bulletin Board solution available, you’re more than welcome to grab the beta and get your hands dirty in your developmental sites. We’ve already dispatched a Bertie Bear for server watching duties at OSUOSL. :D

Bertie Bear already at OSUOSL standing by yavin the server in case of fire, as the red hot phpBB 3.0 Beta1 gets downloaded!

Anyway, happy beta testing! ;)

Filed under: Software

phpBB 2.0.21 released!

phpBB “Bertie’s Summer Vacation” 2.0.21 has been released! — This release is a cumulative bug fix update, which includes a number of minor security fixes, all topped off with a few performance tweaks. Running a phpBB 2.0.x? Upgrade before I set Bertiezilla upon you! :P

Uncensored Photogasm™ from the Republic of Singapore (新加坡共和國)!

Posted by Jonathan at 23:18:29 UTC on the 6th of June, 2006

Hadn’t realised it has been over a month since the last Photogasm™, which no doubt would have led to many a frustrations for which I apologise. Singapore in the summer of 2005 was certainly an interesting experience, as from childhood I was told it was “much like Hong Kong, though cleaner and stricter” though now as an adult, was keen to get back into Asia if only for the fact that the cost of living shall be cheaper.

Sod’s Law dictated that on coming up from Alice Springs that my suitcase was to have been delayed, so I only had what I was carrying upon my person which wasn’t the greatest of starts. Turned out to be a blessing as my delayed lugguage entitled me to an automatic SG$120 compensation, which pretty much covered the cost of the hotel I stayed at in Geylang for the 7 days I was in Singapore!

Geylang itself was pretty colourful, packed with about 10 streets worth of stalls all shapes and sizes serving tasty, cheap food pretty much all around the clock! The number of times I got offered “massages” from girls outside certain establishments also caught my eye (and explains why when I was still at the Changi International Airport and getting a hotel room, was asked if I was sure I wanted to be in Geylang). Didn’t actually find out till recently that Geyland is actually the legal red-light district of Singapore…

The smell of Asia gave me a good poking up the nostrils too as Singapore still makes extensive use of open storm drains, the adformentioned food stalls will often put tables and seating right up to them, which combined with the summer heat & humidity, can cook up a rather “fragrant” odour. Ironically, it very much reminded me of the open-air 大牌檔 (Dai Pai Dong) that my relatives and I used to frequent rather a lot, though are now banned in 香港 (Hong Kong) for health and safety reasons!

Anyway, being a rather devilish day today (6th of June, ‘06), it’s enough rambling from me and time to bring forth a new Photogasmic™ explosion, completely uncensored from Singapore! ;) Hold on tight to your knickers…

  • Republic of Singapore (新加坡共和國/Republik Singapura) - Page 1 of 7
  • Republic of Singapore (新加坡共和國/Republik Singapura) - Page 2 of 7
  • Republic of Singapore (新加坡共和國/Republik Singapura) - Page 3 of 7
  • 1421 Theory Exhibition (一四二一年理論展) - Page 1 of 6
  • 1421 Theory Exhibition (一四二一年理論展) - Page 2 of 6
  • 1421 Theory Exhibition (一四二一年理論展) - Page 3 of 6
  • 1421 Theory Exhibition (一四二一年理論展) - Page 4 of 6
  • 1421 Theory Exhibition (一四二一年理論展) - Page 5 of 6
  • 1421 Theory Exhibition (一四二一年理論展) - Page 6 of 6
  • Republic of Singapore (新加坡共和國/Republik Singapura) - Page 4 of 7
  • Republic of Singapore (新加坡共和國/Republik Singapura) - Page 5 of 7
  • Zheng He & Maritime Asia Exhibition (鄭和與海洋亞洲展) - Page 1 of 8
  • Zheng He & Maritime Asia Exhibition (鄭和與海洋亞洲展) - Page 2 of 8
  • Zheng He & Maritime Asia Exhibition (鄭和與海洋亞洲展) - Page 3 of 8
  • Zheng He & Maritime Asia Exhibition (鄭和與海洋亞洲展) - Page 4 of 8
  • Zheng He & Maritime Asia Exhibition (鄭和與海洋亞洲展) - Page 5 of 8
  • Zheng He & Maritime Asia Exhibition (鄭和與海洋亞洲展) - Page 6 of 8
  • Zheng He & Maritime Asia Exhibition (鄭和與海洋亞洲展) - Page 7 of 8
  • Zheng He & Maritime Asia Exhibition (鄭和與海洋亞洲展) - Page 8 of 8
  • Sentosa Island Resort, Singapore (新加坡聖淘沙休闲度假島/Peta Pulau Sentosa, Singapura) - Page 1 of 4
  • Sentosa Island Resort, Singapore (新加坡聖淘沙休闲度假島/Peta Pulau Sentosa, Singapura) - Page 2 of 4
  • Sentosa Island Resort, Singapore (新加坡聖淘沙休闲度假島/Peta Pulau Sentosa, Singapura) - Page 3 of 4
  • Sentosa Island Resort, Singapore (新加坡聖淘沙休闲度假島/Peta Pulau Sentosa, Singapura) - Page 4 of 4
  • Little India, Singapore (新加坡小印度/Little India, Singapura) - Page 1 of 3
  • Little India, Singapore (新加坡小印度/Little India, Singapura) - Page 2 of 3
  • Little India, Singapore (新加坡小印度/Little India, Singapura) - Page 3 of 3
  • Chinatown, Singapore (新加坡牛車水/Kreta Ayer, Singapura) - Page 1 of 4
  • Chinatown, Singapore (新加坡牛車水/Kreta Ayer, Singapura) - Page 2 of 4
  • Chinatown, Singapore (新加坡牛車水/Kreta Ayer, Singapura) - Page 3 of 4
  • Chinatown, Singapore (新加坡牛車水/Kreta Ayer, Singapura) - Page 4 of 4
  • Kampong Glam, Singapore (新加坡甘榜格南/Kampong Glam, Singapura) - Page 1 of 3
  • Kampong Glam, Singapore (新加坡甘榜格南/Kampong Glam, Singapura) - Page 2 of 3
  • Kampong Glam, Singapore (新加坡甘榜格南/Kampong Glam, Singapura) - Page 3 of 3
  • Republic of Singapore (新加坡共和國/Republik Singapura) - Page 6 of 7
  • Chinese Garden, Singapore (新加坡裕華園/Chinese Garden, Singapura) - Page 1 of 6
  • Chinese Garden, Singapore (新加坡裕華園/Chinese Garden, Singapura) - Page 2 of 6
  • Chinese Garden, Singapore (新加坡裕華園/Chinese Garden, Singapura) - Page 3 of 6
  • Chinese Garden, Singapore (新加坡裕華園/Chinese Garden, Singapura) - Page 4 of 6
  • Chinese Garden, Singapore (新加坡裕華園/Chinese Garden, Singapura) - Page 5 of 6
  • Chinese Garden, Singapore (新加坡裕華園/Chinese Garden, Singapura) - Page 6 of 6
  • Republic of Singapore (新加坡共和國/Republik Singapura) - Page 7 of 7
  • Republic of Singapore (新加坡共和國/Republik Singapura) to 香港 (Hong Kong) - Page 1 of 3
  • Republic of Singapore (新加坡共和國/Republik Singapura) to 香港 (Hong Kong) - Page 2 of 3
  • Republic of Singapore (新加坡共和國/Republik Singapura) to 香港 (Hong Kong) - Page 3 of 3

The 400-ish photos of this little Asian city-state, plus the trip onwards to 香港 (Hong Kong) are listed right here:

  1. Republic of Singapore (新加坡共和國/Republik Singapura) - A week from the 10th of August till 17th of August in “Disneyland with a Death Penalty”, better known as the Republic of Singapore (新加坡共和國/Republik Singapura)!
  2. 1421 Theory Exhibition (一四二一年理論展) - An exhibition inspired by Gavin Menzies’ pseudoscientific and pseudohistorical book, “1421: The Year China Discovered The World”
  3. Zheng He & Maritime Asia Exhibition (鄭和與海洋亞洲展) - The very factual and educational “Zheng He & Maritime Asia Exhibition” at the National Library of Singapore
  4. Sentosa Island Resort, Singapore (新加坡聖淘沙休闲度假島/Peta Pulau Sentosa, Singapura) - A day trip on the 13th of August to the island resort of Sentosa on the southern part of Singapore
  5. Little India, Singapore (新加坡小印度/Little India, Singapura) - Around and about the district of Little India on the 14th of August and 16th of August
  6. Chinatown, Singapore (新加坡牛車水/Kreta Ayer, Singapura) - 77% of Singaporeans are Chinese anyway, so “Chinatown” appears to be a bit of a misnomer. Still this ethnic enclave dating back to British Colonial times is also known as “Ox-cart Water” (牛车水/Kreta Ayer)
  7. Kampong Glam, Singapore (新加坡甘榜格南/Kampong Glam, Singapura) - The Kampong Glam district of Singapore, which under the Raffles Plan was originally designated for the Sultan of Singapore and his household, as well as Arab and Malay communities
  8. Chinese Garden, Singapore (新加坡裕華園/Chinese Garden, Singapura) - Designed by the Taiwanese Prof. Yuen-chen Yu, the Chinese Garden is an expression of Chinese gardening art covering some 5,800 square meters located on Jurong Lake complete with SMRT station in its namesake!
  9. Republic of Singapore (新加坡共和國/Republik Singapura) to 香港 (Hong Kong) - Farewell Singapore (新加坡/Singapura) and time for the next stop of the Asian Invasion… 香港 (Hong Kong)!

For those of you that have been following these Photogasm™ will know the ones from 香港 (Hong Kong) are already published and the 600 from there will make a nice round 1000 photos for today! ;) The 300-ish from the Hong Kong Museum of Art will have to wait till another day after I’ve gone through 雲南 (Yunnan) and 澳門 (Macau)… I’ve been gagging to unleash those and just can’t keep it in any longer. :P

Filed under: Personal, Holiday

MySQL 4.1.x/5.x + UTF-8 database + WordPress = ???

Posted by Jonathan at 20:50:05 UTC on the 5th of June, 2006

For those of you like me and have this strange habit of peppering posts in different languages and/or scripts such as 漢字 (Chinese), العربية (Arabic), Ελληνικά (Greek), Русский (Russian), 한국어 (Korean) or extensions to the Latin Alphabet by the way of ß, Ŋ/ŋ, Þ/þ and other such silliness, Unicode as the default encoding (though itself not perfect) is a very good idea!

However, it would seem that WordPress (versions 1.5.x, 2.0.x and 2.1-alpha) chokes when the default encoding of the database is set to UTF-8 (via my.cnf using default-character-set=utf8) which in turns makes the browser display “unknown” characters.

After a bit of digging around and finding a number of Chinese and Japanese blogs each with slightly different takes on a fix, the basic issue was the fact that WordPress was “mangling” the already UTF-8 data through a LATIN1 connection.

So the fix for all this, is to hunt down ./wp-includes/wp-db.php and find the following code (around line 42):


        function wpdb($dbuser, $dbpassword, $dbname, $dbhost) {
                $this->dbh = @mysql_connect($dbhost, $dbuser, $dbpassword);
                if (!$this->dbh) {

… and add en explicit SET NAMES to the query:


        function wpdb($dbuser, $dbpassword, $dbname, $dbhost) {
                $this->dbh = @mysql_connect($dbhost, $dbuser, $dbpassword);
                $this->query("SET NAMES 'utf8'");
                if (!$this->dbh) {

Save the modified file and Unicode lovin’ from database to browser and back shall be yours! ;)

Filed under: Meta, Software