This particular October only occurs every 823 years? Nonsense!

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I’ve seen this posted all over the place recently, and there was something similar for August back in 2010. It’s on Facebook in many forms, from many people and it’s being shared left right and centre.

Not in many places though do I see anyone calling it out, and saying, “That can’t be right?”

It’s a little distressing to see that a good 90% of the Internet just take it on face value that the 823 year claim is correct, and that it’s cool!!1!1!

Any given year can only have one of seven days that it starts on, so that gives a total number of 7 possible calendars, 14 if you include leap years. One of those 14 only gets used every 823 years? Really?

For October to have 5 Mondays, Tuesdays, and Wednesdays it just needs to start on a Monday, that doesn’t happen every 7 years though, because of leap years it goes in a 6 – 5 – 6 – 11 pattern. So the longest gap would be eleven years, a far cry from 823.

And as for the moneybags nonsense, well no need to connect I think.

Why are so many people willing to believe the claim, and pass it on without a moments thought? Is the Internet dumbing us down?

WordPress Admin Dropdown Menu Plugin

I’ve been working a lot in the admin section of my WordPress install recently. Now my hosting doesn’t serve files to me very fast, particulaly admin pages. I installed google.gears and that sped things up some.

What’s really made a difference though is this drop down menu plugin for the admin pages. No more clicking through pages you didn’t need to get to the one you do.

Thanks to Ozh for that!

WordPress Footer.php hacked

Well I’ve learned my lesson regarding critical security updates. I’ve been running a couple of version behind the latest for months now.

I then spotted a whole bunch of 404s in Google’s webmaster tools. Really odd links that shouldn’t even exist on my site. So after investigating I discovered that my footer.php was full of spam links.

So I deleted them. Next time I checked they had come back. So I exported my posts as XML and ditched both the WordPress and the database. I then reinstalled the lastest version of WordPress and imported my posts. Next time I will upgrade when a security patch is realeased!

The only remaining problem is the damage done to my search engine listings, I have fallen off the map completely. Googlebot still hasn’t revisted my site since I repaired the damage, so who knows how long before things correct themselves, I have made a resumbission request just in case I’ve been blacklisted or something.

DasBlog in a sub folder "SSE Provider did not find the database file"

If like me you run an installation of DasBlog in a sub folder/app then you may run into this error message when you start using ASP.net 2.0 membership/role providers in the base app.

The SSE Provider did not find the database file specified in the connection string. At the configured trust level (below High trust level), the SSE provider can not automatically create the database file.

All that is required to fix is to add:

<roleManager enabled=”false”/>

to system.web in the DasBlog web.config.

Windows Live Writer

I’ve just downloaded Windows Live Writer (WLW), Microsoft’s desktop/offline Blog composer/writer software.

Set up was very easy, I simply game the address and login details of my blog. Not only did WLW determine what my blog was running on, but it also has downloaded and used my CSS.

Editing in the WLW is therefore truly WYSYWIG as I am typing I am seeing everything styled by the CSS from my site. I’ll do a screen shot.

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There you go, all I did was ALT-PrintScreen and paste. Looks like it’s inserted a thumbnail with a link. Ah yes it has, there are plenty of handy properties to choose where it links to and how big it is etc.

I’m quite enjoying this, let’s try and publish now.

– edit –

Well that published fine, I forgot categories as always though. I can also do those here, it’s picked them up. Can’t add any new ones though. Still I think I may find this a useful place to store the longer type of heavy thinking articles.

Ahah! I have just discovered you can also open and edit from a list of existing posts. I was wondering how you did that. Overall this is quite a handy utility.

http://ideas.live.com

Welcome!

I’ve given up on using the Blogger service and am now using a handy piece of ASP from http://www.blogworks.com. Quite similar to Blogger really and quite functional, although there are some things that may be recoded to increase functionality quite soon. First off I think, will be an image uploader. ASPJpeg here we come!

Blogworks is nicely template based, with custom tags to add to templates, good CSS and as an added bonus, all the browser code it generates validates as XHTML